Talking Screens, March 24-30, 2023: Deborah Stratman’s “Last Things” | Revisiting Speed Racer, Annihilation, Children Of Men, and the Bling Ring | Sofia Coppola’s Daughter’s Jaw-Dropping TikTok
Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, March 24-30, 2023
Chad Stahelski’s extended elegy “John Wick: Chapter 4” takes only a couple of deep breaths in a trajectory from its imagined Manhattan to fictional Osaka to assassin-occupied Paris. With Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Donnie Yen, Ian McShane, Bill Skarsgård, Asia Kate Dillon, Rina Sawayama, Shamier Anderson, Scott Adkins, Hiroyuki Sanada, Clancy Brown and the late Lance Reddick. Our review is here.
Zach Braff’s “A Good Person” was shot with his former partner Florence Pugh in a study of opioid addiction, recovery and sharing screen time with Morgan Freeman.
“Global crisis has taken from us the ability to weep”: Stellar Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s brief but intimate study of the Pope mingles archival footage of past papal sojourns in nonlinear fashion with access to a couple of recent journeys by the visibly weary octogenarian Francis in “In Viaggio: The Travels Of Pope Francis.” Monday, March 27 at theaters including City North; ICON ShowPlace.
“Last Things”
Deborah Stratman’s “Last Things” opens the Onion City Film Festival in its thirty-third outing. It’s lovely, mesmerizing and recognizably a Stratman enterprise. At its Sundance premiere, that festival wrote, “The human race is old, but rocks are timeless. Weaving stunning imagery with evocative text and interviews, ‘Last Things’ observes the history of all of us and this planet Earth through the most essential parts—evolution and extinction, from the point-of-view of rocks… In a distinctive style seen throughout her long career, Stratman skillfully combines pure science with speculative fiction, not to give you an answer to the meaning of life, but to provide sounds, images, and ideas to contemplate.” Siskel, Thursday, March 30, 6pm. The complete Onion City program, with attractions both in person and online, is here.
David Cronenberg’s media-skeptical and body-disrespecting “Videodrome” shimmers into late-night programming at another venue, DOC Films, Thursday, March 30, 9:30pm.
“Holy Trinity”
“Holy Trinity” by writer-director-lead Molly Hewitt [Newcity Film 50], aka Glamhag, plays after Trivia Night at Facets. “Trinity is an independent, sex-positive millennial working as a Dominatrix in Chicago. After an incident huffing her drug of choice—a mysterious aerosol can from the ubiquitous Glamhag brand—she finds herself with a newfound gift for speaking to the dead.” Facets, Thursday, March 30.
“Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” is the “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” of the British Film Institute’s Greatest Films Of All Time list and returns for another Chicago showing. DOC Films Wednesday, March 29.
John Badham’s “Dracula” (35mm), starring the undead but somewhat younger Frank Langella. Siskel, Sunday, March 26, 6pm.
Highlights of repertory and revival attractions described below are the Wachowskis’ visionary bubblegum, “Speed Racer,” Alamo Drafthouse, March 25-29; “Children of Men” (35mm) at DOC Films, Thursday, March 30; the Sofia Coppola matinee of the “The Bling Ring” (35mm); and “The Shining,” with Music Box midnight shows. “Gore Capitalism” continues with Alex Garland’s trippy, trip-hop hallucination, “Annihilation.” Siskel, Tuesday, March 28, 6pm. Also: two short works by Fred Halsted in a Music Box midnight show. Plus: “The Godfather” in 35mm at Doc.
REPERTORY & REVIVALS
“Speed Racer”
With “Speed Racer” (2008), the Wachowskis dig deep into the traditions and stylistics of anime and their own cultural toybox to create a bold yet somehow hermetic movie with fantastically intricate design and technique that does not fall into any known demographic. It’s noisy and bursting with eyeball kicks: Imagine the characters in low-budget TV-made series like the original “Speed Racer” or “Jonny Quest” forever moving across planes rather than into and out of the perceived “ground” of the screen. The impossibly blue skies in flashbacks are the blue of a Benadryl commercial in CGI heaven. The detestable boy-tubby little brother, Spritle, brandishes Paul Frank monkey pajamas while the one-note chimpanzee, Chim-Chim, wears similar flannel pjs with a boy’s head on them. The blend of hypersaturated green against red, impossible in strictly photochemical terms, is as lush as that contrast in “Amelie.” As with “Fight Club,” “Speed Racer” is a deca-million-dollar fable about how corporations can stifle creativity—“That’s because the sponsors control the media!” The mixed message has its charm; while Motorola walkie-talkies and Cheerios get overt product placement, most of the brands on view are keening gibberish, towering neon monuments in more alphabets and languages than I could recognize, and there are myriad appearances by announcers and characters speaking languages other than English. It seems less a commercial strategy by the Wachowskis than a philosophical one: to incorporate as many forms of communication and color-blind ethnicity as possible, much as they did with the “Matrix” pictures. The Racer X character is also given a late passage of explaining the positive aspects of his radical identity-assignment surgery to his younger brother. “It’s a whole new world, baby, it’s a whole new world,” sounds self-congratulatory out of the mouth of a character after the gravitationally impossible, beautifully stitched final race, yet there are elements of technique here that will be as influential, to the right crew members of future films, as the infernal “bullet time” effect of “The Matrix.”
“Annihilation,” only Alex Garland’s second feature (after “Ex Machina”), moves on mood and implication, except when it doesn’t, and turns to bursts of disturbing terror or lightly lysergic biological poetry akin to imagery by Björk and her visual collaborators. While there are passages of the body horror best exemplified by David Cronenberg’s films, there is more mirroring of movies by Andrei Tarkovsky in its cool pulse, especially the journeys into the unknown and into forbidden zones in “Stalker” and “Solaris.” (The influence of Stanley Kubrick winks and glints through, as well as nods to the wonder of landscapes by Terrence Malick.) Natalie Portman plays Lena, a biologist with seven years military experience who joins a mission into “Area X,” along the American coastline where her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac) had disappeared the year before, and has returned without notice, ill and noticeably weird. Within the classified area where Kane had been, an alien occupation by a phenomenon marked by a fauvist wash of translucency, dubbed “the shimmer,” is advancing, and no other search parties have returned.Garland’s movie starts with the concept of cells dividing, and dividing again, to create life and forces of death, but also with mirroring, sounding a striking metaphor that involves surrealistic explosions of prismatic mutations of life forms within the shimmer to inspire lingering fright. The climax is a dance with doppelgängers, and a metaphor made real from Lena’s earlier talk of an innate biological drive to self-destruction. (For extended reading, I recommend these two rich essays: Josephine Livingstone’s “‘Annihilation’ Is a Brilliant Splicing of Woolf With Cronenberg”; and especially, Angelica Jade Bastién’s vital, personal “How ‘Annihilation’ Nails the Complex Reality of Depression,” which begins, “Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself.”) Part of the “Gore Capitalism” lecture series. Siskel, Tuesday, March 28, 6pm.
“Children Of Men” (35mm), Alfonso Cuarón’s Christmas 2006 feature, is monstrously alive to the condition of despair as well as the necessary dogged march forward. Cuarón consulted a raft of futurists to game a damnable future, his 2027, and the backdrop seethes with detail. Like his other films, including “Roma” (2018), “Children of Men” is concentrated cinema, wrought, focused, emblematic. They don’t make movies like this anymore, and to rewatch this masterpiece is to see that Cuarón is equally concerned with the survival of richly detailed cinema as the fraught voyage of his encircled, besieged characters. Masquerading as a science fiction film, “Children of Men” is set four years from now, when, for reasons unknown, after a series of wars and disasters and plagues, women worldwide are no longer able to conceive. In its quietly bravura opening scene, Theo (Clive Owen), an alcoholic onetime activist, witnesses a crowd in a café weeping over television news coverage of the death of an eighteen-year-old—“the world’s youngest person.” A few seconds later on Fleet Street—a London with grit but without glamour, dirtied as if by another century’s version of the Blitz—a terrorist bomb detonates. Julian (Julianne Moore), a former lover, turns up, dragging Theo into a battle for the future of the other failed, failing cities; he must protect a female “fugee,” a woman (Clare-Hope Ashitey) who is unaccountably pregnant, on her way to sanctuary. Does the government want her dead? What of the masses of angry anarchists? DOC Films, Thursday, March 30.
“L.A. Plays Itself”
“New information for me!” Salvador Dali reputedly said after seeing the work of Fred Halsted in 1972. “The Sex Garage” and “L.A. Plays Itself,” two short works from that year by Fred Halsted, offer glimpses of another time, another world. Writes the Museum of Modern Art: “Halsted’s elliptical, evasive anti-narrative begins in the lush greenery of the natural world before being literally bulldozed into the center of a grimy, feverish Sodom that deconstructs and erodes the human spirit through vivid sadomasochistic catharsis. Constructed almost entirely in the editing room, Halsted’s film is a dream-porn masterwork that would be analyzed, criminalized, and investigated for decades to come.” Programmed and co-presented by Henry Hanson and The Front Row. Music Box, Saturday, March 25, midnight.
“The Bling Ring”
In Sofia Coppola’s fifth feature, the sublime and serene “The Bling Ring” (35mm), five children—four princesses and a prince—run in gentle Angeleno night from enchanted castle to enchanted castle, gathering treasure in the form of beads and raiment and gold and currency, spending themselves afterward on endorphins and coke. But this based-on-fact fairytale is very much like her four earlier fairytales, sharing one keen characteristic. Aloneness: Coppola’s great subject. To be among others and yet so very alone. (Like any proper reader of fairytales as well.) To be a dreamy teenaged girl in “The Virgin Suicides,” a disenchanted actor in “Lost in Translation,” a reluctant royal in “Marie Antoinette,” a dislocated father in “Somewhere.” And “The Bling Ring”: these five privileged suburban kids from Calabasas, from over several hills, who had already gone wrong before they got assigned to a remedial high school where they all meet. Before long, they’re breaking into the homes of celebrities, feckless, heedless, reckless home invaders who think it’s all nothing more than months of late-night joy rides. “The Bling Ring” opens on isolated sounds. A single cricket. A dog barks in the distance. Or is it a coyote? A helicopter, close, not far, not so close. Before a buzzy song crashes onto the soundtrack, Coppola displays her simple but full, supple sound design. The story’s as much in the hearing as the seeing, as much sensation as sense. Can sound be described as “pointillist?” The recurring impression of the second-generation filmmaker being fixed on the trappings of privilege is quickly and succinctly tweaked when Coppola’s writer-director credit appears over a collage that contains the words “Rich Bitch.” (More here.)
Coppola’s sixteen-year-old daughter made a jaw-droppingly concise filmmaking debut this week with a one-minute short, since deleted from TikTok, but parked here. Or, as her grandfather famously said: “To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some… just people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, you know, and make a beautiful film with her… father’s camera recorder… the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That’s my opinion.”
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
