Talking Screens, April 21-27, 2023: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Returns to Chicago | Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid | Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train as Proto-Snowpiercer

“Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives”

School of the Art Institute graduate Apichatpong Weerasethakul returns to Chicago, showing his most recent feature, “Memoria,” at Siskel with a conversation afterwards. Siskel, Thursday, April 27.

“Joe,” as he is also known, will take part in three shows at Block Cinema at Northwestern, including “Tropical Malady” (2004, 35mm, April 24) and “Syndromes and A Century” (2006, 35mm, April 28) as well as “Blessings of Cinema” (April 25), a program of only a few of his short works. Block’s overview is good: “Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates films that feel both earthy and oneiric, transfixing and lulling. Refracting Thai history and culture through prisms of myth, fantasy, and memory, Weerasethakul crafts beguiling narratives that carry the viewer along currents of dreams and desires.” Block Cinema, April 24-28, series details here.

The eighteenth annual CineYouth Festival, presented by the Chicago International Film Festival and FACETS, plays this weekend. Sixty-five short films will be shown in ten programming blocks “featuring everything from uproarious comedies to genre-bending thrills to family-friendly fun.” CineYouth also features workshops focused on social impact through storytelling and creative collaboration through editing. Tickets and all events are free and open to the public. FACETS, Friday, April 21-Sunday, April 23.  Full program and tickets here.

Access Contemporary Music’s Sound of Silent Film Festival plays this week. “Now in its eighteenth year, it’s a unique event featuring new short silent films in every conceivable genre screened with newly-composed musical scores performed live.” Films and scores in the ninety-minute program are described here. $30. Music Box, Wednesday, April 26, 7:30pm.

REPERTORY & REVIVALS

Maria Schneider in “Sois belle et tais-toi!”

“Ex Machina”

For his directorial debut, “Ex Machina,” novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (“28 Days Later,” “Sunshine”) crafted a deceptively simple social comedy deeply invested in ideas about artificial intelligence, the nature of desire and the mind-body divide. But cheekily glib, oft-vulgar banter between its two male characters—a billionaire inventor (Oscar Isaac) and the so-bright employee/programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) he’s chosen for a one-man Turing Test—and a female robot (Alicia Vikander) that can flirt, think and scheme—likably mask the hoped-for profundity. (“Ex Machina” could have easily been called “The Imitation Game.”) Set largely in the rich man’s lair (shot at an actual hotel in the wilds of Norway), Garland also seduces with clean frames, sleek, elegant surfaces, and the most physically convincing of robots on screen in memory. Sentience is sexy! (So’s the dancing that comes out of nowhere.) Drafthouse, April 26, 9:30pm.

“Rabid”

“Rabid” still counts as early Cronenberg, a 1977 entry shown on the U. S. drive-in and grind house circuit, with Marilyn Chambers as a young woman who, injured in a motorcycle accident, wakes from surgery with a thirst for blood—as well as a distinct phallic appendage in one armpit. Genre trappings, yes, but the storytelling still feels like twenty-first-century reactions to contagion and mutation. Doc Films, April 27, 9:30pm.

“Runaway Train”

Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Runaway Train“(35mm, 1985), from a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, has two vivid actors bringing extravagant American screen acting to a boil in the ice. Distantly reminiscent of the later “Snowpiercer” graphic novels, movie and cable show, it’s giddy as both action film and as exemplar of termite behavioral extreme, courtesy of Jon Voight and Eric Roberts as the runaway convicts on a runaway train in the wilds of Alaska. CFS relays: “This is not a film to watch at home, it’s a film to be seen big and loud and bright, to be enveloped and pummeled by. It’s a film that left even Roger Ebert speechless (at least for a moment): ‘The ending of the movie is astonishing in its emotional impact. I will not describe it.'” Chicago Film Society at the Music Box, Monday, April 24, 7pm.

“A Self-Induced Hallucination” (2018), the first project of Jane Schoenbrun, is “a searingly original and profoundly empathetic portrait of Internet life… both a moodboard for and a prelude to their beloved narrative feature debut ‘We’re All Going To The World’s Fair’ (2021). At one level a Youtube collage about myth/meme Slenderman, at another a critique of the role of collective fiction in society, it tracks the figure’s many lives through creepypasta explainers, Lifetime movies, and reaction videos,” write student-run presenters Northwestern Cinematheque. Free admission here. Block Cinema, Friday, April 21, 7pm. 

“Pacific Rim”

Vivid pulp rumpus, Guillermo Del Toro’s monsters-vs.-robots (or “Kaiju” versus “Jaeger”) epic “Pacific Rim” is brimming, bursting, surging and punching with energy, prodigious imagination on a dreamlike plane. Dialogue is pro forma without becoming rigid, largely because of the cast, including the one man who thinks he can save the planet from the monsters bursting from within, from beneath the sea, from an otherworldly vaginal canal, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba): “Today, at the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we’ve chosen to believe in each other… Today, the apocalypse has been cancelled!” (Shakespearean verve is indicated.) Character names thicken with unseemly delight. They’re masterful moniker mastication, on par with David Cronenberg’s strange-named strangers: brother Raleigh Becket and Yancy Becket. Father and son Hercules Hansen and Chuck Hansen. The Wei Tang triplets and the Kaidonovsky siblings. Mako Mori. Stacker. Pentecost. No, we’re in sweet Don DeLillo territory here, with a touch of vaudeville in the form of Ron Perlman’s sharkskin shark of a pirate, Hannibal Chau (“Named after my favorite warrior and my favorite Chinese restaurant in Queens”). When talking about the fine, weathered, tangible textures of “Never Let Me Go,” filmmaker Mark Romanek employed the Japanese term “wabi-sabi” to describe its look, which “Pacific Rim” shares on an industrial scale. “Wabi-sabi is just sort of when things have a patina of wear and the passage of time is evident,” Romanek said. “It’s a cracked cup instead of an uncracked cup.” Del Toro does this with his comics-panel bold compositions and lived-in, lived-on settings: Paint peels. Rust always seeps. Rot beckons. Walls of water crash the walls of men. And the set of determined faces is matched by marvelous costume design that brings it all to human, textural level. Fabrics feel weathered, worn, timeless, classic, wonders of sensation. The slightest tweaking of a seam along the shoulder of a young man’s sweater; the wool-to-linen burst along the hard, pressed crease of Stacker Pentecost’s blue gabardine-ish suit jackets; shoes. Shoes that suit the scenes. Shoes that suit the characters. Little red shoes that make the past explode into the shared memories of two Jaeger pilots. There’s so much onscreen, so much suggested but not explored or explained, almost like jam-packed Harvey Kurtzman panels from classic MAD magazines. It’s joyous even as cities are leveled by the pure malevolence of the Kaiju. Doc Films and Film Studies Center, Thursday, April 27, 7:30pm.