Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, April 14-20, 2023 

A highly selective view of one other tumultuous week of Chicago film programming, highlighted by an outstanding recent film by an American great. Such easy, shivering surfaces: “Showing Up,” Kelly Reichardt’s beautiful and slyly wicked comedy, her ninth feature, explores, with minimalist remark, a single figure’s tribulations and ministrations across a confined time period. Opens Friday, April 14 at River East and Landmark Century.

Most notable of revival and repertory attractions: the Music Box’s Robert Zemeckis retrospective fills out the approaching week, details below and here.

“How To Blow Up A Pipeline” is director Daniel Goldhaber’s meta-adaptation of Andreas Malm’s philosophical manifesto that’s not a how-to-book of the identical name, which contemplated the parameters of future protest within the face of potential ecological disasters. Shot on 16mm with a Seventies-style rating, the reportedly scrappy result’s a thriller that follows a crew of young activist-anarchists who consider eco-terrorism in a world economy depending on fossil fuel extraction. The clock is ticking. Opens Friday, April 13 at River East, Recent City 14, Alamo Drafthouse.

“Suzume”

Makoto Shinkai’s nearly decade-in-the-making anime picaresque “Suzume” is a world of blue skies and lasting worries, a young tale of a tragic seventeen-year-old girl who deals with grief by taking a road trip with a talking chair through disaster-stricken reaches of Japan. Shinkai is a painter and a dreamer and “Suzume” is a large expanse of landscape and feeling to wander off in on a giant screen. It’s a beauty. Opens Friday, April 14 at River East, Block 37, 600 North Michigan, ICON Showplace, Recent City 14, City North,Webster Place.

Chris McKay’s splatter comedy “Renfield” opens Friday in wide release: Nicolas Cage is back because the man in black-and-blood.

“The Pope’s Exorcist“: Russell Crowe, does he wear the white Balenciaga puffer coat? Is he the person in white-and-blood? Opens Thursday.

Facets presents Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s documentary “Body Parts” and a panel, “Intimacy Work on Stage & Screen,” featuring intimacy coordinator Jessica Steinrock, CEO of Intimacy Directors & Coordinators. The panel will discuss “what intimacy coordination is, why it’s critical to creative work, and what’s happening at once in Chicago.” “Body Parts” “explores the evolution of desire and ‘sex’ on-screen from a lady’s perspective… part film-history lesson on the dominance of the heterosexual male gaze and part clarion call for employing intimacy coordinators across the entertainment field. It neither shies away from uncomfortable conversations nor ignores imagemakers attempting to set the next, more inclusive bar on set and on screen,” per Facets. The Recent York Times profiles Steinrock here: “Steinrock’s work on intimate scenes in film has come to prominence because the entertainment industry reels from the litany of sexual abuses dropped at light by the #MeToo movement.” “Body Parts” is at Facets, April 14-16; panel April 15.

“Sakra”

Donnie Yen’s passion project as performer and director, “Sakra” (based on the Buddhism-inflected wuxia novel “Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils ” by Jin Yong), is a rapture of fluent wirework and mid-air stunts, fights, brawls, scrimmages, struggles and clashes that gratify with geometric lyricism. Yen’s a grand old hand at this, and even in the straightforward story of a band of roving martial artists avoiding accusations of murder, there’s so way more to his craft than even his central turn as a blind assassin in “John Wick: Chapter 4.” The credited motion directors are Kenji Tanigaki and Yan Hua, with “Donnie Yen’s Motion Team.” In theaters April 14 and video-on-demand on April 18.

 

REPERTORY & REVIVALS

“The Walk”

Before the chock-a-block profession retrospective of Robert Zemeckis on the Music Box, I checked in with Chicago filmmaker Stephen Cone (“Princess Cyd”), an ardent admirer. “Well, my favorite living American filmmakers are Malick and Sofia Coppola, but for those who mean a pantheon of Hollywood directors I like who’re utilizing technology in a similarly imaginative, large-scale way, I’d put him up with Scorsese and Fincher. Throw Ang Lee into the combination, too, in some ways essentially the most apt comparison.”

Would you say that Zemeckis is a radical filmmaker? He literally is. Radical is defined as fundamental change, far-reaching motion, and that defines each the shape and content of Zemeckis’ art. Almost every movie he makes is about going somewhere nobody has ever been, which is inseparable from the means of making it. He’s also a century-straddling pop artist. Like Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Johns, he’s involved in each kitsch and transcendence, and in opening up recent dimensions using the technology, tools and imagery of the mainstream. As for whether he’s essentially the most traditional experimentalist or essentially the most experimental traditionalist to ever make movies in America, I can’t say. Possibly each.

The 35mm attractions, alphabetically: “Back to the Future,” “Back to the Future II,” “Back to the Future III,” “Beowulf,” “Contact,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Flight,” “Forrest Gump,” “The Frighteners” (executive producer), “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” “Polar Express,” “Romancing The Stone,” “Used Cars” and “What Lies Beneath.” DCP versions: “Allied,” “Forged Away,” “The Walk,” “Welcome To Marwen,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Passes available, too. Tickets and more here.

“Meshes Of The Afternoon”

Two of essentially the most vital of experimental pictures: Dziga Vertov’s 1929 “Man With A Movie Camera” and Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 “Meshes Of the Afternoon.” Advises Doc Movies, “Man with a Movie Camera” “is considered one of the rare cinema 101 works that seemingly everyone loves. Vertov’s revolutionary film, sans intertitles, is a masterclass of cutting, framing, throwing every little thing on the wall, and customarily being hyper in a uniquely Twenties way.” “Meshes” is a weave of strange dreams with imagery that was fresh and daring on the time and vital to at the present time. Doc Movies, Friday, April 14, 7pm.

“Dazed and Confused”

Recent revivals, revived, at Drafthouse: “The Doom Generation” shows Friday night; David Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” shows Tuesday, April 18; and Richard Linklater’s leisurely Renoiresque coming-of-comedy-age that reflects multiple eras, “Dazed and Confused” plays Saturday, April 15; Hype Williams’ urgent, essential only feature, 1998’s fever-neon crime drama with Nas and DMX, “Belly” plays Thursday, April 20.

“A Touch Of Sin”

4 characters in 4 Chinese provinces propel the widescreen “A Touch Of Sin” (2013), based on three true-life murders and one suicide incited by endemic corruption and violence. (Characters overlap, however the stories don’t.) As richly shot by Yu Lik Wai, Jia Zhangke’s seventh fiction feature holds cold, stern, even ruthless beauty in its capture of magnificent and monstrous chaos. All is artfully arrayed, through scale, symmetry and adroit, thrilling camera movements. The opening story is a bloody, concussive, post-Western, and his dissatisfied protagonist shouts down all that’s flawed. It’s as if “Yojimbo” met the Edward Burtynsky doc “Manufactured Landscapes”: the village streets are ruins of never-realized modernity and he’s Yojimbo, the lone man, the lone warrior, together with his weapon, his final destination unknown, his present destination, vengeance. He’s sarcastic and he’s offended and he has a weapon. (His shotgun is wrapped in a towel that may barely contain a roaring tiger.) There’s a precise, poetic visual detail in every scene throughout: in a chilly workroom, twenty men hold their bowls of noodles as much as slurp from, steam rising in columns; an overturned truck of fruit in landscape; huge, half-finished, sky-high overpasses; snakes writhe on the ground of a sauna; police cars race a method, a horse together with his cart, no rider, goes the opposite. There are pressures in modern China: put simply and stridently, a person in a sauna shift demands sex from the attendant: “I’ll smother you in money… I even have fucking money! Fuck! Fuck you! Isn’t my money adequate?” I can’t imagine a comparable American movie, militating passionately, lyrically over on the economic inequities of American life. It just isn’t done. A part of the “Gore Capitalism” lecture series. Siskel, Tuesday, April 18, 6pm.

Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.

His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will probably be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.

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