Centerpiece Review: Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is not the Centerpiece Selection for this year's Chicago International Film Festival. That one involves James Franco cutting his own arm off, and it's starting any minute now, playing to an audience that doesn't include me. I'll wait to experience Danny Boyle's amped-up colors and attention-deficient edits when everyone else does. But I'm calling this full review of Black Swan my own "Centerpiece" for this year's CIFF because it was by far the quickest title to sell out (implying feverish anticipation, and hopefully an interested audience for this piece!), because sorting through what "grabbed" me in my seat and what rankled me in my mind took some doing, and because I'm not sure I'll manage another essay of equal length before the festival wraps up in about a week.

Short version, for those of you avoiding "spoilers" by staying away from long reviews: Black Swan is easy and in many ways gratifying to enjoy in a pulse-quickening way. But in most respects, it plays to me like a real retreat in layering, empathy, and ambition, compared to Aronofsky's two most recent films. The sound design feels over-worked and the performances under-conditioned, particularly in the key area of dance. Some viewers won't mind and may even relish Aronofsky sleek extrapolation of Swan Lake's stark white/black oppositions and fascination with doubling; others will think he could have brought a much more nuanced structure to this haunted house without violating the obvious register of sinister fairy tale. I think it's a good film (remember, for me, B– really is slightly above average), but I feel disappointed all the same.

That's all I'll say about that if you want to hold out till you've formed your own opinion, in or around early December. But if you've already seen the movie, or you just can't wait to read another take, here you go.

Monday Reviews: The Housemaid

Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid comes teasingly close to adequate pulp, but by around the halfway point, I lost my patience with it. It's not a bad movie so much as an overweening and frankly annoying one, which is not a critical vocabulary I really like to privilege, but there you are. I'm a little worried that this sense of annoyance hangs too heavily over the full review I'm now posting, possibly because I started the review a week ago, the day I saw The Housemaid, and am finishing it now as a way to tie off a loose end, not because it's anywhere close to the group of movies I'm feeling most eager to write about at present. Especially having just seen so many doozies. So, I'll try to get to more of those this week.

Meanwhile, if you saw more in Im Sang-soo's stylistically showy sudser than I did—a worthier, high-gloss retread of inherited material than Egoyan's Chloe was, but tacky and desperate enough, by the end, to call the comparison to mind—I hope you'll let me know in the comments.

CIFF Reviews: Sex Magic: Manifesting Maya; also, Sasha

Jonathan Schell and Eric Liebman's frisky, earnest, hilarious, eye-rolling, and eye-opening documentary Sex Magic: Manifesting Maya only plays the 46th Chicago International Film Festival tonight and tomorrow, and I think it deserves a strong audience, though no one under 18 will be admitted. Given my imagined readership for this blog, I doubt this poses a problem to any of you. My full review is here. I was less taken with the German-Montenegrin coming-out drama Sasha, but as I say in my review of that one, the clearly extant audience for pathos-inflected, light-comic gay movies will very likely enjoy it. I wanted more formal and storytelling ambition and fewer narrative strands tied up so neatly, but many moviegoers have exactly the opposite tastes. Chacun à son CIFF. Sasha's two play dates are Saturday and Sunday.

Meanwhile, if you aren't following my Twitter page, I just want to underscore how much I loved the French, girl-centered, coming-of-age drama Love Like Poison, which made use of that haunting Belgian-choir cover of "Creep" before the Social Network trailer did, and which also got a strong, early notice from Bill Stamets in the Chicago Sun-Times. Tickets to that one should be no problem to buy, unlike the situation with the delectable Certified Copy and the mystifying but must-see Uncle Boonmee, which are already sold out on all dates. Among the less high-profile movies, it's definitely my pick of the festival so far.

Monday Reviews: Leap Year

Finally, a full review cranked out for one of the films I've been screening in the weeks leading up to the official launch, this coming Friday, of the 46th Chicago International Film Festival. The movie I picked is the first one I screened, and one that is bound to enter discussion at the "Sex on Screen" panel that CIFF has invited me to join on Saturday: it's Michael Rowe's Leap Year, a prizewinner for Best First Film at last spring's Cannes Film Festival. More than one colleague has described Leap Year to me as a kind of shabby shocker, almost obnoxiously lacking anything to say and putting its female lead in needlessly compromising positions. I can't defend the fully from having fewer ideas at its core than it seems like it ought to, but I think the direction is refreshingly unhysterical given the premise and trajectory, and I was altogether impressed. Full review here, and thanks for waiting well past the usual midnight posting hour!

In Which Nick Savors a Lovely Moment

Today's Chicago Film Festival press screenings of Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy and Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats (wonderful and good, respectively) marked only the second time in four years that I have swung an invitation to the venue where the critics for the major Chicago media outlets screen the bulk of the films they review. I like seeing movies with an audience, but I'm not so jaded as not to enjoy this rare incursion into the sanctum of the paid professionals. And who among us wouldn't feel a surge of joy at hearing a voice from the hallway saying to some invisible interlocutor, "Chaz and Roger are on their way up"?

Congenitally early, especially for what I had gathered was upper-tier Kiarostami and top-drawer Binoche, I was in my aisle seat, third row from the back, virtually from the moment they opened the screening room. I didn't realize that, once the Eberts had arrived, Roger had placed himself two rows behind me and that, since I'm rather tall, my head might be blocking part of his view. About five minutes into the movie, as William Shimell's "James Miller" got going with his self-satisfied press conference, my peripheral vision caught someone signaling me from just behind my shoulder and to my left: Roger, standing in the aisle. For reasons we all know, he was signaling with hands and gaze rather than words, and the predictable upshot had a lovely extra accent: he wanted me to scooch just a bit out of his eyeline, but not so far that I would block his wife's. "James Miller" needs some tutelage during Certified Copy about how to make a partner feel appreciated, but Roger Ebert obviously doesn't. I migrated one seat, but not two, and looked back to make sure I had understood what he wanted. He looked wholly grateful, but of course he couldn't speak that aloud, either.

So – he gave me a thumbs up. Imagine!

Unlike most of the critics who attended Certified Copy, he stayed for Heartbeats, which started a half-hour later. I noticed he was grabbing some shut-eye between the two movies, and I didn't want to bother him anyway, so I quickly scribbled a note, folded it, and wrote his name across the top, so I could leave it on the seat next to him. But when I re-entered the room to subtly deposit my letter, he was fully awake again and made instant and friendly eye-contact, so I handed him the note in person. So lovely to have an impromptu chance to speak from your heart to someone whom you admire but never expect to thank directly. My note, in certified copy:

Dear Roger,

I teach film studies and occasionally film reviewing in the English Department at Northwestern. You mean so much to so many of my students.

Thanks, in perpetuity, for everything you do, from them and from me. To get a thumbs-up from you—if only for scooting over a seat!—is such a special treat.

With such debts and affection,
Nick Davis

Chicago Film Festival 2010

The full lineup for the 46th Chicago Film Festival, the longest-running competitive film festival in North America, went live on the web last night at midnight. Members of the non-profit umbrella organization Cinema/Chicago get to buy tickets today and tomorrow before the full onslaught begins on Friday. I might be officially the biggest CIFF nerd in the city, having bought all my tickets in person at the office from the minute the second hand hit 10:00:00 this morning. They all have a little "#1" on them, referring to the fact that I was first in line, so my film-festival OCD can be preserved for future generations.

Not much Venice carry-over but quite a bit from Berlin, which pleases, since that festival's entrants tend to have a harder time reaching the U.S. Plus, a full half of the official Cannes competition slate. I told you this festival works hard to be au courant. As per usual, though, it's just as thrilling to see how loaded the large World Cinema program is with titles and directors I've never heard of, and with appearances by personal favorites like Since Otar Left's Julie Bertuccelli whose recent works have been flying slightly under the radar, and with festival phenoms I haven't yet encountered, like Aaron Katz and Xavier Dolan. Dolan's second film, Heartbeats will play along with Bertuccelli's The Tree in the New Directors competition, reserved for filmmakers' first and second features, and also in the "Outrageous" LGBT program, burgeoning from six entries last year to nine in 2010. (I have it on good authority that Dolan's even better-received debut I Killed My Mother, which apparently got a nominal NYC/LA release this summer, will appear as part of the queer Reeling Film Festival in Chicago in November, so put $10 aside now!)

Official press screenings aren't tremendously numerous, leading nicely to the media mostly seeing the films alongside "real" audiences. Between those that have been formally scheduled and the tickets I scooped up out of my own pocket this morning, based on the color-coded Excel sheet I rocked so hard into the wee hours of night, here are the films I'm currently slated to see, in addition to the four I've already screened:

Amphetamine (Hong Kong, dir. Scud; Outrageous)

Black Field (Greece, dir. Vardis Marinakis; New Directors)

Black Swan (USA, dir. Darren Aronofsky; Special Presentation)

Caterpillar (Japan, dir. Kôji Wakamatsu; World Cinema)

Certified Copy (France/Italy/Iran, dir. Abbas Kiarostami; Main Competition)

Cold Weather (USA, dir. Aaron Katz; World Cinema)

Heartbeats (Canada, dir. Xavier Dolan; New Directors)

The Housemaid (South Korea, dir. Im Sang-soo; World Cinema)

How I Ended the Summer (Russia, dir. Aleksei Popgrebsky; Main Competition)

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (Romania, dir. Florin Serban; World Cinema)

Loose Cannons (Italy, dir. Ferzan Ozpetek; Outrageous)

Love Like Poison (France, dir. Katell Quillévéré; New Directors)

Love Translated (Canada/Ukraine, dir. Julia Ivanova; DocuFest)

Of Love and Other Demons (Costa Rica/Colombia, dir. Hilda Hidalgo; World Cinema)

On Tour (Tournée) (France, dir. Mathieu Amalric; World Cinema)

Revolución (Mexico, dir. Misc.; Special Presentation)

The Robber (Austria/Germany, dir. Benjamin Heisenberg; Main Competition)

A Screaming Man (Chad, dir. Mahamat-Saleh Haroun; Main Competition)

The Sentiment of the Flesh (France, dir. Roberto Garzelli; New Directors)

The Tree (Australia, dir. Julie Bertuccelli; New Directors)

Tuesday, After Christmas (Romania, dir. Radu Muntean; Main Competition)

Waste Land (UK/Brazil, dir. Lucy Walker; DocuFest)

We Are What We Are (Mexico, dir. Jorge Michel Grau; Main Competition)


I also bought tickets to two groups of collected shorts, the scary Midnight Mayhem program and the Tales of the Unexpected collection, which I'm guessing means the "weird" ones, and includes the James Franco-directed Feast of Stephen.

But you know I love to give you all homework, and since I will have possibilities to add here and there to this itinerary, have a look at my CIFF 2010 page and let me know if you recognize anything in the Main or New Directors Competitions or the Outrageous lineup that you think I'm short-changing. Or, obviously, if there's anything else in the full schedule that you can vouch for. I am aware of skimping on the documentary offerings at present, but I cannot say a lot of them sound like they're up my particular alley. Happy to be instructed otherwise, though. Whereas I'm unlikely to take any hints to check out Special Presentations of 127 Hours, Fair Game, Made in Dagenham, The Tempest, and other Oscar hopefuls that will be easy enough to track down later. I did make one exception to that rule for Black Swan, following the same "But I'm Gonna Explode If I Don't!" principle that I followed last year into Precious. But that's it.

I'll add in closing that Sex Magic: Manifesting Maya, the documentary I screened this morning, was funny, unpredictable, and frank, not just in its advertised sexual explicitness but in the extensive, casual access that its key figures enable into a subject that can be very hard to make a documentary about that isn't stuck operating from a considerable distance. I'll be seeing as much as possible of the sex-focused material in the lineup, because that's how I suffer for my job. That is, not only have I published on films in that vein, so one must keep up, but the Festival office has asked me to speak on an October 9 panel about Sex and Cinema, alongside the makers of some of this year's movies. I have been asked to track down those directors' work and to follow all the envelopes they have pushed therein. I was even encouraged to wear to the panel what I was wearing last night to the pre-festival press kickoff, where the invitation was very kindly and unexpectedly extended.

It's one of those life lessons people can be slow to divulge, even though it's been known since the time of Confucius: if you're hoping opportunity will find you, give it a little nudge by wearing hot pink.

Monday Reviews: Never Let Me Go. Also: CIFF Looms!

I'll be surprised if Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go stays in the Oscar hunt in any category except Best Original Score, even though Rachel Portman's maudlin and overly conspicuous music is, sadly, the only thing in the movie about which I can't think of anything nice to say. Well, the music and the wigs: just awful. The rest of the movie is either an intriguing failure or a seriously flawed success, depending on my mood; almost every element has moments of working and moments of falling short. Did you feel differently, or do you plan to see it? Full review here, including two paragraphs guest-written by the main character, Kathy H.

The multiplex has a welcome aura of real appeal these days, with The Town and Easy A pulling down numbers and high critical marks. Buried is also on the way to Chicago on Friday, packing the same enviable cred of impressing reviewers and filmgoers back at Sundance, so I'll aim to see one of those three this week.

The full lineup for the Chicago Film Festival goes public on Wednesday, so in whatever time I have left, I'll try to say something about that and offer up some early reviews about the three movies I've gotten to screen in advance, all of them carried over from Cannes. Michael Rowe's Leap Year and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives come in about the same gradewise, though the former is sort of half full, using a taut, judicious shooting and editing to elevate a shaky premise, and the other, sadly, feels half empty, showcasing the filmmaker's ingratiating visual, tonal, and sonic trademarks through the first act, but then taking them nowhere truly satisfying.

Both films are easily worth a look, but neither is a patch on the Ukrainian showstopper My Joy, which starts as a kind of highway noir in the sunny but unsettling vastness of rural Russian highways but then gathers force as something more fractured, more uncanny, but equally gripping. Lots of movies sacrifice tension when they make a move toward national allegory, because you suddenly start seeing more or less how everything is meant to add up. By contrast, though, as My Joy raises its stakes and broadens its canvas, it actually becomes even richer and stranger, and the bravura technique astonishes even further. Standout passages, confirming Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu as even more of a world-class treasure, include a long sequence shot at a rural town market and a late, masterfully mounted rencontre among multiple characters at a roadside checkpoint. If you're reading this and already planning to hit the film festival in October, you've already got at least one movie on your docket that you owe it to yourself to catch.