Previewing the 55th Chicago International Film Festival

October 18, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Festival

Cinema/Chicago, the “presenting” organization of the Chicago International Film Festival, annually invite members of the press to a breakfast where they announce their festival lineup. Programmers remark on a handful of titles, logistics get figured out, and everyone flutters about the stale pastries before and after the event. Every year I mentally keep track of the different variants wherein organizers deploy the word “rebrand”, all while musing how something could be re-anything when there’s not much of an identity in the first place. It was also the first year where a few of the colleagues that I call friends didn’t show up to the breakfast. I sympathize with why. There’s a certain masochistic agony associated with these things, where my thoughts tend to gravitate toward the films that are missing rather than what’s there. I’m not the only one who does this and I’m fairly certain that it’s not a healthy way of thinking, but it’s frequently unavoidable.

Part of me cites this disappointment out of some hope that it might inspire change? I’m grateful to be alive in a city that shelters such a passionate community of cinephiles; it’s a pocket of benevolence that engages with film in such a proactive and communal way. That kind of community is eerily out of sorts with the bill of goods sold by CIFF (or Chi Film Fest or whatever they want to go by now). Their preferred method of quote unquote curation is seemingly queued to arbitrary, with a particular preference for middlebrow Oscar-fare that has already had the benefit of being vetted and considered ad nauseam. But whatever Cinema/Chicago is doing is clearly working for them (frequent sell-outs of premium-rate screenings) even if it’s not working for me.

The 55th Chicago International Film Festival runs from October 16 through October 27. For a complete schedule, please refer to their website here. Below are some of the titles I had the opportunity to preview, updated regularly as the festival proceeds.

Clemency

The Components of Love

Deerskin

Fire Will Come

Girl on the Third Floor

Mother

Tremors

The Truth

The Twentieth Century

The Whistlers

Mister America (Eric Notarnicola)

October 09, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Mister America, Eric Notarnicola, Review

Earlier in the year, I caught Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s travelling roadshow at Chicago’s Thalia Hall. At the time, my knowledge of Heidecker and Turkington was largely condensed to a fleeting familiarity of their filmography, aware that they’ve both been featured in Rick Alverson films. And I had seen Turkington, as his alter ego Neil Hamburger perform an absolutely lacerating set earlier in the year at the dive-bar-disguised-as-a-venue, The Hideout. But beyond that, I was mostly unfamiliar with the depths of their oeuvre, which include ten seasons of the On Cinema at the Cinema show, six two-plus hour Oscar specials, a six-season web series/action parody called Decker, and Heidecker’s EDM collaborations. Little could prepare me for what I saw during On Cinema Live and even with that minimal exposure, little could prepare me for Mister America.

Right Here, Right Now: On A Faithful Man and The Mountain

September 30, 2019 by Daniel Nava in RHRN, The Mountain, A Faithful Man, Rick Alverson, Louis Garrel, 2018

Currently screening at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center are Louis Garrel’s A Faithful Man (Recommended) and Rick Alverson’s The Mountain (Recommended). The Kino Lorber double-feature barely share anything in common, but I thought it useful to consider both films in the same space. If anything, it’s their cultural and thematic contrasts that serve to illuminate my reading and thoughts on both. And more importantly, it’s their unexpected moments of similarity, Garrel and Alverson’s calculated use of elision, which makes a duel reading of the films more rewarding.

The Death of Dick Long (Daniel Scheinert)

September 27, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, Daniel Scheinert, The Death of Dick Long

Daniel Scheinert’s The Death of Dick Long deals with a specific subphylum of masculine ennui that can be largely associated with quote unquote white trash. I don’t necessarily mean that as a dig or even to be dismissive of what Scheinert and writer Billy Chew are doing here either. If anything, Dick Long happens to share a lot of things with James Gray’s Ad Astra, a film that’s been on my mind a lot lately. The two films examine masculinity in uniquely specific ways: if Ad Astra provokes despair through its cerebral provocations, where emotions cannot crack the veneer of its stoic protagonist, then Dick Long is something more primal, less intended for the intellectual unraveling. It’s about the hostility that comes from not understanding a question, about a certain absent-minded naivety that I tend to associate with the political Right. It’s easy to ridicule, sure, but it ends up becoming surprisingly more complex than its Nickleback-laced soundtrack would suggest. If Dick Long’s provocations are more sensational and weird, does it make Scheinert and Chew’s observations on male relationships any less genuine?

Ad Astra (James Gray)

September 18, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, Ad Astra, James Gray, Essential

“Are you ready for your psychological evaluation?” It’s the computer prompt that astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) responds to in minute detail every morning. There’s something rehearsed about the cadence in which Roy responds to the question, as if to suggest that he’s answered this question ad nauseam, prepared to reaffirm a stranger’s perception of what constitutes being well-adjusted. It’s one of those ridiculous but necessary aspects of his day-in and day-out and it’s the sort of thing that is best mitigated by embracing a palatable lie. And so Roy conceals the truth: the truth about missing his wife (Liv Tyler) and the truth about his missing father (Tommy Lee Jones), now gone for nearly three decades after what was presumed to be a failed mission to Neptune. Instead he dedicates himself to the now, his “eye on the exit,” with the hope that whatever insular, emotional hemorrhaging he encounters can be compartmentalized, stowed away and forgotten. The instinct is, painfully, an all too relatable one.

Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria)

September 13, 2019 by Daniel Nava in Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers, 2019, Review

Dorothy (Constance Wu) doesn’t have the luxury of time. Her grandmother is ill and has debts, leaving Dorothy to take up dancing jobs and menial service posts to eke out a living. But it’s 2007 and with it comes the rose-tinged nostalgia of a uniquely American past that was somehow everything and nothing. It’s baffling, yet profoundly relatable, to look at 2007 as an end of an era of sorts. For me? I was living on my own and forced to become a fully functional human being. Something similar could be said for Dorothy, especially when she meets Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). It’s at that moment that she finds some measure of self, some agency. In a world of impulse and insincerity you end up clinging onto those who seem to have it all figured out. Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers presents itself as a catalog of decline, where women are let down by the men that orbit around them. Where a system of dependence proves inadequate and how, when backed against a corner, they prove to be more resourceful than the men who stood in defeat, palms stretched out as they beg for a bailout.

The Goldfinch (John Crowley)

September 11, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2019, Review, The Goldfinch, John Crowley

John Crowley’s The Goldfinch follows some kind of algorithm of suffering, detailing the misfortunes of Theo Decker (Ansel Elgort as Adult Theo, Oakes Fegley as Young Theo). The boy loses his mother in a bombing at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he stows away Carel Fabritius' painting, The Goldfinch, in his backpack. What follows is a film of excess: a film scrubbed clean of its Dickensian magnitude, sanitized and glossed for a less than discerning film festival crowd. If The Goldfinch hints at the traditions of 19th century literary writing, or even implies a passing resemblance to Great American existential films like Ordinary People or Paris, Texas, it’s a superficial kinship. ‘Cause this film is nothing but glossy surfaces, paying lip service to actual despair. Even the rubble is pristine.

It Chapter Two (Andy Muschietti)

September 06, 2019 by Daniel Nava in It Chapter Two, 2019, Review, Andy Muschietti

So it’s about living with regret, how we dislodge memories and the messy mechanics and symptoms of masculinity. It’s about inhaling the past, and how home no longer feels like a destination or refuge but something backwards – a symbol of drift and decline. Or at least that’s what I wanted Andy Muschietti’s It Chapter Two to be about. This is one of those specific examples of a film that I’m willing to make unhealthy and proactive concessions for. Films about memory and how it corresponds with regret tend to howl louder for me and as a result I’m prone to overlooking many of It Two’s flaws until… I couldn’t. Thing is that much like It’s 2017 predecessor, It Two is a film with rich ideas, lofty in its themes and realized with a confidence that would suggest a command of Stephen King’s source material. But it communicates these ideas in the most banal, lowest common denominator way imaginable. I really like what It Two is about, I just hate how it goes about it.

Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (Morgan Spurlock)

September 01, 2019 by Daniel Nava in 2017, Review, Morgan Spurlock, Super Size Me 2

What an embarrassing title. Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! is another example of the quote unquote documentary filmmaker peddling his brand of Gen-X whining as cultural and critical complaint. I was an impressionable 16-year old when Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, Super Size Me, entered the cultural conversation and even then I found his gonzo journey of eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days to be juvenile. Fast-forward 15 years and Spurlock’s follow-up is impossibly more jejune and inconsequential than his predecessor, relying on a series of hackneyed formal devices that serve to lecture rote banalities. Spurlock isn’t a documentarian. Or a filmmaker. Instead he’s perpetually auditioning to be a late-night talk show host, constantly mugging for the camera, insisting upon his moral, ethical, and intellectual superiority.

American Factory (Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert)

August 22, 2019 by Daniel Nava in American Factory, Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert, 2019, Review, Recommended

Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s American Factory opens in Moraine, Ohio with the closure of a General Motors plant. It’s the start of the decade and we observe brief glimpses of workers in tears as the final car makes its way down the assembly line. Immediately after, set several years later, we see a Chinese couple remarking on the beauty of the Midwestern plains of Moraine, ultimately shuddering as the Ohio chill settles into their marrow. American Factory details the profoundly devastating transition in which Ohio residents see the closure of an American institution and the opening of a new factory owned by Chinese billionaire Cao Dewang.