Entries associated with the tag "Movies":

In this week's issue, a long review of Neil LaBute's Lakeview Terrace, with Samuel L. Jackson as an LAPD cop harrassing the interracial couple who've moved in next door, and a Critic's Choice for Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water.

Regarding Lakeview Terrace, I'm struck by the fact that two different people, when the movie came up in conversation, commented to me, "That looks awful." Screen Gems is marketing it as more of a slam-bang cop movie than the racial drama it really is. I don't expect an avalanche of glowing reviews either, because it's a decidedly conservative movie, and many critics pan movies that offend their politics. On the plus side, it's opening wide (we're listing it at 14 theaters), so you shouldn't have much trouble finding it. A rare case of the industry accidentally supporting a good movie.

Given that there are only a handful of narrative archetypes—I used to be able to rattle them off, but college was a long time ago—it's not surprising that, watching two dozen features over six days at the Toronto film festival, I sometimes thought I was watching the same one over again. That's not necessarily a rap against any of the filmmakers, because the details are what make an old story come alive. But in at least two cases, the similarities helped me clarify what separates a good movie from an exceptional one.

One of the festival's biggest buzz movies was Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which ended a distribution drought on Monday when Fox Searchlight picked up the U.S. rights for $4 million. Its main attraction is Mickey Rourke's unimpeachable performance as a washed-up wrestling star who's still riding on the fumes of his 80s glory when a coronary forces him into retirement for good. Rourke is one of those actors who's always working (since Diner made him a star in 1982, he's appeared in a whopping 50 features) but who's become such an industry punchline that any good role is inevitably heralded as a comeback. In The Wrestler he looks like a truck ran over him, but I can't think of many 52-year-old actors still ripped enough to get away with this role; the real subtext of The Wrestler is Rourke's indomitability, not the character's. The story is fairly sentimental—more Requiem for a Heavyweight than Requiem for a Dream—and the wrestler's relationships with his estranged daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and a stripper with a heart of gold (Marisa Tomei, another jaw-dropping specimen at 43) are pretty familiar. But the grimy details of life at the bummed-out bottom of the wrestling circuit are so convincing that I was pulled into the story anyway.

The same tale unfolds with a lot more energy, wit, and meta-movie flash in JCVD, a French action flick starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. Writer-director Mabrouk el Mechri befriended the Muscles From Brussels and wrote him the comeback role of all time—as himself, a washed-up action hero whose early 90s stardom in movies like Timecop and Universal Soldier has deteriorated into a life churning out straight-to-video martial arts flicks. People badger him on the street for autographs, making embarrassing remarks about his fading career; in a child custody hearing, his daughter testifies on the stand that classmates make fun of her whenever daddy's movies come on TV. When Van Damme blunders into a hostage crisis in a post office, the hostages look expectantly to him for heroic action, while the bad guys try to exploit his fame in negotiating with the police, who've set up a command post in the video store across the street. JCVD functions perfectly well as an action vehicle, but it's also a funny and poignant look at a man who can no longer live up to the exploits of his youth.

Another French production screening at Toronto—and scheduled for the Chicago film festival in October—was I've Loved You So Long, the debut feature of novelist Philippe Claudel. As the film opens, a middle-aged woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) is waiting for her much younger sister (Elsa Zylberstein) to pick her up at the airport; the woman has just been paroled from prison after 15 years, and before long Claudel reveals that she was convicted of killing her six-year-old son. Claudel withholds the details of the crime until the very end—you'd think a novelist would know better than to play around like that—exploring instead whether the killer, who moves in with her sister's family for the time being, can ever be accepted again by them or the larger community. Thomas acquits herself admirably as the remote, hardened woman, but when the truth finally comes out, it's considerably less heinous than one might have imagined. I've Loved You So Long purports to be about living with guilt, but in the end Claudel seems more intent on ameliorating it.

Where Claudel promises, Jonathan Demme delivers. Rachel Getting Married begins with a young woman (Anne Hathaway in a decidedly unglamorous role) getting picked up from her drug-treatment facility so she can attend her sister's wedding. Like the Thomas character, she's treated with a mixture of anger and alarm by her sister, her milquetoast father, and the assorted relatives who've gathered for the nuptials, and the reason for this emerges soon enough: years earlier, as a drugged-out teen, Hathaway drove into a lake, drowning her preschool brother. In contrast to the well-mannered I've Loved You So Long, Rachel Getting Married gets messier as it goes along, ripping the scabs off the dysfunctional family. (Declan Quinn's handheld photography contributes to the sense of barely contained chaos.) I've Loved You So Long contrives to isolate and alleviate the heroine's responsibility for a child's death, but in Rachel Getting Married, the responsibility seeps slowly outward, staining everyone.

TORONTO—Four days into the Toronto film festival, I've seen many fine features, and four that were excellent: Agnes Varda's delightful, career-spanning memoir The Beaches of Agnes; Jonathan Demme's vertiginous domestic drama Rachel Getting Married; Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's melancholy immigrant tale Sugar, and Joel and Ethan Coen's cruelly funny farce Burn After Reading. But the only film so far that's really turned me inside out is Kelly Reichardt's minimalist, ultra-low-budget indie Wendy and Lucy.

Readers might remember Reichardt's previous feature, Old Joy, which premiered in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September 2006 and played for a week at the Music Box two months later. Part landscape film, part muted drama, it followed two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) as they try to rekindle their relationship with a road trip to a natural spring out in the wilderness. Like many such reunions, their time together only confirms that they no longer really understand each other, and the sadness of their dead friendship is objectified by the passing of lush greenery into crummy industrial landscape as they drive home.

Wendy and Lucy is similarly low-key and landscape-oriented, taking place in a hick town in Oregon, but its simple story also delivers a profound social punch. Wendy, played with impressive restraint by Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain), is homeless and sleeping in her car, trying to make her way north so she can find work in a cannery. Her only companion is her beloved mutt, Lucy, who she makes the dire mistake of tying up outside a grocery store before she goes in to steal some food. Caught red-handed, Wendy spends 12 hours at the police station, and by the time she gets out, Lucy has long since disappeared.

Presenting her film at the AMC theater in Toronto, Reichardt explained that she and coscreenwriter Jonathan Raymond began working on the story after listening to the conservative backlash and "contempt for poverty" that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some commentators, she recalled, couldn't fathom the idea that you can't escape a storm zone if you're too poor to own a car. In her movie, Wendy has no safety net whatsoever—no job, no insurance, no assets except for her beater. She's one mishap away from falling through the cracks forever, and in its haunting finale, Wendy and Lucy recalls no less than Mervyn LeRoy's classic Depression-era drama I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932).

Remarkably, when Wendy and Lucy opens in Chicago this December, it will be the second high-profile American indie this year to stare poverty in the face, after Courtney Hunt's thriller Frozen River. This may be box-office suicide, but it's also a hell of a dramatic device. Most movies do all sorts of huffing and puffing to raise the stakes for their characters, but when you don't have a dime to your name, just pulling a meal together can be a matter of life and death.

TORONTO—Greetings from the Toronto film festival, where grown men will bull past you without so much as an "excuse me" to get into a high-profile industry screening, then watch 20 minutes of the movie and walk out. Last night's screening of Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom started a half hour late, a rarity at this impeccably well-managed fest, but the young woman who came in to explain the delay still got a face full of hostility from the crowd. Fortunately I'd come equipped with a saw-toothed survival knife and was able to cut through the sense of entitlement for a clear view of the screen.

Johnson made his feature debut with the art-house sleeper Brick (2006), which transposed the hard-boiled dialogue and tangled mystery of a Dashiell Hammett novel to a suburban SoCal high school. It was one of those microbudget indies whose script has been so lovingly polished that it overcomes any financial limitations, though it also benefited from a magnetic performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the hero, a jaded gumshoe in sneakers. With The Brothers Bloom, Johnson has a little more money to play with (about $20 million according to IndieWire, still a pittance by industry standards), and he gets the most out of it, conjuring up a continental, Old World-vibe with locations in eastern Europe. There are also an unusual number of fireballs for an art-house movie, which proves you don't have to be Michael Bay to blow stuff up. In fact, it blows up real good.

Like Brick, the new movie is a puckish reworking of a familiar tale—in this case the con-man story, in which a professional trickster falls in love and has to figure out whether he's capable of maintaining a relationship based on candor rather than deception. Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody are a pair of brothers who, shunted from one foster home to another in their youth, have learned to trust only each other. Ruffalo is the older sibling, the plotter, and Johnson lays it on pretty thick in comparing his skills to those of a storyteller. "He writes cons like dead Russians write novels—with thematic arcs," Brody explains in voice-over. The rub comes when Brody falls for an eccentric heiress (Rachel Weisz), the perfect mark.

It's the sort of unapologetically self-conscious movie that requires a little generosity but also rewards it. Johnson is a witty writer, and he does a lot more with the camera here than he could afford to with Brick. Strangely, though, The Brothers Bloom seems less novel than its predecessor, which actually used the noir mythology to comment on the ruthlessness of high school kids. The Brothers Bloom is every bit as quirky and literate, but without the earlier movie's edge, it kept reminding me of Wes Anderson's comedies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou). One Wes Anderson is enough for me—though, given the choice, I'd rather have another of him than another Michael Bay.

This week's repertory pick is the coolly literate indie drama Chameleon Street (1989), which screens this Thursday, September 4, 7 PM, at Chatham 14, 210 W. 87st St., 773-783-8711. Winner of a Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance film festival, the movie has been revived around town occasionally and recently won a DVD release from Image Entertainment. But this screening comes with an added treat: an appearance by Wendell B. Harris Jr., the movie's brainy writer, director, and star.

Chameleon Street is based on the life of William Douglas Street, a Detroit con man who pulled off a series of impersonations in the 70s and 80s. An early scene shows Street arguing with a coworker in the cab of their delivery truck about the ways black people alter their appearance and behavior to mesh with the white world. The conversation clearly frames the movie's trenchant vision of African-American life: when Street passes himself off as a reporter for Time magazine, an exchange student at Yale, a surgeon, and a human rights attorney, he's only indulging in a more pathological version of the masquerade some blacks endure for much of their lives.

Onscreen Harris often positions himself in the frame so that his face is cloaked in shadow, which not only becomes an effective visual motif for his chameleonic hero but also serves as an ironic summary of his career since then. As Harris explains in an interview with Cinemad, his triumph at Sundance led to a series of Hollywood production deals that never panned out. The industry was less interested in distributing Chameleon Street than in remaking it with a bankable star (Sinbad, Wesley Snipes, Will Smith) and a more mainstream point of view. Eventually Harris moved back home, and since 1993 he's been working on another independent project, a sci-fi epic called Arbiter Roswell. Perhaps the recent rediscovery of Chameleon Street will bring him out of the shadows once and for all.

Frank Borzage's masterful romance History Is Made at Night (1937) screens this evening (Wed 8/27) at 8 PM at University of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th Street. Jean Arthur stars as an American socialite trying to escape her unhappy marriage, and Charles Boyer is the dashing Parisian headwaiter who comes to her aid. There are also choice supporting performances by Leo Carillo (oddly shorn of his sombrero) as Boyer's loyal pal, a fatuous French chef, and Colin Clive (oddly shorn of Boris Karloff) as Arthur's husband, a sour and controlling businessman.

Dave Kehr describes the film better than I can, noting that "Borzage uses every resource of mise-en-scene—lighting, camera movement, depth of focus, and cutting—to create a separate enchanted environment for his characters." Yet the moment that moved me the most comes when that enchanted environment widens to include everyone else. Trapped on a sinking ocean liner, Boyer insists that Arthur leave him behind and board one of the lifeboats. As the women and children are all herded onto the boats and the men stay behind, Borzage cuts from the lovers to an assortment of other passengers in their heartbreak, as wives are torn from their husbands, children from their parents. Love, as the song goes, is all around.

TV writer-director Alan Ball, who created the HBO series Six Feet Under and won an Oscar for the screenplay of American Beauty (1999), will appear at Landmark's Century Centre on Monday, August 25, following a 7 PM preview screening of his feature directing debut, Towelhead. Adapted from the 2005 novel by Alicia Erian, the movie stars Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi, and Summer Bishil as the main character, a Lebanese-American teenager trying to survive life in a Houston suburb during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The movie premiered last September at the Toronto film festival under the title Nothing Is Private.

Tickets are free, but admission is first-come, first-served. To RSVP, send an E-mail to TowelheadChicago@43kix.com. The Landmark is located at 2828 N. Clark, 773-509-4949.

Back when I was cutting my teeth on American auteurs, The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) was probably the film that confused me most. I'd seen just about everything in Budd Boetticher's celebrated Ranown cycle, the series of low-budget westerns with Randolph Scott on which his reputation largely rests, and didn't quite know what to make of this anomalous black-and-white gangster melodrama. Since where the Ranowns were naturalistic and gritty, behaviorally laid back, even ramblingly philosophical, Legs was all stylization and cartoon surface, a wholly artificial concoction, with a kind of studio glitz and polish that seemed utterly alien to what Boetticher's "artistic vision" ought to have been about—or so I thought at the time. (Dave Kehr remarks on its "newsreel surrealism," with "overcontrasted" images and "shoddy cardboard sets," but what I seem to remember is a slickly styled noir, deep darks and dazzling lights with a high Hollywood sheen.) In the Boetticher canon, I'd probably rank Legs among my three or four favorite films—a superior old B, maybe even a bit retro before the word was coined. And Karen Steele, whose cover-girl glamour verged on the grotesque in the hardscrabble desolation of Ride Lonesome (on my all time top-50 list, incidentally), seems to have found her true ornamental calling here.

The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond screens Thursday, August 21, at 8 PM at University of Chicago Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th Street, Ida Noyes Hall. The print is 16-millimeter, apparently the best available in these celluloid-straitened times. For more information call 773-702-8575.

This week's repertory pick is John Ford's classic American myth Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which screens Saturday at 8 PM at Bank of America Cinema, 4901 W. Irving Park. Tickets are $5, and parking is free in the Bank of America lot, which is where the theater entrance is squirreled away (turn south on Lavergne, then east into the lot).

Nowadays, when most teenagers can't tell you when the Civil War was fought, a filmmaker can expect to get rapped hard for fictionalizing any aspect of history. (Oliver Stone, this means you!) But back in Ford's day—perhaps because more Americans could be trusted to tell fact from fancy—there was a little more tolerance for fond invention. Young Mr. Lincoln may not be too accurate as a lesson in American history, but it's such a moving expression of Lincoln's memory that it's become history itself.

Here's a clip from the movie, centering on young Abe Lincoln's ill-fated romance with Ann Rutledge. The lovely score is by Alfred Newman.

Last week's New Yorker carried an interesting personal essay by Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University instructor who became a star on the 1950s quiz show Twenty One and then an object of disgrace when the public learned that the show was fixed by the producers. Movie fans probably know that story from Robert Redford's Oscar-winning Quiz Show (1994), but Van Doren's essay also details his life after the scandal, including the genesis of the movie. Redford offered him $50,000, and then $100,000, to serve as a consultant, but Van Doren, acting on the advice of his attorney and the feelings of his family, turned the offer down. According to the piece, that didn't stop actor Ralph Fiennes (pictured) from driving up to Van Doren's house and sneakily asking for directions in order to get a look at him.

A footnote: Redford's movie was adapted from a superb book by Richard Goodwin called Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties. A House subcommittee investigator on the quiz-show case, Goodwin later wrote eloquent speeches for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Senator Robert Kennedy. (He's also the husband of presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.) Goodwin is a tremendously gifted writer, and Remembering America is an essential memoir of the 1960s. I can't recommend it more highly.

Fifteen years ago this week I turned in my last set of college grades, and I've never looked back. Teaching wasn't for me—I still cringe when I think of myself at a podium, hemming and hawing—but I have plenty of friends who've made it their life's work. I doubt many of them would consider their profession well-represented in the movies. Not that there aren't plenty of lecture halls: there's never been a better place for a lazy screenwriter to unload a bunch of exposition. And hundreds of movies deal with the student experience, relegating the professor to the role of ice-cold taskmaster (think John Houseman in The Paper Chase). But when I try to think of movies that actually delve into the world of college faculty—as, for instance, Mary McCarthy did in her wicked satire The Groves of Academe—I mostly draw a blank.

When movies do focus on college professors, they're usually about something other than the character's work, which may be used as a plot device but is almost always treated with a whiff of contempt. Take The Savages, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a frustrated theater professor in Buffalo who's trying to finish an esoteric book on Bertolt Brecht. Or Smart People, with Dennis Quaid as a frustrated English professor at Carnegie Mellon whose book on the closing of the American mind is snapped up by Penguin; the editors clean up its tendentious prose, retitle it "You Can't Read," and hope to launch Quaid as the latest cultural theorist people love to hate. Or The Visitor, with Richard Jenkins as a frustrated economics professor whose department sends him to New York to deliver a paper he coauthored with a younger colleague but didn't actually research or write.

One movie that does get down and dirty in the world of academia is Chen Shi-zheng's Dark Matter, which begins a weeklong run today at Facets Cinematheque. (The movie, which ends with a shooting spree in a lecture hall, screened here in April 2007 as part of the Asian American Showcase festival; nine days later the Virgina Tech massacre banished it to commercial limbo.) Ye Liu (Purple Butterfly) plays a docile but brilliant Chinese student, Lu Xing, who arrives at a California university to pursue a PhD in astrophysics under his idol, Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn). The renowned author of the Reiser Model of the universe, the professor knows firsthand how quickly an academic star can fall to earth; years earlier, his own theoretical breakthroughs discredited the work of his academic mentor, and he reacts with anger and alarm when Lu develops a radical new notion that may send the Reiser Model into the same dustbin of history.

Remember when the Coen brothers opened Fargo with the legend "This is a true story" and it turned out to be fiction? Roger Donaldson's new heist thriller The Bank Job seems to operate on the reverse principle. A press release says it was "inspired by" the 1971 robbery of a London bank, suggesting a certain amount of fiction. But a full year ago the UK Observer reported that screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais drew on a "deep throat" informer familiar with the hushed-up case to "incriminate high-ranking police officers, the secret service, politicians, and a prominent member of the Royal Family."

A more recent story in the UK Telegraph neatly sorts the established facts from the conspiracy theory. On September 13, 1971, thieves tunneled from an adjacent storefront into the bank's basement safe-deposit section and made off with £3 million in cash and jewels. A ham radio operator happened to catch some of their walkie-talkie communications and contacted the police, who tracked down the location of the robbery. It was too late to catch them, but police broadcast recordings of the culprits in hopes of someone identifying them. After four days of heavy media coverage, the government issued a "D order" prohibiting any further press stories on the robbery.

The screenwriters' Deep Throat turns out to be a man named George McIndoe, listed as a producer on the film, who claims that he met two of the robbers. McIndoe's story is that the robbers were indirectly sponsored by MI5, the British intelligence service, which was after sexually incriminating photos of Princess Margaret being held in a safe deposit box by the revolutionary Michael X. The movie argues that Gale Ann Benson, the daughter of a conservative MP whose body was found in a shallow grave on the grounds of Michael X's Trinidadian commune in 1972, was in fact an MI5 spy trying to get the goods on Michael. And, just for good measure, I suppose, Clement and La Frenais also have the robbers stumbling on ledgers of police payoffs, a discovery that makes them the target of violent reprisals from the cops.

The movie opened in the UK last week and hasn't forced the royal family to abdicate. But having turned the story into an entertainment instead of a muckraking documentary, the writers will probably get a lot more mileage out of the material and face a lot less scrutiny. Another story, in the Daily Mail, revisits Princess Margaret's wild social life; oddly, it states that Margaret is never named in the movie, though the print I saw has heist meister Jason Statham gaping at the photos and exclaiming "That's Princess Margaret!" Could there be two different cuts of the movie, one for the U.S. and another the UK?

I could go on, but I hear black helicopters outside and must head for the basement.

The Gene Siskel Film Center has released the schedule for the 11th European Union Film Festival, which runs March 7 through April 13. Though many Chicago film festivals have been contracting, the EU Fest just keeps getting bigger: this year's edition offers a whopping 61 features, almost all of them screening in the Chicago area for the first time. Among the highlights:

• From Austria, Ulrich Seidl's Import Export (3/8, 3/11).

• From Denmark, Peter Schonau Fog's The Art of Crying (3/9, 3/13) and Pernille Rose Gronkjaer's The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun (3/7, 3/11).

• From Finland, Aku Louhimies's Frozen Land (3/23, 3/24).

• From France, Olivier Assayas's Boarding Gate (pictured, 3/8, 3/12), Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two (3/23, 3/25), Claude Lelouch's Roman de Gare (3/16), and Guillaume Canet's Tell No One (3/15, 3/18).

• From Germany, Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (3/21, 3/22) and Stefan Krohmer's Summer '04 (3/16, 3/17).

• From Hungary, Robert Koltai's Train Keeps a Rollin' (3/29, 3/31).

• From Ireland, Tom Collins's Kings (4/3) and John Boorman's The Tiger's Tail (3/22, 3/26).

•  From Italy, Gianni Amelio's The Missing Star (3/29, 3/31) and Giuseppe Tornatore's The Unknown (3/30, 4/1).

• From the Netherlands, Albert ter Heerdt's Kicks.

• From Portugal, Paul Auster's The Inner Life of Martin Frost (3/15, 3/18).

• From Romania, Nae Caranfil's The Rest Is Silence (3/15, 3/20) and Catalin Mitulescu's The Way I Spent the End of the World (3/8, 3/13).

• From Spain, Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia (3/28, 3/29), Mercedes Alvarez's The Sky Turns (3/16, 3/18), and Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes (3/22, 3/26).

• From Sweden, Johan Kling's Darling (3/14, 3/19) and Klaus Haro's The New Man (3/30, 4/1).

•  From the United Kingdom, Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha (3/8, 3/10) and Ken Loach's It's a Free World . . . (3/15, 3/20).

Tonight would be a good night to visit that old friend of yours who has premium cable: beginning at 7 PM Central, Turner Classic Movies will screen a four-and-a-half-hour block of early films by Los Angeles indie Charles Burnett. The schedule kicks off with his acclaimed debut feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), and includes the recently released director's cut of My Brother's Wedding (1983). Both of these have enjoyed Chicago runs recently, but harder to see are the three shorts also showing: Several Friends (1969), The Horse (1973), and When It Rains (1995). TCM host Robert Osborne will interview Burnett throughout the broadcast, which repeats in its entirety at 11:30 PM.

By the way, all these films are available as part of Milestone's new DVD release of Killer of Sheep. So when you're at your friend's house, remind him about that 40 bucks he owes you.

Facets Film School has announced its winter session of weeknight film classes, which begins February 5 and runs for six weeks. I took a class on early Fassbinder there once, and it wasn't bad—the films were projected from DVD and the lectures tended more toward open discussion, but the tuition is only $95.

On Mondays, Christy LeMaster of Chicago Cinema Forum will teach "Stranger Than Truth: The Hybrid Documentary" and screen such titles as Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein's The Kid Stays in the Picture, Jessica Yu's In the Realms of the Unreal, and Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder.

On Tuesdays, Jeremy M. Davies will teach "What I Tell You Three Times Is True: The Provocative and Fantastic World of Raul Ruiz," which includes screenings of Klimt, Life Is a Dream, and Three Crowns of the Sailor.

On Wednesdays, Bruce Scivally will teach "Saints & Sinners: Politicians in the Movies," focusing on such features as Gergory La Cava's Gabriel Over the White House, Preston Sturges's The Great McGinty, Frank Capra's State of the Union, and Michael Ritchie's The Candidate.

And on Thursdays, Brandon Linden will teach "Arrows of Desire: The Films of Powell & Pressburger During WWII," examining the British team's treatment of the war in such dramas as Contraband, The 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Is there ever a good time to release a comedy about a woman giving head to a dog? In Bobcat Goldthwait’s Stay, a young man (Bryce Johnson) urges his fiancee (Melinda Page Hamilton) to reveal her deepest, darkest secret, and gets more than he bargained for when she confesses that, as a bored and curious teen, she once pleasured her pooch. The movie screened in January at the Sundance Film Festival and showed up in the fall preview issue of Premiere with a release date of September 29, atrociously retitled Sleeping Dogs Lie to distinguish it from Marc Forster's recent thriller, Stay. It finally opened in New York and Los Angeles on October 20 and was scheduled for release here on November 24 (holiday counterprogramming at its finest). But now Matt Cowal of Samuel Goldwyn Films/Roadside Attractions, the movie’s distributor, confirms that the Chicago release date has been moved back to January 19.

I haven’t had a chance to see the movie, but according to the Hollywood Reporter it "flabbergasted and fractured" the audience at Sundance (except for Todd McCarthy, who panned it in Variety). It also picked up good reviews from Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times ("Rather than the escalating gross-out spectacular it could have been, Sleeping Dogs Lie is an unexpectedly thoughtful look at what it takes to make relationships work") and Stephen Holden in the New York Times ("The uncomfortable message sent by Bobcat Goldthwait’s lean, subversive comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie is how easy it is to gross out people who think they’re so swinging and cool").

Goldthwait definitely deserves a break after what happened to his first movie, Shakes the Clown (1992). Aptly called "the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies," it starred Goldthwait as the title character, a birthday clown who drinks like Charles Bukowski. Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson plays a revolting slut who has a one-night stand with Shakes, and a prestardom Adam Sandler, in his single best screen performance, is the chronically depressed clown Dink the Doormat. It’s one hell of a funny movie, but upon its release it was reportedly picketed by clowns as defamatory, and it flopped at the box office. Who would have guessed that clowns have no sense of humor? Who’d have guessed they were so organized? (Perhaps they all piled out of the same little car.)

Since then Goldthwait has directed some episodic TV, including Crank Yankers, Chappelle’s Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live, but this is his first theatrical movie since Shakes. You have to admire someone who gets scolded by clowns and comes back (albeit 14 years later) with a movie about having sex with a house pet. Perhaps by January they can come up with a better title than Sleeping Dogs Lie. How about Lassie Come Hard?