We admit to having mixed feelings about the beast that has become Wicker Park's Around The Coyote Festival. We don't dig all the suburbanites stumbling down the sidewalk in an effort to discover "culture" in the space of a few days. At the same time we have plenty of artist friends that look forward to the event as a chance to sell some of their work and mingle with the public. So, weighing that, we've decided that overall the fest has good intentions.

It began as primarily visual arts oriented, but in recent years the disciplines included have expanded to include music, film, theater, books, and pretty much any other mode of artistic expression the organizers can cram into the program.

Naturally, as the festival grows bigger, there's a greater need for people to help out with the ins-and-outs of the non-profit's signature event, so the organizers have put out a call looking for folks willing to donate a few hours of their time in order to keep everything running smoothly. And if you volunteer, not only do you get the chance to rub elbows with real-life starving artists, you also get a festival T-shirt, a one-day pass to the festival for each day you volunteer, and admission to the opening night party. Interested? Apply here.

Coyote Building photo by sierraromeo.

Thinking about going to the movies tonight? Looks like everyone in town is warning you against Good Luck Chuck, the Dane Cook/Jessica Alba rom-com whose plot keywords on IMDb are ... wow. Inspired by Matthew Baldwin's genius Bad Review Reviews, we present highlights from Chicago media's terrible reviews of GLC.

Scott Tobias, AV Club: "Proof that a million MySpace users can be wrong."

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: "The film is some sort of humor-deprivation experiment."

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: "Like a Farrelly brothers gross-out without the laughs."

Roger Ebert, Sun Times: "There is a word for this movie, and that word is: Ick."

If you were at last night's Estrojam (warning: makes noise) opening-night Panty Party at Funky Buddha, it's likely you're familiar with the festival. You're also probably a) hungover from all the $1 beers and mango vodka shots, and b) searching for your face on Last Night's Party, hoping for a new MySpace photo.

The five-year-old, woman-centric music and culture festival continues all over the city this week with a bevy of concerts, films, workshops and comedy shows. A few highlights:

• Margaret Cho's The Sensuous Woman opens tonight. As she told us last week, the show is a big 'ole variety show, complete with a viral YouTube star, burlesque dancing and, duh, a gay rapper.
• The Cinejam Film Festival, featuring shorts, animation and music videos created by women filmmakers from around the world.
• Workshops that span from women's reproductive options/issues to the obligatory sex-ploration seminar.
• The final performance ever by the renowned and often sampled electro, art-funk band ESG.

While not a man-hating affair (the penis-growing set is more than welcome and invited to attend the festivities), Estrojam serves as an annual celebration of women's contribution to music, art and filmmaking. So get on out there and celebrate the ladies, already. The festival ends Saturday, and tickets are still available.

Northern State at Estrojam photo courtesy of the festival.

A few days ago we unwittingly created a monster when we expressed our frustration about having to wait to see the schedule for this year's Chicago International Film Festival, which runs October 4-17. Well, we finally have a copy of said schedule in our hot little hands. What follows is a very brief, cursory summary of what you can expect this year (the full schedule will be online within the next few days).

Regardless of what shenanigans might or might not be going on behind the festival's scenes, this year's lineup looks remarkably strong. Opening Night will see the U.S. premiere of The Kite Runner, directed by Marc Forster (Monster's Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) from the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini. That's a definite coup for CIFF. Roger Ebert will be on hand to receive a special honor. The Closing Night movie is The Savages, starring Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. We loved Tamara Jenkins' earlier film The Slums of Beverly Hills, whose lip sync sequence left us breathless with laughter. Another solid get.

Incidentally Philip Seymour Hoffman is also in Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a suspense thriller co-starring Ethan Hawke. There seem to be a lot of crime movies and paranoiac political thrillers this year. Noise (from Australia), Eye in the Sky (Hong Kong), and the American Home of the Giants sound like variations on the crime-gone-wrong setup, while other movies involve surveillance cameras (like Look and the aptly-named Surveillance) and conspiracy (Heartbeat Detector, Black Butterfly and The Aerial). Surprisingly there are few movies dealing with the Iraq War (one of which is a Hollywood movie, Grace is Gone with John Cusack).

It's very heartening to see several films from Africa on the schedule, an entire continent with films that remain all but unseen even on art-house screens. Dreams of Dust, about the brutal existence of gold miners in Burkina Faso, is definitely on our must-see list. Another must-see is the documentary A Walk Into the Sea, which sketches the mysterious life of Danny Williams, a young filmmaker who was part of Andy Warhol's circle until he disappeared in 1966. In the "Restored & Rediscovered" sidebar is a special, once-only screening of Renoir's masterpiece The River. It's a film with color cinematography so beautiful you might begin to levitate in your seat. And in the "Late Night Screamings" series is Chicago-native Stuart Gordon's (Re-Animator) queasy new film Stuck, a blacker-than-black horror comedy about a young woman driving home one night who accidentally hits a homeless man — and leaves him stuck in the windshield of her car.

There are 160 movies unspooling this year, and we just don't have the space (or stamina) to tell you about any more of them just now. But check back here for reviews and updates over the coming weeks, and we'll do our best to keep up.

CIFF runs October 4-17 at various theaters (mostly the Landmark Century, River East 21 and the Music Box). Full details, including ticket info, right here.

The Chicago International Film Festival is one of the highlights of the Chicago movie calendar. Every October for the past several years, we've purchased a festival pass and taken a gamble; in addition to catching films every year that we've already heard about, we always force ourselves to see at least a few films we know nothing about. In the past that's meant such pleasant surprises as Syndromes and a Century and 10th District Court.

This year, there's something fishy going on. The festival runs October 4-17 and will feature 150 movies from 35 countries. And that's just about all we know. With less than three weeks to go, we haven't been able to find a published schedule or even a list of venues. A quarter-page ad in Section Two of last week's Reader directed us to an online Sneak Preview at the festival's site, but even this is fairly uninformative.

In previous years, by this point a final schedule would have been printed up and distributed all across the city; over Sunday morning coffee, we would have mapped out a plan of attack, made our first- and second-tier choices and purchased a festival pass. True, we could go ahead and buy a pass online. But without seeing a schedule, we're a little hesitant. And on the CIFF site it clearly states that tickets will not be mailed for online reservations and that passes cannot be redeemed until September 22, less than two weeks before Opening Night! That doesn't leave a whole lot of time for planning on anyone's part.

So what's going on? Is there trouble behind the scenes, or is festival staff just being extra meticulous this year? We hope that this post triggers someone with inside knowledge to come forward so we can get some answers (an email directly to CIFF has so far gone unanswered). This year's festival will undoubtedly still be worth going to, and gorging on. But the festival should be two weeks preceded by the joyful anticipation of Chicago movie lovers, not restless anxiety about what the hell is going on.

Image of the 1983 festival poster via Cinema Arts.

Let's start with a tough question: Who is Chicago's greatest filmmaker? When it comes to experimental film some might advocate for James Fotopoulos, whose output is both prodigious and relentlessly probing. When it comes to documentaries, Steve James is more than formidable. And on the narrative end of things although neither Andrew Davis nor John Landis quite make the grade, they've both had their moments.

We would argue that the title should go to Tom Palazzolo, who has been a tireless chronicler of Chicago since the early 60's. His movies combine the best of all worlds; taken as a whole, his work is a mosaic-like depiction of the city, verging on the experimental while firmly maintaining an earthy sense of humor (and abundant pathos for local foibles). His coverage of everything from the unveiling ceremony of the Picasso in Daley Plaza, to a 70's-era Gay Pride parade and a senior citizens picnic takes us back to a time and place both eerily recognizable and unfamiliar.

This Thursday, Chicago Filmmakers presents seven newly preserved prints of films by Palazzolo (the screening is in conjunction with SAIC and will take place at the Siskel). The new prints are courtesy of funding from the Avant-Garde Masters program of the National Film Preservation Foundation, and promise to look even better than earlier DVD releases. If you love movies and Chicago history, it's an event not to be missed.

And if you love movies and Chicago history, you'll also want to head out to the Portage Theatre on Friday night to catch the documentary Uptown: Portrait of a Palace. It's part of a mini-festival called Preserving Palaces, a collection of films about the (often unsuccessful) attempts to restore and preserve some of America's grandest movie theaters. We hardly need to rehash the whole Uptown Theatre mess; it's a sad history of glory, decline and dashed hopes. But could a brighter future be just around the corner? Let's hope for the best ... but don't hold your breath

Amazing photo of the Uptown Theatre auditorium via Undercity.org

Recently we’ve told you a little bit about the Chicago Cinema Forum, a new group that’s trying to bring rare and underseen movies to Chicago. To honor Ingmar Bergman after his passing, they quickly put together a mini-retrospective that touched all the bases; and last weekend they presented Roberto Rossellini’s all-but-unseen masterpiece India, Motherland. What was to have been the final screening of the latter, in fact, was sold out (!) so a third show was added; not only that, at the second show there were some rather inebriated audience members who loudly expressed their displeasure when the movie didn’t start on time. Drunken, enthusiastic audience members at an obscure art film from 1959? That’s some kind of step in the right direction.

One of the principal members of the CCF is Darnell Witt, who maintains his own website, CINE-FILE. Witt moved to Chicago a few years ago and started up the website because he says he saw a need for a Chicago cinephile resource. Rather than attempting a comprehensive weekly listing it instead summarizes the cream-of-the-crop of Chicago film events, always with some well-written commentary that sketches in some context or juicy trivia. You can sign up for notification by email whenever there’s an update.

Speaking of essential film sites our all-time fave remains GreenCine Daily, which provides an endlessly thoughtful and comprehensive compilation of interesting movie news and links. It’s updated several times a day, so it’s one of those sites we can get lost in for hours at a time. Our only real complaint is that in past years anyway the Chicago International Film Festival coverage has been pretty spotty. But the sad fact is that despite being North America's oldest competitive film festival, CIFF is still viewed as being second-tier.

image via a blog

- In case you've missed the previous screenings of local film Crime Fiction, produced by former U of C students, you've got another chance to see it this evening at this month's edition of the Midwest Independent Film Festival. That's at the Landmark Century. There'll be an afterparty just around the corner at Cousin's.

- Starting this Wednesday night at 6, Jonathan Rosenbaum presents a weekly series of film screenings and lectures at the Siskel titled "The Great Transition: World Cinema in the 1950s." It's pretty much the last word in eclecticism, taking in everything from Sam Fuller (opening feature The Steel Helmet) and Jean Cocteau to Ozu and Orson Welles. Tickets are $9 if you're Joe Schmo but only $4 if you're a Film Center member, so it's a great excuse to join up.

- Most details are still shrouded in mists of secrecy, but little by little the Chicago International Film Festival is beginning to provide some peeks at what will be on tap this year. Brett Morgan's semidocumentary Chicago 10 will be featured as will a special program of Essanay shorts made between 1907 and 1915 in Chicago. Incidentally, this year's festival is dedicated to Roger Ebert. It will run October 4-17. More details and membership information at the festival's site.

- Looks like there's been another victim of Blues Brothers 2000 disease: The Time Traveler's Wife, although set in Chicago, will actually be filmed in Canada. Tsk tsk.

image via the Library of Virginia