Results tagged “woodyallen”

A native Chicagoan, it's no wonder that Bob Balaban was bitten early on by the movie bug, since his family is the Balaban of the Balaban & Katz movie threater chain. What's more surprising is how many hats he's worn. He's a character actor royale, appearing in films by everyone from Woody Allen and Christopher Guest to Terry Zwigoff and Robert Altman. (But he's probably best known for playing the NBC exec who's obsessed with Elaine in five episodes of "Seinfeld"). He's also a children's book author and a filmmaker.

Next Wednesday the Instituto Cervantes presents a fascinating evening of Buster Keaton, including a screening of one of our all-time favorite movies Sherlock Jr. The sad-eyed Buster created a film that was post-modern before "modern" even existed: he plays a projectionist who eventually steps into the very movie he's showing, in the process solving a crime that's taken place in the onscreen world. It's a hilarious movie that's also unexpectedly poignant, and it's been appropriated by countless filmmakers including Buñuel and Woody Allen.

The “Chicago theater season” is as anachronistic as our Columbia House Record Club membership. August was simply a lull before the crush of Fall openings coming to major institutions and their well-funded houses, who'll receive sufficient ink and column inches in the daily and weekly papers. We’re turning an eye to those less heralded venues doubling as rental space, educational resource, and meeting locale. None of these theaters are named after deep-pocketed donors, but that...

Who was Ingmar Bergman? You probably heard the news that he died last week, at age 89, and somewhere you mostly likely read Woody Allen’s pronouncement that he was, “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion-picture camera.” But you shouldn’t feel ashamed if you don’t really know who he is. For example, he was not the father of Ingrid Bergman (although they did make one film together, Autumn...

We were surprised to see that Woody Allen’s film “Matchpoint” didn’t win for best original screenplay. Oh wait, no we weren’t, because much of Allen’s film was taken from one of the greatest Chicago books of all time, “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser. Even Dreiser based his novel on the true story of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown.

Chicagoist and its fellow cinemaphiles have it rough this weekend. With the college crowd on Spring Break, most of our favorite off-the-beaten-path movie houses (Block Cinema, Doc Films) are dark. Don’t even get us started on the mainstream box office this weekend. We know The Ring was a big hit, but we saw the sequel the first time, you know? As for the new Woody Allen film, we’re skipping that one too. Unlike the family dog, we only have to be hit on the nose with a newspaper twice before we learn our lesson. And as much as we love Joan Cusack and Buffy’s little sister, we’re not sure we can bring ourselves to see The Ice Princess especially when our local video store has The Cutting Edge on DVD. Now THAT'S an ice skating movie.

You wouldn’t think blogging takes up all that much of your day but it does. Mostly because any time spent on the Internet eventually devolves into time spent reading stuff like this or playing with crap like this. But suffice it to say time gets away from us on occasion, which then causes us to miss a first-run film here and there. And we hate that. Luckily, we can catch the ones we miss as part of the University of Chicago’s Doc Films program, which just announced its winter quarter slate of second-run and classic films.

This Friday at the Music Box marks the long awaited (by Chicagoist, anyway) rerelease of Jacques Tati's classic Playtime (and, for better or worse, influence on Steven Spielberg's The Terminal). Like Francis Ford Coppola with his similarly neglected One From The Heart, Tati went all crazy Orson Welles on this one, demanding that an entire city be constructed on a soundstage. And again like Coppola, constructing that city on a back-lot effectively bankrupted him. But what a way to go out!