FILM ROUND-UP: Last Chances, Hidden Treasures And Spy Cameras

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jul 25, 2012 5:40PM

Is there a name for LCD Soundsystem fans, a la Deadheads or Juggalos? Pandabros? Whatever they are called, Chicago has a lot of them. Music Box honchos declared on Monday that more people had seen the documentary about their final performance Shut Up and Play the Hits there than at any other theater in the country.

One last opportunity will be on offer next Thursday during the Music Box's Summer Music Film Festival. [Ed. Note: I saw this Monday and it is fantastic. Take this chance to see it in the theater with before it comes to DVD in October. - Tankboy] Last chances seem to be a theme of the festival, in fact, as next Wednesday night's screening of the Andrew Bird doc Fever Year will also be the very last opportunity to see it... at all: Bird has declined to allow the documentary to be released in video format.

In other movie-related news:

• The Chicago Film Archives have completed a big push to put all of their collections online. The CFA website now allows you explore their different offerings of home movies, professional films and stock film documenting Chicago and the Midwest. Browsing the collections by subject gives a taste of what is available, including some titles available to stream online, from old baseball movies to fascinating architectural subjects to unique portraits of everyday life.
• Lynn Becker penned a lovely reminiscence of the way movie exhibition has changed over time at the Architecture Chicago Plus blog. The relationship between the twilight of the city's great movie houses and the transition from limited openings in the downtown theaters to "Showcase" releases in many spots simultaneously makes for a great read.
• Reel Chicago reports that regular-looking sunglasses that record POV video are flying off the shelves of the only Chicago area retailer that stocks them. Watch out for any shades with a black dot on the bridge of the nose, as those may be the Pivothead models available for $349. Maybe wearing them for one day a month, with the footage publicly available, should be a requirement for anyone holding the office of Da Mare? On second thought, we're not sure the world is ready for Rahmvision.
• The Future Shorts film festival, a "pop-up" film festival that bills itself as the world's biggest, comes to North Center shop/gallery/locus-of-interesting-stuff Transistor. The offerings include animated, documentary, and fiction shorts from across the globe ranging from 6 to 20 minutes in length, including Street Vendor Cinema, which documents a week spent on a busy market street in São Paulo selling short films on demand to any of the 450,000 people who walked by the spot every day.