Talking Screens, May 10-May 16, 2024: The Tortured Melancholy of “I Saw The TV Glow” | Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Beguiling “Evil Does Not Exist” | Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft”

“Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes”

Talking Screens, A Week In Chicago Film, May 10-May 16, 2024

A range of new movies in Chicago this week, including sequel-sequel “Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes,” from the solid series, previewed after our deadline. Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows his Oscar feat of “Drive My Car” with the even better, eminently more mysterioso “Evil Does Not Exist.” Toronto filmmaker Chandler Levack brings her tender portrait of teen cinephilia, “I Like Movies” to the Music Box, with weekend appearances; Harmony Korine’s feature-length infrared hallucination “Aggro Drift” opens cold with late shows at Drafthouse, without preview screenings; and deeply troubling “I Saw The TV Glow,” the sophomore feature by Jane Schoenbrun (“We’re All Going To The World’s Fair”).

Peripatetic, prolific octogenarian artist-filmmaker Jon Jost brings his 1988 “Walkerville” which played here in its initial release, as part of the fiftieth anniversary of Chicago Filmmakers.

There’s also a wide range of stuff all across town, as always, at the Music Box, Facets and Doc Films, enumerated below in Revivals & Repertory, including Darren Aronofsky’s much-maligned “Mother!” Never a dull 7pm or 9:30pm. Also: The Music Box announces “Godzilla vs. Music Box,” described below. Plus: at Doc Films, James Benning’s “Four Corners“; Charles Burnett’s “My Brother’s Wedding“; Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers“; Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant” and Godard’s “Tout va Bien.” Um, wow? (The Doc calendar with dates and showtimes is here.)

“Evil Does Not Exist”

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s quotidian eco-chiller, the beguilingly complex “Evil Does Not Exist” is marred only by the necessary inclusion of the homely portmanteau “glamping” to set this story in motion. In a radically different key from his Oscar-winning “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi doesn’t put a foot wrong. His characters, however, prompt a world out of balance in excursions into a wood some miles from Tokyo. There are confounding worlds within the one that we take for granted. Puzzling but poetic, happenings accrue and then settle into sensations that are nightmarish and cannot be shaken. Opens Friday at Landmark Century.

“I Like Movies”

Chandler Levack’s feature debut, “I Like Movies” is affable, genial and so, so kind, the kindly take on potential cringe you’d expect from a young Canadian filmmaker. Clumsy seventeen-year-old Torontonian Lawrence Kweller (the indomitable Isaiah Lehtinen) does indeed like movies, and his life changes when he gets a job at an early-2000s video store with an older female manager. It’s a triumphant low-budget teen comedy, both familiar and fresh, with cultural ambassadors Levack and Kweller, but doesn’t rest on that forgotten formula, but instead drills to the source of movie love and how it can come from pain and alienation. Indie cinema lives and thrives. Honesty rocks. Passion rules. Levack will appear after the Saturday and Sunday showings. Opens Friday, May 10 at the Music Box.

“I Saw The TV Glow”

“This isn’t ‘the midnight realm.’ It’s just the suburbs,” says a character in Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature, the brooding horror entry “I Saw The TV Glow,” a tortured and melancholy tale written in blacklight paint and nail polish, set mostly in the mid-nineties and entirely in the heart of Owen, a stymied young man who says he doesn’t care for boys or for girls, but for TV shows and who seems at first to bloom when a female classmate introduces him to “The Pink Opaque,” a late-night television show that the filmmaker openly states is confected from her teen obsession with Buffy. (“The Pink Opaque” is also the name of a Cocteau Twins compilation.) The references are surely impacted beyond recognition to an outsider, but it parallels David Lynch, with effects like a rattier and more moldy sister to “Twin Peaks.” (A body-horror moment of radioactive white cathode light beaming like electrical cancer from within would impress any number of predecessors including Lynch and Cronenberg.)

A primary-colored scream, “I Saw The TV Glow” crosses days and nights and many more nights and then years. The sadness eddies, deepens, torments. Schoenbrun’s palette is dimmed, filled with black-light colors and pale neon, as if lit only by a warm yet hollow glow, a glum glow from a small set cloistered in a room of gloom, endlessly playing white noise intruded upon by half-remembered narrative (or from light reflected by the A24 signature loop). The pacing is doomy, and many scenes are framed as tableau that would work as well in a gallery, often drawing on characters on opposite sides of the frame. The rare pure close-ups are of expressions of confusion and rage: and that dim light shines as if it were dying, not as if night had come, but that light itself were to die.

When Owen (Justice Smith) meets Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), their awkward encounters simmer with the potential of complicity, but his loneliness rules. She supplies him with VHS tapes of the shows his parents deny him. At the start, the movie breaks joy off, interrupting needle drops, earwig interruptus. Later songs play through, whether sung by a singer or rising to crescendo on the soundtrack: glorious moments of levitation that are not found elsewhere. There are bursts of surrealism: a young teen’s fingers trickling over the buttons of a voting machine offering Clinton, Dole and Perot; ice cream trucks ablaze; glimmering Pac-man style ghosts drawn or tattooed on the backs of necks. Prime also is a sequence of plot points that scroll as scribble, notes filling the screen as Owen escapes down with his bounty through dark, twining hallways, complexities that become labyrinthine but also secreted in handwriting. (Neon tubes lighting muzzy school corridors suggest the atmosphere of “Time Stands Still,” Hungarian filmmaker Peter Gothar’s 1982 gloom-drenched teen dream lit by Lajos Koltai.)

Exceptionally bruising, “I Saw The TV Glow” is canny about the lure and dangers of self-assembly through spectatorship, expressed by a gentle trance but then more violently through pained dissociation from reality itself. Opens Friday at River East, Drafthouse and Landmark Century.

“Aggro Dr1ft”

Harmony Korine’s seventh feature “Aggro Dr1ft,” would, by its title, appear to deliver on two things his work is good at: aggravation and drift. “Spring Breakers” was a movie that worked fugue-style through motifs and musical repetition, with some scenes like vaudeville sketches and others like gallery installations; the ill-fated “The Beach Bum” attempted a more traditional narrative, but still drifted with stoner delight through the improvisations of Matthew McConaughey. The latest, which debuted theatrically at a high tariff in West Coast strip clubs, is a gangster story driven by music, shot entirely with thermal cameras: bring on the aggro, hang on to the drift. The eyeball-mauling trailer for the eighty-minute feature is here. Opens Friday, May 10, for one show each night, mostly late shows, at Drafthouse.

The twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” continues, including at Drafthouse. Our aggravated original review is here: “What if it had been good? What if it had been a movie?”

“Walkerville”

Jon Jost, a remarkably prolific artist and often provocative observer of the quotidian in his everyday world travels, will present his 1988 “Walkerville: A State Of Mind.” An early example of the nonfiction-fiction blends of Jost’s more recent tone poems, it’s a portrait of the town of Walkerville, Montana, and of Jost’s lead actor, Gary Winterholler, who was in recuperation from a severe stroke. Jost blends impressions more than plot strands in maverick, little-seen work like this, “more akin to music and poetry than narrative storytelling,” Filmmakers suggests. Chicago Filmmakers, Saturday, May 11, 7pm.

REPERTORY & REVIVAL

“Love Lies Bleeding”

Facets features second runs of Radu Jude’s exemplary comic provocation, “Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World” and the torrid grime of Rose Glass’ “Love Lies Bleeding.”

“The Holy Mountain”

The Music Box presents Alejandro Jodorowsky’s dense, mad drama “The Holy Mountain” on 35mm, Friday and Saturday late night. The 2024 HUMP! Festival is also on hand Friday and Saturday, and the great neo-noir “Le Samourai” continues for a second week.

“Mother”

Once more, with feeling: “God? It’s me, Darren.” After the massively scaled juggernaut of the life of “Noah,” Darren Aronofsky returned in “Mother!” to his favored location for all of his work since his first feature, “Pi”: the confines of the disordered mind, or at least, in this case, the interior of a single house that contains many, many minds. A man mind. A God mind. An Aronofsky mind. He’ll show you the Life of the Mind! Jokes and puns occasion themselves to distance from the beaten heart of “Mother!” and its head-on, headlong, careening allegory and metaphor and fancy-free that not only includes a kitchen sink, but an unmoored kitchen sink that detonates with abandon. (Floods, even.) Going for baroque! After all the reckless, restless frenzy that courses through this non-narrative nightmare in the form of homage, religious allegory, parables invoked, revisited, detonated, I would willingly grant Aronofsky four or five or six exclamation points. !!!!! seems just right! A Man (no name) and a Woman (no name) live in a baronial octagonal house in the middle of grassy anywhere-nowhere. Man, old, is a writer, a pretentious poet, whose work tends to the terse and telegraphic, suited for parchment and revered like Paulo Coelho’s. Woman, young, attempts to refurbish the house in her own image, a “paradise,” even mixing her own paints to pillowy perfection, with a yellow dust like pollen. “When there’s a generation between you…” an intrusive drunken middle-aged radiance sneers among her on-point sneers. Javier Bardem looks as old as craggy Gibraltar; Jennifer Lawrence as young as a hen’s egg. She’s a timeless mother nature. The camera stays close to Lawrence’s pale form, her shoulders, face, eyes, like in László Nemes’ “Son of Saul.” Each wide shot revealing that she remains barefoot, throughout the film: Madonna, icon, vessel, vassal? Is “Mother!” inside her head, His head, our head? Man has writer’s Matterhorn more than he has block: and he neglects his muse at his, her, our peril. This swarming tapestry is berserk from the get-go, an infuriating, confounding, inexorable apocalypse as large as the cosmos and as compact as the human heart. Each breath taken introduces further noxious fumes, figuratively, literally. The camera lingers at door facings, wondering what terrible things lie just inches to the left, just as any proper pupil of Polanski would place it. Confounding social interactions are forced upon Jennifer Lawrence’s title character with the dream illogic of a half-dozen passages from Buñuel, pictures painted by Bruegel and Bosch. (So many minor, crawling figures to creep you out.) From the 1960s: American theater “happenings,” cinematic central European political parables by Ionesco and others. (The house is a house, of course, but our planet as well.) Sound design of yawing specificity sustains the fever: doors close with a sepulchral thump. Ching! and Pinggg! and Wooosh! are adept minor players. All of Aronofsky’s tools and technical talents are on flagrant display. And, well, the religious parallels are there in blood and thunder, to be taken and mildly masticated or eagerly devoured, depending on your personal training and beliefs. And finally, “Mother!” is also a movie that writer-indicting writer Janet Malcolm can love. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” Malcolm wrote in “The Journalist and the Murderer.” “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” Without putting too much English on it, this may be the Work of Man, of The Artist, but Aronofsky’s game as well: trust me not, the crystalline final images say, art is afoot and for that, there are no apologies, only… art. Each strand of madness is there to be relished, even if it will make some viewers seethe. “His words are yours,” as another nameless figure from the mass of humanity insists. Take, eat. Music Box, Sunday, May 12.

CHICAGO SEEN

“Godzilla Vs. Music Box” Marches On Southport Avenue

The seventieth anniversary of the towering, prickly yet cuddly kaiju will be celebrated June 7-13, with “Godzilla Vs. Music Box.” Twenty-four features will be shown, with seven on 35mm.  A twenty-four-hour marathon of all fifteen Showa era (1954-1975) “Godzilla” movies—”with vendors, exclusive merchandise, food trucks and live introductions”—begins Saturday, June 8 at noon. (More on that here.) Full details, including the $100 pass, here.