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William Lennon writesCHIRP Radio Movie Collection: It Follows (2014)
[The CHIRP Radio Movie Collection documents great movies that feature musicians or the use of music in storytelling.]
The Plot: After being drugged and assaulted, a young woman is stalked by a shape shifting killer.
The story is simple by design. A mild-mannered community college student (Jay, brought to life by Maika Monroe in an exquisitely understated performance) goes out on a date. She’s drugged, and wakes up bound to a chair in an old parking garage. Her date, now her captor, informs her that she’s been infected-from now on, she’ll be hunted by an unknown, malicious force.
The only cure is to extend the chain of betrayal a step further and pass the infection on to someone else. Her pursuer (who we’ll call “The Follower”) is amorphous-it can look like anyone, so despite the fact that it takes several actors to portray its many faces, the one who brings it to life the most memorably and consistently is the composer, Rich Vreeland, AKA Disasterpiece.
William Lennon writesCHIRP Radio Movie Collection: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
[The CHIRP Radio Movie Collection documents great movies that feature musicians or the use of music in storytelling.]
The Plot: In the cosmic depths of the Marvel Universe, a human scrapper assembles a team of thieves and bounty hunters to recover a weapon capable of destroying the galaxy.
[VERY MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD]
Look at it in the right light and Guardians of the Galaxy is a movie about the dark side of wish fulfillment. After all, what red-blooded American twelve-year-old doesn’t dream of taking to the stars and becoming a Flash Gordon-by-way-of-Han Solo style vagabond?
That’s just what happens to Peter Quill (who takes the name Star Lord to celebrate his transition from middle-schooler to space pirate) and, while he seems to enjoy gallivanting across the cosmos, he never manages to sever the connection between himself and what made the earth special to him: his family.
Guardians is a movie with two MacGuffins. First, there’s The Orb, known as the Power Stone to the greater Marvel Universe, a standard sci-fi plot device described as being able to “mow down entire civilizations like wheat in a field.” It does a fine job of moving the story forward and it makes some seriously cool purple sparks when it’s activated, but beyond that The Orb is not all that interesting. Swap it out with, say, The Tesseract from Guardians’ sister film The Avengers and nothing really changes. Quill even breaks the fourth wall a bit mid-movie, mentioning that The Orb has a “Maltese Falcon, Arc of the Covenant vibe.” See also: The Holy Grail, the Death Star Plans, the One Ring.
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesCHIRP Radio Movie Collection: Trainspotting (1996)
[The CHIRP Radio Movie Collection documents great movies that feature music or musicians.]
Trainspotting (1996)
The Plot: A group of heroin addicts in Scotland tries to make their way in an economically depressed late 1980s UK.
For a few years in the 1990s, “heroin chic” was a thing. The pale, hollow-cheeked look that came from riding the white horse was, in certain circles, considered a desirable image. It represented decadence and fun, regardless of the danger that’s always close behind.
The cinematic expression of this idea is Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting, a film based on a novel by Irvine Welsh. Released two years after Quentin Tarantino’s landmark movie Pulp Fiction, Boyle’s work is similar in its highly stylized mise-en-scène and the characters’ ironic detachment from realities that would be quite different were this a documentary instead of a work of make-believe. Sure, being hooked on smack is bad, but it certainly doesn’t keep the main protagonist (played by Ewan McGregor) from saying a lot of clever things or fooling around with hot young teenagers. Four years after this film’s release, Darren Aronovsky’s Requiem for a Dream, using even more visual flair, would indirectly indict the “addiction as entertainment” sub-genre by presenting drug addiction as closer to what it actually is - terrifying, depressing, and gross without the movie-star chic or uplifting ending.
Clarence Ewing: The Million Year Trip writesCHIRP Radio Movie Collection: The Blues Brothers (1980)
[The CHIRP Radio Movie Collection documents our favorite movies that feature music or musicians.]
The Blues Brothers (1980)
The Plot: Two brothers (played by Dan Akroyd and John Belushi) put their old band back together in a quest to raise money to save the orphanage where they were raised.
This is a movie that remains one of the more successful film adaptations of a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Unlike most most movies that started out as SNL ideas, this one feels like an actual film put together by actual film makers. The movie is elevated by several effectively staged stunts and car chases as the Brothers tear their way from Joliet prison to Chicago’s Loop while being chased by everyone from highway patrolmen to neo-Nazis.
E. Malcolm Martinez writesThe Midwest Independent Film Festival’s Screening of “Sole Survivor” Is This Tuesday!
The Midwest Independent Film Festival’s First Tuesdays series returns to Landmark’s Century City Theatre (2828 N. Clark) on November 5th with the screening of the acclaimed documentary Sole Survivor.
Directed by local filmmaker Ky Dickens, who will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion, the documentary presents the stories of four sole survivors of commercial airplane crashes. They speak for the first time of the tragic events that they, and only they, survived and the questions and feelings that arose from their experience. It has been recognized by PBS as one of the most anticipated documentaries of the coming year and CNN Films is scheduled to release the film in early 2014.
The evening begins at 6pm with a pre-show cocktail reception and a Producers Panel at 6:30 p.m. Sole Survivor screens at 7:30 p.m., followed by a post-screening reception. Sole Survivor is co-presented by the festival and Women In Film Chicago. You can watch a trailer for the film and purchase advance tickets ($10 General Admission, $15 for Premium Reserved) at www.MidwestFilm.org.