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Jessica Hopper on girl groups p 25 The most popular gassy Jewish lesbian on the Web CHICAGO’S FREE WEEKLY | THIS ISSUE IN FOUR SECTIONS p 10 FRIDTheAY, JAN 6, 2006 | VOLUME 34, NUMBER 15 Best Movies andJonathan RosenbaMusicum, p 1 J.R. Jones, p 17 ofA 15 -music2005-critic pileup, p 19 McSweeney’s reprints a lost Chicago writer, a Roscoe Village businessman says he’s being PLUS harassed for speaking up, the music scene rallies around a veteran soundman, and more. Section One Letters 3 Reviews Music 25 Columns One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Hot Type 4 Sounds Lost and Found, Evie Sands’s Any On the Trib on the war Way That You Want Me The Straight Dope 5 Books 27 Literally scared to death? Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap by Nik Cohn, The Riddle of the The Works 8 Traveling Skull by Harry Stephen Keeler A row in Roscoe Village Plus Our Town 10 What Are You Wearing? 15 A podcaster to watch; how the City Council Aay Preston-Myint spends its money; have Virgin, will travel January 6, 2006 Ink Well 31 This week’s crossword: Subscription Descriptions ON THE COVER: JIM NEWBERRY (MADGE), COURTESY BERTHA MCNEAL (THE VELVELETTES) The Best Film of the Past Two Years And 24 more picks from what the industry thought us yokels could handle in 2005 By Jonathan Rosenbaum o choose the best movies of 2005 is to compromise. I T limit my list of candidates to films that have screened in Chicago, but I could easily fill it with movies that haven’t screened in the U.S. at all, and God knows what I’ve missed altogether. I’m at the mercy of studio heads, distrib- utors, and publicists, whose deci- sions about what to release and when defy comprehension. I saw Woody Allen’s Match Point in Madrid in mid- November, believing the distribu- tor’s announcement that it would open in Chicago in December. Surprised at how much I liked it, Idecided it probably belonged on my list, but then some industry executives decided that only the people in New York and Los Angeles should get to see it this year (in time for Oscar nomina- tions), not the less discriminating moviegoers in the Chicago boon- docks. I also couldn’t consider other films that won’t open here until 2006, such as Tommy Lee The World Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. onto the Internet, Cinea will be that my top ten list expanded to tion, set in a theme park outside The people who run Disney able to analyze the copy and iden- 15 including ties. Beijing with scaled-down models spent a fortune sending critics tify the player, the time, and the of the world’s most famous and Academy members security- date on which the copy was 1. The World. Not just the best tourist attractions and populated encoded DVDs with special “high made.” Unfortunately, these play- film of 2005, Jia Zhang-ke’s fea- by visitors and workers. It’s a end” players to view them on. ers aren’t high-end enough to be ture was better, or at least more kitsch monstrosity that Jia Once we register the players we region free, and the version of important, than my first choices makes endlessly fascinating and can watch the five films we’ve Howl’s Moving Castle they sent for 2004 (The Big Red One) and suggestive—in contrast to the received so far as often as we like, me is the same old dubbed one I’d 2003 (25th Hour and Crimson cramped and unattractive “back- though each time we do, accord- already reviewed. The Japanese Gold). Those earlier master- stage” living spaces where the ing to the instructions, “the original with English subtitles pieces lack its vital and complex main characters spend most of SV300 inserts a powerful, com- won’t be out commercially on vision of what the whole planet is their time when they’re not pletely invisible watermark. It DVD until March. I can’t consider like at the moment. working. The animated fantasies stamps the content with your that version here because I Jia’s greatest film, Platform sparked by characters’ text mes- player’s ID number, and the time haven’t seen it, so I’ve grudgingly (2002), is about the Cultural sages are often even more spa- and date of the recording. If the put the dubbed version on my list. Revolution; The World is a cious and ethereal than the shots playback is copied illegally to These complaints aside, superb companion piece about of the theme park. The play videotape, recordable DVD, or 2005 was a good enough year China’s recent capitalist revolu- continued on page 16 16 CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 6, 2006 | SECTION ONE Rosenbaum continued from page 1 among all these spaces marks Jia as the most talented Asian direc- tor currently at work—with the possible exception of Hou Hsiao- hsien, whose hauntingly mini- malist Cafe Lumiere will be play- ing at the Music Box in January. 2. Not on the Lips. At 35, Jia may be the youngest supreme film master working today. At 83, Alain Resnais is the second old- est working regularly, after 97- year-old Manoel de Oliveira, who visited Chicago for the first time during this year’s film fest. This exquisite film version of a 1925 operetta is Resnais’ fifth cine- matic effort to convey his love of musicals, and in some ways it’s his most successful. A weird, ghostly farce about loneliness and emotional fragility, it’s also an anachronistic history lesson, with its 1920s manners, 1950s MGM colors and lighting, and early-21st-century French racism and anti-Americanism. It also displays much of the formal mas- tery of previous Resnais master- works, including Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Providence (1977), and Melo (1986). Fox Lorber never bothered to adver- tise this film, but it’s been avail- able on DVD since March, when it also screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center. 3. A History of Violence . I’ve yet to encounter a single attack on David Cronenberg’s multilayered yet fluid meditation on violence in George Bush’s America— filmed entirely in Canada. The writer-director clearly knows what he’s doing—note the bril- Clockwise from top left: A History of Violence, Not on the Lips, Howl’s Moving Castle, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Capote liantly worked-out sex scenes— and though the film peaks well Part one of Tropical Malady Johnny Depp as chocolate tycoon Onion City Film Festival at complexity of his underrated before its end, making the climax shows the budding romance Willy Wonka are a reminder that Chicago Filmmakers, used digital Coffee and Cigarettes, and the fact almost an afterthought, it’s less a between a soldier on leave and a Burton has better instincts for the technology to show Antonioni, that he edited it backward is serious flaw than an indication of shy country boy with a mixture of visual than for human behavior. now in his 90s and confined to a apparent, because it starts out how lean and mean the earlier irony and tenderness. Part two wheelchair since 1975, walking rich and ends up depleted. Bill segments are. turns folkloric and allegorical as 7. A tie between two literary through Saint Peter’s in Rome, Murray’s narcissism bores me the soldier travels through a dark movies, Yes and Capote, both high- looking at and caressing almost as much here as it did in 4. Ten Skies. Here’s an experi- forest, alternately stalking and ly unexpected successes. Yes , a Michelangelo’s restored Moses— Lost in Translation, but the other mental film seen by many fewer being stalked by his lover in the post-9/11 love story about an Irish- one restored Michelangelo con- actors are delightful. July’s com- people than the titles above, hav- form of a tiger spirit, with a talk- American scientist (Joan Allen) sidering another. Saraband, a pulsion to tweak Americans for ing screened only once at Chicago ing baboon offering sage advice. and a Lebanese surgeon working sequel to Bergman’s 1973 Scenes their puritanism is also somewhat Filmmakers. This masterpiece by as a cook (Simon Abkarian), From a Marriage, was shot in off-putting, but the characters are James Benning is an elaborately 6. A tie between two kids’ proved that contemporary world DV and shown that wayat sweet, her direction deft. constructed montage of ten ten- movies, Howl’s Moving Castle politics could be gracefully con- Bergman’s insistence during its minute takes, a mesmerizing and Charlie and the Chocolate fronted in iambic pentameter. It’s commercial release. It’s a kind of 10. A tie between two examples study of time, light, movement, Factory , both based on well- the best film Sally Potter’s made postcinematic effort by of not-quite science fiction, Hal and moisture that traces the known English novels. I especially since The Gold Diggers (1983), in Bergman, now in his 80s, made Hartley’s modest The Girl From shifting relations between clouds value the first, Hayao Miyazaki’s part because she found some- with a new technology after a Monday and Wong Kar-wai’s and earth, nature and people. It animated feature—based on thing a∞rmative to say. Capote 60-odd-year career using film. almost Wagnerian 2046 . had much more to say to me than Diana Wynne Jones’s book and showed that Truman Capote’s The content is typically self-pun- Hartley’s hilarious futuristic most narrative films, though the the most commercially successful downfall could be partly ishing, but I could only admire satire imagines a “dictatorship of subtly shifting patterns and tex- domestic release in the history of explained by the ethical and emo- his willingness to record such the consumer,” with citizens tures of each shot provide plenty Japanese cinema—for the radical tional conflicts he went through barrenness using a technology wearing bar codes on their wrists of narrative as they tell the story fluidity with which people and while writing In Cold Blood.

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