Costume suggestions from the Beachwood Halloween Affairs Desk.
1. Dennis Hastert. Wear dark sunglasses and bring a cane, a guide dog, and ear plugs in order to further the impression that you couldn’t possibly have known what was going on with Mark Foley. Dress your friends in the same manner so they can come as the rest of the Republican congressional leadership. Break out your old wrestling uniform to charm partygoers dressed as the press. Sample party comment: “Sorry I’m late to the party, it’s all George Soros’s fault.”
2. Red State. Paint yourself in red from head to toe, wear a Dale Earnhardt T-shirt, and carry a bible. Sample party comment: “Pass the pork rinds. Hey – you’re just dressed as a homo, right?”
3. Blue State. Paint yourself in blue from head to toe, wear an NPR shirt, and hand out Planned Parenthood brochures with condoms stapled to them. Sample party comment: “Excuse me, hostess? I couldn’t help but notice that this party isn’t ethnically diverse.”
4. Ann Coulter. A long blonde wig, a short black skirt, and a gigantic chip on your shoulder is all that’s needed to pull off this costume. Sample party comment: “The only reason we’re eating salsa is because the damn liberals let all the Mexicans into the country.”
5. Prince Harry. Remember, you’re not dressed as a Nazi, you’re dressed as Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi. Sample party comment: “Easy on the vodka. I don’t want to get blitz-krieged tonight. Ha-ha.”

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Posted on October 26, 2006

By Scott Gordon

To love horror movies, one must love overkill, and the Music Box Massacre proudly delivers just that. The 24-hour horror-film festival launched last year, embracing the insane kitsch that makes so many horror films lovable, but not forsaking the Music Box’s penchant for picking the finest in obscure films. The festival sold out this year (and last year), which I hope means it’s on its way to becoming one of Chicago’s finest entertainment traditions. While there are probably enough shitty slasher flicks out there to fill up any number of weekends, the Massacre is all about range, and the following roster was enough to keep me awake with a minimum of stimulants. If you can track ’em down, this lineup would serve you well for your own home Halloween festival.

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Posted on October 26, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This past weekend has been one long adrenaline crash. Two weeks of film festival is about all this film geek can take. The constant air of excitement, the frustration of missing a screening, the high of talking with other audience members or, better still, the creators of a film, take their toll. In a city like Chicago, where there is a film festival of one sort or another about every week, the pace could be suicidal.
The Chicago International Film Festival seemed like a festival in flux this year. Programming seemed a little weak, the popular Critics Choice films were notably absent (perhaps because Chicago’s most famous critic, Roger Ebert, has been out of action), and I can’t remember a time when I saw so few guests of the fest. Attending for the first time as a member of the press, I found little support for me to do my work and missed one sold-out film I desperately wanted to see (the South Korean horror film The Host) because, as press, I was lowest on the totem pole of priority seating. But the CIFF has always had peaks and valleys over its 42-year history. I have no doubt that it will bounce back strongly.

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Posted on October 23, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

There are a lot of reasons to attend film festivals, but one of the best has to be the chance to meet and ask questions of the filmmakers. There is a real magic in learning about the creative process, the challenges of making and distributing a movie, and the “backstage” drama and comedy that occurred during filming. In my case, a chance to rub elbows with a director turned into my one significant contribution to cinema.

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Posted on October 22, 2006

By Maude Perkins

I am out of the muck. I have suffered through the last of the workshops, role plays, ritual whale sacrifices, and workbook scenarios that challenge me to solve crises such as the one in which my imaginary customer, “Jose Espresso,” chips his tooth on a nutty pastry and for some reason comes crying to me about it.

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Posted on October 21, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Closing night of the Chicago International Film Festival brought us a treat – a new film starring Peter O’Toole. Anyone, male or female, who didn’t fall in love with him in Lawrence of Arabia had to have been very jaded indeed. His portrayal of a rather naive and vulnerable adventurer made almost mad by his experiences in North Africa is a performance for the ages. In Venus, O’Toole plays a character very close to himself, an elderly actor of renown, who takes one more shot at love with a barely legal girl. He is no longer naive, but he is just vulnerable and at least as seductive.

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Posted on October 21, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

In 2002, the filmed version of the Bob Fosse/Kander and Ebb musical Chicago won the Academy Award for best picture. It was a stunningly great film with a message for our media-manipulated times. The genesis of these works was a hit Broadway play from 1926 by Maurine Watkins, a Chicago Tribune reporter who sensationalized the stories of two female murderers and contributed to their acquittals at trial. One of the killers was Beulah Annan, a glamourous and adulterous party girl who, in 1924, shot her lover, Harry Kalstedt, when he announced he was leaving her. The other was Belva Gaertner, a cabaret singer who gunned down her lover Walter Law as he sat in his car. The larger-than-life producer and director Cecil B. De Mille grabbed the rights to the play, and the result is the 1927 film Chicago.

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Posted on October 19, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The winners of the Chicago International Film Festival competitions have been announced. Once again, I didn’t see a single film that won a Hugo Award. I’m really good at picking also-rans in films and elections.

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Posted on October 18, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Is honesty a virtue? The three films I saw last night at the Chicago International Film Festival hedge their answers, but not necessarily because dishonesty pays. Rather they seem to tell us that truth might be there, or not there, and possibly is irrelevant.

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Posted on October 17, 2006

By Marilyn Ferdinand

Shoot the Messenger is a humorous and profoundly uncomfortable film for any serious-minded, well-intentioned liberal to watch. As a white liberal, I found it particularly hard to react to. The film opens with a black man saying in an angry and anguished tone, “Everything bad that has happened in my life has happened because of black people.” It is tempting to think of the man as a successor to the unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a black man made profoundly self-loathing by racism. But in the spirit of the unintentionally ironic “feminist” ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes, “We’ve come a long way, baby.”

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Posted on October 16, 2006