Can you make a persuasive, evocative Chicago movie without filming most, or any, of your movie in Chicago?
For decades, Hollywood answered that with: Stupid question. Outside Chicago, who cares? Look at the late silent and early sound era gangster classics, from âUnderworldâ (set in an inferred, not stated, Chicago) to âLittle Caesar,â âThe Public Enemyâ and âScarface.â Those werenât filmed here. Who cared? They worked like crazy, and they maximized the customary way of shooting movies, on studio backlots and a few Los Angeles streets.
Until âCall Northside 777â³ filmed with James Stewart on location here, in 1947 for an early 1948 release, location authenticity wasnât on any production budgetâs priority list.
Column: The Oscar for Chicago Authenticity goes to well, not Trial of Chicago 7 or Judas and the Black Messiah
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The Chicago-set movies up for Oscars feel a little off
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Director Suman Mukhopadhyay first staged
Mephisto in Kolkata to protest the 2002 Gujarat riots. The Bengali play re-emerged in 2012 as a critique of the violence displayed by the ruling Trinamool Congress party. It is based on Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel of the same name, Ariane Mnouchkine’s stage version of the book and Hungarian filmmaker Istvan Szabo’s movie adaptation.
Now, smack in the middle of the Bengal assembly elections,
Mephisto is back on the stage in Kolkata to “remind people of how authoritarian fascist rule can destroy the fabric of a country, and what the role of an artist can be in this situation”, Mukhopadhyay told
Screenshot: Pixar / Disney
It is not hard to hate Sid Phillips, the enfant terrible of Pixar’s groundbreaking 1995 CG animated film,
Toy Story. From the toys’ point of view, he is the devil incarnate, an 11-year-old anarchist who never met a plaything he couldn’t burn, explode, or Frankenstein into a bizarre, mutant lifeform. With his braces-clad sneer, his skull-emblazoned T-shirt and his bedroom stocked with ominous Army handbooks, Sid is the polar opposite of childhood innocence, an unholy force of nature who revels in destruction for destruction’s sake.
Or is he? Granted, Sid would not be anyone’s first choice for Most Huggable Child, but is he really an unambiguous personification of evil? Consider: What comes out of Sid’s desktop workshop the likes of a dinosaur/Raggedy Ann hybrid or a shaven, one-eyed doll’s head affixed to an arachnid-esque assemblage of Erector set girders may look horrific. But viewed from a loftier perspective, these creations might just