Has our obsession with new movie theater technology-multichannel sound, razor-sharp projection-helped kill that old eccentric pleasure, the outdoor movie theater? Perhaps not. The special Chicago Film Festival showings this week on the Navy Pier’s new outdoor Skyline Stage offer a wonderful, exotic experience more common a generation ago: Watching a movie under the stars.
Fresh-air aficionados can catch Roman Polanski’s mordant, twisty, modernist film noir “Chinatown” at 8:30 p.m. Thursday, with its dark romanticism, tip-top Bob Towne dialogue and brilliant cast of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston.
Friday night: A fantastic double bill of Blake Edwards and George Axelrod’s fine, sprightly adaptation of Truman Capote’s effervescent Manhattan fairy tale, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (8:30 p.m.), with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, plus Alfred Hitchcock’s supreme shocker “Psycho” (11 p.m.), with Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and the scene that almost destroyed the home shower industry.
All prints have been newly struck. And the “Cinema Under the Stars” audience will have advantages over patrons of the old outdoor theaters: no rowdy neighbors or tinny car speakers, and protection from the elements by the theater’s Teflon-coated fiberglass cover. The movies, of course-no matter how often you’ve seen them-can’t be beat.
Tickets are $5 ($9 for the double feature) and are available at the Navy Pier box office, 600 E. Grand Ave., between noon and 6 p.m. For more information, call 312-644-3400.
– As a filmmaker, in his own country, John Cassavetes was severely underappreciated during his fiercely independent 25-year career. In Europe, it was different; Cassavetes’ stature there approached Ingmar Bergman’s.
Since Americans are still catching up with one of their native-born geniuses, Facets Multimedia’s weekend double bill of Cassavetes’ trailblazing 1959 “Shadows” (6:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday) and his even more powerful 1968 “Faces” (8:15 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 6:45 p.m. Sunday) is a must-especially for anyone interested in independent American filmmaking.
“Shadows” is set in a beat, interracial, Jack Kerouacian world of hip jazz (Charles Mingus helped score it), nocturnal rambles, rumbles and reckless affairs. “Faces” shows that a middle-class Los Angeles milieu is just as desperate, driven and lost. The films hit as hard as they did in the ’60s. The camerawork is searingly immediate, the acting (Ben Carruthers in “Shadows,” John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassell in “Faces”) gut-wrenching. These are great, much-copied, yet unique films that still have not had their due.
Facets is at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. Call 312-281-4114.
– The Korean cinema series at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute closes with its most offbeat entry: a cool, lacerating satire on the Darwinian world of commerce and marketing by a talented, irreverent young writer-director, Jang Seon-woo, called “The Age of Success” (6 p.m. Thursday).
The center’s other shows this week include Alice Stone’s interesting documentary-history on female motorcyclists, “She Lives to Ride” (6 p.m. Friday and Saturday); a repeat of “The Revenge of Itzik Finkelstein” (Sunday, noon at the Skokie Theater, 7924 Lincoln Ave., Skokie, and 6 p.m. at the Film Center); what is perhaps the funniest rock movie since “This Is Spinal Tap,” Jeff Feuerzeig’s deadpan, and all true, bedroom punk rock documentary “Half-Japanese: The Band Who Would Be King” (8 p.m. Friday, 4 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday)-and a Boris Karloff double bill (6 p.m. Tuesday).
