Smile Politely. Speak Directly. A Champaign-Urbana Culture Blog

Wind Water and Light, an artisans gallery, opens an exhibit dubbed The Real Politik — just in time for February’s political rumble, Super Tuesday, on Feb. 5. A relatively new kid on the block in downtown Champaign, Wind Water and Light opens the month-long exhibit today featuring two-dimensional and three-dimensional works from local artists reflecting hot button issues in the country and the current political landscape. Displaying artists include Billy Morrow Jackson, Siti Mariah Jackson, Hyon Joo Kim, Brian Sullivan, Rosalind Famian Weinberg and Cindy Westfall. If the tight races and politicos trading barbs isn’t enough to get you into the voting mood — perhaps this exhibit will be the inspiration you need to the primaries. Go democracy!

Wind Water and Light is located at 10 E. Main St. The Real Politik closes on Feb. 29.

Photo by Justine Bursoni

The landmark we all know and love, Alma Mater, gets giddy over the inclement weather in Champaign-Urbana.

I went to see Rambo over the weekend and I’m not embarrassed to say so. (My admitting that I’m a Barry Manilow fan will have to wait for another day…baby steps and all that…) There are a variety of reasons why I was eager to go, even though the folks at Lionsgate Entertainment refused to screen the film in advance for critics. The First Blood movies have always been guilty pleasures for me, though I would argue that the initial entry in the series is a moving social statement on the plight of Vietnam vets as well as a fine action film. There was also the nostalgia factor, as I simply had to find out how the years had treated John Rambo and see if he could still blow up stuff real good. (He can, and did, a lot!) But the overriding reason was the Stallone factor. I have a soft spot in my cinematic heart for the oft ridiculed actor and while he has made more than a few movie missteps, he’s a far better actor than most people give him credit for because of one simple reason: he’s sincere even when the material is not.

Art museums sometimes get a bad rap. Maybe this is caused by flashbacks to unpleasant school excursions from our youth, when we were shepherded through boring exhibits while pretentious docents blathered on about Etruscan art. Maybe it’s the fear that we won’t know the artists or their work, and will be forced to face our own cultural inadequacies. Or maybe we just want some action, and feel that museums won’t deliver the goods.

But there are those other times when a museum steers clear of this bad rap by filling its space with compelling art and getting on with the business of making you wish its exhibits would never end.

This is exactly what you’ll find at the Krannert Art Museum, which is host to a new, multimedia exhibit titled Blown Away. The opening reception for the exhibit was held last night at 8 p.m.

There Will Be Blood
Rated R
Opening at Boardman’s Art Theater on Friday

The most impressive thing about writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson is that he continues to challenge himself with every feature film he makes. While each of his movies (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) have been successful to varying degrees, they’ve all been flawed as well.

There are some who will dislike Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and it’s easy to see why. It’s an abrasive work with an unsavory protagonist, its structure is anachronistic and it does lose its way during its final act. Be that as it may, this is a film that should be embraced fully for its wild ambition, its emotional and physical scope, its sheer audacity and the performance from Daniel Day-Lewis who delivers a haunting portrait of a man who allows himself to be consumed by greed, forsaking love, community and his soul for a hollow existence that leads to insanity.

Chicago-based graphic designer Jay Ryan got into the poster-making business when Highdive talent buyer, Ward Gollings approached the graphic design company Ryan worked for to craft a poster for an upcoming show at Champaign's Blind Pig in the mid-90s. Ryan’s boss enlisted him to illustrate the Supersuckers and Rocket from the Crypt poster design.

Now, the popular graphic designer can’t keep his sought after posters on the walls of record stores and rock clubs for long before fans pull them off for the their own Jay Ryan collections.

Something odd happens every year around this time. Longtime runners and newbies alike, all of them fully aware of the unfriendly temperatures lurking right beyond their doors, fish their sneakers out of the closet, tighten their laces and set out into the chilly air to cover miles of terrain by swift foot.

For many, this is more than the result of a valiant New Year’s resolution that — let’s be honest — is likely to wither away in a few weeks’ time; instead, this is the beginning of months of training for the 5k, the 10k, the half marathon or, the biggest of them all, the 26.2-mile haul known as the marathon.

The race of all races is the subject of Spirit of the Marathon, a documentary film by Mark Jonathan Harris, Jon Dunham and Gwendolen Twist that’s playing tonight only at the Savoy 16 movie theatre on Route 45.

As busy as we are, it’s easy to take things for granted. For instance, take those blue jeans you’re wearing. You go to the mall, find a pair that makes your ass look good and pay for them with your credit card. It never crosses your mind that they might have been made by a 15-year-old Chinese girl who works 20-hour shifts and earns six cents an hour, that is, if she ever gets a paycheck.

Not this month.

If, as some critics have suggested, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1954) was a collective catharsis for Japanese filmgoers regarding the atomic bomb disasters that befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, then Cloverfield can be seen as a similar cinematic exorcism for Americans still reeling from the 9/11 disaster.

Using lightweight recording devices and a high-definition digital format, director Matt Reeves has created what appears to be nothing more than a modern take on a hoary movie cliché as he gives us a victim’s eye view of what it would be like if a monster, 50 stories tall, came to your town and had it for lunch. Utilizing camcorders and all of the positives and negatives inherent to that format, the director is able to create an immediacy in the action that’s exhilarating and frightening. The whipsaw camera movements, jittery hand-held shots and the visual confusion created while filming on the move is effective in underscoring the chaos of the premise. Many have referred to this as The Blair Witch Project meets Godzilla and while that is an oversimplification, it is an apt description of Reeves’ aesthetic. Yes, there will be those who bitch about only getting occasional glimpses of the monster in question, but in taking this approach, Reeves generates a sense of terror by keeping the military-engineered baddie under-wraps.

More importantly, he’s emphasizing that the creature is not the focus of this endeavor but the plight of the victims is, as they find themselves in the middle of an inexplicable urban disaster that quickly changes and spreads, tearing their lives asunder at a moment’s notice. Sound familiar?

With all the hype surrounding Joe Wright’s Atonement and the pedigree involved in its making, I had no doubt that I would like the film. After all, the director and his muse, Keira Knightly, breathed new life into Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice two years ago, turning that old chestnut into an unabashedly romantic and genuinely moving film. As a film lover, I was also eager to witness Wright’s “stunning,” unbroken five-minute tracking shot that showcases the carnage of war, which has already been heralded as a milestone in cinema.

Imagine my surprise when after seeing this film I was thinking of Gertrude Stein’s famous statement about Oakland, Calif. (“There is no there, there.”) instead of wracking my brain for accolades of my own.

"Little Shop" is a musical black comedy that tells the story of Seymour, a nerdy florist's assistant, and his quest to satiate a bloodthirsty man-eating alien plant while also winning the heart of the girl of his dreams. Admission is by donation only, although the cast promises that whoever gives $20 or more gets to sit onstage during the show — just out of range, we hope, of Audrey II.

Central High School is located at 610 W University Ave., Champaign.

“I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”

Truer words were never spoken by Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page). At 16 years of age, she’s straddling that line between the fancies of a little girl and the concerns of a mature woman. One minute, she's talking on a phone shaped like a hamburger about complex emotions; the next, she's surprising her best friend, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) by moving some discarded furniture to the front of his home. Yep, she’s all over the place emotionally and mentally, yet this intelligent teen knows she’s going to have to make some important decisions real soon. She’s pregnant and telling her parents is the least of her worries as she has to decide whether to keep her child, a decision she knows deep down she’s not ready to make.

Yep, we’ve got a Big Ten school and a county-wide population of about 185,000. We are home to an internationally recognized film festival presented and curated by one Roger Ebert and we even have an independent cinema that regularly shows art house films throughout the year. But damned if there weren’t some films with major talent behind them that were never screened in town over the past year.