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This weekend the Gene Siskel Film Center presents a one-week run of Nina Paley’s rhapsodic animated feature Sita Sings the Blues, which also screens twice in Evanston as part of the new Talking Pictures Festival. Like two other instant classics, Michel Ocelot’s Azur & Asmar and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud’s Persepolis, Sita revitalizes 2-D animation by drawing on the heavily ornamental artwork of the East. Watching the movie on a laptop, I was overwhelmed, so I can only imagine how one would feel being dwarfed by its elaborate imagery on a big screen.
Also opening today, and highly recommended, is John Crowley’s British drama Is Anybody There?, with Michael Caine as a bitter, despondent old stage magician adopted by a young boy with an interest in the paranormal (Bill Millner from Son of Rambow). The aforementioned Talking Pictures Festival starts tonight and continues through Sunday in Evanston. And we have new reviews of Audience of One, Battle for Terra, A Decade of Love, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Lemon Tree, Lymelife, The Merry Gentleman, Obsessed, The Soloist, Tyson, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
