Docs, 1/8.

"[W]e feel it is in the best interest of the Gene Siskel Film Center to postpone the screening of Senator Obama Goes to Africa until after the election," exec director Jean de St Aubin tells Chicagoist's Rob Christopher. "Screening the film at this time could jeopardize our not for profit status."

The Chicago Reader's JR Jones writes that the doc, "which screened as a work-in-progress at the Chicago International Documentary Festival last April, is a rather dry but nonetheless illuminating look at the freshman senator, already an international star, as he tours the African continent in August 2006":

Excitement surrounds Obama even at that point, and to his credit he takes advantage of it to call attention to problems. In Kenya he and his wife get tested for HIV/AIDS, and in a speech he denounces the country's political corruption. From there the Obamas travel to Kibera, a gigantic slum on the outskirts of Nairobi that Obama first became acquainted with when he toured the continent by auto with his sister, Auma, in 1987. In Chad he visits a camp for Sudanese refugees and hears stories of Janjaweed atrocities, and in Cape Town, he criticizes the South African ministry of health for its inadequate response to the AIDS crisis.

"The Reeler dropped by the Bryant Park Hotel Monday night to take in a standing-room only screening of The Price of Sugar, Bill Haney's chronicle of illegal Haitian immigrants locked into servitude in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic. Following the controversial Father Christopher Hartley on his parish rounds - revealing medieval levels of squalor, pestilence, malnutrition and extreme poverty in the bateyes where crops are harvested - and his ongoing social justice crusade for his parishioners, Sugar crafts a graphic, damning critique of its namesake industry." And ST VanAirsdale talks with Haney.

Bruce Handy in Vanity Fair on Chicago 10: "If you want to know what it felt like to live through 1968, America's annus horribilis, this is the place to start.... [Brett] Morgen makes you feel the queasy anxiety coursing through the streets: it's the sensation of America rending itself in two. Current relevance TBD."

At IFC News, Matt Singer is "of the opinion that Schwarzenegger's legacy in both the political and cinematic arenas is worthy of far more serious discussion" than he finds in Running With Arnold.

Posted by dwhudson at January 8, 2008 3:44 PM