Reel life: 'Precious Mettle' is more sincere than most crime dramas
<h3 class="briefHead">Film critics notebook:</h3>
The After Hours Film Society presents "Flowers," an adult drama about love and memory at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 21, at the Tivoli Theatre, 5021 Highland Ave., Downers Grove. In Basque, with English subtitles. afterhoursfilmsociety.com Not rated. 99 minutes. ★ ★ ★
"Precious Mettle" turns out to be a much smarter, more sincerely rendered crime melodrama than you might imagine for an ultra-independent production filmed and produced in Naperville and Aurora.
It opens with the killing of a retired cop, the torture of a mysterious, unidentified character and a police commander (a world-weary Paul Sorvino) who pays cash to a homeless teenage girl (Fiona Dourif) if she'll come to his house.
Then, director Edmond G. Coisson - operating from a researched, detailed screenplay he wrote with Glessna Coisson and producer Leonard Brink - connects the dramatic dots with relentless efficiency.
Coisson, a part-time film actor, and his wife Glessna are the founders of the Naperville Independent Film Festival. (OK, it was Glessna's idea.) "Precious Mettle" will have its world premiere at 7:15 p.m. on Tuesday, March 22, at the Hollywood Palms Cinema, 352 S. Route 59, Naperville. Go to hollywoodpalmscinema.com. Rated R for language, violence, sexual situations. 90 minutes. ★ ★ ★
Congratulations to Oak Park's Gustavo E. Saravia for winning Classic Cinemas' Predict the Oscars contest. Saravia won the Grand Prize: a pass for two for a year at Classic Cinemas theaters, passes for Brookfield Zoo and a $200 gift card for Francesca's Restaurants. Saravia submitted his predictions at the York Theatre in Elmhurst. classiccinemas.com.
<h3 class="briefHead">Wheaton filmmaker </h3>
"This is trippy to be doing an interview for the Daily Herald," said Benjamin Dickinson, a graduate of Wheaton Warrenville South. "It was on my doorstep every morning when I was growing up!"
That's not as trippy as Dickinson's new R-rated, "five minutes into the future" movie "Creative Control," a cautionary satire on how modern technology drives upscale Brooklynites apart instead of bringing them together. The movie opens at the South Barrington 30 and the Music Box in Chicago.
Q. How did growing up in Wheaton influence your world view?
A. Wheaton is a very strong, Bible, fundamentalist community. I absorbed a lot of that point of view while growing up. I was forced to think about questions of theology because I had to be able to argue with people who had been indoctrinated into a certain system of beliefs.
Q. How so?
A. I knew something was amiss. I had friends who in all sincerity and concern tell me they were worried I was going to go to hell because I didn't view the story of Christ in the same way they did. That forced me to develop a sort of critical rhetoric approach. But I do to this day tend to view things, politics and relationships through a spiritual lens.
Q. Your movie clearly is the product of a critical thinker. Where did you develop that skill?
A. Maybe I was just born that way. I always felt like I didn't fit in. If you're an outsider, you're already aligned against the status quo. If you're an insider, the privileges and social rituals are invisible to you.
As an outsider, you see the hypocrisy. You see the injustice. You see the silly protocol, at least it appears silly if you're on the outside, if that makes any sense.
Q. Why is it that new technologies seem to be instantly used to gratify our baser instincts, like sex?
A. I think there's a biological imperative there. The other thing that drives technology is war machines and weapons. This is a basic Freudian quandary. We still have a reptile brain, even if it's invisible in all our behavior. Fundamentally, what's pushing us forward are the most basic survival instincts: sex, food, shelter, war and violence.
Q. So, is technology the salvation of mankind or the work of the devil?
A. Technology is neutral. It doesn't do anything. It's about what we're going to do with the technology. It could empower us to do all sorts of amazing things, if that was where we were really at. But I don't think we're there.