Swallow Your Cinema Premiere: COOLEY HIGH

We're officially kicking off the SWALLOW YOUR CINEMA film night with an ode to Chicago, a city that has served as the Joker's playground, overtime for Eliot Ness, and risky business for Tom Cruise. Harrison Ford's Dr. Richard Kimble really made trouble for himself in Chicago, and Goldie Hawn coached an inner-city high school football team here (check Wildcats). Somewhere along the way Hollywood got the idea to have Gary Coleman live in a Chicago railway station locker (check On the Right Track), and even weirder, have Judge Reinhold, and a still very young Fred Savage (i.e. Kevin from The Wonder Years) switch bodies in Vice Versa. It took Arnold Schwarzenegger, while playing a ridiculously wooden Russian narc in the 1988 film Red Heat, to finally proclaim that "this Chicago is a very strange city." In essence, when Hollywood, and those who work outside of that system, want tough, unforgiving, and weird, they look to no other city. 

It's a city that loves to laugh at itself, and at those who inhabit it, but you rarely see a film made in Chicago where the characters are in love with themselves or Chicago - the characters and the city are in a constant struggle to find love (check John Hughes), to learn, and many times, just get by (check Hoop Dreams). As the writer Nelson Algren once said, "Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose." 

Culling from a list of 1700 films that were either filmed entirely or partly in Chicago, we surfaced with three films that we thought not only represented Chicago as a celluloid wonderland (at least in warmer weather), but three films that speak tenfold about a particular time in the city.

Swallow Your Cinema's inaugural film is Cooley High, a 1975 gem that is Chicago to the bone. Exploring the world of Chicago's housing projects in the 1960s, Cooley High is just as much a high school comedy as it is a comment on inner-city life. Turner Classic Movies did an exceptional re-cap of Cooley High's history that can be found here. 

Rounding out our cinematic ode to the city of Chicago is the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, and Jeff Garlin's 2006 film I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. 

We hope to see you in our front room for the above three films and all those in the future --- we have some great themes already planned for 2009, including:

• Australia 
  
• Brother's Keeper (think Baldwin, Marx...)
  
• Healthy Cinema (think organic characters...)
  
• Monkey See, Monkey Do (think Clint Eastwood/apes....)
  
• Old Men Stuck On Mad Horses
  
• Texas 
  
• Gus Van Sant
  

Come summertime, we hope to take our projector outside...until then, come for the free popcorn. And in case you're wondering, that Judge Reinhold/Fred Savage body switcheroo was actually a serious contender for our kickoff film.