Displaying a dreamy logic typically found in smiley Hollywood musicals, Hodson Nell figures publishing a free journal of film essays might raise the capital he seeks to make his own movies. Last week the cerebral 24-year-old Bucktown resident hauled around 8,000 debut copies of his Chicago Film Review to over a hundred locations, ranging from Chicago State University on 95th Street to the Adelphi Theater at 7074 N. Clark.
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No ads appear in the 16-page paper, but Nell plans to sell space at rates as high as $300 for a full page. Far from entertaining Citizen Kane-size delusions of grandeur, publisher Nell fancies himself a “culture worker,” a notion gleaned from philosopher Cornell West. In his editorial manifesto, Nell announces that “inclusive politics, social/self awareness and irony are good markers for our stance.” One of the projects he hopes his publishing venture will subsidize is a documentary on Native American identity. Nell was adopted into a military family now settled in Dodge City, Kansas, but his roots lie among the Salich Indians of western Montana.
Another contributor, Eli Balint, pursued graduate work in African-American and gay/lesbian literature in New York City before returning to Chicago, where he now clerks at Borders. Along with Touch and Trainspotting, he reviews Donnie Brasco (“By the end of the film I had connected with Brasco because I felt less imperious about my own moral choices”) and Marvin’s Room, which he finds “is really about force-feeding a rigid, moral scheme.” He also writes up a conversation he recorded with a friend in a bar after a second viewing of Breaking the Waves. “I have to say that I see the film as a typical guy film based on some half-acknowledged male fantasy made semilegitimate by an artsy atmosphere,” offers Jane Fragonard, who pushes Balint to weigh the sexist subtext of the film.
