movie Glossary
The Fourth Out
Anyone displaying an extremely rare baseball card will, within three minutes, see it lost, stolen, torn up, burned or otherwise destroyed. Similarly, any valuable object d'art made of flammable or breakable material is likewise doomed. (A resourceful filmmaker can drag this out into an entire feature, e.g., "Bean"). MICHAEL SCHLESINGER, Culver City, CA
more »
on sale now
|  | |
Two movies about the love of movies lead the field in the 2012 Academy award derby. Both look back at formative years for the art form. Martin Scorsese's "Hugo," about a young boy who makes a friend of the inventor of the cinema, led the field with 11 nominations. And Michel Hazanavicius' "The Artist," set when Hollywood was making the transition from silent pictures to the talkies, placed second with ten.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Complete list of 84th Annual Academy Award nominations announced Tuesday:
Ivan the Terrible, Parts I & II (Unrated) (1944/1958)
The two parts of Eisenstein's "Ivan the Terrible" are epic in scope, awesome in visuals, and nonsensical in story. It is one of those works that has proceeded directly to the status of Great Movie without going through the intermediate stage of being a good movie. I hope earnest students of cinema will forgive me when I say every serious movie lover should see it -- once.
In its own way, the success of the Iranian film "A Separation" is as remarkable as the success of "The Artist." Neither one seems made for an American audience. One is silent and black and white. The other is from Iran, a nation not currently in official favor. Both just won Academy Awards nominations, following their victories at the Golden Globes last week. "The Artist" had ten, and "A Separation" was nominated not only for best picture but, in a surprise, for Asghar Farhadi's original screenplay.
When she was not yet five years old, Tilda Swinton told me, she saved the life of her brother. At least that's what everyone told her, and praised her for, and only little Tilda knew that soon after he was brought home from the hospital she intended to murder the baby.
Since I learned Monday that my friend Bingham Ray had died of a stroke at Sundance, I've been tweeting random memories of him. He was 57, but we first met in 1984 when he was 30 and I was 27. In the years I knew him, he worked at New Yorker Films, Alive, Samuel Goldwyn, Avenue Pictures, October Films (which he co-founded with Jeff Lipsky), United Artists, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment... I can't keep track of them all, but I hadn't spoken to him since he moved west in November to head up the San Francisco Film Society. What I can't fathom right now is that I won't be running into him, as I could be sure I would, at a film festival or his office if I happened to be in town, or calling or e-mailing him on a whim... What I treasure most are the things I've been spontaneously remembering and tweeting about, like: Come ona Tree House (of Life)Tinker Tailor, Moneyball: Between the lines (Part 1) Watching (and listening to) Fincher's Girl Desert Island DVDs (Matt's & mine & yours) Moments Out of Time 2012 When I fall in love... Shame, Tree of Life: Ambiguity or bust? My first 2011 "Ten Best" list Idiocracy and the ten-best trolls Hey girl, The Artist, Shame and hype-season backlash A piece of David Cronenberg's mind
> > > >
you should visit jim emerson on twitter
The Opening Shots Project Index
| |
Of course, no nominee is really robbed of an Academy Award nomination. It's a gift; not a right. The balloting procedure is conducted honestly and reflects a collective opinion, which was demonstrated this year when the Academy voters had the curiosity to seek out Demian Bichir for best actor for his deeply convincing performance as a Mexican gardener in Los Angeles in "A Better Life." He wasn't on my mental list of possible candidates, but when I heard the name, I thought, "Of course! Good thinking!"
For an hour before bedtime every night for a week, I've watched an episode of "Downton Abbey." Last night the Earl of Grantham interrupted a garden party to announce the beginning of World War I, and I pulled up short. I was watching the first season via Netflix Instant, and inattentively failed to notice there were only seven episodes. I naturally expected ten.
by Kevin B. LeeFew things bring out the worst tendencies of Hollywood than the genre mash-up, as evidenced by two of last year's worst films, "Cowboys vs. Aliens" and "Battle: Los Angeles" (aka "Independence Day" filmed as part Iraq War documentary, part video game). The "movie-x-meets-movie-y" mentality seems to inspire little more than z-level creativity in the land of big budgets and small minds. And yet, somehow the British have a better track record at bringing together disparate elements into a compelling whole. One of the best British crime movies, "The Lavender Hill Mob," is also one of their best comedies. Their most famous horror movie, "The Wicker Man," is actually a trifecta of horror, crime thriller and musical. And now there's Ben Wheatley's "Kill List," which takes seemingly familiar genre elements and offsets them in ways that can be confounding, but leave an unforgettable impact. And by impact, I'm not just talking about a scene involving a tied-up librarian and a hammer.
by Steven Boone"Mistakes are lodged like harpoons and fish hooks in an intelligent person's soul," says one friend of political folk singer Phil Ochsof the deep depression that eventually led him to suicide in 1976. Och's friends are like that, eloquent and insightful. His mentor Pete Seeger, in particular, speaks like he sings, modulating his voice to give anecdotes a mythic luster and heartbreaking resonance. But after watching "Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune" take a measure of the man's adult life, it seems that some friends put too much emphasis on generic therapist's reasons for his downward spiral -- schizophrenia, alcoholism, declining popularity. It seems that Phil Ochs' fall was inevitable, given the fact that his singing career began when he was barely out of his teens, when JFK's assassination was a couple years off, and crashed after every progressive movement for which his protest songs provided spiritual fuel was crushed.
by Jeff ShannonThe cause of the disease is unknown, and there is no cure. It could be a cluster of diseases, nobody knows for sure. The experts say it's not contagious, but that's just a futile ploy to prevent panic. It's spreading throughout the world as a full-blown epidemic. The symptoms are brutal and unrelenting: Slowly but surely, your senses fall away -- first you lose the sense of smell. Then taste, and eventually hearing...panic strikes you anyway, and the world around you ceases to make any kind of sense. How can you possibly survive the onslaught of sensory deprivation? What can you do when you're overwhelmed by an escalating sense of infantile helplessness?
• Anath White in Los AngelesAwards season again. Last year, as you may recall, a many months pregnant Natalie Portman received the Oscar for Best Actress for "Black Swan." Her lithesome acceptance speech, without notes, thanked many colleagues she knew had helped her stand there. As both a lifelong moviegoer and a worker on films, my spirit lifted at these words: "There are people on films that no one ever talks about, that are your heart and soul every day, including Joe Reidy, our incredible A.D..." Along with so many others, I was thrilled by her sentiment -- and especially pleased for Joe Reidy.
• Omer M. MozaffarThe sunglasses, scowls and black leather make it easy to forget that the Wachowski Brothers' mega-popular "The Matrix" (1999) is a dystopian superhero movie, if that makes any sense. The story is an exciting but familiar origins story. We experience and recognize its Frankenstein mythology telling us that our creations, the machines, have conquered us. We see its Orwell/Kafka environment, sometimes taken straight from Orson Welles' "The Trial." And we appreciate its fantastically choreographed martial arts (at least early on, paying homage to video games and Hong Kong movies). And, the philosopher will appreciate the conscious exercise in semiotics. Perhaps, the greatest fun of this movie is the popcorn entertainment. But, for me, even though the movie invests itself so much in its coolness, the overarching appeal of "The Matrix" is its mysticism.
thumbs
Linked here are reviews in recent months for which I wrote either 4 star or 3.5 star reviews. What does Two Thumbs Up mean in this context? It signifies that I believe these films are worth going out of your way to see, or that you might rent them, add them to your Netflix, Blockbuster or TiVo queues, or if they are telecast record them.
Gathered here in one convenient place are my recent reviews that awarded films Zero Stars, One-half Star, One Star, and One-and-a-half Stars. These are, generally speaking to be avoided. Sometimes I hear from readers who confess they are in the mood to watch a really bad movie on some form of video. If you are sincere, be sure to know what you're getting: A really bad movie.
the ebert club newsletter | |
|
RSS Headlines
