Great Movies
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Thumbnails 7/20/20
Izzy, the creator of Be Kind Rewind; Lockdown Puppet Theater; Tribute to Ennio Morricone; In praise of "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets"; Legacy of John Lewis.
Izzy, the creator of Be Kind Rewind; Lockdown Puppet Theater; Tribute to Ennio Morricone; In praise of "Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets"; Legacy of John Lewis.
Veronica Cartwright on "The Field"; Musso & Frank turns 100, Silent films' universally accessible power; 'Mrs. Maisel' actresses battle restraints on women; In defense of "The Fanatic."
An appreciation of the life and work of the legendary producer Menahem Golan.
"Inside Llewyn Davis" star Oscar Isaac talks about how he got here, the way an actor can use music to express what's not there in dialogue, and the difficulty of playing a guy who might be considered a jerk.
What you are about to read may shock you. It's all true, and it happened to me. It involves censorship and the movies and one man's loathing of strong contemporary women.
I love motion pictures, and I love writing about them. I have been a movie critic in Buffalo, New York for a number of years. Reviewing films rose out of my passion for both journalism and cinema, the perfect combination.
In preparing this column, I thought about various headlines for it. Something like: The Perils Of Movie Reviewing. Or perhaps: What's Happening To Freedom Of The Press? Or maybe this one: There Truly Are Reactionary Men Who Fear And Hate Strong Women.
Charles Bukowski died on his day in 1994. His voice is open and fearless, romantic, honest. He probably has a whole generation of writers getting drunk and wondering why they can't write like that.
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In Big Ed's during the filming of "Barfly." Left to right, Bukowski, Ebert, Faye Dunaway, visiting fireman Andre Konchalovsky.
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My story about a day on location with "Barfly."
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Tom O'Bedlam reads Bukowski's incomparable "Who in the Hell is Tom Jones?"
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Bukowski sits in the back set of a convertible and gives a running commentary along Hollywood Boulevard.
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Bukowski photos and a song by Johnny Cash
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Bono reads "Roll the Dice" by Bukowski
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Charles Bukowski Reads "The Fire Station"
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Tom Waits reads Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart," Hanks version of Ecclesiates 7, 3 -12:
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Marie writes: Ever since he was a boy, photographer John Hallmén has been fascinated by insects. And he's become well-known for photographing the creatures he finds in the Nackareservatet nature reserve not far from his home in Stockholm, Sweden. Hallmén uses various methods to capture his subjects and the results are remarkable. Bugs can be creepy, to be sure, but they can also be astonishingly beautiful...
Blue Damsel Fly [click to enlarge photos]
In the biochemistry class during my naive undergraduate years, the professor jokingly said the capability of metabolizing alcohol depends on our genetic makeup. Thanks to the variations in the genes, some people can produce more enzymes or more active enzymes to take care of alcohol in their body. They can be heavy drinkers, or the ones less susceptible to the hazards caused by alcoholism than their fellow drunks.
That may explain the existence of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), the "laureate of American lowlifes" who lived a relatively long life despite many days and nights of bottles and women at the bars. As Stephen King says in his insightful book "On Writing," writing usually has no business with drinking ("Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do."). Sometime there are exceptions like Bukowski. Drinking and writing always came together to him, and he had no problem with that.
Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), my choice for the best film of the decade, will appear after the screening of his masterpiece at Ebertfest 2010. The 12th annual festival will be held April 21-25 at the landmark 1,600-seat Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, and for the first time ever, all festival Q&A sessions and panel discussions will be streamed live on the Internet.
There is a large electric billboard in the Las Vegas airport, right above luggage area 3, which flashes the following messages, one after another:
LOS ANGELES -- Down here in the bad part of town, a man named Big Ed runs a bar named Big Ed's, which pretty much sums up the way he sees things. A lot of the regulars live upstairs in low-rent rooms, and come downstairs to drink when the bar is open. When the bar is closed, they go upstairs and wait for it to open again.
