Great Movies
Features
Breaking Bread on the 25th Anniversary of Big Night
A feature on watching Campbell Scott & Stanley Tucci's Big Night on its 25th anniversary, especially in light of how the last year impacted the restaurant business.
A feature on watching Campbell Scott & Stanley Tucci's Big Night on its 25th anniversary, especially in light of how the last year impacted the restaurant business.
Matt writes: Over the past couple weeks, I joined RogerEbert.com publisher Chaz Ebert and my fellow editors in featuring reviews, interviews and essays both new and republished on our site in allegiance with Black Lives Matter, the critical American movement upholding Black voices.
The veteran actor found greatness in small characters, and universality in villains and knaves.
A nightmare movie ruled by nightmare logic, and gorgeous from start to finish.
Go ahead and scream. No one can hear you.
An AFI FEST review of Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.
“The Sweet Hereafter” is superlative in its uncompromising but undeniably compassionate depiction of a bleak human condition.
A Great Movie is hidden somewhere within "Blade Runner" and "Blade Runner 2049."
An FFC essay on Woody Allen's "Another Woman."
An appreciation of Richard Lester as a retrospective of his work is about to unfold in New York City.
Marie writes: For those unaware, it seems our intrepid leader, the Grand Poobah, has been struck by some dirty rotten luck..."This will be boring. I'll make it short. I have a slight and nearly invisible hairline fracture involving my left femur. I didn't fall. I didn't break it. It just sort of...happened to itself." - Roger
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Marie writes: Behold a living jewel; a dragonfly covered in dew as seen through the macro-lens of French photographer David Chambon. And who has shot a stunning series of photos featuring insects covered in tiny water droplets. To view others in addition to these, visit here.
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Marie writes: It's no secret that most Corporations are evil - or at the very least, suck big time. And while I have no actual proof, I'm fairly certain there is a special level of Dante's Hell reserved just for them. (Map of Dante's Hell.)That being the case, when my younger brother Paul wrote me about a cool project sponsored by Volkswagen, I was understandably wary and ready to denounce it sight-unseen as self-serving Corporate shyte. As luck would have it however, I was blessed at birth with curiosity and which got the better of me and why I took a look. For what I found was nothing less than extraordinary....
Marie writes: At long last, after two years of mediocre weather compounded by bad timing, the planets managed to align themselves again in my favor and I was finally able to return to Pender Island and where my tale begins....
Does groundbreaking cinema go hand in hand with movie greatness? That's a question answered by Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" (1982). Like "Metropolis" before it, here's a rare film with sequences that generate a sense of awe. Even though we now live in an age when the creation of extraordinary cities of the future has become routine thanks to digital effects, it's hard to imagine the Canyons of Coruscant (in the "Star Wars" prequels); the futuristic Washington in "Minority Report" or even the forthcoming versions of present day cities (in the new adaptation of "Total Recall") without the influence of "Runner" and none of these examples keep the audience's eyes fixed to the screen like Scott's Los Angeles of 2019. Here's a director whose doesn't just use special-effects to tell a story, he creates visual works of art in every frame of his films.
The visceral impact that Ridley Scott's "Alien" had in 1979 can never quite be recaptured, partly because so many movies have adapted elements of its premise, design and effects over the last three decades -- from John Carpenter's remake of "The Thing" (1982) to David Cronenberg's remake of "The Fly" (1986) to "Species" (1998) and "Splice" (2009). No movie had ever looked like this. And it still works tremendously -- but let me tell you, in 1979 a major studio science-fiction/horror film that hinted darkly of interspecies rape and impregnation was unspeakably disturbing. (It got under my skin and has stayed there. We have a symbiotic relationship, this burrowing movie parasite and I. We nourish each other. I don't think Ridley Scott has even come close to birthing as subversive and compelling a creation since.)
The thing is, the filmmakers actually took out the grisly details involving just what that H.R. Giger " xenomorph" did to and with human bodies (the sequels got more graphic), but in some ways that made the horror all the more unsettling. You knew, but you didn't know. It wasn't explicitly articulated. Dallas (Tom Skerrit) just disappears from the movie. The deleted "cocoon" scene (with the haunting moan, "Kill me...") appeared later on a LaserDisc version of the film, and then was incorporated into the 2003 theatrical re-release for the first time. The deleted footage:
Marie writes: behold the power of words, the pen mightier than the sword.
I've seen scenes in this movie multiple times in multiple movies, yet I've never seen this movie before. Andrew Niccol's "Lord of War," is the story of the rise and decline of an arms trafficker (Nicholas Cage) and takes many predictable narrative steps. It is a list of cinematic clichés, from the personalities (even the names) of the characters, to the moments of suspense and surprise, to the preposterous ethnic stereotypes. It contains everything short of a protagonist dangling from a cliff or a racing bus driving through a fruit stand. Further, there is very little character development, very little revelation, and most of the characters are caricatures. Nevertheless, the final product is a thoroughly original, provocative satire that explores a violent decade of global peace and haunts you with an almost silent sinister laugh.
Welcome to a special Halloween edition of the Newsletter! Marie writes: the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris is considered one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, in addition to being the final resting place of many a famous name. From Édith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt and Chopin to Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Georges Méliès, the well-known sleep on the tree-lined avenues of the dead and which you can now explore in a virtual 360 degree tour...
ENTER Père-Lachaise
From Richard T. Jameson, Editor, Movietone News, 1971-81; Editor, Film Comment, 1990-2000:
The opening credits of Richard Lester's "Juggernaut" (1974) play over a neutral backdrop that can just barely be detected as an undefined image rather than a simple blank screen. Whether it's an out-of-focus image or something more elemental -- say, the granules of the film emulsion itself -- is hard to say. The basic color is a beige-y grey, with now and then the merest hint of a diagonal band of something warmer attempting to form across the frame. On the soundtrack are noises similarly difficult to ascertain; some suggest hammers falling, an unguessable project under construction, while in other select nanoseconds we seem to be listening to something beyond the normal range of hearing -- the mutual brushing of atoms, perhaps, in an unimaginably microscopic space. In short, nothing; and the essence of everything.
The first shots cut in after the (swiftly flashed) credits have ended, and we get our worldly bearings. An oceanliner is preparing to depart an English port and, among other things, a dockside band is tuning up. I say "first shots," but we won't cheat: there can be only one opening shot, and it's over with before we barely register it. And indeed, why register it? It's nothing dramatic. Indeed, it's barely informational. There are streamers, fluttering limply and unremarkably in the breeze. Send-off streamers; bon voyage and all that. Most of their brief time onscreen, they're out of focus, because that's a gentle way of easing us from the shimmering nothingness behind the credits and into the coherent imagery of a movie we are obliged to pay attention to. Besides, this is 1974, five years after cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and "Easy Rider" had made rack focus a fashionable, sometimes almost fetishistic aspect of self-consciously contemporary moviemaking. (Not that Kovacs worked on "Juggernaut": the DP is Gerry Fisher, working with Lester for the first and last time.) So out-of-focus and then in-focus streamers, no big whoop. And the movie moves on.
It's only on a second viewing that these streamers may hit us like a fist in the chest. For the essence of the shot is that there are two streamers in particular traversing the frame in clarity. And one is red, one is blue.
Howard Hughes: Leonardo DiCaprio, Katharine Hepburn: Cate Blanchett, Ava Gardner: Kate Beckinsale, Noah Dietrich: John C. Reilly, Juan Trippe: Alec Baldwin, Sen. Brewster: Alan Alda, Professor Fitz: Ian Holm, Jack Frye: Danny Huston, Jean Harlow: Gwen Stefani, Errol Flynn: Jude Law, Johnny Meyer: Adam Scott, Glenn Odekirk: Matt Ross, Faith Domergue: Kelli Garner, Mrs. Hepburn: Frances Conroy, Robert Gross: Brent Spiner, Louis B. Mayer: Stanely DeSantis, Joseph Breen: Edward Herrmann
TORONTO--One of the best films at this year's Toronto Film Festival is "too slow," another is a "chick flick," a third is "too weird," and a fourth is "too talky." People told me these things as they were leaving the theater.
PARK CITY, Utah I've seen 10 movies so far at this year's Sundance Film Festival, some of them, I fear, destined to play nowhere else. I'll comment on some of them in later articles, but here's one for today: Stanley Tucci's "Joe Gould's Secret," about the strange and strained long-term friendship between New Yorker staff writer Joseph Mitchell (Tucci) and a brilliant, charming bum named Joe Gould (Ian Holm).
Q. I saw "Titanic" a second time to be sure I heard correctly. During the scene where the crew is trying to avoid the iceberg, they shout, "Hard to starboard!" Since they were frantically trying to turn the ship to port, I didn't understand the command. The scene clearly shows the ship veering left, and all of the damage was subsequently done to the starboard side. If someone told me "hard to starboard," I would turn the ship to the right. Maybe we have just discovered the real reason the ship hit the iceberg that night ("Oops! I meant 'port!'"). (Denise Leder, Las Vegas).
