movie Glossary
Corrected Bullet Velocity Rule
In the Bullet Velocity Rule, the equation should go as follows: HBS=RBS/IC* * -- Hollywood Bullet Speed equals Real Bullet Speed divided by (not "times") the importance of character, where the more important the character, the higher the number. That way, the more important the character, the slower the bullet will be, and the easier to jump out of the way. I know it's ridiculous for a grown man who is a director of a nonprofit and a teacher to spend time correcting this, but I love the Little Movie Glossary and want it to be perfect. BOB DIEFENDORF, PRINCETON, N.J.
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Argo (R)
It's the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy. When a little picture named "Prancer" came to Three Oaks, Mich., I was sitting in the bar and overheard one bearded regular confide in his friend, "See that guy? He's assistant makeup."
The Paperboy (R)
"The Paperboy" is great trash, and as Pauline Kael told us, the movies are so seldom great art that if we can't appreciate great trash, we might as well not go at all. This is a humid, deep South wallow in raunch, with the wrong man on Death Row, the right man lurking in a swamp with his inbred family, a dead sheriff, a curious newspaper reporter, a slutty blond slattern, the younger man who adores her and alligators, lots of 'em.
There's a tense scene in Ben Affleck's new thriller "Argo" that dramatizes how the magic of Hollywood is potent all over the world. The movie, based on a true story, involves a cockamamie scheme to rescue six American embassy workers during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis by passing them off as location scouts for a non-existent science-fiction epic.
UPDATED Capsules: 10/10/12
The 48th Chicago International Film Festival opens the serious cinema season with a line-up of 125 features from around the world, and Chicago. Purists take note: only 18 will be projected on 35mm celluloid. The city's ace spectacle of cinema boasts auteurs Leos Carax, Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Carlos Reygadas, Ulrich Seidl and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Stars include Juliette Binoche, Alan Cumming, James Gandolfini, Paul Giamatti, Jennifer Lawrence, Ewan McGregor, Robert DeNiro, Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and Elijah Wood. And actor Dustin Hoffman directs "Quartet," a comedy about retired opera singers.
Max
The central mystery of Hitler, William Boyd writes in a recent Times Literary Supplement, is: "How on earth could a dysfunctional, deranged, down-and-out homeless person in pre-First World War Vienna become, 20 years later, Chancellor of Germany?" A peculiar and intriguing film named "Max" argues that he succeeded because he had such a burning need to be recognized--and also, of course, because of luck, good for him, bad for us. If Hitler had won fame as an artist, the century's history might have been different. Pity about his art.
ebert's dvd commentaries
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A depression has descended upon me. I look at the blank screen, and those are the words that come into my mind. I do not believe for a second that Mitt Romney will win the election. I do believe that at this moment he is tied, 50-50, in various national polls. Many of my fellow Americans have at least temporarily disappointed me.
This entry was originally titled, "Would you kill Baby Hitler?" Unfortunately, as several readers pointed out, most of the comments centered on the title, suggesting few had made it to the end. The entry is not about Hitler so much as about fate, chance, and luck. I'm giving it a second chance under another title.
I don't have any answers in this entry, which will calm those who think I never do. I have questions, and the answers will appear in the comments. I want you to share your experience with acupuncture.
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by Tom ShalesNetwork commentators and reporters fell all over each other in declaring Mitt Romney the winner of the first presidential debate Wednesday night, but maybe Romney didn't so much win as Barack Obama surrendered. Obama all but handed it to Romney by mistaking "presidential" behavior for half-hearted diffidence. He acted over-confident when all indications are he has no reason to be over-confident.
by Tom ShalesRarely does a TV show arrive with lower expectations than the annual Emmy Awards telecast. It's a given that the thing will suck. Even so, this year's -- the 64th -- managed to come up short and disappoint. And it wasn't one of those "so bad it's good" campy things you can enjoy making fun of, either. It was more like one of those "so bad it's lousy" things that leave you incredulous and drained of the will to live.
I think my very favorite thing in Rian Johnson's "Looper" is a squiggly cloud. It hangs there in the sky above a cornfield and you can't help but notice it. Which is good, because this is a time-travel movie and the cloud comes in handy later when something happens again in this same spot and the cloud tells you what time it is. Thanks to that cloud, you know this is a re-run.
"They love it, they don't like it, they like it better a second time, they see it a third time and they reverse their opinion."-- Paul Thomas Anderson on "The Master," in a Toronto Star interview with Peter Howell The critics agree! Paul Thomas Anderson's new film "The Master" is... ambiguous. What they don't agree on is whether, as we say in the software world, that's a bug or a feature. Is the movie "demanding" and artfully elusive, challenging audiences by refusing to offer a conventional dramatic catharsis or provide an artificially wrapped-up ending; or is the thing just vague, opaque, muddled? The answer depends on who you ask, what they think of Anderson as a filmmaker and, possibly, what they expected going in: a historical exposé of Scientology, a portrait of post-war/micd-century America, "character study," an acting duel... Take a look:
At one point well into Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" I thought that the movie was going to reveal itself as a story about the meaninglessness of human existence. But that notion was based on a single piece of aphoristic, potential-thesis-statement dialog that, like much else, wasn't developed in the rest of the movie. Which is not to say that "The Master" isn't about the meaninglessness of human life. The line, spoken by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the cult guru known to his acolytes as Master, is addressed to the younger man he considers his "protégé," a dissolute mentally ill drifter and navy veteran named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), and the gist of it is that the Freddie has as much to show for his life as somebody who has worked a regular 9-to-5 job for many years. The point being, I suppose, that for all Freddie's adventures, peculiarities and failures, he isn't all that much different from anybody else. Except, maybe, he's somewhat more effed-up.
Opening Shot Project Index
• Omer M. Mozaffar in ChicagoWe know that "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982) is the best of all of the "Star Trek" movies. I am not stating anything new here. The rest of the series of films struggled to repeat the mastery of this film, and the reboot has also fallen short, thus far. I did, however, watch Star Trek 2 recently to see if the overlooked "Star Trek: First Contact" was able to take the helm as the Best of the Treks. In the process, however, I realized that Star Trek 2 is a much better movie than I remembered. I invite everyone to watch this movie again to appreciate how great it really is. This is a great movie. It is exciting. It is complex. It is emotional and philosophical. It is one of the great adventure movies.
Gerardo Valero in Mexico CityBen Affleck's "The Town" (2010) is an impressive effort from a third time director whose acting choices almost derailed his Hollywood career. With the clear exception of "Changing Lanes" (2002), this film is better than everything he ever did before and the reason is simple: instead of choosing to be involved in another blockbuster wannnabe, Affleck wrote, directed and starred in this heartfelt project about a fascinating borough that he seems familiar with. It is also a work of numerous, obvious inspirations, raising the question of whether said fact makes it any less worthy.
• Charlie Schmidlin in ChicagoGathering the notion that excess equals legitimacy, studios as well as independents seem to have recently relegated the term "black" filmmaking to mean diversity-centric productions with market potential. In the past few years, as films like "Pariah," "Restless City," and "Middle of Nowhere" carve out singular representations of black perspectives. It seems damaging to believe that simple bait-and-switch tactics, as seen in Neil LaBute's remake of "Death at a Funeral," can fall under the same blanket classification.
by Edward Copeland"It was an amazing experience," said Jeffrey Tambor. "I come from the theater and it was very, very much approached like theater. It was rehearsed and Garry took a long, long time in casting and putting that particular unit together." In a phone interview, Tambor talked about how Garry Shandling and his behind-the-scenes team selected the performers to play the characters, regulars and guest stars, on "The Larry Sanders Show" when it debuted 20 years ago. Shandling chose well throughout the series' run and -- from the veteran to the novice, the theater-trained acting teacher and character actor to the comedy troupe star in his most subtle role -- they all tend to feel the way Tambor does: "It changed my career. It changed my life."
By Jana J. MonjiIn this reality-TV ruled world, the word bachelorette seems firmly attached to the legacy of Trista Rehn and the female spin-off of a competitive dating game. Yet in writer/director Leslye Headland's dark comedy, "Bachelorette," the subject isn't the tricks and lines men use in the warfare of love but how three women deal with being on the downside of not-married when the least conventionally attractive of their high school clique is preparing to walk down the aisle. This cocaine-fueled cattiness never rises above callow, although the acting talent is deeper than the script.
by Steven BooneCinema, that traditionally aristocratic medium, has always found unlikely ways to commiserate with the working man and the poor. In America, King Vidor's "The Crowd" showed us a man trapped on the treadmill of lower middle class survival in the big city. A few years later, Frank Borzage's "Man's Castle" gave us Spencer Tracy as a street hustler who learns that Depression-era struggle is no excuse to turn his back on a chance at family life. It's the same in every country, every era: Societies that place the bulk of their economic burden upon the low man's shoulders often send that man scrambling in the opposite direction of happiness, in the name of happiness. A random spin of the world cinema wheel will turn up great directors whose finest work touches on this phenomenon: Ken Loach, Ousmane Sembene, the Dardenne brothers, Ulrich Seidl, the Italian neorealists, the blacklisted Americans, and so on.
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