movie Glossary
Vivaldi Coefficient
The probability that Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" will be used in a scene requiring classical music is inversely proportionate to the movie's quality, and approaches 100 percent in buddy-cop movies where the villain is giving a lavish dinner party. Josh Powers, Washington, D.C.
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The Life of Oharu (Unrated) (1952)
Here is the saddest film I have ever seen about the life of a woman. It begins on a chill dawn when the heroine wanders, her face behind a fan, until encountering some of her fellow prostitutes. "It's hard for a 50-year-old women to pass as 20," she observes. She says it has been a slow night: She was only picked up by an old man, who took her into a candlelit room filled with young men. "Look at this painted face!" he told them. "Do you still want to buy a woman?" To be held up as a moral spectacle is a cruel fate for a woman who has been treated immorally almost every day of her life, and who has always behaved as morally as it was within her power to do.
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One of the readers of this blog asked a few days ago if audiences absolutely demand that movies be linear and realistic. The question came in the thread about "Cloud Atlas," which in fact is realistic, at least in the sense that we understand stories set in the past and in the future--although we don't often get six of them in the same film. There's nothing in the film we can't understand in the moment, although we may be hard-pressed to understand how, or if, they fit together. And if the actors play multiple characters of various races, genders and ages, well, we understand that too.
I'm posting this review of "Cloud Atlas" both on my web site and as a blog entry, because the blog software accepts comments and I want to share yours. At the end, I have added the post-screening press conference at Toronto.
The notion for this blog has been rattling about on my to-write list for months. It many ways it should not need to be written. All the same, again today another of Those Comments came in: "Just stick to movie reviews. you have no idea of what you're talking about. You love socialism? Move to Europe."
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by Chaz EbertPhilosophy was one of my favorite subjects in college, and if I had to summarize in one sentence what I took away it's that Man in the state of nature is basically good. Sure I know that plenty of philosophers argue otherwise, but this is what I choose to believe to this day, and it is what I expect of those leading our nation. It is a “goodness” tempered with compassion as we give up some of our individual goals for the good of society. It is not a simplistic belief, it underscores the very contract we make when we gather under a set of laws for society, commerce, protection and procreation. It gives us strength in community and provides a safety net to those who can least afford to take care of themselves.
It was almost as if President Obama's advisors had said before the debate, "Don't agree with Romney on anything," while Romney's advisors might have said to their boy, "Agree with Obama as much as possible." After all, this third and final presidential debate of 2012 was supposed to be about foreign policy, an area in which Obama is expert and seasoned and in which former governor Romney has no enviable credentials.
"What I try to do is be consistent," said President Barack Obama. He was talking about energy policy -- not about debating strategies, because as all the world knows by now, Obama projected a far more aggressive and engaged persona at his second debate against Mitt Romney than he did at the first. He managed to do it without being self-conscious, a neat trick since the reviews of his previous performance were so unanimously negative.
Oh my. Here we go again with the deathiness. Movie criticism keeps dying deader and deader. Film itself has keeled over and given up the ghost. Cinema ist kaput, and at the end of last month "movie culture" was pronounced almost as deceased as John Cleese's parrot. Ex-parrot, I mean. Then the movie "Looper" came out, posing questions like: "What if you could go back in time? Would you kill cinema?" Or something like that. People,all this dying has gotta stop.
Is "Room 237" some kind of crazy joke? Rick Ascher's much-discussed "subjective documentary" features five people who present their theories/interpretations of the "hidden meanings" they say they've found in the rooms and corridors of Stanley Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, the setting of his chilly 1980 horror film, "The Shining." I'm asking a question; I don't know the answer. I haven't yet had the opportunity to see the picture, which has played a number of festivals (Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, NY, London, Karlovy Vary) and has been picked up by IFC Films and is slated for release in 2013. I have seen Ascher's 2010 short, "The S from Hell," however, which the "Room 237" web site says "in many ways laid the groundwork" for the new film. That one is satire.
The story of Ben Affleck's "Argo" concerns the real-life rescue of six fugitive American embassy employees from Ayatollah "Salman Rushdie Fatwa" Khomeini's Iran in 1980. The Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor, hid them in his home until they were smuggled out of the country 79 days after the takeover of the embassy by Iranian militants. But the movie is more substantially interested in the nature of movies themselves, and how stories get turned into them. Since its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, "Argo" has been praised as "a crackerjack thriller" (the kind of argot movie reviewers use) and criticized for downplaying the Canadians' considerable efforts and not being, you know, "historically accurate. I'm sore-y, we know it's Based On A True Story and all, but that's not really what this movie is aboot.
Opening Shot Project Index
• Scott Jordan Harris in the UKI love Jerry Lewis. I love Jerry Lewis so much that I have a friend who, whenever I mention Lewis online, sends me the simple two word message "Rupert Pupkin". That, of course, is the name of Robert De Niro's deranged wannabe in Martin Scorcese's "The King of Comedy". Pupkin is so obsessed with Jerry Langford, the comedian played by Jerry Lewis, that he kidnaps him and takes his place on his talk show.
• Charlie Schmidlin in Los AngelesHad the unflagging perseverance of Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings not shown them through their trying development prior to "Cloud Atlas," its existing pitch materials and visionary test footage likely would have elevated the project into cinema's tragic archive of could've beens. Like Samuel Fuller's haphazard, ash-covered collection of unproduced scripts, the absence of product, sitting idly by the raw materials required to construct one, can coat an enigmatic gloss over the entire endeavor.
• Michał Oleszczyk from Kraków"The Terence Davies Trilogy" is a work of such profound sadness and despair that watching it has to result in either obliteration or catharsis (unless it provokes a walk-out). Six years in the making, the three black-and-white shorts took their time oozing from Davies' personal experience and one can see the growing assurance of their director's hand. "Children" (1976) try out things in a tentative way, "Madonna and Child" (1980) solidify them into a steady mode of expression and "Death and Transfiguration" (1983) present a mature, stunningly poetic cinematic voice. Now that the three movies are only shown spliced together (and became available on a Region 2 DVD released by British Film Institute), one can see the emergence of Davies' techniques and savor what remains his most direct and devastating work to date.
by Odie HendersonThe cinema of 2012 is brought to you by Viagra, or so it seems. The year has been chock full of movies about horny old people. Sure, the characters still complain, have aches and pains, and deal with moments both senior and regrettable. But Nana's also out to prove she's still got the ill na na, and Gramps is in the mood like Glenn Miller on an endless loop. Films like Dustin Hoffman's "Quartet," with its randy Billy Connolly, and the main characters of Stephane Robelin's "All Together" dispel the myth that once you go gray, the sex goes away. These folks are reclaiming "bitch and moan" from its grumpy origins, and turning the phrase into a cause-and-effect relationship.
by Jeff ShannonOctober, 1961: A New York fashion model on the verge of Hollywood stardom, 31-year-old Tippi Hedren (Sienna Miller) is invited to a celebratory lunch with legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock (Toby Jones) and his wife Alma (Imelda Staunton), who's also his long-time collaborator. A divorced single mother (of future actress Melanie Griffith, then four years old), Hedren is plucked from obscurity to star in "The Birds," Hitchcock's highly anticipated follow-up to his phenomenally successful 1960 thriller, "Psycho." After Alma sees her in a TV commercial ("I like her smile," she says to "Hitch"), she arranges a meeting. Secretly smitten, Hitchcock directs Hedren's screen test in his own Bel Air home and, shortly thereafter, offers a toast.
by Donald LiebensonIn begrudgingly recommending "Paul Williams Still Alive" to his legion of fans, I am reminded of a Rolling Stone magazine review of Janis Joplin's first solo album, "I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama!" Janis never sounded better, the reviewer said, but to enjoy her, you had to be able to tune out her backup band. A similar caveat is necessary here. Enjoyment of "Still Alive" will depend on your tolerance of writer-director Stephen Kessler, who takes Williams' joke at one point that the documentary could become the "Paulie and Steve Show" as a carte blanche invitation to intrude on the proceedings.
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