movie Glossary
Phantom Photographer
A family's vacation snapshots always include every family member, even if they were twenty miles from the nearest neighbor. Who took the picture, the family dog? ALESSANDRA KELLEY Chicago, IL
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Michael Haneke's "Amour," which won the Palme d'Or last May at Cannes, was voted Saturday the best film of 2012 by the prestigious National Society of Film Critics. The award, coming on the eve of voting for the 2013 Academy Awards, confirms "Amour" as a Best Foreign Film frontrunner. Other NSFC winners will also draw welcome attention.
Monsieur Hire (PG-13) (1989)
Patrice Leconte's "Monsieur Hire" is a tragedy about loneliness and erotomania, told about two solitary people who have nothing else in common. It involves a murder, and the opening shot is of a corpse. Monsieur Hire is a scrawny, balding middle-aged tailor who lives by himself. Alice is a beautiful, tender-hearted 22-year-old blonde who lives alone across the courtyard from Hire in the same apartment building.
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Consider now the curious character of Dr. King Schultz. He is an itinerant dentist who works from his little wagon, traveling the backroads of the pre-Civil War South. As Quentin Tarantino's "Django Unchained" opens, we see a line of shackled slaves being led through what I must describe as a deep, dark forest, because those are the kinds of forests we meet in fairy tales. Out of this deepness and darkness, Schultz (Christoph Waltz) appears, his lantern swinging from his wagon, which has a bobbling tooth on its roof.
Night on a highway somewhere. A hat and a shoe. In its very simplicity the photograph signals it has some hidden significance. The caption explains that the two objects on the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles are at the spot where a young man named Chris Guerra was struck by a SUV and killed at about 6 p.m. New Year's Day while trying to cross the four-lane highway.
A funny thing happened on the way to the Oscars. Not to the Oscars. To me. I sustained a hairline fracture of my left hip. I didn't fall. I didn't break it. It just sort of...happened to itself. Most of the time, it causes me no pain at all. But my left leg won't bear any weight, nor can I walk on it. This pain is off the charts. It has nothing to do with cancer. It's plain bad luck.
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Quentin Tarantino has found his actor in Christoph Waltz -- someone who can speak Tarantinian fluently and still make it his own. When Waltz uses a self-consciously ostentatious word like "ascertain" (as in, "I was simply trying to ascertain..." -- the kind of verbiage QT is as likely to put in the mouth of a lowlife crook as a German dentist, or a Francophile plantation slavemaster, for that matter), it sounds right. As someone to whom Tarantino's dialog often sounds cliche-ridden and cutesy, it's a pleasure to hear Waltz saying the words in character rather than simply as a mouthpiece for the writer-director. Oh, stop. This isn't sounding the way I want it to.
"As a country, we have been through this too many times..."-- President Obama, December 14, 2012 It was a busy week of business-as-usual in the USA: Tuesday, December 11: A man killed three people (including himself) and wounded another in shootings at the Clackamas Mall in Portland, OR.
At the heart of Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" is a quiet scene between President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) and two young men, Samuel Beckwith (Adam Driver) and David Homer Bates (Drew Sease), in an otherwise empty telegraph cipher office. Lincoln has to make a crucial decision: Does he consider a peace proposal from a Confederate delegation on its way to Washington, and thus perhaps immediately end the bloody Civil War that has claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans, knowing that it would doom his attempt to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, officially banning slavery in the United States? Or does he try to legally solidify and extend his Emancipation Proclamation by getting the Thirteenth Amendment passed during a narrow window of opportunity (during the lame duck session of Congress between his re-election and second inauguration) at the cost of extending the war?
Opening Shot Project Index
• Michal Oleszczyk in KrakowThe only Polish actress ever to become a major Hollywood star, Pola Negri (née Apolonia Chałupiec), lived a life as exciting as the movies she graced with her presence. Born in a small Polish town of Lipno in 1894 (while the country was still under a triple occupation by its neighbors), she climbed her way up: first to the theatre stages of Warsaw and then to the budding movie business. After a successful crossover to the much more sophisticated German film industry -- and a happy pairing with its finest director, Ernst Lubitsch -- she starred in the international smash-hit, "Madame Dubarry" (1919). It was Lubitsch's ticket to Hollywood -- as well as Pola's.
• Omer M. Mozaffar in ChicagoBenh Zeitlin's first feature film, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" (2012), is at times a wonderful and at times a gripping story of a little girl making sense in a forgotten land of trees and rust. It follows in the tradition of movies about happy children running through an unhappy world, in an America we never see on the screen. If she does not steal your heart in the first hour, she will surely grab it in the final thirty minutes. So, if you have your own little Ruthless Gradeschooler her age, then I pity the levees that hold back your tears.
• Gerardo Valero in Mexico CityI'm fairly certain most Martin Scorsese fans prefer his Robert DeNiro period to the current one with Leonardo DiCaprio. The later entries may include the film that won him the Academy Award for Best Picture ("The Departed") and they've surely displayed signs of greatness, but I don't think any of them can be discussed as pinnacle achievements like his earlier ones.
• Seongyong Cho in South KoreaIk-hyeon is a sleazy piece of work you cannot help but look at with disgust and wonder. While he is corrupt, greedy, treacherous, opportunistic, vain, and foolish, he is also a wily scoundrel who may get away with his crimes and misdemeanors even when everything seems to fall down on him, and he is willing to win the game by any means necessary for his survival and advance in the system.
• Michał Oleszczyk from Kraków"Lincoln," a new movie directed by Steven Spielberg, overflows with talk, large chunks of which are delivered by the titular character. It opens, however, with an instance of Lincoln listening. After a brief outburst of violence, which allows us to witness the Civil War strife in all its mud-drenched brutality, four soldiers of various ranks and differing races casually approach the sixteenth President and talk to him. Their demeanor varies, running the gamut from celebrity-struck goofiness ("Hey, how tall are you?") to brave political confrontation by a Black corporal, demanding equal opportunities for a military career. And yet, as the scene closes, the soldiers end up literally speaking in Lincoln's words. By showing they have memorized the "Gettysburg Address," they give the ultimate proof of political trust in one's leader: they allow Lincoln's mind to merge with their own.
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