movie Glossary
Physician, Heal Thyself
Any doctor taking on a tough case also has a problem of his own which the treatment of the patient will cure. Especially true of psychiatrists. See "Good Will Hunting." LEE FYOCK, Natick, Massachusetts
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"This is the best use of 3-D I've ever seen," I say to Ang Lee. And I mean it. His "Life of Pi," based on Yann Martel's novel about a shipwrecked boy, is an astonishment, not least because it never uses 3-D for its effect, but instead as a framing device for the story as a whole. There are, for example, shots where the point of view is below the sea's surface, looking up at the boat and into the sky beyond. The surface of the sea seems to be an invisible membrane between the water and the air. I've never seen anything like it.
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.
Andrew Sarris, who loved movies, is dead at 83. He was the most influential American film critic of his time, and one of the jolliest. More than anyone else, he was responsible for introducing Americans to the Auteur Theory, the belief that the true author of a film is its director. Largely because of him, many moviegoers today think of films in terms of their directors.
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Searching for mention of "Amore" on our 2012 PBS program "Ebert Presents at the Movies," I was pointed by Google to one of Chaz's video reports. I remembered liking her video at the time, started noodling through all of her reports, and found myself thinking of my wife's emerging role as a movie critic. For more than 20 years, she's attended virtually every film festival and press screening with me, debated the films, made friends with the people.
After she had the heart attack out in Michigan on Thanksgiving 1988, I stood by her bedside in the recovery room and she tried so hard to tell me something, but it just didn't work. I loved her so much. Did she know how much? I never told her. There are always questions you wish you'd asked after it's too late to get an answer. Sometimes years can pass before you realize they're questions.
The first Chicago bar I drank in was the Old Town Ale House. That bar was destroyed by fire in the 1960s, the customers hosed off, and the Ale House moved directly across the street to its present location, where it has been named Chicago's Best Dive Bar by the Chicago Tribune.
• Simon Abrams in BrooklynFor better and worse, "Stoker," South Korean director Chan-wook Park's first film with an all English-speaking cast, is very much Park's baby. Park ("Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," "Thirst") is most well-known for directing "Oldboy." In that now-famously bloody, operatic revenge drama, and most of his other films, Park takes great pains to steep viewers in his protagonists' subjective worlds. Perspective is accordingly a prison in "Stoker," a soapy Southern Gothic-style coming of age story with an Alice in Wonderland fetish.
• Kevin B. Lee in ChicagoIn the age of YouTube and Vimeo, one of the most exciting developments in film culture are online video essays that explore different aspects of the movies. These videos take footage from films and reconfigure them using editing, text, graphics and voiceover to reveal startling observations and insights, visualizing them in ways that text criticism can't. These videos are typically produced independently by using consumer-level equipment, demonstrating that just about anyone with a computer can be both a filmmaker and a critic. The only limits are those of imagination and intelligence.
thumbs
Linked here are reviews in recent months for which I wrote either 4 star or 3.5 star reviews. What does Two Thumbs Up mean in this context? It signifies that I believe these films are worth going out of your way to see, or that you might rent them, add them to your Netflix, Blockbuster or TiVo queues, or if they are telecast record them.
Gathered here in one convenient place are my recent reviews that awarded films Zero Stars, One-half Star, One Star, and One-and-a-half Stars. These are, generally speaking to be avoided. Sometimes I hear from readers who confess they are in the mood to watch a really bad movie on some form of video. If you are sincere, be sure to know what you're getting: A really bad movie.
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