movie Glossary
'Hold Your Fire' Music Cue
When one character is considering shooting another, and there's a closeup of the would-be shooter's finger tightening on the trigger (and a tense crescendo on the soundtrack), that gun is not going to be fired. Tom Hill, Portland, Ore.
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Public Enemies (R)
by Roger Ebert
"I rob banks," John Dillinger would sometimes say by way of introduction. It was the simple truth. That was what he did. For the 13 months between the day he escaped from prison and the night he lay dying in an alley, he robbed banks. It was his lifetime. Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" accepts that stark fact and refuses any temptation to soften it. Dillinger was not a nice man.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (PG-13)
by Roger Ebert"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
by Roger Ebert
Revised, updated 6/25.
In a stunning surprise, the number of Best Picture nominees was increased from five to ten Wednesday by the Motion Picture Academy.
"The Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,” said Sid Ganis, outgoing Academy president. In 1934 and 1935 there were 12 nominees, and from 1935 to 1943 there were 10.
Q. I’ve long suspected that not so deeply layered in the John Wayne’s and John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956) is the idea that Debbie isn’t Ethan’s niece — she is his daughter. Ethan’s sister-in-law Martha (Dorothy Jordan) is clearly in love with Ethan (Wayne) by the way she treats him and by the way she holds his clothes close to her when she believes no one is looking.
Man With a Movie Camera (No MPAA rating) (1929)
by Roger Ebert In 1929, the year it was released, films had an average shot length (ASL) of 11.2 seconds. "Man With a Movie Camera" had an ASL of 2.3 seconds. The ASL of Michael Bay's "Armageddon" was -- also 2.3 seconds. Why would I begin a discussion of a silent classic by discussing such a mundane matter? It helps to understand the impact the film made at the time. Viewers had never seen anything like it, and Mordaunt Hall, the horrified author of the New York Times review, wrote: "The producer, Dziga Vertof, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention." This reminds me of Harry Carey's advice in 1929 to John Wayne, as the talkies were coming in: "Stop halfway through every sentence. The audience can't listen that fast."
by Roger Ebert
Karl Malden, who won an Academy Award for one of the best American films and became a household name for a TV commercial, is dead at 97. He died at home in Brentwood of natural causes, according to his family.
by Roger Ebert Michael Jackson was so gifted, so lonely, so confused, so sad. He lost happiness somewhere in his childhood, and spent his life trying to go back there and find it. When he played the Scarecrow in "The Wiz" (1978), I think that is how he felt, and Oz was where he wanted to live. It was his most truly autobiographical role. He could understand a character who felt stuffed with straw, but could wonderfully sing and dance, and could cheer up the little girl Dorothy.
by Roger Ebert Michael Mann saw the Biograph Theatre at 2433 N. Lincoln for the first time while riding past it on a streetcar when he was 8 or 9. His mother Esther told him, “That’s the old Biograph Theatre where they killed Dillinger." She took a bow from the audience at the Chicago premiere of his movie "Public Enemies," which ends with a corpse on the Biograph sidewalk.
Kevin Davis is a Chicago writer who has a bit part as a crime reporter in "Public Enemies." His wife, the actress Martie Sanders, plays the cashier at the Biograph. This memory first appeared in City Talk magazine.
By Kevin Davis
On a cold January day in 1934, my grandfather shot John Dillinger. Sol “Dixie” Davis steadied himself in front of the notorious bank robber, aimed his Speed Graphic 4-x-5 camera and took a picture. Dillinger, who was handcuffed and under police guard, let him take a few more photos and then said enough. “Taking these pictures’ll drive me screwy,” Dillinger said.
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roger ebert's journal
I wrote recently about my childhood growing up in Downstate Illinois. I mentioned me and my friends roaming all over town on our bikes, walking to the movies and the swimming pool on our own, and riding our bikes through rain water backed up after thunderstorms. Also, for that matter, through piles of burning leaves. One of my classmates wrote to mention that the Boneyard, the creek running through town, was a drainage canal. "What?" I asked. "Where we caught crawdaddies?"
The day will come when "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms.
A new movie is titled "The 500 Days of Summer." That's what it looked like on the last day of school, time reaching forward beyond all imagining. There was a heightened awareness in the room as the second hand crept toward our moment of freedom. We regarded the nuns as a discharged soldier does his superior officer. Here had existed a bond that would never be again. We didn't run screaming out the door. We sauntered. We had time. We were aware of a milestone having passed.
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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