Features
Streetcorner Symphony: The Music of Mean Streets
On the use of music in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, which just turned 50.
On the use of music in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, which just turned 50.
A brief look at next month's Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, including a tribute to Russell Crowe.
A review of "Backdraft," the first film this critic ever reviewed professionally.
The latest and greatest on Blu-ray and DVD, including Tenet, The Irishman, Possessor, The Dark and the Wicked, and special edition releases of Total Recall, The Lord of the Rings, and Tremors.
A great movie star and versatile actor, the once and future Bond was also an icon of primordial masculinity, for better and worse.
Far Flung Correspondent Gerardo Valero reviews Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman."
An overview of twelve films in the 2019 Venice Film Festival that get my thumbs-up vote.
A brief consideration of "Taxi Driver," still Scorsese's masterpiece.
A piece about The Alloy Orchestra in light of their Ebertfest presentation of "The Son of the Sheik".
An appreciation of the actor's perseverance through age 63 despite depression.
An interview with Nicolas Winding Refn, director of "Valhalla Rising," "Drive" and "Only God Forgives," among other films. Simon Abrams talks to the filmmaker about midnight movies, meeting Alejandro Jodorowsky, and the possibility that he might day make a Wonder Woman movie.
Dedicated to memories of Roger Ebert, for the simple reason that talking about movies is so thrilling. He did not like lists, but I love his lists.
I'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.
The key strength of David O. Russell's "Silver Linings Playbook" (2012) is that the acting is so strong that we forget we are watching the movie. In those moments that the plot guides us, it takes us in some directions familiar, some directions frightening, and some directions fun. In a year that has given us a compassionate story about addiction in "Flight," we also have this equally tender film about mental illness. I want to see this movie again, if at least because it is so happy, even though it did not have to be.
"Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel" is available March 27 on online outlets via iTunes, Vudu, CinemaNow and Amazon. Also on DVD and Blu-ray.
For B-movie buffs, exploitation film aficionados, and midnight movie cultists, the grand finale of "Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel," will be every bit as exhilarating as that montage of forbidden kisses at the end of "Cinema Paradiso." Taking its cue from the liberating, rebellious high point of the Roger Corman-produced "Rock and Roll High School," in which P. J. Soles and the Ramones rock the hallways of Vince Lombardi High, it offers up dizzying bursts of quintessential Corman: cheesy monsters, fiery car explosions, Vincent Price, blaxploitation kickass, marauding piranhas and Mary Woronov with a gun.
Alex Stapleton's "Corman's World" celebrates the singular cinematic legacy of the "King of the Bs," who has improbably and regretfully fallen into obscurity. Observes director Penelope Spheeris ("The Boys Next Door," "The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years," "Wayne's World"): "If you ask a 20-25-year-old film buff, they won't know who he is."
This despite a career that spans almost 60 years and more than 400 films that Corman either directed or produced. But while his own name may be unfamiliar, many of the once-fledgling actors and filmmakers whom he nurtured/exploited are not: Martin Scorsese ("Boxcar Bertha"), Ron Howard ("Grand Theft Auto"), Peter Bogdanovich ("Targets"), Jonathan Demme ("Caged Heat"), Joe Dante ("Piranha"), Robert DeNiro ("Bloody Mama"), Pam Grier ("The Big Doll House"), screenwriter John Sayles ("The Lady in Red") -- all these and many more appear in "Corman's World" in new and archival interviews.
Robert DeNiro, receiving his honorary Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe Sunday night and acknowledging all his movies ("Stanley and Iris," "Jacknife" and "Little Fockers") -- not just the ones that are included in his three-minute clip reel: "It's up to the audience to decide if it's entertainment, critics to decide if it's good and ultimately posterity to decide if it's art."
• Roger Ebert / August 25, 1983
They honored Robert Duvall the other night at the Festival of Festivals in Toronto, dedicating their annual Tribute to an actor's actor who is only now entering into stardom after two decades of great character performances.
Duvall was accompanied onstage by Gene Siskel and me, on a guided tour of clips from a lot of his best movies, and when we got to one of his key scenes in "The Godfather" (1971), you could have heard a pin drop.
The scene was the famous one where Duvall, as Tom Hagen, Don Corleone's trusted family lawyer, goes to Hollywood to persuade a studio boss to give Johnny Fontane, the mob-connected singer, a starring role in a movie. "Godfather" fans will recall that the sequence ends with the boss refusing Hagen's request, and waking up the next morning in the same bed with the severed head of his beloved racehorse.
Anyway, when the scene was over, Duvall got to talking about the film's director, Francis Coppola.
"It's not widely known that when Coppola made 'The Godfather,' the studio had a substitute director standing by at all times," Duvall said. "One false move and Francis would have been replaced. That was incredible pressure for him to work under. It's a great picture, but under the circumstances it's a miracle he even finished it. As for Francis himself, he's like a kid with an all-day sucker. He wants his Hollywood studio, and a vineyard in Northern California, and an apartment in Paris. He's a great director, but he loves all his toys."
All this could be checked out, at first hand, because Coppola himself was a surprise guest, lurking in the back of the theater. Wearing a Panama hat, he marched down the aisle, took a seat on the stage and shared his notions of acting, directing, Duvall and "The Godfather."
"That was a strange scene to show," Coppola said, "because in the long shot it isn't even Bobby. We shot Bobby's scenes on the East Coast, and for the West Coast exteriors we used a double."
"You can tell," Duvall said, "because he doesn't have my bow-legs."
Coppola and Duvall began remembering moments from "The Godfather," especially an early rehearsal dinner.
"I assembled the whole cast for a dinner at Pearl's restaurant in New York," Coppola said. "There they all were -- Brando eating everything in sight, and Pacino looking tragic, and Duvall doing his Brando imitations every time Marlon turned his back. It was like the Corleone family having dinner. It was that night I knew the picture would work."
After two more clips from "Godfather, Part Two," we viewed perhaps the most famous single scene Coppola or Duvall has ever been involved with: The beach landing in "Apocalypse Now" that begins with a flight of helicopters playing Richard Wagner over loudspeakers, and ends with Duvall's famous line: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It seems like . . . victory!"
"One take," Coppola said. "We did that scene in one take, the first take."
That made it all the more extraordinary, because the scene is not only an exercise in logistics, but a demonstration of physical courage. While jets thunder overhead, helicopters make close passes and shells go off within yards of Duvall, he remains totally unaffected. He doesn't even twitch an eyelash at the special effects explosions, and marches around on the sand talking obsessively about the great surfing beach he has just occupied.
"There wasn't any time to think," Duvall said. "I heard over the intercom that we only had the use of the jets for 20 minutes. One fly-by and that was it. I just got completely into the character, and if he wouldn't flinch, I wouldn't flinch."
As Duvall reviewed his career from "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1963) to "Tender Mercies" (1983), his acting approach was clearly revealed: He believes in giving himself over to the character. He talked about spending time with homicide cops before making "The Detective" (1968), and hanging out with good ol' boys from Texas to find his character, a country singer, for "Tender Mercies."
"Not to brag, but I got calls from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson telling me I had the character just right," he said.
Robert Duvall has long been known as an accomplished actor, but the range of his acting career was dramatized by the three-hour program. The scenes ranged from "True Grit" (he faced John Wayne in that great shoot-out in the mountain meadow) to "The Chase" (Duvall and Brando) to George Lucas' "THX 1138" (Duvall as a puzzled automaton) to Robert Altman's "MASH" (Duvall's love scene with Hot Lips) to "True Confessions" (Duvall as a cop, Robert DeNiro as his brother, a priest) and "The Great Santini" (Duvall as a military pilot who demands perfection from his family).
Two things stood out as the scenes marched past; Duvall never plays the same character twice, and he makes other actors look good. He brings a quality to his listening, his reactions, that charges a scene even when he's not talking.
One of the movies shown at Toronto was unfamiliar. It was "Tomorrow," a 1972 adaptation of a William Faulkner short story. The movie was never widely released, but Duvall says his performance in it, as a poor dirt farmer that loves and loses a woman and her child, is the one he likes best. "It's got the most of me in it," he said.
And what, at mid-career, what has he learned about acting? "Give yourself completely to the moment."
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