Booked into the Auditorium Theater in Chicago in the 1930s, Orson Welles was confronted by a snowstorm of historic proportions. Most of his audience couldn’t make it to the theater.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”
They are two people accustomed to ruling their physical domains with muscle, sex and beauty. They don’t ask themselves a lot of questions about what could stand some improvement in their inner lives. They will rely the powers given them. Ali is powerfully-built and roughly handsome. He dreams of becoming a champion of mixed martial arts fighting. At present he is a nightclub bouncer, firmly exercising control over the hopefuls swimming out of the night. Stéphanie is a trainer at a seaquarium, using body language and dead fish to command a tank filled with whales to rise up from the water. They live near Cannes, celebrated for launching more successful people up a red carpet.
• As told to Roger Ebert
Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin walk into a hotel room, and that sounds like the set-up for a joke. It’s more like a long-delayed punchline. These guys have been stars for more than 40 years, but until “Stand Up Guys,” they’ve all three never been in a movie together. Arkin and Pacino were in “Glengarry Glen Ross” together, and Walken and Pacino were both in “Gigli,” but that’s as far as it goes.
I mention they go way back.
“Yes, absolutely,” Walken says. “I’ve known Al for decades, from New York and from, you know…”
“He didn’t know I was an actor,” Pacino says, “until we did this movie. He’d just see me around the street a lot.”
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.
The good news is that I’ve seen the films of one of the best recent years in cinema. I wrote more than 300 reviews in 2012 — a record — and it was unusually difficult to leave out many of the quote-unquote “best” films in 11th place.
Rating: Four stars
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 Sepulveda Blvd. 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.
Here is a collection of a dozen of the best documentaries I saw in 2012. It’s not a “best of the year” list. Just some good memories of these films.I will not burden you again with another complaint about lists. More than ever, I despise them because they shift focus away from a film and toward a list. When I recently caught up with “Django Unchained,” for example, I gave it four stars. The comments section was overrun with readers asking if that meant it was now on my Top Ten list. One reader insisted on knowing which title it replaced. Although the piece was some 2,000 words long, another reader insisted he still wanted to see “my official review.”
My good Sun-Times pal from the 1970s at the Chicago Sun-Times, Cynthia Dagnal, wrote me today:
“A friend in London sent me this, obituary from the London indpendent and I was stunned to see that Jeni Le Gon attended the same Southside dancing school in Chicago that I did. It was probably the most reputable one on that side of the “color line,” and not very far from my house. So I studied with the younger “protégés” of Mary Bruce, and all those cute pics of me in little but EXPENSIVE tutus and whatnot that I sometimes use on my blogs are reminders of those days! I took tap, jazz and ballet as a wee one, and loved to walk around en pointe all day long in those danged–and also expensive–toe shoes!”
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”
–Stephen Crane
That man can be found at the center of Werner Herzog’s films. He is Aguirre. He is Fitzcarraldo. He is the Nosferatu. He is Timothy Treadwell, who lived among the grizzlies. He is Little Dieter Dengler, who needed to fly. She is Fini Straubinger, who lived in a land of silence and darkness since she was 12. He is Kaspar Hauser. He is Klaus Kinski. He is the man who will not leave the slopes of the Guadeloupe volcano when it is about to explode. He is those who live in the Antarctic. She is Juliana Koepcke, whose plane crashed in the rain forest and she walked out alive. He is Graham Dorrington, who flew one of the smallest airships ever built to study the life existing only in the treetops of that rain forest.
✮✮✮
by Roger Ebert
Osama bin Laden is dead, which everybody knows, and the principal facts leading up to that are also well-known. The decision to market “Zero Dark Thirty” as a thriller therefore takes a certain amount of courage, even given the fascination with this most zero and dark of deaths. (The title is spy-speak for “half past midnight,” the time of bin Laden’s death.)
(AP Photo/ Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks)What’s different about the Newtown Massacre? Not very much. On top of the Columbine tragedy, “The Dark Knight Rises” shooting and so on and so on, it still doesn’t even have its own Twitter hashtag. I haven’t had the heart to look for any theme music that has been drummed up for cable news.
The Oscars are the most important way the American film industry can honor what it considers the year’s best work. But for millions of movie lovers all over the globes, they are something else: A show.
That’s why I suspected last June that Quvenzhané Wallis might win a nomination. The pride of Hounduras Elementary School in Houma, LA, has now become, at nine, the youngest nominee in history for Best Actress. Her story is even better: She was five when she auditioned for the role, and six when she performed it.
