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Shrader's Mishima: Blood cult

The first thing Paul Schrader wanted to talk about after the Ebertfest screening of his ambitious 1985 "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" was his youthful fascination with the primitive rite of "suicidal blood sacrifice." That's what he said his…

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The Seitz-geist

View image The House Next Door. Now that Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he's moving on, back to Dallas from Brooklyn and into full-time filmmaking, I thought I'd take a quick glance over the shoulder at some of the…

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Matt Zoller Seitz: Rocking the House

View image Matt Zoller Seitz. Matt Zoller Seitz, long one of my favorite film writers and the pioneering architect of the priceless House Next Door, is moving into full-time filmmaking. That's great news, and sad news for those of us…

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The Uncertainty Principle (or, The Easy Read)

Son (Michael Shannon). Opening shot: "Shotgun Stories." In Sally Potter's "Yes," there's a scene in a restaurant kitchen in which a Lebanese chef and a young Brit-punk dishwasher get into fierce confrontation (you can't really call it an "argument") over…

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Local hero

View image The most famous phone box in the world. After the screening of Bill Forsyth's long-unavailable masterpiece "Housekeeping" at Ebertfest (about which more later) somebody asked him why he used the word "moving" in a key piece of dialog…

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Overheard exposition, Part II

Seeing a series of exquisitely subtle films that includes Jeff Nichols' "Shotgun Stories," Eran Kolirin's "The Band's Visit" and Bill Forsyth's "Housekeeping," you become sensitized to how clumsy most movies are about unloading their expository details. These Ebertfest films and…

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Wi-Fried in Urbana

The Illini Student Union wi-fi network has been down since late Friday/Saturday morning, so I'll have to file more when I get back home (I'm between planes in Chicago now, on airport wi-fi). I think the Saturday convention of student…

Festivals & Awards

The Uncertainty Principle

In Sally Potter's "Yes," there's a scene in a restaurant kitchen in which a Lebanese chef and a young Brit-punk dishwasher get into fierce confrontation (you can't really call it an "argument") over politics and religion. The kid grabs a…

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Bill Forsyth: "Great"-ness

View image David Bordwell and Bill Forsyth on an Ebertfest panel. (photy by Thompson McClellan) My Ebertfest has already been made for me because I spoke to Bill Forsyth yesterday and, at one point, he said "Great." This is major…