A report from this morning's Golden Globes nominations announcement, and a full list of the nominees.
An interview with the co-writer and director of the new comedy, "Book Club."
A report from the Cannes Film Festival on the latest from Michael Haneke, Noah Baumbach and Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
An obituary for actress Mary Tyler Moore.
An AFI review of Warren Beatty's first film since 1998.
Mike Nichols' 1971 drama "Carnal Knowledge" is part of a canon of American films of the late 1960s to mid-1970s that mirrored the freewheeling sexual culture and society from which they emerged. These films ("Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice", "Shampoo" and others) examined varied notions of commitment, companionship and sex. "Carnal Knowledge", written by playwright, author and cartoonist Jules Feiffer, shows men talking casually, bluntly and frankly about women, their bodies, of strategies to get sex and of sexual belt-notching, though not necessarily much about the specific act of sex.
The Grand Poobah is still working away on his memoirs from his quiet retreat in Harbour Country, Lake Michigan and where last week, we caught glimpse of Roger's assistant Carol Iwata, visiting the soda fountain at Schlipp's Pharmacy in Sawyer for a chocolate milkshake. Leading me to wonder "exactly where is that milkshake?" See map. Smile.
That's what some people tell me. Maybe I do. I look myself up in Metacritic, which compiles statistics comparing critics, and I find: "On average, this critic grades 8.9 points higher than other critics (0-100 point scale)." Wow. What a pushover. Part of my problem may be caused by conversion of the detested star rating system. I consider 2.5 stars to be thumbs down; they consider 62.5 to be favorable. But let's not mince words: On average, I do grade higher than other critics.
Now why do I do that? And why, as some readers have observed, did I seem to grade lower in my first 10 or 15 years on the job? I know the answer to that one. When I started, I considered 2.5 stars to be a perfectly acceptable rating for a film I rather liked in certain aspects. Then I started doing the TV show, and ran into another wacky rating system, the binary thumbs. Up or down, which is it?
Gene Siskel boiled it down: "What's the first thing people ask you? Should I see this movie? They don't want a speech on the director's career. Thumbs up--yes. Thumbs down--no." That made sense, but in the paper it had the effect of nudging a lot of films from 2.5 to three stars. There is never any doubt about giving four stars, or one star. The problem comes with the movies in the middle. Siskel once tried to get away with giving thumbs up to a 2.5 star movie, but I called him on it.
Q. I was watching "Godfather II" the other day and remembered that the scene with Vito sitting on the steps with his family, after he has killed Fannuci, was originally intended to lead into an intermission, which was scrapped somewhere along the way. I'm pretty sure James Cameron never intended on having an intermission for "Titanic," but let's pretend the studio asked you, an up and coming editor, to find a place to insert one. Even though you know it was wrong and that Cameron would surely kill you, where would you have put an intermission? (Frank Mendez, Dallas, TX.)
Louis Malle, who died last week at 63, was a director whose movies caused scandal sometimes for their content, sometimes for their style, sometimes for both. The respected French filmmaker, married since 1980 to actress Candice Bergen, died Thursday at their home in Los Angeles, from lymphoma.
If this were a scene in a movie, you'd know right away that it was the scene about the actress' last day in town. Jacqueline Bisset's two-room suite at the Sheraton Plaza was scattered with props for her departure. The bedroom floor was lined with trunks and suitcases, their lids tilted open, clothes tumbling out of them. Leaning against the wall in the living room was one of those big cartoonist's caricatures showing Jackie with a giant head balanced on top of a tiny body. It said, "Good Luck, Jackie!" and it was signed by all the members of the cast and crew of her latest film.
“Kramer vs. Kramer,” the drama of a child custody fight, won nine Academy Award nominations on Monday – and so, in a surprise, did "All That Jazz," about a Broadway director’s self-destruction.
In the beginning it didn't much matter where you made a movie. The motion picture was a gimmick nobody took very seriously, and the vaudeville houses used them to chase out customers between shows. When the customers started to linger, an industry was born.
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA - "There's no use kidding ourselves," Lewis Gilbert said. "The appeal of this film will be based on sex and violence, of course. But the difference is, this will be the first sex and violence epic. Usually sex and violence are counted on to sell themselves, and so that sort of thing is made cheaply..."
Great Movies
