Great Movies
Interviews
The Whole of Ourselves: Tim Blake Nelson and Karan Kendrick on Just Mercy
An interview with actors Tim Blake Nelson and Karan Kendrick about co-starring in Destin Daniel Cretton's fact-based drama "Just Mercy."
An interview with actors Tim Blake Nelson and Karan Kendrick about co-starring in Destin Daniel Cretton's fact-based drama "Just Mercy."
The 2011 edition of a movie critic's dream unreels again this week. In my own home town, I'll be able to show the films of my choice in a classic movie palace, flawlessly projected on a giant screen before a movie-loving audience. To paraphrase Orson Welles when he was given the run of RKO Radio Pictures to make his own movie, it's the biggest train set a boy could ever want.
Ebertfest 2011 runs April 27-May 1. The passes have been sold but we've always been able to find room for everyone in line inside the 1,600-seat Virginia Theater. Its long-term renovation continued this year with work on the lobby, the concession stand and the upstairs lobby. The marquee is a work in progress.
From the Grand Poobah: Club members Gerardo and Monica Valero from Mexico City went to see the David Letterman Show a few years ago and informed him of something that is discussed on the air...
It was my last film of the festival, on the morning of the day I was flying home, and it turns out to have been my favorite one. Tim Blake Nelson's "Leaves of Grass" is some kind of sweet, wacky masterpiece. It takes all sorts of risks, including a dual role with Edward Norton playing twin brothers, and it pulls them off. It is certainly the most intelligent, philosophical and poetic film I can imagine that involves five murders in the marijuana-dealing community of Oklahoma and includes John Prine singing "Illegal Smile."
Tim Blake Nelson
Sometimes you cannot believe your luck as a movie unfolds. There is a mind behind it, joyful invention, obvious ambition. As is often the case, I had studiously avoiding reading anything at all about "Leaves of Grass" before going to see the movie, although I rather doubted it would be about Walt Whitman. What I did know is that the actor Tom Blake Nelson has written and directed three films enormously admired: "Eye of God" (1997), "O" (2001) and "The Grey Zone" (2001), all three dealing in a concrete dramatic way with important questions: Religion, redemption, race, the Holocaust. And that the actor Edward Norton has never agreed to appear in a film he didn't believe he had reason to respect.
