Baz Luhrmann, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio.

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I never expected Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” to feel understated, but it’s almost demure at times. While busy and jumped-up, it’s as much about trappings of luxe, the secret life of brands. (The brands include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jay-Z, Tiffany & Co., Miu Miu, Prada, Brooks Brothers, Fogal of Switzerland, Moët & Chandon, and of course, Baz Luhrmann.) Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio: none of this trio of dreamers, schemers, adulterers and enablers feels like a grown-up, only playacting children rather than Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway and Daisy Buchanan. (Even DiCaprio’s pronounced laugh lines fail to make him seem Gatsby’s age of thirty-two.) But Gatsby’s mannered way of speaking, a made-up accent of uncertain and variable provenance, is annoying, transparent and wholly appropriate. As is our introduction to the elusive Gatsby’s full face, gleaming and golden and fireworks-festooned like the most grandiloquent Suntory whiskey ad ever storyboarded. Such freighted momentousness is endless, the acting erratic, sapping even Mulligan’s sorrowful kitten-cum-coquette intonations of quiet despair. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

“Quality over quantity,” Roger Ebert wrote to me when he’d just signed onto Twitter, seeing how much I posted on any given day. But soon after, he was furnishing the Internet with his own personal, characteristic rivulet of riffs, reviews and retweets. His voice sounded in yet another form.

Last weekend, at the fifteenth annual Ebertfest in Champaign-Urbana, tributes were consistent in both quality and quantity. It was a living wake. But the programming, largely by his hand, served as a hyperarticulate last will and testament as well, the shape of which grew more and more emphatic as the five days and nights lengthened. The opening was a 35mm print of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” with hearty ninety-two-year-old co-cinematographer Haskell Wexler in attendance. Five of the fourteen films were 35mm prints, another sort of wake, for the form he had always celebrated, in the format he first found it, bright and nourishing in the communal dark. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Ray Pride

By Ray Pride

EVERYTHING THAT ROGER EBERT WAS, was a newspaperman, and was because he was a newspaperman. Ink, and then film, and then ink about film. That would include appreciating the movement of careers, the motion of plots, like a sportswriter. That would include the late-night badinage of the ink-stained, as in the many years spent, without regret, at O’Rourke’s and the Old Town Ale House. That would include the competitive urge with The One Across Michigan Avenue, the one called the Chicago Tribune. But also the one called “Gene Siskel.” Plus, words and paper with racy asides and winning wisecracks. (And in later years, wisecracks sketched quickly on a small pad of paper and handed to you.) Television didn’t make Roger Ebert, but in a small, small way, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel made television. (And when I was a guest on the show after Siskel’s death, Ebert’s key words of advice were, you’re not doing this or that, it’s not even conversation, you’re committing television.) Words. Anecdotes. There are a lot of them. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

The first frames of “The Dark Knight Rises,” my eyes tear up: It’s film. It’s celluloid. It’s huge.

This is one of the marvels of Christopher Nolan’s 164-minute conclusion to his Batman trilogy: You’ll believe a man can shoot in and finish on celluloid. So many practical locations, massing of people and machinery, flying and falling, the rushing of water, the creasing and uncreasing of sly smiles, all on film. There is one particular shot in profile in full IMAX ratio of Marion Cotillard in profile, her skin shown razor-sharp, peachy, perfect: doesn’t look the same in digital 3-D. Even the visual-effects-heavy scenes are a real world away from a digital superhero movie.

It’s a massive investment that pays off in nearly every way. Read the rest of this entry »

Johnny Reb finds he belongs on Planet Red. Andrew Stanton’s most peculiar “John Carter,” which was produced as “John Carter of Mars,” and appears as the film’s end title, is a boy’s dream story come true, if you’re Andrew Stanton grown tall. Adapted from a novel in an Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series about a Confederate soldier transported to Mars, “John Carter” makes a mix of live action and animation into something deluxe but dinky, neither “Cowboys & Aliens” nor the original “Star Wars.” Read the rest of this entry »

All Michael Bay’s “Transformers” in 3D is missing is a 40. (Take a 40, please.) Robustly cynical, “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon,” credited to screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Scream 3,” “The Ring Two,” “Transformers 2″), serves up generous lashings of counterfactual pulp, including an Autobot-Decepticons-NASA-JFK-Nixon conspiracy with a soupcon of Chernobyl for spice. It’s like a Bizarro World Warren Report reduced to postage-stamp size. (The briefly seen JFK stand-in resembles someone who took second place in a Donald Trump look-alike contest.) “TDOTM” premiered at the Moscow Film Festival, and some of the most jazzed-up (yet largely incomprehensible) passages resemble the winningly cheesy special effects of local mogul Timur Bekmambetov’s “Night Watch” and “Day Watch,” but with less rude charm. Hope for keenly choreographed mayhem quickly fades. If not on the level of Michael Kidd and Vincente Minnelli’s work on “The Band Wagon,” say at least a few bars of “Collateral Damage,” the musical? When you’re working with Decepticons, a sentient race of mechanical beings that preceded film executives, you can hope to be the biggest and the best, but at best, you could only ever be ne plus Ultraman. (Or “Cars 3,” with eager-school-leaver Shia LaBeouf in the role of “Mater.”) Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

What’s in a title? While Oscar contenders linger in the theaters, “Rapunzel” is only a couple of weeks away from grossing over $200,000,000 in the U.S. and Canada.

Oh, wait. It’s “Tangled”—not “Rapunzel.” The studio made a mid-course correction in the content and title of its movie, fearing the all-powerful Boy. An adventure about a Girl? No, thanks, dude. One of the season’s most gratifying successes at the box office is the Coen brothers’ most successful film yet, “True Grit,” which has passed $150,000,000. Yes, it’s an adventure about a girl, but even in the Oscar race, Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the lead of the film, the bossy, obstinate, fierce, willful Mattie Ross, is nominated in the “Best Supporting Actress” category.

Still, studios gamble on stories with strong younger women. Focus Features has placed a modest bet on Joe Wright’s comic-booky “Hanna,” with two strong girls in the international trailer, at least—Jessica Barden, eyes-wide and manic again as she was in “Tamara Drewe,” even if the center of the 1960s-styled killer-thriller is young Saoirse Ronan, the angry marvel in the midst of “Atonement.” It looks to be “Kick-Ass” with grown-up eye candy (and Cate Blanchett as a secret agent!). Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Contrails crosshatch and feather a deep blue sky to the sound of planes. A camera pointed upward, soon to come to earth to trace how the lives of three adults’ lives criss-cross.

Shocking and shockingly beautiful, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Every Man For Himself” [Sauve qui peut (la vie)] is as brutish as it is sensitive. First released in the U.S. in 1980, Godard called it his “second first film,” marking his return to European art-house film after a decade experimenting first with didactic political films and then with emerging video technology. Francis Coppola was the original U. S. distributor, and was set to produce an ill-fated American gangster movie by Godard, “The Story.”

Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) is a television filmmaker fighting with his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye), who cross paths with a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert). The camera’s gaze remains as simple as those opening shots. Blunt statements about power and sexual violence are threaded throughout, and are usually also in the service of describing filmmaking as being an equally brutal act. (The scenes of sexual display are largely absurd, including a Rube Goldberg-style roundelay in a hotel room that resembles a tableau from a late Fassbinder film as well as a mockery of how movies are directed.) Read the rest of this entry »

John Wayne

By Martin Northway

Western movies were once as common as today’s Bourne-type thrillers and as ubiquitous on television as modern reality programming. In my youth they were part of my generation’s universe of discourse.

If you’re younger than I, and there’s a good chance you are, we had it better. This is not simple nostalgia speaking. You missed something, and with each new Western film that comes along—and they are few and far between—I hope for your sake this will be the one that revives the genre.

Back in the day, when my friends and I argued about who was cooler, Steve McQueen or James Dean, even though Dean made only three movies before his untimely death, one was a modern Western.

And McQueen, well, McQueen—whose film career likely interrupted a delinquent youth’s arc toward a life of crime—was a principal in one of the most influential Western movies of all time, “The Magnificent Seven.” Was it a great film, in the way “The Searchers” is great? Hardly. Nor was it a very realistic depiction of the old West. Read the rest of this entry »

On Coal River

By Ray Pride

George Hickenlooper’s death Saturday at the age of 47 ended a career that more and more typifies how curious, ambitious filmmakers are keeping their line of business alive in a moment of seismic upheaval in the film industry: alternating features and documentaries.

Hickenlooper has a final film arriving around Christmas, the Kevin Spacey-starring based-on-true-graft “Casino Jack,” yet his forays into nonfiction are his legacy, especially the co-directed “Hearts of Darkness,” the “Apocalypse Now” making-of doc, painstakingly constructed and sculpted from Eleanor Coppola’s raw footage from the epic’s extended Philippines shoot.

In conversations with Hickenlooper dating back to the nineties, he always talked about what he wanted to accomplish in the vein of a John Schlesinger or a Hal Ashby, but his path always led back to nonfiction. Beginning as a journalist who conducted interviews with filmmakers for early laserdiscs, Hickenlooper struck up acquaintances with 1970s “Hollywood Renaissance” figures like Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, and later made documentaries about their work. European directors like Wim Wenders have dabbled in both forms, but economics of big-budget features versus low-project means of production tempt more and more working American filmmakers (Jonze, Gondry, Kuras). Even an established heavy-hitter like Jonathan Demme has drawn from the template Hickenlooper lived: Demme hasn’t tempted the rocky shores of “adult drama” since 2008′s “Rachel Getting Married,” in which he and his cinematographer Declan Quinn applied what the director had learned about working on the fly and embracing what mistakes may come in at least six documentaries since 2000. Read the rest of this entry »