One night in autumn 1969 we found ourselves in the Old Town Gate, three blocks from our customary posts at O'Rourke's Pub. "I had my first job in Chicago here," he reminisced. "I invented the Roquefort Burger. Somebody ordered a cheeseburger and I, being a dumb Mick, didn't know any better." I told him Roquefort Burgers had long been widely known. "You've got to be shittin' me."

John is one of 10 brothers from Sligo, Yeats Country, on the west coast of Ireland. His father had been a member of the IRA gang that held up the Ulster Bank of Sligo. "They were raising funds for the cause," he explained. "All of the money was never accounted for. Trooper is the only man in Sligo who has a son who graduated from Indiana University." He was entrusted to Indiana under the protection of a cousin in Indianapolis

who was a nun. John himself had studied briefly for the priesthood under the Christian Brothers, but was expelled at 15, charged with smoking. There was also some discussion that during his service as the supervising altar boy, certain wedding and funeral tips may have been mislaid.

Late that night at the Gate, we determined to pay a visit to his homeland. David Lean was filming "Ryan's Daughter" on the Dingle Peninsula, and MGM was flying in film critics to visit the location. We traded one first class ticket for a couple of cheap ones. McHugh insisted in sitting in the last row on the Aer Lingus flight, because he had read about a recent crash in which the tail had broken free, and the passengers in back had survived.

John McHugh: "Oh, we're off to Dublin in the green, in the green..." [Photo by Jack Lane; click on all art to enlarge]

"Okay, McHugh," I said, "we're thrown free and survive. Now we're in the middle of the ocean. Now what do we do?"

"We swim for shore. Do I have to explain these things to you?"

Robert Mitchum, the star of the film, was living in a rented cottage on the edge of town, and drinking Scotch one night while feeding peat to the fire and listening to Jim Reeves records with his man Harold, who had been a paramedic with the Coldstream Guards. They sang along: My heart goes where the wild goose goes... We had accumulated Eugene, John's younger brother, who had fled to London and the brickmason's trade after some trouble at home, but now had returned, the prodigal son.

"Mitch!" Eugene said. "Remember 'Thunder Road,' when you flew into that transformer? What a way to go!"

"I wrote that show," Mitchum said.

"Mitch, your blood's worth bottling'."

Trevor Howard was co-starring in the film. "I like to have Trevor with me on a picture," Mitchum said, "because all I have to do is glom him, and I know I'm okay. One night Trevor is in the kitchen making love to a bottle of Chivas Regal and Harold steps out to take a breath of fresh air. He bolts back in. Mitch! Helen Howard has measured her length in the garden, and is passed out cold! We carry her in, put her on the sofa, and fan her back to witness. Harold examines her. I think she's broken her coccyx! We'll have to put her in the Land Rover and drive her 26 miles across that rocky mountain road to Tralee. That's going be bloody difficult on a broken coccyx.

"I thought I had best tell Trevor. Mitch, don't pay a moment's notice, he tells me. She's always pulling these stunts. Helen! Come in here and have a drink! There's a good girl.

"But, Trevor, we have to drive her 26 miles across that rocky mountain road to Tralee. That's going be bloody difficult on a broken coccyx. Right you are, Mitch! Bloody difficult! Most painful! No sense in my going."

MGM paid for a hired car and driver to take us up to Sligo. There, at 77 Tracy Avenue, I met Trooper and several of the brothers, and some of the 10 sisters who lived next door. It was decided to stroll down to John Holland's Pub at the corner of Wolfe Tone Road. "Watch yourself," McHugh cautioned me. "When the Irish aren't watching you, they see every move. And when they're not listening, they hear every word."

In Drumcliffe churchyard: "An ancestor was rector here"

Halfway into the first pint of Guinness in my life, I asked Trooper, "Mr. McHugh, is there a men's room here?" Total silence fell. All were waiting for Trooper's reply: "Well, Rogers, some of the lads, what they do, they step through that door right there." I stepped through, and found myself under the stars, with a concrete drain running alongside the building. When I returned, all eyes were on me. "Did you find it, Rogers?" I had. Trooper nodded with satisfaction. "You've not been to Sligo till you've seen the steam risin' off your piss."

The next day we jammed into a tiny car for a drive up the coast. "I used to patrol this road as an agent of the customs and excise," Trooper explained.

"Tell Ebert what they issued you for the performance of your rounds," McHugh said.

"A bloody bicycle."

John McHugh stands something over six feet tall. I would not call him athletic, although in recent years he has taken up golf. He was clean-shaven in those years, but later started, as he puts it, "cultivating under my nose what grows wild on my ass." He became the great friend of a lifetime. As young men we sowed wild oats. As middle-aged men we harvested. As old men we ripen. Always we laugh.

We flew on to Venice, where McHugh bonded with Lino, the trattoria owner I have written about elsewhere. Although they did not speak a word of each other's languages, McHugh was so successful at communicating that Lino gave him his apron and installed him behind the counter. McHugh has the ability of convincing others they are already his friend.

Sophia Loren was on the mainland, in Padua, filming "The Priest's Wife" with Marcello Mastroianni. Warner Bros. laid on a car to take me over for an interview, and I took along my friend from the Chicago Daily News. We had to rise early on the morning, and I had unfortunately been overserved the night before. On the road, I gave McHugh his instructions: "I've interviewed a lot of these stars and I know the drill. Just keep quiet and they won't know any the better." But when the great beauty swept into the room, I was paralyzed by hangover, drenched with sweat, and speechless. McHugh whipped out his Reporter's Notebook and came to the rescue.

"Miss Loren, is that a tiara you're sportin'?"

"This? It is a hair clip."

"I see." McHugh took notes. "Miss Loren, I understand you recently gave birth. Can you confirm that?"

"Yes, it is true. I had my little Cheepee. When I was pregnant, I had to stay for weeks in a clinic in Switzerland. Now I feel like a true woman. Carlo visits from Rome on weekends. If I never make another film, it is all right with me. Now I am a mother!"

A rest on Hampstead Heath during the Perfect London Walk: With McHugh and Bob Zonka. [Jack Lane]

McHugh nodded and took more notes.

"And in addition to little Cheepee, have you any other hobbies?"

"You call my baby a hobby?"

"I meant...like poker, or something?"

Later on that trip, we found ourselves in Rome, at the famous Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto. The bartender, Luigi, displayed a framed certificate attesting that he had placed second in the world cocktail-mixing competition at San Diego.

"If you don't mind my asking, what do you do?" he inquired.

"I'm in the movie business," John said.

"Are you an actor?"

"Luigi, I buy 'em and I sell 'em."

"Oh, my. Do you see that gentleman in the corner?"

McHugh turned to look. "Luigi, I know everybody in Hollywood, but I've never seen him before."

"That is Omar Sharif!"

"McHugh look a longer look. "Luigi," he confided, "he looks bad."

"And coming in just now, it is King Constantine of Greece. He stays here in the hotel. His wife, she has just had a baby!"

The King presented a cigar to Omar Sharif. McHugh observed this closely. The King, smiling happily, walked over and presented him with a cigar. McHugh accepted it, ran it under his nose, placed it in his vest pocket, and slapped him heartily on the back:

"King, you're one of the best!"

As the son of an IRA man, McHugh has a certain disdain for royalty and aristocracy. "The McHughs were the kings of Sligo until the British invaded," he explained. We went one day to visit Yeats' grave. Yeats was a Protestant, but a great poet, and McHugh knew yards of his work. At some point during every evening he would intone:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.

One morning at the Silver Swan Hotel in Sligo we arose and went to the Lake Isle of Innisfree. There was a cottage at the end of the lane, and a rowboat tied up, but your man didn't feel like rowing us out. Later that day we drove under bare Ben Bulben's head to Drumcliffe churchyard, where Yeats is laid.

On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Then we stopped at Lissadell House, ancestral home of the Gore-Booths. It was there that Countess Constance Markiewicz, a great obsession of Yeats', had lived.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

We were taken on a brief tour by a man who introduced himself as a distant cousin of the family. "These are the people who stole Ireland from the Irish," McHugh whispered. On his way out the door, he tipped the cousin: "Here's a copper for you, my good man."

In those years I was living in the attic of the house of Paul and Anna Dudak, at 2437 N. Burling, and paying $110 a month. The Dudaks were the nicest people on earth. Pop was a retired window-washer from the Ukraine, where he had been an anarchist playwright. Anna was an Okie from the Dust Bowl, who spent six weeks every winter in what Pop referred to as "Lost Wages." She said it cost her less than at home: "Nine dollars for a motel, $1.95 for the buffet, and I never gamble."

Another apartment opened up, and John moved in. Like me, he had to survive a severe grilling from Pop: "We have here only intellectual gentlemen, who enjoy the luxury of conversation." The Dudaks did no drinking to speak of, but these interviews were always smoothed by Pop's secret recipe cocktail, made of Pepsi and Green Chartreuse. The front yard of his house, never very popular with the neighbors, was populated by a zoo of colorful little figures, sunk in concrete to prevent theft. In the back yard was a small pond with a shower head to supply a fountain, and in this pond floated a plastic frog with an orange golf ball glued to its head.

Pop's front yard on Burling Street [Must click!]

"John," Pop asked him one day, "have you ever been to Colorado?"

"I have not."

"You must travel there sometime. There you will find Cathedral-like Mountains!"

Pop was a student of the Reader's Digest feature Toward More Picturesque Speech.

One year McHugh and I returned from an expedition to Europe having been well served. As I gather, John entered his apartment, fell in bed without turning on the lights, and awoke at dawn to see snakes crawling all over the walls. He called me, deeply disturbed, and I hurried downstairs. He had not been imagining things. The snakes were there. Pop had painted them in florescent greens and yellows.

"I am working in my capacity as a room decorator," he explained. "For trendy young gentleman, I have created psychedelic wall paintings."

He had also improved my attic apartment, where the roof leaned at low angles over the rooms.

"Ebert!" he had said, greeting the taxi from O'Hare. "Does your mirror steam up when you shave after a shower?"

"Yes," I said.

"Working in my capacity as an inventor, I have solved the problem!"

He led me upstairs and proudly showed me that he had cut an 18-by-18 inch hole through the roof, directly above the bathtub.

"Prop open the window when you shower," he explained, "and steam escapes to outer atmosphere, leaving mirror ready for shaving!"

This innovation proved imperfect. Even on summer days, the outside breeze blew chilly into the shower. On rainy days, twigs and leaves would wash past the sliding glass into the bathtub. And when I lay soaking, I would sometimes find myself being regarded by the beady little eyes of squirrels. They found the glass warm in wintertime, and my tub began to collect squirrel shit.

O'Rourke's Pub at 319 W. North Avenue, in the 1970s [Jack Lane]

We logged a lot of hours at O'Rourke's, which for more than two decades was the address of choice for newspapermen, writers, artists, folk singers, social workers, would-be Irishmen and bohemians in general. Nelson Algren was a visitor. Studs Terkel and Mike Royko were frequently seen. Jay Robert Nash, the legendary crime book writer, was good for one, maybe two, immortal anecdotes an evening. John Prine looked in when in town. John the Garbage Man sold chess pieces he made after melting down silverware found in the garbage. Hank Oettinger, the old lefty who was Chicago's most famous letter to the editor writer, would circulate with clippings of his latest publications. Self-Destruct Westcott, a student radical, pledged the bar's solidarity with the occupation of Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago. Clean Jim Agnew, the assistant manager of the Clark Theater, which showed a different double feature every day, lectured me nightly on the supremacy of John Ford. From down the street at Second City, John Belushi, not yet famous, would come in late. Everyone remembered the night Charlton Heston autographed Natalie Nudlemann's brassiere, while she was wearing it.

One owner was Jay Kovar, who smoked Pall Malls, drank half shots all evening without getting drunk, and was the study of countless alcoholics who tried to figure out how he did it. The other owner was Jeanette Sullivan, who was Japanese. Nelson had a crush on her. One night he and Tom Fitzpatrick, the Pulitzer winner, threw shot glasses at each other. At a certain point during many evenings, John would call out, "Jay! Clear the bar! I want to drink by myself!"

We had our own Sun-Times delivery truck. Red Connolly would make O'Rourke's his last stop of the night. One night Cliff Robertson was in the bar, and had fallen under its spell. Red offered to give us all a lift to Oxford's Pub on Lincoln Avenue, which was a late-night joint. We piled into the back of his big red Sun-Times truck: Robertson, McHugh, a bagpipe player, assorted other regulars, and Good Sydney Harris. Good Sydney Harris was a Spanish Civil War veteran, not to be confused with the Other Sydney Harris, the Daily News columnist. Good Sydney had fallen into conversation with a dominatrix named Jake, who joined us.

We tied the canvas flaps closed on the back of the truck, because of Red's theory that what we were doing was not technically legal. Jake took off her belt and began to flog Good Sydney. We passed around the Dew. The bagpipe player began "My Bonnie Lassie." We heard the whoop! whoop! of a police prowler, and Red pulled over to the curb.

"Top 'o the mornin', Sergeant!" he said, and handed down copies of the Sun-Times and the Wall Street Journal. The prowler pulled away.

"My last delivery," Red said.

"Chicago," said Cliff Robertson.

John was popular with the ladies, although his girl friend in the 1970s,, Mary Ulrich, who was a banker, once told me: "John's idea of being charming on a date is to look up from the bar, notice me sitting next to him, and say, Mary, me old flower! How long have you been sittin' there?"

John and Miss Mary at Billy Goat's Tavern in the 1970s, with Sam Sianis and the symbol of the famous Chicago Cubs curse.

Miss Mary, for so she was known, was a perfect lady. Skirts instead of pants. Nylons. Heels. Business suits. Every hair in place. She loved the guy. Nobody could figure it out. She cooked for him, mended his shirts, took naughty Polaroids which no one was allowed to see. She hardly drank. She reminded me of Kathleen Carroll, the longtime friend of Billy (Silver Dollar) Baxter. My theory is, after the fun of being with a McHugh or a Baxter, they couldn't easily return to the mainstream.

Mary eventually fell in love with a lawyer, but thanks to John's influence, he was a colorful one. John, in the meantime, had left the Daily News to become a feature writer for Chicago Today, the former Chicago's American. When Mayor Daley the First promised someday that, God willing, the working men of Chicagah will be able to go fishin' in the Chicago River, and catch their lunch, McHugh, sensing a story, went to a sporting goods store and asked what he needed to catch fish in the river. "You should be asking what you can catch from the fish," the salesman said. McHugh went fishing one noontime on the river banks near the Michigan Avenue bridge, and drew quite a crowd.

"The best job in town," he told me. "It's what I dreamed of when I was down in Bloomington that last summer. I had just graduated and had my degree in my pocket. I got a job with the Arab Pest Control, crawling under houses and spraying around bug poison. One day it was about 98 degrees, and a trap door opened above my head. It was the lady of the house.

"It must be hot down there," she says. "Wouldn't you like some nice cold lemonade?"

"I say I would. I stand up through the trap door but don't climb into the kitchen because I'm all covered with sweat, dust and cobwebs. She pours me out a nice big glass from a pitcher from the icebox. Then she calls her little boy into the room.

"Junior," she says, "you take a good look at that man. If you don't study hard and go to college, that's what will happen to you."

John met a woman always referred to as The Old Lady through the newspaper's contest to fulfill its readers' dreams. The Old Lady had never been to the opera. Neither had John. The paper supplied them with two tickets to a Lyric Opera matinee, and before the curtain John took her to lunch in the opera's private Graham Room.

The Old Lady, who took to calling him Johnnie, said she would order the whitefish. After being fed little but seafood, potatoes and corn flakes during the years of wartime rationing, John never ate seafood again. He ordered the roast. Their meals came.

"Johnnie, what's that on my plate?" The Old Lady's eyesight was not good.

"That's a tater. Salt it and eat it,."

She did. Then she reproachfully spit it out on her spoon. "Johnnie," she said, "that was a lemon, wrapped in gauze. By all rights, young man, you deserve a reprimand."

"You silvery-tongued devil."

John continued to visit The Old Lady for as long as she lived, bringing her chocolate ice cream, her favorite.

My attic flat at the Dudak's

"Ebert, I pay you too much to live here," Jim Hoge, the editor of the Sun-Times, told me when he saw the Dudak's house for the first time. For me, the apartment was ideal. It even came furnished. I had lured Hoge and a dozen others upstairs to continue an evening that had started at O'Rourke's. McHugh had just been made jobless when Chicago Today folded. My theory was that Hoge would offer him a job. I was gratified to see them deep in conversation on the sofa.

"How did it go?" I asked.

"Not too well, me old amigo," McHugh said. "He spent an hour and a half telling me all about his problems."

John went to work for NBC News Chicago, as the assignment manager. At one time his two principal anchors were Maury Povich and the legendary Ron Hunter, who was possibly the model for every character in the movie "Anchorman." John liked Maury but found Ron unendurable: "He's so vain that instead of wearing glasses, he has a prescription windshield on his Jaguar."

Anchormen value stories when they can go on the street and be seen in the midst of the action. One day McHugh came up with a juicy assignment for Povich. "The next day, " he said, "Ron Hunter comes into my office, puts his feet up on my desk, and says, John, that was a good story you had for Maury yesterday. What do you have for me today? I tell him, Utter contempt."

At NBC, John met the perpetually sunny Mary Jo Broderick, with whom he has lived happily now for many years. When our great friend Bob Zonka died, John took over editing and publishing his New Buffalo Times for a year. By then, he had come to like southwest Michigan, and he and Mary Jo purchased a comfy little white frame two-story in Three Oaks, the home of a dandy Fourth of July Parade where Shriners circled in formation on their power lawnmowers. John works as as a computer consultant, and Mary Jo is an online commuter who works from home designing the catalog for a company that sells the cheapest possible toys. Think along the lines of Cracker Jack prizes. John and Mary Jo have a dog named Mick Q, not named after the movie director.

Three Oaks, with barely 3,000 souls, has an excellent downtown art theater, the Vickers, which Mary Jo faithfully attends every week. McHugh never goes. When he was a child, once a year he was delegated to take all of his brothers to the movies. "It was always the same show: 'How Green Was My Valley.' Every time I saw it, nine months later I'd have another brother."

Why do I like this guy? We get along. We are amused by one another. We were eyewitnesses to all the stories, and never get tired of hearing them, although normal people do. He is a conservative, I am a liberal, but we have given up on each other. We drank together, and we stopped drinking together. That will make a bond. He introduced me to Mary Jo. He never gets in fights. In O'Rourke's, he was always the peacemaker. He pulled me away from those neo-Nazi skinheads in Amsterdam that time. He dragged me free from the gendarmes who were pounding me with rubber batons during the 1968 student riots in Paris. As the second oldest of ten, he knows how to make any baby stop crying. He defeats me at chess. He loves poetry and never goes for long without quoting some. We are both astonished at human nature. We are very well-informed. He buys his golf shoes from his poker earnings. I refuse to learn golf. Our friend Ivan Bloom says John's insistence on the rules of the game "borders upon the homicidal." When Chaz and I visit, we feel just like we're at home.

Mary Jo and John, at home in Three Oaks. [Ebert]

I lived at 2437 N. Burling for most of the years between 1967 and 1977. Then I bought a coach house behind the Four Farthings Pub on Lincoln Avenue. I held a house warming, at which one of the guests was our friend Sherman Wolf, a nice guy, a really nice guy, which helps explain this story.

Sherman found me in the kitchen, and said, "Congratulations on your new house! You've worked hard and you deserve it. It's a real step up from that pig-pen you used to live in."

"Sherman," I said, "I don't believe you've met my landlady from Burling Street, Mrs. Dudak."

Sherman turned red as a fire plug. "Oh my God!" he said. "Oh, Mrs. Dudak, actually it was a very nice place, the rent was low, Roger was happy there, I was just trying to think of something nice to say to Roger."

"Now Sherman, don't you apologize for a thing. It was time Roger found something better, and we're happy for him."

Sherman fled to the deck outside the kitchen door. McHugh was sitting out there.

"How are you, Sherman?"

"Oh God, John, I'm so embarrassed I could crawl into a hole. I just told Roger this place was a lot better than that pig-pen he used to live in, and who was standing right there but Mrs. Dudak!"

"I'll bet that made you feel awful," John said.

"It's one of those things you can never take back," Sherman said.

"Sherman," John said, "I don't believe you've ever met Mister Dudak, who is sitting right here next to me."

"Good...lord!"

"And...Sherman? When Roger moved out of the pig-pen, I moved in."

¶

John McHugh's book The New Buffalo Chronicles.

¶

Tom O'Bedlam reads "The Fiddler of Dooney," by W. B. Yeats

¶

Tom O'Bedlam reads "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," by W. B. Yeats

¶

William Butler Yeats reads the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben"

¶

Two of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, joined by Pete Seeger,
singing: "I Never Will Play the Wild Rover No More"

¶

On the Lake Michigan beach in the early 1990s: Monica Eng, now a Chicago Tribune reporter, McHugh, the poet and writer Patricia Smith, and Milo Zonka, now a city councilman of Palm Bay, Florida, and director of the Economic Development Commission of Florida's Space Coast.

]]> tag:blogs.suntimes.com,2009:/ebert//103.24834 2009-05-27T19:14:26Z 2009-06-04T20:25:01Z

It started for me with a letter from a Los Angeles filmmaker named Mike Williamson, who contacted me March 7 in outrage about a bait-and-switch involving IMAX. He paid an extra fee to see a movie in Burbank, and wrote...

Roger Ebert It started for me with a letter from a Los Angeles filmmaker named Mike Williamson, who contacted me March 7 in outrage about a bait-and-switch involving IMAX. He paid an extra fee to see a movie in Burbank, and wrote the company in protest: "As soon as I walked in the theatre, I was disgusted. This was not an IMAX screen. Simply extending a traditional multiplex screen to touch the sides and floor does not constitute an IMAX experience. An IMAX screen is gargantuan. It is like looking at the side of a large building, and it runs vertically in a pronounced way. It is not a traditional movie screen shape....This screen was pathetic by IMAX standards."

If you will click to enlarge the graphic below, you will see that Williamson has a point. The illustration comes from Jeff Leins of newsinfilm.com, based on one with a useful article by James Hyder, editor of the LFexaminer, devoted to this issue. But documentation isn't really necessary. Most of us know what an IMAX screen looks like,

and we instinctively know one wouldn't fit inside our local multiplex. What "IMAX" means in such situations is that the company has taken over the largest screen in the complex, removed a few of the front rows of seats, and moved a somewhat larger screen that much closer to the audience. The picture is not projected through large format 70mm film, but with dual "high end" digital projectors. Every digital projector ever introduced was "high end" at the time.

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James Hyder makes bold to mention the elephant in the room: New Coke. That marketing fiasco gave financial meaning to the old saying, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Twenty-four years after millions were spent to roll out New Coke, the multiplexes of the world sell Old Coke, Old Pepsi, and in India, the admirable Thums Up Cola. There is a lesson there somewhere. The lesson is, if you have advertised Kleenex, don't fill the box with paper towels.

IMAX created a spectacular film format, and found universal customer satisfaction. I'll bet 98% of the people who experienced it loved it. In a piece written the other day by Patrick Goldstein for the LATimes, he wrote that when he interviewed IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond, the CEO "got right to the point. He continues to insist that Imax enjoys enormous customer satisfaction, backing up the claim with a market-research study that found that 98% of Imax moviegoers had enjoyed their experience at the new, medium-size theaters as much as at the older giant screens." Uh, huh. If I were Gelfond and market researchers gave me that result, I'd fire them. I certainly wouldn't be trusting enough to quote them.

Executives need a seat-of-the pants instinct. Coca-Cola's expensive surveys assured them that people preferred the taste of New Coke. The fact is, they didn't.Anyone reading this could have told them that for free. Yet Hyder quotes Gelfond: "we don't think of IMAX as the giant screen. Rather, it is the best immersive experience on the planet." His problem appears to be that most people do foolishly persist in thinking of IMAX as the giant screen. The "IMAX" version offered in multiplexes could be duplicated by any multiplex that was willing to sacrifice a few rows of seats and install the nice projectors. It's even possible that you could have an equivalent of the experience simply by taking a seat closer to the front.

The obvious solution is to brand "new IMAX" so customers know what they're getting. Call it IMAX Lite, IMAX Junior, MiniMAX or IMAX 2.0. Or call the old format "IMAX Classic." Hey, that worked for Coke. Significantly, a lot of exhibitors favor specifically identifying the new format, perhaps because they're offering something better than on their other screens, yet getting flack from customers because it's inferior to IMAX Classic. One reason exhibitors are friendly to IMAX is that the company is spending money to convert the target theaters. The exhibitors themselves, however, are expected to pay for an upgrade to the latest 3-D technology. Everybody is short of money these days, and both formats offer an excuse for a $5 surcharge.

The business model makes sense for IMAX because it plans to identify its trademark with "tentpole movies." You won't be seeing "Let the Right One In" anytime soon on their screens. They offer studios a bonus in terms of ticket pricing for giving them films like "The Dark Knight," "Iron Man," "Watchmen" and so on. Their opening weekend tentpole target customers, fanboys, don't mind the five bucks as much as a family with four kids.

Michael Todd and Brian O'Brien Jr., technician of the Todd-AO camera during "Around the World in 80 Days

Theaters feel a sense of urgency because they're being squeezed by cable, view-on-demand, DVD, Blu-ray and other less expensive ways to see a movie. As analysts have observed time and again, when radio squeezed theaters, the response was talkies. When TV did, the response was a different viewing experience: Wide screen, original 3-D, and so on. The compromise today is, the industry is offering an ordinary good viewing experience as somehow a superior one.

Why doesn't every screen offer a picture as good as IMAX? Will the customers in the other theaters in the same multiplex feel like second-class citizens? My guess is, they will not. If a film is properly projected and has good sound, it is as immersive in regular theaters as in upgraded ones. Immersion is an experience of the imagination, not the body. Besides, not everybody wants to have a head trip at the movies. Some people want to sit outside the film and simply look at the damned thing.

My belief is that 3-D does not aid in immersion. As Goldstein writes, it "still largely looks like a marketing hustle designed to grab more dollars from gullible moviegoers." I've written a lot about 3-D, which has admittedly been effective if seen through advanced glasses on IMAX screens with films like "The Polar Express" and "Beowulf." On an ordinary screen with ordinary glasses, I recommend 2-D as superior. For most films, 3-D is an annoyance and a distraction. Yes, I'm told, but just you wait for James Cameron's "Avatar" to open this December. That film has been 10 years in the making at a reported cost of $300 million. I fully expect to be impressed. I doubt if the same effect can be achieved more quickly and cheaply, and by a director less immersed in technology than Cameron.

The fact remains that most movies should look better than they do today, even at their best, if they're to compete with a family sitting happily at home in front of a big screen, watching Blu-ray. There is a mature format that can easily achieve that, called 70mm, but the industry is unwilling to spend the money. Is there no possibility of a breakthrough?

Of course there is, and faithful readers know what it is: Maxivision. This is the system that projects film at 48 frames per second through a stable (non-vibrating) gate, and achieves a picture quality better than anything you've seen: Four times as good, in fact. Those who have seen it demonstrated know what I'm talking about. It has been ten years since I joined Todd McCarthy, chief film critic of Variety, and two leading cinematographers, Allen Daviau ("E.T.," "Bugsy") and Dean Cundey ("Jurassic Park," "Apollo 13"), in making a pilgrimage to Maxivision headquarters in San Luis Obispo, where the Oscar-winning film editor Dean Goodhill demonstrated the system he had invented. We were all seriously impressed by it. I wrote about the stats:

It can project film at 48 frames per second, twice the existing 24-fps rate. That provides a picture of startling clarity. At 48 frames, it uses 50 percent more film than at present. But MV48 also has an "economy mode" that uses that offers low-budget filmmakers savings of up to 25 percent on film. The MV48 projector design can switch on the fly between 24- and 48-fps formats in the same movie, allowing extra clarity for scenes that can use it. And it can handle any existing 35mm film format - unlike digital projection, which would obsolete a century of old prints. MV48 uses a new system to pull the film past the projector bulb without any jitter or bounce. Goodhill explained that MV48 completely eliminates the jiggle that all current films experience as they dance past the projector bulb.

Watching it, I was startled to see how rock solid the picture was, and how that added to clarity. The result: "We figure it's 500 percent better than existing film." It is also a lot cheaper, because it retrofits existing projectors, uses the original lamp housings and doesn't involve installing high-tech computer equipment. MaxiVision's business plan [at that time] calls for leasing the projectors at $280 a month, but if you wanted to buy one, it would cost you about $10,000. Estimates for high-end digital projectors range from $110,000 to $150,000 per screen.

So what's the problem? Frankly, I think the problem is that many studio executives are focused on their own survival and their current grosses much more than emerging technologies. They're mesmerized by the word digital and hope that by pouring money into digital technology they'll cover their bases. Digital is the safe and obvious choice. Not Maxivision, which costs a fraction as much, is many times superior, uses existing projectors and proven technology, is backward compatible with the film heritage, and in Econo-Mode would reduce the film footage needed for an ordinary movie.

I've been saying that for years. I'll keep on saying it. Sooner or later, someone will listen. Holllywood must still have a few visionaries like Mike Todd and Douglas Trumbull. The case for Maxivision is too compelling. I remember something Goodhill once told me in an e-mail: "I'll make a special offer. We're leasing MV48 for $280 a month, but for $2,800 a month, we'll throw in a little chrome plate that says 'digital' on it."

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Maxivision at Wikipedia.

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Trailer: "House of Wax" in the "Third Dimension"

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Mike Todd appears on "What's My Line?"

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]]> tag:blogs.suntimes.com,2009:/ebert//103.24738 2009-05-24T20:27:11Z 2009-06-04T20:43:40Z

Now I understand why Cannes 2009 opened with Pixar's "Up." They knew what was coming. Has there ever been a more violent group of films in the Official Selection? More negative about humanity? More despairing? With a greater variety...

Roger Ebert Now I understand why Cannes 2009 opened with Pixar's "Up." They knew what was coming. Has there ever been a more violent group of films in the Official Selection? More negative about humanity? More despairing? With a greater variety of gruesome, sadistic, perverted acts? You know you're in deep water when the genuinely funniest film in the festival is by a Palestinian in today's Israel, whose material includes a firing squad, a mother with Alzheimers, and a hero with dark circles under his eyes who never utters a single word.

And most of these films were not over quickly. Not that there's something wrong with a film running over the invisible 120-minute finish line, if it needs to, and is a good film. I regret that not all the 21 films in this year's selection were good. And that's not just me. The daily critics' panel for Le Film Francais was as negative as I've seen it, even giving a pas de tout ("worthless") to a film I would defend, von Trier's extreme but courageous "Antichrist."

In the past I have felt the elation of discovery at Cannes, seeing for the first time films like Kielowski's "Red," Lee's "Do the Right Thing," Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," Spielberg's "E.T."--and premieres by Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Chen Keige, Fassbinder, Altman, Herzog, Scorsese. Titans bestrode the earth in those days. This year the only ecstatic giants, love them or hate them, were Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino.]]>

Yes, there were great directors on the list: Michael Haneke, Jane Campion, Ken Loach, Ang Lee, Alain Resnais, Pedro Almodovar, Marco Bellocchio. But with the exception of Lee, they all chose material of a sort they've mastered. Where were the obsessions, the wild inspirations, the films beyond our imaginings? I hope to be shaken in my bones at least once a year at Cannes. I know the von Trier was hated, and I've hated some of his films myself, but he was hurling lightning bolts.

Michael Haneke flanked by jurors Isabelle Huppert and Robin Wright Penn (AP)

The 2009 feature film jury awarded some reasonable prizes, and then lost its mind. In my opinion the Mendoza film "Kinatay" deserved no award, and Le Film Francais panel agreed with me ("pas d tout"). But why in heaven's name would you give him the award for best direction? The second half of his film is an illustration of directorial monomania--a willingness to drive audiences from the theater not so much by the violence (rape, beheading, vivisection) but by the directorial style itself. You want to depict human atrocity, look to the von Trier.

Or, if you want to award a director in the grip of the relentless execution of a obsession, at least go for broke and give a prize to "Enter the Void," by Gaspar Noé ("pas de tout"). At least you could see what was happening in his film. Or honor a director who dealt with a human life at length and depth, like Jacques Audiard ("The Prophet"). Or Jane Campion, who handles the enigmatic and apparently chaste love affair of young John Keats as a balancing act between romanticism and genteel derangement. Or give it to Resnais. Now there's a director, with a light and wise touch in a whimsical story of fate dealing out what fate always deals. Death, you know.

You want a violent film, honor Johnnie To's "Vengeance," with Johnny Hallyday as a father who swears a blood oath and then loses his focus in the fog of old age. It played by the rules of film noir and Hong Kong cop thrillers. It didn't insanely slash and burn. You want an existential hit man? Try a woman, the fish market girl played by Rinko Kikuchi in Isabel Coixet's lovely "Map of the Sounds of Tokyo"--a film that evoked some of the same mood as "Hiroshima, mon Amour." Or go with Almodovar, even though "Broken Embraces" was minor Almodovar, just as "Looking for Eric" was minor Loach, and (so most people thought) "Taking Woodstock" was minor Ang Lee.

Not easy to fall in love with a Romantic (Jane Campion)

On the third day of the festival, I made an obvious sort of observation to its director, Thierry Fremaux, about the many important filmmakers in his selection. "Yes, but...you know, a great director doesn't always make a great film. We choose from what each year brings us." Was he trying to tell me something?

I should mention the two acting awards, to Charlotte Gainsbourg for "Antichrist" and Christoph Waltz for "Inglourious Basterds." Gainsbourg and her co-star, Willem Dafoe, were truly heroic in meeting the challenge set for them by von Trier. And Waltz, I suspect, won for just plain old-fashioned acting, in a Tarantino script that required his character to be many things to many people, including himself.

Before the festival, it was much commented upon that Isabelle Huppert was only the fourth Madame President in Cannes history, and that her jury was the first ever to have a 5-4 female majority. What would this mean?--we all asked. Would the women send a message? Make a statement? Reveal the differences in female values? After the awards, such questions inspire only a hollow laugh. If a male-dominated jury had read out this winners list, there would have been hell to pay.

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Immediately following is my news story about the awards. Below that are my shaky-cam videos of the jury explaining itself (or not) at a post-Palme press conference.

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The 2009 Cannes festival was heavily tilted toward films that were long and shocking. The awards ceremony Sunday night was concise, elegant and, for some, equally shocking. I haven't heard more booing at the prize list in some years.

The Palme d'Or went, however, to the generally admired "The White Ribbon," by Michael Haneke. Set before World War I and filmed in black and white, it tells of a rural German community plagued by a series of inexplicable deaths and other events.

The Grand Prix, essentially second place, went to Jacques Audiard of France, for "The Prophet," also well-received. It follows a young Arab through the French prison system, which educates him and unwittingly allows him to learn the criminal trade from a Sicilian godfather. Both of the top winners were purchased during the festival for North American release by Sony Pictures Classics.

Alain Resnais when la vague was nouvelle

There was a prolonged standing ovation when the jury awarded a lifetime achievement award to Alain Resnais, 86, one of the founders of the French New Wave, generally credited for launching the modern era of filmmaking.

It is exactly 50 years since Resnais' classic "Hiroshima, mon Amour" was nominated for the Palme d'Or, and 41 years since he led a director's strike that shut down the festival in a protest against its conservative tastes in film. In this year's festival Resnais' latest film, "Wild Grass," was a popular favorite. It shows how a series of accidental events determine the paths of lives.

Another popular winner, for the Camera d'Or, or best first film, was Warwick Thornton's "Samson and Delilah," the first film by and about Aborigines selected by Cannes. It's about a desert journey by two teenagers.

The acting awards went to performances in two of the festival's highest-profile films. Best actress was Charlotte Gainsbourg, who underwent and inflicted brutal punishment in Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," a film in which the garden of Eden seems to be hell, not heaven. Best actor was Christoph Waltz, as a snaky Nazi SS leader in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds," about a scheme to attack the Third Reich from behind enemy lines. "You gave me my vocation back," he said to Tarantino from the stage.

Christoph Waltz, chief basterd.

Those awards were perhaps not expected, but were well-received. Then the jury started springing surprises that didn't go over as well.

The biggest was the Best Director Award to Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, for the very violent "Kinatay," one of the worst-received films of the festival. It involves the kidnapping, torture, rape, beheading and dismemberment of woman by members of the police force.

The announcement was greeted by loud booing as the festival's press corps watched on closed circuit TV in the Debussy theater, next door to the Lumiere, where the ceremony was held.

There were also boos for the winner of the Best Screenplay award, Mei Feng, who wrote Ye Lou's "Spring Fever," from Hong Kong, about a man hired to spy on a love affair; and for Chan-Wook Park's "Thirst," a vampire film from South Korea. "Thirst" shared the Jury Prize with "Fish Tank," a story of a troubled teenage boy, by Andrea Arnold of the UK.

None of these films was booed in the Lumiere, but reflect that most of the press would have seen all the films, and most of the black tie Lumiere audience would not have.

The jury for the Un Certain Regard section, which votes a day ahead of the Palme jury, gave its Grand Prix to "Dogtooth, by Georges Lanthimos of Greece, about three children raised by their parents in a house behind a wall and taught to remain childish, fear the outside world, and learn nothing about it. Its Jury Prize went to "Police, Adjective," by Corneliu Porumboiu of Romania, about a cop who is reluctant to destroy a life by making a marijuana arrest.

There was a Special Prize for "No One Knows About Persian Cats," by Bahman Ghobadi of Iran, about two hip-hop musicians in Tehran who scheme to gain passports to Eurpope even though they have prison records. Another special Prize went to "Le Pere de Mes Enfants" ("Father of My Children"), by Mia Hansen-Love, about a workaholic French film producer and his family.

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The judges explain themselves, part #1: The Cannes 2009 jury press conference after the ceremony:

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The Cannes jury press conference, part #2:

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]]> tag:blogs.suntimes.com,2009:/ebert//103.24722 2009-05-23T15:31:18Z 2009-06-04T20:44:08Z

Michael Barker is not only a prime moving force in indie film distribution, but one of the funniest raconteurs alive. He and Tom Bernard, also a funny man, have been the co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics since 1992, which qualifies...

Roger Ebert Michael Barker is not only a prime moving force in indie film distribution, but one of the funniest raconteurs alive. He and Tom Bernard, also a funny man, have been the co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics since 1992, which qualifies them as the Methuselahs among studio heads. Their films have won 24 Academy Awards and 101 nominations. He knows everybody and takes little mental notes, resulting in an outpouring of stories I could tell you, but then I would have to shoot you.

Like many funny people, he exerts a magnetic attraction for funny experiences. He attracted one just the other day, when he went to see the new Paul Verhoeven film. "I'm looking at the screening schedule and I can't believe my eyes," he was telling us the other night. This was at dinner on the Carlton Terrace with Richard and Mary Corliss, Chaz, and our granddaughter Raven. "I'd never heard anything about this. I mean, Verhoeven just made 'The Black Book,' for chrissakes!

"It's titled 'Teenagers,' and it's screening in one of those little marketplace theaters in the Palais. I figure it must be a rough cut under another title or something. The place is jammed. People are fighting to get in. I'm able to get a seat. There are people sitting in the aisles, standing against the wall, flat on their backs on the floor in front of the screen. You can't breathe.

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"The lights go down, they have some titles with names I've ever heard of, except for Paul Verhoeven. The movie starts, and a kid takes off his shirt. This is not the Paul Verhoeven I know. There's a stampede for the exit. People on the floor are almost trampled. I finally get out and the director is standing by the door. Sure enough, it says Paul Verhoeven on his badge. I ask him to his face if he stole the badge.

"You're thinking of the other Paul Verhoeven," he says. "He's my cousin."

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It's been a slow year for sales, what with the economy and all, but Baker and Bernard bought the rights to Jacques Audiard's "A Prophet," Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" and "Jan Kounen's "Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky." They were up-front investors in "Broken Embraces" by Pedro Almodovar, his ninth film they've released.

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We have our first winners. The jury for the Un Certain Regard section, which votes a day ahead of the Palme jury, has given its Grand Prix to Dogtooth, by Yorgos Lanthimos of Greece, about three children raised by their parents in a house behind a wall and taught to remain childish, fear the outside world, and learn nothing about it.

Iranian musician

The Jury Prize went to "Police, Adjective," by de Corneliu Porumboiu of Romania, more evidence of the remarkable recent renaissance in Romanian cinema. It's about a cop who is reluctant to destroy a life by making a marijuana arrest.

There was a Special Prize for "No One Knows About Persian Cats," by Bahman Ghobadi of Iran, about two hip-hop musicians in Tehran who scheme to gain passports to Eurpope even though they have prison records. Another special Prize went to "Le Pere de Mes Enfants" ("Father of My Children"), by Mia Hansen-Love.

The Iranian film has generated much discussion simply because it is from Iran, a nation with a great cinematic richness that is much more diverse and complex than many Americans realize.

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Faithful readers will recall that after I filed an early report from Cannes, I received this message from a reader named Scott Collette:

I am currently in Cannes, working out of an office on the Croisette across from the Palais. Work ends Tuesday/Wednesday and I am here until the end of the festival and I am very worried that when all is said and done, I will have attended the largest film festival in the world and will have not seen any films. This is already probably the longest I have gone in my life and I'm going through withdrawals. I have no credentials as they are very expensive.

I took sympathy. No reader of this blog should come to Cannes and return home empty-handed. Cannes is not a public festival but a business convention. However, our granddaughter Raven blogged about getting a ticket to a screening in the Lumiere. She joined the throngs of hopefuls outside the Palais at every screening, holding up signs saying: Invitation, si'l vous plait!"

Saturday afternoon, Chaz, Carol Iwata and I were leaving after the screening of "Map of the Sounds of Tokyo." Standing there in the lobby was Scott Collette, proudly holding up his ticket. "I got in!" he said. I asked him how. "What Raven did," he said. "I begged."

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Newcomers to screenings in the Auditorium Debussy may be puzzled by an event that frequently takes place just after the lights go down. A voice, sounding like a dog baying at the moon, cries out despairingly: "Raoul! Raooouuulll!"

It is possibly a different person every time. This is an ancient Cannes tradition. Legend had it that one day in the infancy of the festival, a guy was saving a seat for his pal Raoul. The screening was packed and he was having trouble defending the seat. In desperation, he called out.

The fact that this practice has survived for 35 years that I know about, kept alive by people who have never met one another, explained to each curious new festivalgoer, is an excellent demonstration of the Richard Dawkins theory of memes. A meme is an idea, phrase, cliché or tune that leaps from one mind to another in its attempt to survive, just as genes leap from body to body.

Someday years from now, somebody reading this will call out for Raoul at a festival. Who knows. Maybe it will be Scott Collette. Remember: Only the Debussy. Never the Lumiere. I can't begin to explain how gauche that would be.

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I am much disturbed that for the first time in at least 20 years I have not had a Leopard Lady sighting. Perhaps I haven't been in the right place at the right time. These are a mother and daughter who live in Lisle and for years and years have made an annual pilgrimage to Cannes for the purpose of walking up and down in their matching leopard skin dresses and being photographed as the famous Leopard Ladies.

No, they are not looking for handouts. They're simply enjoying their 15 minutes. I have always seen them walking. Never seated. One year the daughter said she had a short in the competition. They never reveal their names. What are they seeking at Cannes? Maybe leopard hunters.

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I have appended one of my Leopard Lady photographs from over the years. Also, a lot of other photos from the last decade or so. I have no idea why they are all of are of beautiful women.

Because the Movable Type blog software tends to mix up captions of long assortments of photos, I have thrown up my hands in despair, and posted them without captions. Most of them explain themselves. The subjects you should be able to recognize. These photos are copyrighted by moi, but by the masterstroke of not captioning them, they will elude Google searches.

As always, every photo can be enlarged by clicking. The newer ones are much improved. The older ones reveal their how small their files are. Posting these helps me pass the time as we await the Sunday night awards ceremony.

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Here you will find a trailer for "Teenagers," by the other Paul Verhoeven.

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]]> tag:blogs.suntimes.com,2009:/ebert//103.24691 2009-05-22T09:32:06Z 2009-06-04T20:44:30Z

I think I may have just seen the 2010 Oscar winner for best foreign film. Whether it will win the Palme d'Or here at Cannes is another matter. It may be too much of a movie movie. It's named "A...

Roger Ebert I think I may have just seen the 2010 Oscar winner for best foreign film. Whether it will win the Palme d'Or here at Cannes is another matter. It may be too much of a movie movie. It's named "A l'origine," by Xavier Giannoli, and is one of several titles I want to discuss in a little festival catch-up. Based on an incredible true story, it involves an insignificant thief, just released from prison, who becomes involved in an impromptu con game that results in the actual construction of a stretch of highway. At the beginning he has no plans to build a highway. He simply sees a way to swindle a contractor out of 15,000 euros. He is sad, defeated, unwanted, apart from his wife and child, sleeping on a pal's sofa. What happens is not caused by him nor desired by him. It simply happens to him.

This is one of those movies that catches you in its spell. It's a hell of a story. There's a difference between caring what happens in a movie, and merely waiting to see what will happen. The hero, who calls himself Phillip, ends by bringing about an enterprise involving millions of euros, hundreds of workers and tons of massive earth-moving machinery, falling in love with the lady mayor, and becoming a good man, all without ever saying very much. I was reminded of Chance the Gardener In "Being There." Phillip is shy, socially unskilled, inarticulate, apparently the opposite of a con man. To repeat: There is a true story involved here. Some facts are offered at the end. The highway, which which the workers essentially built on their own, with the con man as "management," was completed on time, under budget and up to code.

]]> François Cluzet: A man with a nice face (Click all art to enlarge)

The character is played by the veteran French star François Cluzet, who played the lead in last year's "Tell No One," the top-grossing foreign film in the North American market. That was the superb thriller about the dead wife who wasn't dead. A handsome, undernourished-looking man in his 50s, with a pleasantly lined face, looking something like Dustin Hoffman, Cluzet co-stars with Emmanuelle Devos, who you will recognize from a dozen French films. Gerald Depardieu has an important, if over-billed, supporting role. Cluzet's performance is the key. He never says much, allows people to assume things he has not claimed, allows them in a sense to con themselves. He's more fascinating than the impostor in Spielberg's "Catch Me If you Can."

It has been a very good year for French films at Cannes. One of the most-loved has been Les Herbes Folles, ("The Wild Grass") by Alain Resnais, whose "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961) was one of the founding films of the New Wave. Now 86, looking fit and youthful on the red carpet, he has made one of those films perhaps only conceivable in old age. It is about an unlikely and fateful chain of events that to a young person might seem like coincidence, but to an old one illustrates the likelihood that most of what happens in our lives comes about by sheer accident. To realize this is to become more philosophical; the best-laid plans of mice and men are irrelevant to the cosmos.

To explain how this could all possibly happens would be not wild (folles) but a folly (une folie). Here is how it begins: The heroine Josepha (Sabine Azéma) decides one day to buy a pair of shoes. That leads to her purse being snatched. That leads to Georges (Andre Dussollier) finding her wallet. That leads to everything else. Resnais uses an omniscient narrator, as he must, because only from an all-knowing point of view can the labyrinth of connections be seen. He films in a colorful, leisurely style; not taking even the most serious things too very seriously, because, after all, they need never have happened.

Alain Resnais and his star, Sabine Azéma

Le pere des mes enfants ("The Father of My Children") belongs to the genre of the country house movie, French division. British country house movies are a mix of Jane Austen, Agatha Christie and Evelyn Waugh, with Wodehouse as the mixologist. French country house movies tend to tell bourgeois family stories, including children of all ages, and they tilt toward the pastoral. This film, the third by Mia Hansen-Løve, only 28 and is a rising star of French cinema, stars Louis-Do de Lencquesaing as a movie producer who is willing to take chances on serious auteurs and is currently deep in debt, not least because of his backing of a temperamental perfectionist not a million miles separated from Lars von Trier. The story is said to be inspired by the real-life producer Humbert Balsan, who made von Trier's "Manderlay" (2005)

The producer is a nice man. Too nice. Too loving, too loyal, too driven. We begin by following him through desperate attempts to keep his company afloat, and then watch as his wife (Chiara Caselli) and children try to deal with the impossibilities he has created. Some of this happens in Paris, much of it happens in his country house, and the focus is not on film production but on family. I was reminded of two other recent French films: the current "Summer Hours," about an old lady leaving a legacy for her family to deal with, and last year's "A Christmas Tale," with Catherine Deneuve as a mother less worried about her death than her children are.

Los Abrazos Rotos ("Broken Embraces") is the much-awaited new Pedro Almodóvar collaboration with his recent muse, Penelope Cruz. It's about an old man remembering a woman he loved. Lluis Homar ("Bad Education") plays a director who went blind in an auto accident that killed his love (Cruz), who was his secretary, and who he met as a call girl. Now he works as a successful screenwriter, using touch-typing. One day he's approached by an ambitious young filmmaker named Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), who he suspects is the son of the evil millionaire he holds responsible for the woman's death.

Man on the verge of a nervous breakdown

As always with Almodóvar, it isn't nearly as simple as that. Using interlocking flashbacks, the film reconstructs what actually happened in a combination of overwrought Sirkian melodrama and Hitchcock. The music, indeed, pays homage to Bernard Hermann's work, particularly his score for Hitchcock's "Vertigo," and the film's romantic entanglements pay homage to Almodóvar's own pansexual stories. Cruz is a life force, but Homar's work is the film's engine.

It must be a year for movies about old men remembering lost parents and lovers. One of the more unexpected successes here is "The Time That Remains," a deadpan Palestinian comedy written by, directed, and starring Elia Suleiman. Read that again: a deadpan Palestinian comedy. And not especially political, although almost all stories set in Israel must be political to one degree or another.

The film, dedicated to the memory of Suleiman's parents, shows his father as a firebrand gun-maker, gradually aging into an old guy who sits outside a cafe with his pals, smokes, smokes, smokes, and drinks coffee as if he has kidneys of steel. This family lives in a small but pleasant flat with a nice view of Nazareth; they're part of a friendly community. The film consists of fairly self-contained vignettes of human nature, reminding me curiously of the Czech New Wave comedies. The character played by Suleiman, satire linked with autobiography, a solemn, silent figure with dark shadows under his eyes, is poker-faced and never speaks. He simply stands and regards all that happens for 60 years. I don't know what that makes it sound like to you. I was surprised by how it grew on me. The karaoke scene is unreasonably funny.

Elia Suleiman: Not much to say

"Irène," by Alain Cavalier, 77, a frequent Cannes winner and nominee, is a personal, subjective, experimental meditation on the 1972 death of the actress and beauty pageant winner Irene Tunc. Unlike Cavalier's conventional narrative films ("Thesese"), this one actually shows very few speaking actors. It is almost all done with his own first-person narration, and a hand-held camera that examines diaries and other relics of a life ended but not forgotten. More than half Cavalier's own lifetime has passed since Irene died, and his old man's attempts at amends are very touching. The film received an unfairly dismissive review from Variety.

One of the final Official selections, Gasper Noe's "Enter the Void," is a nearly unendurable in-depth investigation of a very shallow idea. The camera positions itself close behind the head of a callow youth, jug-eared and crew-cut, as he films with his video camera and then becomes the camera as the remainder of the film is seen from his POV. The hero, an orphaned American, lives with his sister in Tokyo, where she is a nude dancer and possibly a booker, and he is a druggie and possibly a dealer. If they don't practice incest, you could have fooled me.

After he dies in a shooting at a nightclub named the Void, we live through subjective scenes intended as what he sees after death. They involve flashbacks, replays of what has already happened, and hovering above what's happening now. In Noe's view, the soul does survive the body, which for much of this time has been cremated. These scenes are spaced out with sound and light abstractions resembling 1960s underground films past their shelf life. If Noe's camera plunges into a vortex once, it does so a hundred times: Into white holes, black holes, psychedelic kaleidoscopic holes, over and over and over again, representing the delightful diversity of the Void. The visuals might have been juicier if he had known abut fractals. The film includes obligatory genitals of both genders, and one of the voids the POV plunges into is the mess in a stainless steel pan after an abortion.

Ken Loach and Eric Cantona

Looking for Eric, by the great British director Ken Loach, is a disappointment, his least interesting work. It involves a hapless man named Eric, from Manchester, whose life takes a turn for the better after the spirit of Eric Cantona, the great star footballer for Manchester United, materializes in his bedroom. Cantona plays himself, produced the film, and may have been involved in the financing, which could explain how it came to be made. What I can't explain is why Loach choose to make it. Maybe after so many great films he simply wanted to relax with a genre comedy. It has charm and Loach's fine eye, and the expected generic payoff.

But I had a problem I'm almost ashamed to admit. Loach has always made it a point to use actors employing working-class accents, reflecting the fact that accent is a class marker. I've always been able to understand them--it's the music as much as the words, and then I start to hear the words. This time, his star Steve Evets uses an accent so thick many of the English themselves might not be able to understand it. Ironically, the Frenchman Eric Cantana is easier to understand.

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The streets of Cannes, a madhouse a week ago, have grown strangely quieter. The press screenings have empty seats. The daily festival newspapers have called it a wrap. Old friends who have been racing against time all week are now finally making plans to meet at dinner. There are a few films still to play, and some to be repeated. Then the jury will appear on stage in the Auditorium Lumière and reveal its awards, and there will be cheers and boos and a big party under an enormous tent for about 1,000 of the survivors. Sometimes I feel I have spent my whole life at Cannes, and the rest is just trips out of town.

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Now for something completely different. I was attending the first Cannes screening for "Le Père de mes Enfants." Before the film began, Thierry Fremaux, director of the festival, appeared onstage and introduced Mia Hansen-Løve and her entire cast, and they walked down a side aside and ascended to the stage. Then they did something unexpected and rather beautiful. They didn't line up in a row and face the audience. That's what a movie cast always does. I've seen it dozens, maybe hundreds of times. You have, too. With perhaps an older actress holding hands with a little one. They file on, they file off.

What these actors did was make a statement with body language. They stood around. They behaved as if they were really there. They took possession. As if they were at a cocktail reception. None of them faced the audience while standing at attention. They relaxed. Some stood a little forward, others a little behind. Some looked offstage, or at a friend in the audience, or at each other. They spoke a little among themselves. They didn't ignore the audience, nor were they very aware of it. They were relaxed and at all times graceful. Annie Liebowitz couldn't have arranged them any better for a Vanity Fair cover. Whether this was planned I have no idea. I doubt it. It felt natural and instinctive. That's all. I just thought I'd mention it.

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Hanging out in the lobby of the Hotel Splendid with Chaz and the celebrated cineaste Pierre Rissient. Supporting role by our assistant, Carol Iwata.

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How much longer until the movie starts? Virtual waiting during six minutes before a morning press screening. The money shot is at the end: Every Lumiere screening begins with the stairway climbing from the sea to the stars.

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Pierre holding court at his home away from home

]]> tag:blogs.suntimes.com,2009:/ebert//103.24614 2009-05-20T15:26:43Z 2009-06-04T20:44:59Z

Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to find a climax unique in the history of war movies. Also trust QT to get away with a war movie that consists largely of his unique dialog style, in which a great deal of...

Roger Ebert Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to find a climax unique in the history of war movies. Also trust QT to get away with a war movie that consists largely of his unique dialog style, in which a great deal of action is replaced by talk about the possibilities of action. His "Inglourious Basterds," which premiered Wednesday morning here at Cannes, is a screenplay eight years in the writing, and you can't fill 148 minutes with descriptions of special effects. At least not if you're a motormouth like Tarantino.

My review will await the film's August 21 opening. I know, I wrote a lot about "Antichrist," but with this one I'd like to hold out until opening day. No, that doesn't mean I disliked it. It means it inspired other kinds of thoughts--about Cannes, Tarantino, and the way the movie industry seems to be going these days.

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"Why," Mr. Tarantino, he was asked at the press conference after the film, "did you choose to bring the film to Cannes?" In other words, why didn't you open it with another one of those god-awful junkets where entertainment reporters are plied with chilled shrimp and cycled through 3-minute sound-bite ops in a Four Seasons somewhere? You know, a controlled environment designed to churn out mindless publicity? Why expose it to the glare of Cannes, and to the baying of the hounds of hell, otherwise known as the world's film critics? A place where there are more questions at a press conference for the director of a film than for the stars?

"I make movies for Planet Earth," Tarantino answered, "and Cannes represents that." Not Planet Hollywood (whose branch here has long since closed). He said it never occurred to him to open his film anywhere else. His shooting schedule was under the gun of today's Cannes deadline. "We started talking about the film in August," Brad Pitt said, "and he said he would be here in May. And here we are."

And it's Tarantino, over the top!

I remember Tarantino the first time he came to Cannes in May 1992, with "Reservoir Dogs." Chaz and I had him all to ourselves at lunch down on the beach. We picked up the check. When he came in 1994 with "Pulp Fiction," there was a party that took up most of the top floor of the Carlton. In other words, something happened, and it wasn't that the freeloaders got chilled lobster. What happened was that Tarantino took his place in the Cannes Pantheon. It really does mean more to win the Palme d'Or than the Oscar for best film. It means more for the director, for sure. Hell, the best film Oscar is accepted by the producer.

QT is sometimes criticized for including too many references (some say whole scenes) from other movies in his own work. There are legends about his days as a video store clerk, memorizing B movies from the $1.99 bin. But the borrowed, or repurposed, or inspired, or quoted movie material in his films is there not because he lacks imagination but because he has too much. He loves movies with a fervor that inspires him to absorb us not only in his films, but in the films he loves. His arms are wide and gathers us in.

"Inglorious Basterds" is, I believe, the only war movie with its climactic scene set in a movie theater. The only war movie with a critical last-minute confrontation in the projection booth. The only war movie with a lecture on the fire hazard of nitrate film stock. The only one that pays much attention to the names of such great directors as Pabst and Clouzot. Tarantino's hero, played by Brad Pitt, is named Lt. Aldo Raine, which is as close as you can get to Aldo Ray, the star of "Battle Cry" (1955), which co-starred Van Heflin, who also gets a shout-out in "Basterds."

Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy arrive by horse-drawn carriage

Cannes has become, in a way, the sundowner party of Day of the Locusts. There was once a world, much deprecated at the time, of patriarchal studios, star machines, genre movies, fan magazines, searchlights, and filmmakers who wanted their movies to play big to everybody all over the world. Now what survives of that old world, hunched and inward, is no longer show business but just--business. A screenplay is evaluated for its demographic appeal, its video game possibilities, its spin-offs, its potential for commercial tie-ins. The suspense of its premiere is diluted a by pale, gnome-like creatures hunched over computers down in their parents' basements, busy as bees ripping off video copies of new films and posting them on the internet, to be downloaded by thieves who get more of a thrill out of stealing a film than by watching it. At least when there's a premiere at Cannes, you know it's a premiere. Some of the entries don't even have complete IMDb entries yet. Fans by the thousands cheer the arrivals. The red carpet becomes a fashion show staged by the Paris design houses, with the world watching on cable.

Buddy, can you spare a crime? (Carol Iwata)

The critics here are not on junkets. Many of them paid their own way, because if you're a movie critic, baby, this is where you gotta get your ass. Back home, most editors care more about Brad Pitt than Quentin Tarantino. That would be all right if they cared about Pitt for the right reasons. But the American press has been dumbed-down so much that some papers seem edited for an audience that does most of its reading off of TV screens. I ran into an old friend who has free-lanced for USA Today. "Yesterday, Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" was the big story," he told me. "USA Today featured coverage of Jim Carrey as Ebenezer Scrooge, arriving at the Carlton Hotel with Jenny McCarthy in a horse-drawn carriage."

There can be news value in such events. Consider the crowds Jerry Seinfeld drew when, dressed as a bee, he slid down a wire from the roof of the Carlton to promote "Bee Movie." To be sure, much of the press just wanted to have someone on the scene if the cable snapped. Now that would be newsworthy, a photo of a crumbled and bloody bumblebee suit.

My door is always open (Roger Ebert)

Cannes behaves as if such a world doesn't exist. Today the talk is about Tarantino. Yesterday it was about Lars von Trier. Here it doesn't matter if you liked his new film. At least you've heard of him. There are students here waiting tables in the beachfront pavilions to finance their stays, their hopes of "networking" and making their own films someday. Here there is a young man named Scott Collette who e-mailed me saying, "I am at the greatest film festival in the world, and it looks like I won't be able to get into a single film." He has a festival job with a distributor renting space across the street from the Palais. I advised him to try what worked for our granddaughter Raven--stand in front of the Palais holding a sign saying Invitation! and hope someone will give them a ticket.

After "Inglorious Basterds" today, Scott introduced himself outside on the sidewalk. I asked if he'd seen any films. "Not yet. And I got my boss's pass confiscated for using it to try to sneak in." I guess he doesn't look much like the I.D. photo of a middle-aged distributor. Chaz told him she had heard stories of people with the wrong passes being taken down into the bowels of the Palais and lectured sternly by security.

It happened that at the Tarantino press conference, we were seated near to Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother Bob is releasing the movie. The Weinsteins were once kids here without a ticket. "We were hanging around the stage door, hoping to get in and make our way around to the front," Harvey told me. "An official festival limo pulled up, and Clint Eastwood got out. We probably looked needy. He sized us up, held open the door, and let us in. To this day, we both make it a point to let someone into the Palais."

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Note to Scott Collette: Someday when you are a big-time distributor with an office across from the Palais, you will remember this story, and do the right thing.

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Below: The basterds at their press conference (Roger Ebert; Click on all art to enlarge)

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My Shaky-Cam video from Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds" press conference at Cannes (Part One)

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Part Two: The "Inglorious Basterds" press conference at Cannes

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Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" acceptance speech, Cannes 1994

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Lars von Trier's new film will not leave me alone. A day after many members of the audience recoiled at its first Cannes showing, "Antichrist" is brewing a scandal here; I am reminded of the tumult following the 1976 premiere...

Roger Ebert Lars von Trier's new film will not leave me alone. A day after many members of the audience recoiled at its first Cannes showing, "Antichrist" is brewing a scandal here; I am reminded of the tumult following the 1976 premiere of Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses" and its castration scene. I said I was looking forward to von Trier's overnight reviews, and I haven't been disappointed. Those who thought it was good thought it was very very good ("Something completely bizarre, massively uncommercial and strangely perfect"--Damon Wise, Empire) and those who thought it was bad found it horrid ("Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with "Antichrist"--Todd McCarthy, Variety).

I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound. Von Trier has a way of affecting his viewers like that. After his "Breaking the Waves" premiered at Cannes in 1996, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice fled to the rest room in emotional turmoil and Janet Maslin of the New York Times followed to comfort her. After this one, Richard and Mary Corliss blogged at Time.com that "Antichrist" presented the spectacle of a director going mad.

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Enough time has passed since I saw the film for me to process my visceral reaction, and take a few steps back. I can understand why this confrontational film has so sharply divided its early critics. It is fascinating to me that there's a sharp divide between American, Canadian and British critics monitored by the Tomatometer, and a cross-section of French critics monitored by Le Film Francais, a French equivalent to Variety, which is published daily at the festival. Reflect that French critics are often noted for more intellectual, theoretical reviews, and American critics are more often populist. Which group hated or approved of the movie more?

Think again. A surprising 44% of the early Tomatometer critics gave positive reviews. Le Film Francais asks its national panel to vote on every film in the Official Selection and the Un Certain Regard section. They can vote as follows: (1) Must win the Palme d'Or; (2) Three stars ("Passionately"); (3) Two stars ("Good"); (4) One star ("One likes it a little"); (5) "Pas de tout"--"not at all"). The French critical consensus for "Antichrist" is... pas de tout. I can't recall when another Official Selection by an important director has been disliked so strongly.

Charlotte Gainsborgh and Willem Dafoe as She and He in "Antichrist." (Click on all art to enlarge)

A reader signing himself Scott D posted this comment after my first entry on the film: "If it is in fact the most despairing film you've ever seen, shouldn't it be considered a monumental achievement? Despair is such a significant aspect of the human condition (particularly in the modern western world) so how can this not be a staggeringly important film, given your statement?" There is truth to what Scott D says. In the first place, it's important to note that "Antichrist" is not a bad film. It is a powerfully-made film that contains material many audiences will find repulsive or unbearable. The performances by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg are heroic and fearless. Von Trier's visual command is striking. The use of music is evocative; no score, but operatic and liturgical arias. And if you can think beyond what he shows to what he implies, its depth are frightening.

I cannot dismiss this film. It is a real film. It will remain in my mind. Von Trier has reached me and shaken me. It is up to me to decide what that means. I think the film has something to do with religious feeling. It is obvious to anyone who saw "Breaking the Waves" that von Trier's sense of spirituality is intense, and that he can envision the supernatural as literally present in the world. His reference is Catholicism. Raised by a communist mother and a socialist father in a restrictive environment, he was told as an adult that his father was not his natural parent, and renounced that man's Judaism to convert, at the age of 30, to the Catholic church. It was at about the same age that von Trier founded the Dogma movement, with its monkish asceticism.

If you have to ask what a film symbolizes, it doesn't. With this one, I didn't have to ask. It told me. I believe "Antichrist" may be an exercise in alternative theology: von Trier's version of those passages in Genesis where Man is cast from Eden and Satan assumes a role in the world.

The Prologue, a masterful sequence lovely b&w slow motion, shows a couple, He and She, making love while their innocent baby becomes fascinated by the sight of snow falling outside an open window, climbs up on the sill, and falls to his death. This is Man's Fall from Grace. Consequently, She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) falls into guilt and depression so deep she is hospitalized. That is one half of Original Sin. The character named He (Willem Dafoe) insists she cut off her medication. He will cure her himself. That is the other half. Her sin is Despair. His is Pride. These are the two greatest sins against God.

He and She go to their country home, named Eden. He subjects her to merciless talk therapy, relentlessly chipping away at her rationalizations and defenses, explaining to her why she is wrong to feel the way she does. I suspect many of the reviews will focus on the physical violence She inflicts upon He in the next act of the film. It is important to note that the earlier psychological violence He inflicts is equally brutal. He talks and talks, boring away at her defenses, tearing at her psyche, exposing her. Listen to Dafoe's voice in the trailer linked below. It could be used for Satan's temptation of Christ in the desert.

There is little sense at Eden of real lives together; He and She they are locked in combat that seems their inescapable destiny after the loss of their child. The violence in the film is explicit, but is it intended to be realistic? I don't believe you can have a hole drilled clean through your leg, an iron bar pushed through it, and a grindstone bolted to it, and do much other than be in agony. That He can even speak, let alone crawl into the woods, contend with her and defend himself, is remarkable. I think the violence illustrates the depth of her venom and that She, like He, will stop at nothing.

Images suggesting Bosch are evoked toward the end of the film. Human limbs rise up to grasp He and She as they have sex. There is a talking dog, bluebirds, a deer, inhabiting the world of Man. At the end He stands atop a hill while a legion of unnatural humans ascends toward him, evoking "Night of the Living Dead." The suggestion is Biblical, but not from the Bible we know. The human figures are not naked, climbing toward birth, but clothed, climbing toward death. After their fall in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve learned shame, and covered their nakedness. In this evil world, they are created covered, and by their sins are cast out into nakedness.

Von Trier's original intention, it's said, was to reveal at the end that the world was created by Satan, not God: That evil, not goodness, reigns ascendant. His finished film reflects the same idea, but not as explicitly. The title "Antichrist" is the key. This is a mirror world. It is a sin to lose Knowledge rather than to eat of its fruit and gain it. She and He are behaving with such cruelty toward each other not as actual people, but as creatures inhabiting a moral mirror world. As much as they might comfort and love each other in our world after losing a child, so to the same degree in the mirror world they inflame each other's pain and act out hatred. This would be the world created by Satan.

If I am right, then von Trier has proceeded with perfect logic. Just as a good world could not contain too much beauty and charity, an evil world could not have too much cruelty and hatred. He is making a moral statement. I'm not sure if he's telling us how things are, or warning us of what could come. But I am sure he has not compromised his vision. He has been brave and strong, and made a film that fully reflects the pain of his own feelings. And his actors have been remarkably courageous in going all the way with him.

In his own defense here at Cannes, von Trier has described himself "the greatest director in the world." Well, if Le Film Francais says he is merde, what can he be expected to say? He is certainly one of the most heroic directors in the world, uncompromising, resolute. He goes all the way and takes no prisoners. Do I believe his film "works?" Would I "recommend" it? Is it a "good" film? I believe von Trier doesn't care how I or anyone else would reply to those questions. He had the ideas and feelings, he saw into the pit, he made the film, and here it is.

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¶Von Trier discusses his upcoming comedy (!)

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Von Trier's mentor, Jørgen Leth, made a 12-minute film in 1967 that von Trier admired so much he saw it 20 times in a year. In 2002, he summoned the 67-year-old Leth from retirement in Haiti and commissioned him to remake the film in five different ways, despite obstructions which von Trier would supply. My review of "The Five Obstructions" is here.

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]]> tag:blogs.suntimes.com,2009:/ebert//103.24487 2009-05-17T21:24:36Z 2009-06-04T20:46:24Z

There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von...

Roger Ebert There's electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier's "Antichrist," and we are ready for anything. We'd better be. Von Trier's film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, "No!" At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing "That's Entertainment!"

Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It's been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I've ever have seen.

If, as they say, you are not prepared for "disturbing images," I advise you to just just stop reading now.

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The film involves a couple, He and She, whose infant child falls out a window and smashes to the pavement while they are making explicit love. They feel devastating grief. He, a psychologist, takes She off medications, and they go to live in their secluded hideaway in the forest, a cottage named Eden.

He subjects her to probing questions and the discussion of the Meaning of it All, which must affect her like a needle stab to an inflamed tooth. He is quite intelligent and insightful, and brings passive aggression to a brutally intimate level. Then she wounds him, and while he's unconscious she drills a hole through his leg and bolts a grindstone to it. He drags himself into the forest and tries to hide in an animal burrow. She finds him, and pounds him with a shovel to force him deeper. Then she tries to bury him alive. I won't mention two gruesome scenes involving the genital areas.

Lars and the real girl (Roger Ebert, 2003)

What does this metaphor (with a Prologue, an Epilogue and Four Chapters) mean? The dinner conversations all over town must not have been appetizing. Some read it this way: Perhaps the world began with man evil instead of good, guilty instead of innocent. That the Garden of Eden was visited by the Antichrist, not the Lord. That man's Original Sin was not eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but not vomiting forth knowledge and purging himself.

All for this will be discussed at great length. What can be said is that von Trier, after what many found the agonizing boredom of his previous Cannes films "Dogville" and "Manderlay," has made a film that is not boring. Unendurable, perhaps, but not boring. For relief I am looking forward to the overnight reviews of those who think they can explain exactly what it means. In this case, perhaps, a film should not mean, but be.

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You see strangely assorted films all in a row here. The first eight Cannes films I've seen have been: (a) a Pixar animated comedy about a man who ties balloons to his house and floats into the rain forest; (b) a film about the young love of the doomed John Keats; (c) a devastating African-American drama about an abused fat girl; (d) a Korean film about a mother defending her dim-witted son against a murder charge; (e) a Filipino film with 45 minutes of an impossible-to-see, too-loud-to-listen to kidnapping; (f) a Hong Kong film about a French chef's violent revenge; (g) a French bourgeois family drama about a bankrupt movie producer, and (h) "Antichrist." First thing tomorrow, the new Almodovar film, about a film director who loses his eyesight and the love of his life. At least there will be Penelope Cruz to look at, if only he could see her.

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Cannes has always cast a wide net. It was here I first began to learn more about violent Asian films that were not "chop-socky" trash but in fact polished genre exercises with their own auteurs. After seeing my first Takeshi Kitano film in the awesome Lumiere, I began to suspect he might become one of my favorite directors. The legions of Western fans for Hong Kong films, in particular, may have Cannes to thank.

Speaking of Western fans, this morning I saw a classic Western named "Vengeance." There were certain parallels with Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven;" it had gun-slingers striding down streets deserted by the townspeople, and a score (guitars and lonely flutes) that Sergio Leone might have envied. Was this film set in Durango or Tombstone? No, it was set in modern-day Macao, the Las Vegas of China. Was the hero played by Eastwood? No, he was played by the 65-year-old Johnny Hallyday, known as "the French Elvis." Who was the hero of this Western? Was he named Slade or Cain or Shane? No, he had a good French name, Costello. Who was the film directed by? Johnnie To, who has also made "The Heroic Trio," "My Left Eye Sees Ghosts," "Running on Karma," and 46 other films since 1986.

A stranger in town (Click to enlarge)

This was really a good film. The plot is off the shelf: Costello's family is murdered, and he vows revenge. But the twists, now, that's where the pleasure comes. And the acting, dead serious and low key, but with some jovial fat men allowed. And a stunning visual sense. And pacing that made it compulsively watchable--just the curative for me after the previous evening's excruciating "Kinatay."

This is not the place for my review. Let me just mention two details. If you know Johnny Hallyday, picture him standing over a dying crime boss in the street. He has plugged him with about a dozen rounds. And before firing a final fatal round, he thoughtfully and quite seriously observes, "that's your coat."

And then imagine a gunfight in a vast open field, seen from a high angle. Three men surrounded by enemies. The field containing for some reasons tightly-compacted bales of waste newsprint, almost as high as a man. The three in the center using three bales as cover. The dozens around advancing in a wall of forward-tumbling bales, and firing from behind them. Words do not convey the macabre visual effect of this scene.

The film involves professional killers quite prepared to sacrifice their lives for their values. No, not for their criminal code. For their deep human values. They are craftsmen who respect their work. They will perform it well and faithfully even if the man who hired them knows nothing of it, and is away playing with some little children on the beach. These are values that could come from...a Western. And recall that the Western began with Greek drama.

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The "Antichrist" trailer

Lars von Trier's Antichrist - Official Trailer from Zentropa on Vimeo.

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Johnny Hallyday in the "Vengeance" trailer.

Johnny hallyday Vengeance bande annonce
Uploaded by ejr2. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

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