A couple of weeks ago I told you about some Oscar hopefuls. Here are two more, both not just hopefuls but real contenders. In fact, they’re amongst the best films currently playing in conventional multiplexes. Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee bounces back from the inedible Hulk with a sweeping romantic tragedy. As Ennis, Heath Ledger brings … Continue reading Oscar Hopefuls, Part 2

Good news: The Roxie Theater has found an angel. The non-profit New College of California is taking over the oldest continually-running movie theater in San Francisco, known for introducing new independent films that are truly independent, not Miramax independent. Renamed the Roxie Film Center, it will be, according to the press release, "a non-profit Cinema … Continue reading The Roxie’s Angel

Forget Christmas and Chanukah! December is Oscar Season. This is the time that Hollywood studios release their Oscar hopefuls. To officially qualify, a movie must come out before the end of the year. But anything that opened before November is likely to get lost in Academy members' notoriously short attention spans. Thus, this is Oscar … Continue reading Oscar Hopefuls

The end is near! At least when you watch a movie, the ending is never more than a few hours away. But what kind of ending? The general rule of thumb is that Hollywood movies have happy endings, because that’s what people want, while serious films have sad endings, because life is like that (or … Continue reading Endings, Happy and Sad

The Balboa starts its Samurai series today. That's as good an excuse as any to talk about my all-time favorite filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa. No one else combined as full a technical and artistic mastery of the medium with such a deep and sympathetic understanding of the human condition. At least no one else did so … Continue reading Kurosawa

Projecting 35mm motion picture film is a violent, potentially dangerous act. (Dangerous for the film. Not, thankfully--for the humans involved, although it was before acetate film replaced nitrate more than 50 years ago.) Every minute, 90 feet of expensive artwork passes through a complicated, gear-and-sprocket machine. For the purposes of sound, it must move at … Continue reading Methods of Projection

The MPAA's movie rating system--the one that brands a film R, or G, or NC-17--is very much like democracy. It's only redeeming feature is that it's better than the alternative. The alternatives to democracy and the rating system are totalitarianism and the Production Code that kept movies in line from 1934 through 1968. Not much … Continue reading The Ratings Game

If you're a subscriber, I hope you've been getting the newsletter. My Web and mail host, IX WebHosting, had some trouble with one of its mail servers that was finally resolved Wednesday night. I don't know when the problems started (sometime in October) or if if it actually effected the mailings. If you didn't receive … Continue reading Rufus T. and George W.

As the holidays pass, life returns to normal. I even managed to get out and see some movies. And one of them challenged a long-cherished belief. Good Night, and Good Luck. (the comma and period are part of the title) is based on well-documented historical events, and it follows those events"”as near as I can … Continue reading Smoking in Black and White