Roger Ebert Movie Review

Weekend Box Office: May 23-26, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tops the box office with $126.9 million

Daily Box Office: Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tops Wednesday's box office with $6.0 million

by Roger Ebert I am not the person to review this movie. Perhaps you will enjoy a review from someone who disqualifies himself at the outset, doesn’t much like most of the characters and is bored by their bubble-brained conversations. Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: “Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.”

The Fall / **** (R)

"The Fall" (R, 117 minutes). In a Los Angeles hospital, circa 1915, a paralyzed stunt man (LeePace) enthralls an angelic little girl (Catinca Untaru) with an adventure story that her mind supplies extraordinary images for. The film is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms, directed by Tarsem ("The Cell"). A movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it. Rating: Four stars.

The Strangers / *1/2 (R)

"The Strangers" (R, 90 minutes). Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman star as a couple with romantic difficulties who go for the night to their deserted summer cottage and are terrorized by home invaders. Competently acted and directed, but what a despairing exercise in nihilism. Rating: One and a half stars.

Mister Lonely / ** (No MPAA rating)

"Mister Lonely" (Unrated, 112 minutes). An odd, desperate film, lost in its own audacity, and yet there are passages of surreal beauty and preposterous invention. A Michael Jackson impersonator meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator in Paris, and she takes him home to the Highlands of Scotland to meet her extended family of other impersonators, including Charlie Chaplin, the Pope, Abraham Lincoln, the Three Stooges and Madonna. Strange and baffling. There is the temptation to forgive its trespasses simply because it is utterly, if pointlessly, original. Rating: Two stars.

Constantine's Sword / *** (No MPAA rating)

"Constantine's Sword" (Unclassified; 95 minutes). An engrossing tour through history with author and former Catholic priest James Carroll, who touches on the misalliance of church and state, evangelicalism at the Air Force Academy, the shadowy dealings of the Church and the Nazis, the crusaders who massacred Jewish villages, his father the Air Force general, and surprising individual stories. Too much ground to cover, really but Carroll is the kind of conversationalist you urge to keep on talking. Rating: Three stars.

Recount / *** ()

By Roger Ebert Now showing on HBO. Katherine Harris was a piece of work. The Florida Secretary of State during the 2000 elections is not intended as the leading role in "Recount," an HBO docudrama about that lamentable fiasco, but every time Laura Dern appears on the screen, she owns it. Watch her stride into a room of powerful men, pick up a little paper packet of sugar for her coffee, and shake it with great sweeping arm gestures as if she were a demonstrator in an educational film.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull / ***1/2 (PG-13)

By Roger Ebert "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Say it aloud. The very title causes the pulse to quicken, if you, like me, are a lover of pulp fiction. What I want is goofy action--lots of it. I want man-eating ants, swordfights between two people balanced on the backs of speeding jeeps, subterranean caverns of gold, vicious femme fatales, plunges down three waterfalls in a row, and the explanation for flying saucers. And throw in lots of monkeys.

Roman de Gare / **1/2 (R)

"Roman de Gare" (R, 103 minutes). The intriguing character Dominique Pinon, who looks like an insect when she's chewing gum, can do a lot of things at the same time. According to the labyrinthine plot of this movie, he is perhaps an escaped serial killer, a ghost writer, or a runaway husband. He meets the heroine (Audrey Dana) at 3 a.m. at a highway cafe, where she has been dumped by a jealous boyfriend. And in Claude Lelouch's twister, which is too clever by half, various possibilities of his possible identities loop back upon themselves. Also starring Fanny Ardant, Truffaut's widow, as an elegant best selling novelist. Rating; Two and a half stars.

Reprise / ** (R)

"Reprise" (No MPAA rating, 105 minutes). If there was ever a movie that seems written and directed by its characters, that movie is Joachim Trier's "Reprise." Here is an ambitious and romantic portrait of two young would-be writers that seems made by ambitious and romantic would-be filmmakers. In the movie, the young heroes idolize Norway's greatest living writer, who tells one of them his novel is good and shows promise, except for the ending, where he shouldn't have been so poetic. The movie itself is good and shows promise, except for the ending, when Trier shouldn't have been so poetic. Not only does "Reprise" generate itself, it contains its own review. Rating: Two stars.

Great Movie: My Man Godfrey (1936)

By Roger Ebert When Carole Lombard and the family maid discuss the newly hired butler, we can read her mind when she says, "I'd like to sew his buttons on sometime, when they come off." In 1936, when elegant men's formalwear didn't use zippers, audiences must have had an even better idea of what she was thinking. The two women both have crushes on Godfrey (William Powell), a homeless man who Lombard, competing in a scavenger hunt, discovers living at the city dump. Lombard wins the hunt by producing Godfrey at a society ball and then, during an argument with her bitchy sister and loony mother, hires him to be the butler for her rich family. "Do you buttle?" she asks him, so crisply and directly that she could mean anything, or everything. Her romantic obsession is hopeless because Godfrey has transformed himself overnight from an unshaven bum into a polished, sophisticated man who prides himself on his proper behavior. When she grabs him and kisses him, he regards her with utter astonishment.

Movie Answer Man: Beauties in black and white

Q. You asked if readers raised on color had any thoughts on the B&W issue. I was born in 1971, and the worlds of television and cinema were fully in color. I grew up "hating" black and white, and dismissed it as something that was only used because there was no better option. In my teenage years, I saw two films that used black and white when color was readily available, and it worked exceptionally well: Woody Allen's "Manhattan," and David Lynch's "Eraserhead". These films convinced me that black and white is beautiful,and can help in the creation of mood and theme (although Lynch might have done "Eraserhead" in B&W for financial reasons). So, to the reader who wants to expose her children to films that they will enjoy, and wonders if using the color versions will help that process--I say, go for it! If they truly learn to love film the way I did, they will discover that b&w is an option, not a drawback. I would rather a young person watch a colorized old film than not watch it at all, and hopefully someday they will love it enough to see it the way it was intended to be seen. (Scott Mobley, Las Vegas NV) A. My selection as the Great Movie on Sept. 30 will be "My Man Godfrey," a b&w masterpiece that on the Criterion DVD is as stunning a b&w movie as I've ever seen on video. I go into detail about its beauty.

People: In Memory: Sydney Pollack

By Roger Ebert Sydney Pollack, who directed some of the best mainstream films of the last 40 years and acted in some of the others, is dead at 73. He died Monday of cancer at home, in Pacific Palisades, according to a friend.