Who cut the cheese?
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Archives
Top winners at Sundance 2013 and their trailers
“Fruitvale” is the hands-down champ at
Sundance 2013, and its 26-year-old director, Ryan Coogler, is the toast of the town. It’s based on the story of Oscar Grant, a young black man shot in the back by Oakland transportation police on New Year’s Day 2009. Starting with actual cell phone footage of the death, it unreels into fiction to retrace the last hours of his life. Go here for a story by Entertainment Weekly.
There are many categories at Sundance. Here are the trailers for the top ones. Click here for the complete list of 2012 winners.
“Fruitvale,” winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic, and the category’s Audience Award.
“Blood Brother,” winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and the cateory’s Audience Award:
“A River Changes Course” from Cambodia, winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary:
“Jiseul” from South Korea, winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic:
The Audience Award, winner of the World Cinema Dramatic:
“The Square (Al Midan),” from Egypt, winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary: , U.S.A.
Patty Andrews: Last call for the Bugle Girl
Patty Andrews of Andrews Sisters rallied troops
By BOB THOMAS, Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Patty Andrews never served in the military, but she and her singing sisters certainly supported the troops.
During World War II, they hawked war bonds, entertained soldiers overseas and boosted morale on the home-front with tunes like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B” and “I Can Dream, Can’t I?”
Andrews, the last surviving member of the singing Andrews Sisters trio, died Wednesday at 94 of natural causes at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge, said family spokesman Alan Eichler in a statement.
“When I was a kid, I only had two records and one of them was the Andrews Sisters. They were remarkable. Their sound, so pure,” said Bette Midler, who had a hit cover of “Bugle Boy” in 1973.
“Everything they did for our nation was more than we could have asked for. This is the last of the trio, and I hope the trumpets ushering (Patty) into heaven with her sisters are playing ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.'”
The Andrews’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” gave Bette Midler one of her biggest hits. This video shows her performing it over a period of 30 years, always with the same choreography.
Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
Reverend Frost’s page about Sonny and Brownie.
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Why is film criticism important?
This is an excerpt from a 90-minute interview conducted in 2005 by the TV Academy’s official Archive of American Television. The following year, after cancer surgery, I would lose the ability to speak.
It was filmed on the fourth balcony set we used for the show. It wasn’t obvious on TV that the co-host chairs were elevated and angled toward each other for better eye contact. Soon after “Ebert and Roeper” was canceled, that beautiful set was destroyed.
Gene Siskel and I never taped on this set at WLS (ABC Chicago). All of our shows were taped at WTTW (PBS), WGN and WBBM (CBS).
Yes, the show did win an Emmy, from the Chicago TV Academy. It was awarded to Sneak Previews when we were originally at PBS. Below are Siskel & Ebert with Thea Flaum, our first WTTW producer, who conceived the format of the show and had the idea of putting us in a balcony.
I would give anything to watch an archive interview with Siskel, but he died in 1999, before the Archive project began.
The full 90-minute interview is online at the Archive of American Television, where you can search hundreds of interviews.
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Werner Herzog explains radioactive albino crocodiles to Stephen Colbert
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Video Archive
Christopher Hitchens at length on BBC’s Newsnight
Some 200 of my TwitterPages are linked at the right.
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Pauline Kael’s favorite film: “Menilmontant”
Maggie: What was your favorite movie in your entire life?
Pauline: In my entire life? Well, there’s a French movie that probably you’ve never heard of that I like best…
Maggie: And what was the French movie?
Pauline: “Menilmontant,” a silent movie made in 1924 by Dmitri Kirsanov starring his beautiful Russian-born wife, Nadia Sibirskaya.
–From “Afterglow: A Last Conversation With Pauline Kael” by Francis Davis
Another critic who loves it: Ed Howard.
All my TwitterPages are linked at the right.
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A cry from alone
This comment was posted by “Marg” on my blog today.
Hi Zach, Your right I do believe we are just in need of companionship. They tell me get a dog and that would be nice but it’s not what I need it would only be a patch. I have lost all my family and I try to keep busy with church and bible studies and anyone who will befriend me but when the day ends or the holidays come I am alone. When the summer comes everyone is planning their vacations with there families and talking about children and grandchildren which I will never have since my only child died. I would love even a special girlfriend to be a true friend one that feels like a sister. It is raining today and I can run to the gym and talk at people for companionship but what hurts the most is no one ever calls to see how you are not even my christian friends….I wonder sometimes if there is something unpleasant about me or are people not interested because I am alone like my friends with husbands they always look for others with husbands and don’t want you around their husband for fear you may steal him. It stands to reason they want someone that they can do things in common with which I have little to offer those people. Singles well I’ve outlived that catagory. My husband divorced me at age 28 and died at age 42 from drugs which I never enjoyed. So I’m busy , I try to do things to attract friends , I have aquaintances, what do I need? Love and companionship that is directed at me , someone to call my own that is there when something hurts or I am sick or its a holiday or to plan a vacation with or just to hold at night.
The Black Mask Boys
This must be the only photograph of most of the great hard-boiled crime writers who wrote for Black Mask magazine in the 1930s. In the back row, from left to right, are Raymond J. Moffatt, Raymond Chandler, Herbert Stinson, Dwight Babcock, Eric Taylor and Dashiell Hammett. In the front row, are Arthur Barnes, John K. Butler, W. T. Ballard, Horace McCoy and Norbert Davis.
William F. Nolan wrote novels featuring them as the Black Mask Boys.
The original photograph is online here.
Here’s the website of Black Mask Magazine.
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Jonathan Rosenbaum at 70: A tribute
Three friends make a tribute to my own good friend and inspiration, Jonathan Rosenbaum. They write:
To celebrate a legendary critic’s 70th birthday, two critic-filmmakers visit his home to create this intimate video present. Directed by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. Produced by Kevin B. Lee for Fandor Keyframe. Special thanks to Ben Sachs (unintentionally not in the end credits).
Rosenbaum’s Wikipedia entry, with his provocative “Alternative Top 100.
Go here for Rosenbaum’s web site.
All of Hitchcock’s cameos
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Does anybody here know what time it is?
By Roger Ebert
Note in particular what I am doing with my hands. Then see the happiness on our faces. This photo was taken when a plaque was placed on the sidewalk during Ebertfest 2010, marking my birthplace at 410 E. Washington Street in Urbana. The woman is Sally Omiston. The Ormiston family (her husband “Ormy” and their two boys Fred and Georg) lived directly across the street.
Sally celebrated her 100th birthday on Feb. 9. I received a mistaken message from Urbana (no doubt from someone who saw “100” under her photo in The News-Gazette and drew a hasty conclusion. I have never been happier to correct a mistaken tweet.
Sally taught me to tell time. Unable to speak, I’m pointing to where a wristwatch goes.
Sally’s intervention in my life may have come in the nick of time. I had my appendix removed, and when I returned to St. Mary’s Grade School, Sister Nathan did an evaluation to determine if I had lost any speed. She sent a note to my parents: “Roger doesn’t know his multiplication tables or how to read the clock.”
What grade was I in? Certainly a grade where this raised a red flag. My parents took direct action. On a cardboard that came with a shirt from the laundry, my father wrote out the tables in his sure, strong hand, using the fountain pen filled with green ink that my mother used as a bookkeeper at the Allied Finance.
I was to spend half an hour after dinner every day memorizing the tables while sitting on the living room sofa, while my parents had their coffee and read the Gazette and Courier while firing up their Luckies. The silence was punctuated from time to time by mom or dad, saying: “I see in the paper…” and by my stifled sobs. What other kid ever had such cruel parents?”
It was easier to learn about the clock. Sally had been an elementary school teacher before got married. She brought home a big wooden Playskool clock she placed on her kitchen table between us. Its hands and numbers were removable and could be replaced by the wooden slices of a Pie of Time so that any fool could see that a quarter hour or a half hour had been consumed.
On summer evenings my dad and Ormy would stand on the lawn and talk things over. This was an occasion for Ormy to smoke his pipe.
“The Ormiston Boys are allergic to tobacco smoke,” my father told me. “He’s given up on smoking his pipe indoors. A pipe smoker loves his pipe. Think how much he loves those boys!”
The Ormiston Boys, George and Fred, were enough younger than me that we existed on different planes of reality. For books of Green Stamps I got two flimsy aluminum bookcases, and stacked one on top of the other inside my bedroom door, so that when it was opened all you could see was a wall of books.
The Ormistons came over to visit one day, and when the boys started horsing around, they knocked into my cases and all my books came tumbling down. Oh, how I hated those boys.
¶
Sally Ormiston and Pastor J. Michael Smith, Grace United Methodist Church, at her 100th birthday party:
The News-Gazette reported:
Sylvia “Sally” Ormiston of Savoy is celebrating her 100th birthday with an
open house from 1 to 5 p.m. Feb. 9 at Parkview, 100 Parkview Lane, Savoy.
She was born on Feb. 8, 1913, in Witt, Ill., a daughter of George and Rose
Sellett Rushford.
She married Professor E.E. Ormiston on Dec. 21, 1940. He died on March 16, 1996.
They have two sons, George Ormiston of Georgia and Fred Ormiston of Texas; six grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
She graduated from LaSalle High School and LaSalle-Peru Junior College.
She retired from a career as a teacher in Grand Ridge, Ill., when she was
married in 1940.
She is a member of Grace United Methodist Church, the Carle Foundation
Hospital Auxiliary and the Champaign County Nursing Home Auxiliary.
Siskel & Ebert & Stern
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“This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin (nsfw)
Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer
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Buddy Hackett: Up at drama, down at comedy.
Movies / Roger Ebert
“There was a Vegas casino that offered me twice what I was making,” Buddy Hackett was explaining to me one day. “I went to look at their show room, and I said I could never work there. The money didn’t matter, because in that room I would never get a laugh.”
Why was that? I asked.
“Because the stage was above the eyeline of the audience. You had to look up to see the act. It was great for sight-lines but lousy for comedy, because you can never laugh at anybody you’re looking up at. A comic, you have to be looking down at him. My favorite rooms, the audience is above the stage, stadium-style.”
What’s the logic behind that?
“You look up at drama, down at comedy. A singer, looking up is okay. A comic, it’s death.”
So when you go to the movies, I said, should you sit in the balcony for a comedy and on the main floor for a drama?
“Seems to me,” he said.
This was one of many conversations we had in the mid-1990s, when we both found ourselves installed simultaneously at the Pritikin Longevity Center, which at that time was on the beach at Santa Monica. Hackett, a great comedian who died this week at 78, was engaged in a lifelong struggle with weight and cholesterol, although once he had me feel his calf muscles: “Hard as steel! I’m a great skier.”
Hackett lived nearby, but checked into Pritikin to isolate himself from life’s temptations. Other regulars were Rodney Dangerfield and Mel Brooks, who ate at Pritikin twice a week with his wife, Anna Bancroft. At lunch, Hackett would preside over a table of his guests, other comics, including George Gobel, Jan Murray and Soupy Sales.
Once a woman approached the table and said she had a joke she wanted to tell.
“Lady,” said Hackett, “go tell your joke at a table where amateurs are sitting. We’re professionals here. We got all the jokes we can handle.”
One night Buddy brought over a tape of “Bud and Lou” (1978), a movie where he played comedian Lou Costello. He felt he’d done good work in a less than great film, and wanted his Pritikin friends to see it. Hackett’s Costello comes across, as many comics do in private life, as a lonely and sad man, and I felt Hackett did a good job of portraying that–even though I never sensed gloom in his own makeup.
Hackett said he once thought he was on the edge of a great movie role. Martin Scorsese called him up and said he wanted to come over and talk to him about working in “GoodFellas.”
“He comes over to the house,” Buddy says, “and he tells me the scene. Ray Liotta is walking into the nightclub and the waiters seat him, and I’m on stage doing my act. So I ask, what do you want me to say? Where’s the script? And Scorsese says there isn’t any script. I’ll just be in the background telling part of a joke. PART of a joke? “
Hackett’s face grew dark.
“I stood up and walked over to the window. I invited Scorsese to stand next to me. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful lawn?’ I said. He agreed that it was one of the most beautiful lawns he had ever seen.
“Take a real good look,” I told him, “because you will never be back in this house again. Part of a joke! Get the fuck outta here!”
One day I told Buddy a true story. It took place in 1979, I said. Jack Lemmon came to Chicago to promote “The China Syndrome.” He told Gene Siskel and myself he wanted to relax, and suggested we go to the Gaslight Club, where he heard there was good jazz.
Four women at another table were celebrating a birthday. They looked at our table and giggled, and finally one of them approached our table with a menu.
“Here comes the autograph request,” Lennon said.
“Mr. Siskel,” the woman said, “I enjoy your reviews so much! Would you autograph my menu?”
Gene agreed with a smile.
“You’ve made my day,” the woman said.
“In that case,” Gene said, “your day isn’t over. Did you notice who I am sitting with?”
The woman looked over.
“Ohmigod! Jack Lemmon! Oh, Mr. Lemmon, you are my favorite actor. I didn’t expect to see you here! Would you sign my menu?”
Lemmon agreed. Then Gene said, “And your day still isn’t over. Look who’s sitting right here!”
The woman looked at me, and her face broke into a delighted smile.
“Buddy Hackett!!!” she said.
After I told this story to Buddy, he nodded thoughtfully.
“The question is,” he said, “didn’t she know how I look, or didn’t she know how you look?”
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Will Rogers on unemployment
More than 170 of my TwitterPages are linked in the right column.
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