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Now I lay me down to sleep

Roger Ebert

Although most religions forbid it, human societies throughout history have accepted suicide as a reality. Sometimes, as in Japan, it was seen as a matter of personal honor. Usually it was seen as an act of despair, or a manifestation of insanity. It can also be seen as a rational act, and to assist someone in committing it can be seen as an act of mercy.

I have never, even in my darkest hours, considered suicide. But with my troubles I have been fortunate; I’ve never had unbearable physical pain. In Barry Levinson’s movie “You Don’t Know Jack,” Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s best friend says his mother told him: “Imagine the worst toothache you’ve ever had. Now

imagine that’s how it feels in every bone of your body.”

The spheres of the music

Roger Ebert

What do you think of while you listen to classical music? Do you have an education in music, and think of the composer’s strategies, or the conductor’s interpretation? Do you, in short, think in words at all? I never do, and I suppose that would make me incompetent as a music critic. I fall into a reverie state.

Hugh Hefner has been good for us

Roger Ebert

From the moment that Hal Holmes and I slipped quietly into his basement and he showed me his father’s hidden collection of Playboy magazines, the map of my emotional geography shifted toward Chicago. In that magical city lived a man named Hugh Hefner who had Playmates possessing wondrous bits and pieces I had never seen before. I wanted to be invited to his house.

I was trembling on the brim of puberty, and aroused not so much by the rather sedate color “centerfold” of an undressed woman, as by the black and white photos that accompanied them. These showed an ordinary woman (I believe it was Janet Pilgrim) entering an office building in Chicago, and being made up for her “pictorial.” Made up! Two makeup artists were shown applying powders and creams to her flesh. This electrified me. It made Pilgrim a real person. In an interview she spoke of her life and ambitions.

Why I’m so conservative

Roger Ebert

For some time past I’ve realized I am profoundly conservative. No, not in my politics. In my thinking about the movies, and particularly about how best to experience them. This may be a character flaw, but I cherish it, and believe it helps my criticism. I adhere to the notion that the best way to see a movie is by light projected through celluloid onto a large screen in front of a sizable audience that gives it their full attention. The key words here are projected, celluloid, large screen and attention.

Video games can never be art

Roger Ebert

Having once made the statement above, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to be a fool’s errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say “never,” because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

The best train set a boy could want: 2011 edition

Roger Ebert

The 2011 edition of a movie critic’s dream unreels again this week. In my own home town, I’ll be able to show the films of my choice in a classic movie palace, flawlessly projected on a giant screen before a movie-loving audience. To paraphrase Orson Welles when he was given the run of RKO Radio Pictures to make his own movie, it’s the biggest train set a boy could ever want.

Ebertfest 2011 runs April 27-May 1. The passes have been sold but we’ve always been able to find room for everyone in line inside the 1,600-seat Virginia Theater. Its long-term renovation continued this year with work on the lobby, the concession stand and the upstairs lobby. The marquee is a work in progress.

Nil by mouth

Roger Ebert

I mentioned that I can no longer eat or drink. A reader wrote: “That sounds so sad. Do you miss it?” Not so much really. Not anymore. Understand that I was never told that after surgery I might lose the ability to eat, drink and speak. Eating and drinking were not mentioned, and it was said that after surgery I might actually be able to go back to work on television.

Success in such surgery is not unheard of. It didn’t happen that way. The second surgery was also intended to restore my speaking ability. It seemed to hold together for awhile, but then, in surgeon-speak, also “fell apart.”

The best films of the decade

Roger Ebert

“Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in “Synecdoche” (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He’s like a

We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings

Roger Ebert

Inside many superhero stories is a Greek tragedy in hiding. There is the godlike hero, and he is flawed. In early days his weaknesses were simplistic, like Superman’s vulnerability to Kryptonite. Then Spider-Man was created as an insecure teenager, and comic books began to peer deeper. Now comes the “Watchmen,” with their origins as 1940s goofballs, their development into modern costumed vigilantes, and the laws against them as public nuisances. They are human. Although they have extraordinary physical powers, they aren’t superheroes in the usual sense. Then everything changes for Jon Osterman, remade after a nuclear accident as Dr. Manhattan. He isn’t as human as Batman, but that can be excused because he isn’t human at all.

He is the most metaphysically intriguing character in modern superhero movies. He not only lives in a quantum universe, but is aware that he does, and reflects about it. He says, “This world’s smartest man means no more to me than does its smartest termite.” He lives outside time and space. He explains that he doesn’t see the past and the future, but he does see his

410 East Washington Street

Roger Ebert

I was born at the center of the universe, and have had good fortune for all of my days. The center was located at the corner of Washington and Maple streets in Urbana, Illinois, a two-bedroom white stucco house with green canvas awnings, evergreens and geraniums in front and a white picket fence enclosing the back yard. Hollyhocks clustered thickly by the fence. There was a barbeque grill back there made by my father with stone and mortar, a dime embedded in its smokestack to mark the year of its completion.

There was a mountain ash tree in the front yard, and three more down the parking on the side of the house. These remarkable trees had white bark that could be peeled loose, and their branches were weighed down by clusters of red-orange berries. “People are always driving up and asking me about those trees,” my father said. He had planted them himself, and they were the only ones in town–perhaps in the world. They needed watering in the summertime, which he did by placing five-gallon cans under them with small holes drilled in their bottoms. These I carefully filled with the garden hose from the back yard, while making rainbow sprays over the grass around.

What do you mean by a miracle?

Roger Ebert

I’m not a miracle. And neither are the Chilean miners. We are all alive today for perfectly rational reasons. Yet there is a common compulsion to describe unlikely outcomes as miraculous — if they are happy, of course. If sad, they are simply reported on, or among the believing described as “the will of God.” Some disasters are so horrible they don’t qualify as the will of God, but as the work of Satan playing for the other team.

Cannes #1: On a darkling plain

Roger Ebert

Fifty years ago, the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes was Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” More every year I realize that it was the film of my lifetime. But indulge me while I list some more titles.

The other entries in the official competition included “Ballad of a Soldier,” by Grigori Chukhrai; “Lady with a Dog,” by Iosif Kheifits; “Home from the Hill,” by Vincente Minnelli; “The Virgin Spring,” by Ingmar Bergman;” “Kagi,” by Kon Ichikawa; “L’Avventura,” by Michelangelo Antonioni; “Le Trou,” by Jacques Becker; “Never on Sunday,” by Jules Dassin; “Sons and Lovers,” by Jack Cardiff; “The Savage Innocents,” by Nicholas Ray, and “The Young One,” by Luis Bunuel.

And many more. But I am not here at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival to mourn the present and praise the past.

The Texas School Book Repository

Roger Ebert

Do the schoolbook publishers of America have standards? Courage? Ethics? In what sense do they stand behind their product? For “product” they sometimes produce, and not textbooks in the traditional sense. I ask these questions for a reason.

Right-wingers from Texas will be deciding what will be added and taken out of the textbooks of America’s school children. They form the majority of the 15-member Texas State Board of Education. They believe current textbooks are slanted toward a liberal viewpoint, and that discussion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which one member describes as “hooey,” wrongly excludes a consideration of Creationism.