The limerick’s a form metronomical,
For the telling of jokes anatomical.
Yet the best ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Auden, that very good man
Said a limerick need not merely scan.
But put up a struggle
And bend itself double
To be decent, and fail at the plan.
• Bill Stamets and Roger Ebert
The 46th Chicago International Film Festival will play this year at one central location, on the many screens of the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois. A festivalgoers and filmmakers’ lounge will be open during festival hours at the Lucky Strike on the second level. Tickets can be ordered online at CIFF’s website, which also organizes the films by title, director and country. Tickets also at AMC; sold out films have Rush Lines. More capsules will be added here.
Help me out here. There’s something I’ve been spending a couple of months trying to get my head around. Why does BP enjoy such a peculiar immunity after having apparently been culpable in the Gulf oil spill? What is the nature of its invisible protective shield?
All I know is what you know. Like most other ordinary citizens, I try to keep up the best that I can with the news. I am not, as they say, walking in the corridors of power.
But you know, the more I read, the more I imagine those corridors smelling like those disinfectant cakes you see at the bottoms of urinals.
When I first saw it in 1999, Maxivision48 produced a picture four times as good as conventional film. It still does. With 3D fading and the possibilities offered by a new Red camera, its time may be here at last.
Dean Goodhill, the inventor of MV48, laid low while seeking studio backing. Now, he tells me, the time has come to go public. After reading the recent letter from Walter Murch I ran on my blog, he wrote me one of his own. — RE
Does a dog know how it looks? It knows how another dog looks, certainly. It can tell friends from foes from strangers at a distance, aided greatly by smell. But does it place much importance on appearance? I know a smaller dog may back away from a larger one, but does that involve a mental weigh-in? I think it has more to do with the display of emotions, and I’ve seen big dogs back away in the face of small dogs in a
In a back row of the Virginia Theater in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, you will see a raised platform just the right size to hold a reclining chair. This is my throne at Ebertfest. Because of havoc wrought by surgery to my back and right shoulder, I cannot sit comfortably in an ordinary chair. Here I recline at the side of my bride, looking upon the packed houses.
Long-suffering readers will have read many times about my dislike of lists, especially lists of the best or worst movies in this or that category. For years they had value only in the minds of feature editors fretting that their movie critics had too much free time. (“For Thursday’s food section, can you list the 10 funniest movies about pumpkin pie?”) Now their value has shot way up with the use of slide shows, a diabolical time-waster designed to boost a web site’s page visits.
In a field with much competition, Number One on my list of Most Shameless Lists has got to be Time mag’s recent list of the “Best 140 Tweeters.” How did the magazine present this? That’s right, on 140 pages of a slideshow. Considering that the list had no meaning at all except as some hapless intern’s grindwork, I’d say that was a bold masterstroke. I say so even though I was on it. Do you think I would click through 140 pages just looking for my name? You bet I did. And then stopped clicking.
I interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to try explain again what I believe about the issue of the American flag t-shirts in California schools.
In my earlier piece, I made the mistake of using wit and irony. I found many readers who do not receive on those wave lengths. There’s a compulsion in some precincts of the Right to find others guilty of crimes out of proportion to the perceived offense. Anyone who is a liberal, as I am, must therefore be socialist, racist, and so on.
This, for the benefit of future rock historians, is the transscript of a screenplay I wrote in the summer of 1977. It was tailored for the historic punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and was to be directed by Russ Meyer and produced by the impresario Malcolm McLaren. It still carried its original title, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” although shortly after I phoned up with a suggested title change, which was accepted: “Who Killed Bambi?” I wrote about this adventure in my blog entry McLaren & Meyer & Rotten & Vicious & me. Discussions with Meyer, McLaren and Rene Daalder led to this draft. All I intend to do here is reprint it. Comments are open, but I can’t discuss what I wrote, why I wrote it, or what I should or shouldn’t have written. Frankly, I have no idea.
View image Kari Sylwan plays the maid who cradles a dead woman (Harriet Andersson) in Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers.”
One of the most prolific and intelligent contributors to the comments section of the blog is Solomon Wakeling. I wrote in curiosity, asking to know more about him. He replied that he is a 24-year-old law student from Australia, and that one of his problems is, “I read too many books.” There was one thing he said that I felt I needed to write about in the blog: “I find your work is filled with an essentially humanitarian philosophy, dealing with concepts like redemption.”
Mike Leigh has long been a great director, but now he is surely at the top of his form. “Another Year” has premiered here and is the film everyone I talk with loves the most. It is so beautifully sure and perceptive in its record of one year in the life of a couple happily married, and their relatives and friends, not so happy. After “Vera Drake” (2004) and “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008), Leigh cannot seem to step wrong.
A women at the press conference asked Leigh (left) “did you have to make Mary so sad?” She might as well have asked, “did you have to make Tom and Gerri so happy? ”
One of the readers of this blog asked a few days ago if audiences absolutely demand that movies be linear and realistic. The question came in the thread about “Cloud Atlas,” which in fact is realistic, at least in the sense that we understand stories set in the past and in the future–although we don’t often get six of them in the same film. There’s nothing in the film we can’t understand in the moment, although we may be hard-pressed to understand how, or if, they fit together. And if the actors play multiple characters of various races, genders and ages, well, we understand that too.
The blog entry “In Search of Redemption” inspired an outpouring of reader comments remarkable not only for their number but for their intelligence and thought. It became obvious that many of us go to the movies seeking some sort of release or healing. Many of you mentioned titles that especially affected you; two of my most-admired films, “Hoop Dreams” and “Grave of the Fireflies,” were frequently listed. You all had your reasons. Now Ali Arikan, a longtime contributor to this site, has written me about why he was so affected by a relatively unlikely title, “The Out-Of-Towners” (1999). His reasons were personal; he can post them below if he chooses to. But in connection with his explanation, he quoted the first paragraph of one of my reviews.
Every year good films show at the Toronto Film festival that never open anywhere near you. This year some good films played that may never open anywhere, even if you live in Toronto–or New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin or upstairs over a Landmark Theater multiplex. Toronto is traditionally a lively marketplace for the purchase of film rights for new non-studio product: Indies, docs, foreign films. This year Harvey Weinstein paid $1 million for “A Single Man,” and that was that. One sale, one movie, one million — probably as little as Harvey has paid for a movie in some time.
Stands at yellow, rising toward orange
The makers of independent films don’t have to send to learn for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for them. The bottom fell out of the market. That doesn’t mean there were no other offers, but it means there were none that the sellers felt able to accept. It shows a collapse of confidence in the prospects of independent film distribution.
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Anne Thompson, who always knows what she’s talking about. In her blog Thompson on Hollywood, she leads: “The old independent market is over.” She quotes the producer Jonathan Dana: “It’s a massacre. It’s the end of funny money.”
Thompson names a few of the films going home without deals, and it’s depressing:
Today, fifteen years after I first saw it, I believe “Hoop Dreams” is the great American documentary. No other documentary has ever touched me more deeply. It was relevant then, and today, as inner city neighborhoods sink deeper into the despair of children murdering children, it is more relevant. It tells the stories of two 14-year-olds, Arthur Agee and William Gates, how they dreamed of stardom in the NBA, and how basketball changed their lives. Basketball, and this film.
Photo copyright by Roka Walsh. Used with permission
“Hoop Dreams” observed its 15th anniversary Wednesday night at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Agee and Gates were both there. Gates, now a minister, observed that in one period of time he buried 20 victims of gang violence, 16 of them under 16. Agee said when he looks at his friends in the film today, “ten of them are no longer with us.” Yet there they sat, men of around 40 now, articulate, thoughtful, and spoke about how their lives began to change on a Chicago playground 22 years ago when a movie camera showed up.
“We started out to make a little 30-minute documentary about a kid who had basketball dreams,” Steve James, the director of the film, said Wednesday night. This was at a benefit for Kartemquin Films, the 40-year-old Chicago documentary group that produced the film.
When I began as a film critic, Jean-Luc Godard was widely thought to have reinvented the cinema with “Breathless” (1960). Now he is almost 80 and has made what is said to be his last film, and he’s still at the job, reinventing. If only he had stopped while he was ahead. That would have been sometime in the 1970s. Maybe the 1980s. For sure, the 1990s. Without a doubt, before he made his Cannes entry, “Film: Socialisme.”
The thousands of seats in the Auditorium Debussy were jammed, and many were turned away. We lucky ones sat in devout attention to this film, such is the spell Godard still casts. There is an abiding belief that he has something radical and new to tell us. It is doubtful that anyone else could have made this film and found an audience for it.
I didn’t attend the April 30 critics’ screening for “Thor” because it was at the same time Ebertfest was showing “A Small Act,” about an 88-year-old woman named Hilde Back. She’d flown from Sweden, and I wanted be onstage to present her with the Golden Thumb. Missing “Thor 3D” was not an inconsolable loss, because Richard Roeper covered it for the paper and I was able to see it in Chicago in nice, bright 2D. The house was surprisingly well-populated for a 8:50 p.m. screening on a Monday, suggesting that some people, at least, will make an effort to avoid 3D.
“Thor” is failure as a movie, but a success as marketing, an illustration of the ancient carnival tactic of telling the rubes anything to get them into the tent.
Blind people develop a more acute sense of hearing. Deaf people can better notice events on the periphery, and comprehend the quick movements of lips and sign language. What about people who lose the ability to speak? We expand other ways of communicating.
There are three ways I can “speak.” I can print notes. I can type on my laptop, and a built-in voice says them aloud. I can use my own pidgin sign language, combining waving, pointing, shrugging, slapping my forehead, tracing letters on my palm, mime, charades, and more uses of “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” than I ever dreamed of.
Click on image to expand
Another path is open to me in the age of the internet. I can talk with new friends all over the world. Writing has always been second nature to me, as satisfying in a different way as speaking. Maybe because I was an only child with lots of solitary time, I always felt the need to write, and read. I was editor of my grade school, high
When I caught up with “Iron Man,” a broken hip had delayed me and the movie had already been playing for three weeks. What I heard during that time was that a lot of people loved it, that they were surprised to love it so much, and that Robert Downey Jr.’s performance was special. Apart from that, all I knew was that the movie was about a big iron man. I didn’t even know that a human occupied it, and halfway thought that the Downey character’s brain had been transplanted into a robot, or a fate equally weird.
Hollywood has the same problem with the Oscars that the Republicans are having with their primaries. They can’t seem to agree on a candidate with a broad appeal to the base. All nine Oscar finalists were, like Mitt Romney, good enough to be nominated. But none of them appealed to average multiplex moviegoers, just as it’s said Romney doesn’t appeal to the GOP base.
