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Definitely read me second

Roger Ebert

On Oct. 16 I published a review of “Tru Loved” in which, at the end, I noted that I stopped watching after eight minutes. I also published a blog entry, “Don’t read me first!” discussing that decision and reporting that it horrified my editor, who wondered if my action was immoral. The entry has so far drawn almost 500 comments. I have read them all. I have arrived at some conclusions.

How it happened in the first place. I began viewing the movie on a DVD and taking notes. At what turned out to be the eight-minute mark, I paused the disc, looked at my notes so far, and thought, “There’s my review right there.” The movie had left me not wanting to see more.

Why I waited until the end of the review to reveal I had stopped after eight minutes. The review reproduced my thought process while arriving at my decision. My editor, Laura Emerick, thought I should have come clean at the beginning. I thought that would have made the review anticlimactic. There is a top-down structure to a lot of shorter prose that correctly places the payoff at the end. I always try to close my reviews with some kind of punchline, sometimes very serious, instead of letting them dribble off into the ether.

Cannes #9: “I got in!” and other tales, and some great beauties of the festival

Roger Ebert

Michael Barker is not only a prime moving force in indie film distribution, but one of the funniest raconteurs alive. He and Tom Bernard, also a funny man, have been the co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics since 1992, which qualifies them as the Methuselahs among studio heads. Their films have won 24 Academy Awards and 101 nominations. He knows everybody and takes little mental notes, resulting in an outpouring of stories I could tell you, but then I would have to shoot you.

Like many funny people, he exerts a magnetic attraction for funny experiences. He attracted one just the other day, when he went to see the new Paul Verhoeven film. “I’m looking at the screening schedule and I can’t believe my eyes,” he was telling us the other night. This was at dinner on the Carlton Terrace with Richard and Mary Corliss, Chaz, and our granddaughter Raven. “I’d never heard anything about this. I mean, Verhoeven just made ‘The Black Book,’ for chrissakes!

“It’s titled ‘Teenagers,’ and it’s screening in one of those little marketplace theaters in the Palais. I figure it must be a rough cut under another title or something. The place is jammed. People are fighting to get in. I’m able to get a seat. There are people sitting in the aisles, standing against the wall, flat on their backs on the floor in front of the screen. You can’t breathe.

Saint Agnes of Montparnasse

Roger Ebert

Dear Agnes Varda. She is a great director and a beautiful, lovable and wise woman, through and through. It is not enough that she made some of the first films of the French New Wave. That she was the Muse for Jacques Demy. That she is a famed photographer and installation artist. That she directed the first appearances on film of Gerard Depardieu, Phillipe Noiret–and Harrison Ford! Or that after gaining distinction as a director of fiction, she showed herself equally gifted as a director of documentaries. And that she still lives, as she has since the 1950s, in the rooms opening off each side of a once-ruined Paris courtyard, each room a separate domain.

That is not enough, because her greatest triumph is her life itself. She comes walking toward us on the sand in the first shot of “The Beaches of Agnes,” describing herself as “a little old lady, pleasantly plump.” Well, she isn’t tall. But somehow she isn’t old. She made this film in her 80th year, and she looks remarkably similar to 1967, when she brought a film to the Chicago Film Festival. Or the night I had dinner with her, Jacques and Pauline Kael at Cannes 1976. Or when she was at Montreal 1988. Or the sun-blessed afternoon when we three had lunch in their courtyard in 1990. Or when she was on the jury at Cannes 2005.

Where I draw the line

Roger Ebert

It appears that not a single TSA agent has declined to perform a full-body pat down of airline passengers. That includes patting down small children. They’re not patted down on a routine basis, but on some occasions they can be and they are. A child under 12, sometimes way under 12, may be required to remove outer clothing and be touched on such areas as the genitals.

Would you take this job? I don’t believe I would. But it’s worth reflecting that employment as a TSA agent is a good job in these hard times of high unemployment. The starting pay is $12.85 an hour, better than Wendy’s for an employee who doesn’t need a high school diploma. Wages go higher. The 40 hours of training are paid for by the government. Agents are given uniforms, badges, “a choice of health care plans,” and power.

Cannes #3: Fings ain’t wot they used t’be

Roger Ebert

Reposted from May 2009

I want things to stay the way they always were. This is insane, because they weren’t that way in the first place. I see friends who have grown older, and want them to grow younger.

In Cannes, I look around and see a new building where an old one was. A new franchise store where once there was a bookshop, or a little cafe, or a woman who thought she could make a living selling flowers.

Here was a store where I bought my papers every morning, and Tintin comics so I could improve my reading French. Now it is a Häagen-Dazs, which has splendid ice cream but is a company name made of words in no known language.

I would take my newspapers to a little cafe nearby named Le Claridge. That was when all the action in Cannes was down at the other end of the Croisette, huddled in the shadow of the old Palais. Now there is a new Palais. The dusky wooden interior of Le Claridge, where you can imagine Inspector Maigret ordering a beer and filling his pipe, is a bright new brasserie, stainless steel and glass, no smoking. In the old days you could read your paper and be left alone.

The plague of movie trivia

Roger Ebert

When people cheerfully tell me, “I have a trivia question” for you, I have a cheerful answer for them, but I rarely express it: “I’m a professional. Ask an amateur.” Why in the name of Buster would I want to clutter my memory with useless facts? During long, hard years of being asked trivia questions, I have learned one thing for sure. The person asking me is in the possession of one fact, and is pretty confident I don’t know it. Therefore, my admission of defeat will demonstrate their superiority.

I know something about the movies, and here is how I really should reply: “Before I even attempt to answer your question, let me ask you five questions to see if you are qualified to even take up the time of a busy, busy man such as myself. (1) What is the name of the film that codified the language of the cinema? (2) Who was the third great silent clown? (3) Is color intrinsically better than black-and-white? (4) What movie set key scenes on board a train going from Chicago to Urbana, Illinois? (5) Name at least five directors of the French New Wave.

Triumph over “Triumph of the Will”

Roger Ebert

I’ve just finished viewing Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” (1935) for the second or third time, and it will be a Great Movie published June 27. Whether it is truly great or only technically qualifies because of its importance is the question. As faithful readers will know, I have been avoiding this particular opportunity with dread. I felt it would involve grappling with the question of whether evil art can be great art. Since moral art can obviously be bad art, the answer to the flip side would seem to be clear enough, but it took me a fearsome struggle to thrash out “Birth of a Nation,” even though many more excuses (of time, place and context) can be offered for Griffith than for Riefenstahl.

Stranger in a wondrous land

Roger Ebert

• “Patang,” by Prashant Bhargava

I visited India only once, for less than two weeks, but I left a part of my heart there. I can’t say I know it well, but I know how it made me feel, and it seemed impossibly exotic and absolutely comfortable at the same time: I was curiously at home in a strange land.

Start at the top and work your way down

Roger Ebert

• Introduction to The Great Movies III

You’d be surprised how many people have told me they’re working their way through my books of Great Movies one film at a time. That’s not to say the books are definitive; I loathe “best of” lists, which are not the best of anything except what someone came up with that day. I look at a list of the “100 greatest horror films,” or musicals, or whatever, and I want to ask the maker, “but how do you know?” There are great films in my books, and films that are not so great, but there’s no film here I didn’t respond strongly to. That’s the reassurance I can offer.

“Melancholia” descends on Toronto

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Journal #1More than in previous years, I’m noticing the laptops in the audiences here at the Toronto Film Festival. Some of the bloggers seem to be beginning their reviews as the end credits still play. Then you see them outside, sitting on a corridor floor, their computers tethered to an electric umbilical, as they type urgently. Of course many of them share their opinions in quick conversational bursts, and a consensus develops. Most films good enough for an important festival, I think, require a little more marinating.

The ten best animated films of 2009

Roger Ebert

True, the once neglected art of animation has undergone a rebirth in both artistry and popularity. Yet having escaped one blind alley, it seems headed into another one: The dumbing-down of stories out of preference for meaningless nonstop action. Classic animated features were models of three-act stories: Recall “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” or “The Lion King.” The characters were embedded in stories that made sense and involved making decisions based on values. Now too many stories end in brain-numbing battles, often starring heroes the age of the younger audience members. Here is no food for growth and for the imagination, just brainless kinetic behavior.

Paul Galloway: A beloved legend”Sheep, Galloway, sheep!”

Roger Ebert

We will never hear his Sheep Story again. Nor will we enjoy his presence in a room, which was an invitation to good cheer. Paul Galloway, the most incomparable raconteur I ever met in a newsroom, is dead. Everyone who knew him will know what a silence that creates.

(Full article here.)

Please leave your comments and memories of Paul Galloway here.

The sudden death of film

Roger Ebert

Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly? The victory of video was quick and merciless. Was it only a few years ago that I was patiently explaining how video would never win over the ancient and familiar method of light projected through celluloid? And now Eastman Kodak, which seemed invulnerable, is in financial difficulties.

Many of the nation’s remaining mail-order company that processing film from still cameras has closed, even though stills are having a resurgence in serious market. New 35mm movie projectors are no longer manufactured, for the simple reason that used projectors, some not very old, are flooding the market.

How to win friends and influence people

Roger Ebert

I’ve been on Twitter for about two years. It’s a part of my life. A small part, but a nice diversion for someone who publicly claimed, “I will never be a twit!”

My purpose today is not to issue generalizations about Twitter, or to persuade you to take part. You may well have better ways to spend your time. What I want to do is make some observations about successful tweeting.

On orgasms

Roger Ebert

The two most important things that can happen to you in a mainstream movie are being killed and having an orgasm. Sometimes in facial close-ups it’s hard to tell one from the other. When Pauline Kael saw that wall poster in Italy saying “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” she sensed she was onto something.

O, Synecdoche, my Synecdoche!

Roger Ebert

Fair warning: I begin with a parable, continue with vast generalizations, finally get around to an argument with Entertainment Weekly, and move on to Greek gods, “I Love Lucy” and a house on fire.

The parable, The lodestars of John Doe’s life are his wife, his children, his boss, his mistress, and his pastor. There are more, but these will do. He expects his wife to be grateful for his loyalty. His children to accept him as a mentor. His boss to value him as a worker. His mistress to praise him as a sex machine. His pastor to note his devotion. These are the roles he has assigned them, and for the most part they play them.

In their own lives, his wife feels he has been over-rewarded for his loyalty, since she has done all the heavy lifting. His children don’t understand why there are so many stupid rules. His boss considers John Doe as downsizable, and fears he may also get the axe. His mistress asks herself why she doesn’t dump this creep and find an availableman. His pastor has a pretty good idea what goes on during the other six days of the week.

Eternal sun shines on the Malkovich mind

Newspaper Days, Part 2

Roger Ebert

I said the other day my first professional newspaper job was as a sports writer. It was the autumn of 1958, and I was writing for the high school paper. Urbana High sports were being covered for The News-Gazette by a young writer named Dick Saunders, who was promoted and asked to “name his own successor.” How grand that sounds! He liked my stuff and hired me at The News-Gazette for, as I said, 75 cents an hour. To see my byline in print in a real paper for the first time was an experience not unlike winning the Pulitzer Prize. Better, probably.

An affront to the eyes of God

Roger Ebert

“Mary, give me one of your Kleenexes,” my mother told my aunt one morning long ago when we were entering Holy Cross Church. She held a bobby pin in her lips, reached up to part her hair, and fixed the Kleenex on top of her head. My Aunt Mary already had her handkerchief in place.

“Why do you have to do that?” I asked.

“Because we are going into the house of the Lord,” my mother explained, “and we have to spare him from the sight of us.”

“But why?”

“It’s because we’re women, honey,” Aunt Mary said.