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King, you’re one of the best!

Roger Ebert

I met John McHugh in the autumn of 1966, when I was a cub reporter on the Sun-Times and he was a rewrite man, two years my senior, on the Chicago Daily News. We are still best friends. He worked the overnight shift, and among his duties was taking calls from readers.

After midnight, they wanted to settle bets. “And what do you say?” McHugh would ask. He would listen, and then reply,

“You’re 100% correct. Put the other guy on.” Pause. “And what do you say?” Pause. “You’re 100% correct.” If he was asked for his name, he said, “John T. Greatest, spelled with three Ts.” He explained, “They can never figure out that that means.”

The birds of prey are circling

Roger Ebert

Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail? Why are so many showbiz journalists like hyenas circling a crippled prey? Why do so many gossip columnists behave like jilted lovers or betrayed investors, livid with anger at what they once valued so highly? Why are a few stars singled out like the victims of school bullies? Why do the box office receipts of “Australia” appear in almost every news outlet, but an actual review of it appears in so few?

Here is a recent headline: “Australia” Another Nicole Kidman Letdown. We learn in the attached story from Reuters:

Twentieth Century Fox appears to have given up on director Baz Luhrmann’s latest period epic in North America, and is hoping that foreign sales will rescue the costly picture. The movie has sold just $44.3 million worth of tickets at the U.S. and Canadian box office after five weekends, and is shaping up to be the latest in a line of disappointments for its star, Nicole Kidman.

Fancy that. A mere $44.3 million. An attached chart documents Kidman’s previous movies and their grosses, to document her “line of disappointments.” I have left out two titles where she only did voices. Here are the rest of the titles, going back to 2002:

Cannes #5: Even now already is it in the world

Roger Ebert

There’s electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” and we are ready for anything. We’d better be. Von Trier’s film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, “No!” At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing “That’s Entertainment!”

Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It’s been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I’ve ever have seen.

If, as they say, you are not prepared for “disturbing images,” I advise you to just just stop reading now.

“The Artist” and the new Herzog

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Entry #2I have not quite become jaded. Sometimes I fear that I am so familiar with movie formulas that some films don’t have a fair chance. Then I go to see Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist” and it tells a story that would have been familiar in the late 1920s, when it is set, and I begin by admiring its technique and am surprised to find, half way through, that I actually care how it turns out.

Roger’s little rule book

Roger Ebert

We critics can’t be too careful. Employers are eager to replace us with Celeb Info-Nuggets that will pimp to the mouth-breathers, who underline the words with their index fingers whilst they watch television. Any editor who thinks drugged insta-stars and the tragic Amy Winehouse are headline news ought to be editing the graffiti on playground walls. As the senior newspaper guy still hanging onto a job, I think the task of outlining enduring ethical ground rules falls upon me.

My old man

Roger Ebert

Until the day he died, I always called him “Daddy.” He was Walter Harry Ebert, born in Urbana in 1902 of parents who had emmigrated from Germany. His father, Joseph, was a machinist working for the Peoria & Eastern Railway, known as the Big Four. Daddy would take me out to the Roundhouse on the north side of town to watch the big turntables turning steam engines around. In our kitchen, he always used a knife “your

grandfather made from a single piece of steel.”

My new job. In his own words.

Roger Ebert

My new voice belongs to Edward Herrmann. He has allowed me to use it for 448 pages. The actor has recorded the audiobook version of my memoir, Life Itself, and my author’s copies arrived a few days ago.

Listening to it, I discovered for the first time a benefit from losing my own speaking voice: If I could still speak, I suppose I would probably have recorded it myself, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that anywhere as near as well as Herrmann does.

My editor, Mitch Hoffman, suggested a few readers he was confident would do a good job. Herrmann’s name leaped up from his email.

Cannes #10: And, at last, the winners are…

Roger Ebert

Now I understand why Cannes 2009 opened with Pixar’s “Up.” They knew what was coming. Has there ever been a more violent group of films in the Official Selection? More negative about humanity? More despairing? With a greater variety of gruesome, sadistic, perverted acts? You know you’re in deep water when the genuinely funniest film in the festival is by a Palestinian in today’s Israel, whose material includes a firing squad, a mother with Alzheimers, and a hero with dark circles under his eyes who never utters a single word.

And most of these films were not over quickly. Not that there’s something wrong with a film running over the invisible 120-minute finish line, if it needs to, and is a good film. I regret that not all the 21 films in this year’s selection were good. And that’s not just me. The daily critics’ panel for Le Film Francais was as negative as I’ve seen it, even giving a pas de tout (“worthless”) to a film I would defend, von Trier’s extreme but courageous “Antichrist.”

In the past I have felt the elation of discovery at Cannes, seeing for the first time films like Kielowski’s “Red,” Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” Spielberg’s “E.T.”–and premieres by Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Chen Keige, Fassbinder, Altman, Herzog, Scorsese. Titans bestrode the earth in those days. This year the only ecstatic giants, love them or hate them, were Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino.

The world according to Saint Tilda

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Entry #3

If more people were like Tilda Swinton, what a better world this would be. She looks people straight in the eye. She levels. She notices and cares about them–not just the big shots, but everyone. She still corresponds with Hilde Back, the 83-year-old Swedish woman who was the heroine of the great documentary “A Small Act” at Ebertfest 2011. She personally helps haul a trailer across the north of Scotland so that movies can be exhibited in towns without cinemas. She is formidably intelligent and forthright. She has a good heart. She freshens my faith in the cinema.

The ultimate mystery

Roger Ebert

After the release of his “Standard Operating Procedures,” the director Errol Morris writes me: This movie seems to have incited controversy, almost as if I broke some sort of rule or series of rules. The ultimate mystery is people. They are often mysteries not only to others but to themselves. Almost everyone wants to dismiss the bad apples rather than look at them, as if there is nothing inherently interesting in their stories. Oh well. The words “to themselves” hold the key.

The best animated films of 2010

Roger Ebert

I found some good animated films in 2010, but I didn’t find ten. And it’s likely that only two of them are titles most moviegoers have had the chance to see. My list reflects a growing fact: Animation is no longer considered a form for children and families. In some cases it provides a way to tell stories that can scarcely be imagined in live action. The classic example is the Japanese “Grave of the Fireflies” (left), about two children growing up on their own after the Bomb fall.

Cannes postmortem. Is that the wrong word?

Roger Ebert

Everyone seems to believe that Tim Burton and his festival jury did the best they could with slim pickings. The 2010 winners at Cannes were for the most part fair, well-distributed, uncontroversial and safe. You could say the same about the films in the festival.

Last year I left Cannes having seen “Up,” “Precious,” “Antichrist,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Broken Embraces,” “A Prophet,” “The White Ribbon,” “Police, Adjective,” “Thirst,” and many other good films. Of the first “Antichrist” screening, I wrote: “There’s electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row.”

Cannes #6: Of emotion and its absence

Roger Ebert

Of the 12 films I’ve seen at Cannes, the most warmly cheered has been the South African “Life, Above All.” That’s possibly more significant than in other years.

The audiences at Cannes this year have been oddly restrained, and there’s less clapping at the names of directors; even Jean-Luc Godard received only perfunctory applause. Is this becoming less a directors’ festival and more a trade fair?

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.

“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.