Siskel & Ebert recommend great summer movies
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Features
He lives in Detroit, in the old Packard plant
Part of the “This Must Be the Place” series of The Atlantic. URL leads to all entries in the series. Thanks to Jana J.Monji, who writes me: “I used to live in a loft space from a former factory but that was in Pasadena and not Detroit (and my place was a bit neater) than this.”
The God Gene. A breakthrough
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My NetPages are linked at the right.
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Pete Postlethwaite: 1946-2011
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Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham
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Jack Benny, 1894-1974: The man who was funny just by standing there
In October 1974, Benny canceled a performance in Dallas after suffering a dizzy spell, coupled with a feeling of numbness in his arms. Despite a battery of tests, Benny’s ailment could not be determined. When he complained of stomach pains in early December, a first test showed nothing, but a subsequent one showed he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Choosing to spend his final days at home, he was visited by close friends including George Burns, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Carson and New Zealand crooner John Rowles. He died from the disease on December 26, 1974. Bob Hope delivered the eulogy at his funeral. Mr. Benny’s will arranged for a single long-stemmed red rose to be delivered to his widowed wife, Mary Livingstone, every day for the rest of her life.–Wikipedia
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Bob Hope: Thanks for the memories
• Roger Ebert / Oct. 15, 1978
Los Angeles, California – For a lot of people, doing a comedy sketch with Charo would be enough for one day. For almost anybody, doing a comedy sketch with Charo and doing a comedy sketch in bed with Cheryl Tiegs would be more than enough for one day.
But it wasn’t enough for Bob Hope. He got up early in the morning one day last week to fly in a Lear jet to San Francisco. He let me fly along. He wanted to surprise a ballroom full of Budweiser distributors with an unscheduled walk-on during a sales convention. After a standing ovation and a few quick one-liners (“President Carter didn’t invite me to Camp David, maybe because Begin doesn’t like hams…”), Hope was back on the jet and flying down to L.A. to tape his comedy special. (Budweiser, not surprisingly, is one of the sponsors for the show.)
“It’s got a great title,” Hope said. “They’re calling it Bob Hope’s All-Star Comedy Salute to the 75th Anniversary of the World Series. I’m not sure, but I think it sets a record for the longest name of a TV show.”
Hope looked tanned and relaxed and nowhere near his 75 years; he’d worked on his material – for the walk-on and the TV special – while flying up to San Francisco, and now he’d scheduled the return flight for an interview for the World Book Year Book. His schedule accounts for every hour in the day, and he’s working somewhere almost every day of the year.
“The man continues to amaze me,” says Ward Grant, who handles Hope’s public relations. “Here he is 75 years old, and he’s working harder than he ever has. We keep statistics. Last year he did 250 personal appearances. Played 39 rounds of golf for charity. Was on more than 40 talk shows. Taped a season of TV specials. Flew tens of thousands of miles…”
Hope’s schedule is simplicity itself, for Hope. “It’s a great life,” he said. “Say I’m going somewhere to do a show. I get there, I sleep late, I have breakfast, maybe I play a round of golf somewhere, or see the sights. Then I’m on at 8 p.m., I do an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half of material, and I’m finished.
“It’s a great feeling, working in front of an audience. Keeps you fresh. I love it. But when I’m finished, I’m finished. I want to unwind. That’s why I’ve never played Vegas. They want you to do two shows a night. After the first show, I want to call it a day. I’ve never liked doing a lot of shows in one day although I’ve done it, of course, during the overseas trips to entertain GIs. And once when I wanted to set the house record at the Palace in New York, so we opened early and squeezed in a couple of extra shows. I seem to remember they had a 75-minute sea epic on the screen, and to sneak in another show we cut out 15 minutes of waves…”
It’s been a good and a bad year for Hope. It started tragically with the death of his longtime friend and sparring partner, Bing Crosby. It had its high point when Hope’s 75th birthday celebration made him the toast of Washington; he was honored by a special session of Congress, during which, he recalls with a smile, no less than three congressional house rules were broken: “The rules say members can’t recognize anyone in the gallery, or tell jokes, or sing. They did all three, if you call that singing…”
Was the congressional tribute the proudest moment of his life?
“One of the proudest, yes. There was a great moment in 1963 when President Kennedy gave me the Presidential Medal. I was standing all alone in a little room opening onto the Rose Garden, waiting to be introduced, and I had the strangest memory. Maybe it was being all alone that inspired it; I remembered standing by myself in front of the Woods Theater on Randolph Street in Chicago, and looking across the street at Henrici’s restaurant, and thinking ‘They’re eating. I’m not.’
“I was trying to break into vaudeville at the time, and not doing a very good job of it. It was just about then I decided to change my first name from Leslie to Bob.”
Why Bob?
He smiled. “It sounded chummier.”
Crosby’s death brought an end to plans for them to team up once again with Dorothy Lamour for another Road movie. But now, Hope says, he’s thinking of doing a Road movie with George Burns. “It’s terrific, the success George has had recently,” he said. “And I like to stick around him because he’s the only guy out here that’s older than I am.”
Hope’s early motion-picture days were spent at Paramount, the home studio for W. C. Fields. What was Fields like? “Absolutely unique. He had this little gag he’d pull on Paramount. They’d give him a script and he’d take it home, supposedly to study it, and then he’d call up and announce that it needed work but he thought he could fix it. Then he’d just work in one of his old vaudeville routines, and charge them $50,000. On ‘The Big Broadcast of 1933,’ for example, he stuck in a golf game that had nothing to do with the movie. What Fields didn’t know was that Paramount expected him to charge them $50,000, and he was worth it, so they budgeted for it before they ever gave him the script.”
The jet landed not far from beautiful downtown Burbank, and two hours later, Hope and Charo, he in a baseball uniform, she in an astonishing variation on a jogger’s outfit, were taping their sketch before a live audience in the NBC studios.
The audience was made up of people who just happened to be taking the studio tour when Hope needed an audience, and they looked pleased with themselves for getting to see Hope in person: Their applause and laughter seemed a couple of notches more enthusiastic than they might have been for anyone else, and I remembered a short exchange on the plane.
“I don’t want to embarrass you.” I’d said, “by referring to you as an institution…”
“Go right ahead,” Hope said with a grin.
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Update on the TSA breast milk incident
I posted this video a day ago, and it drew thousands of visits and a lot of comments. One of them was from the woman seen in the video, Stacey Armato, who clarifies the situation and adds the charge that the TSA was retaliating against her! She writes me:
Thank you all for your support. My brother in law compiled the video for me to speed up TSA footage I received of my very long screening process at PHX. There were a couple errors in his effort to put together the footage as quickly as possible. [Below] is the updated video.
I was not pregnant at the time (I got pregnant six weeks later), my son was 7mo at the time, and I arrived an hour before my flight (not 20 min)…but TSA erased almost 30 minutes of the second half of my screening. Also, it clarifies that I had filed a complaint against TSA the week before for not knowing the breast milk screening rules and their actions on February 1 were retaliatory because of that complaint.
It was a terrible experience but have so appreciated the kind words and support. I will do my best to give them a good fight.
Thank you. Stacey
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The top 2013 winners at Sundance and their trailer
“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.
Finding the mysterious Vivian Maier
I have the book. This great photographer died unknown, having made an invaluable photographic record of the Chicago of her time. The rediscovery of her work was a great event in the history of photography. The director of this film is Charlie Siskel, Gene’s nephew.
Here is a story in Variety.
This is a dog
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
Britain’s Got Talent 2012 auditions: Not what you may be expecting
Thanks for the link to Michael Jones.
The world’s largest indoor photo in 360 degrees
Go here for an interactive page of the 40 gigapixel photo of the Strahov Library in Prague.
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A conversation with Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan must be a wonderful teacher. (Photo by Roger Ebert)
Egoyan on inspiration
Egoyan on erotic scenes
 
Egoyan on Amanda Seyfried
Egoyan on Liam Neeson
Egoyan on Ingmar Bergman and the essence of cinema
Egoyan on preconceptions about actors
Egoyan on film versus video as a medium
Egoyan on the “tipping point”
Egoyan on why we’re uneasy seeing famous stars in sex scenes.
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John Prine: A concert in Ireland
I’ve already posted a lot of John Prine, but I had never seen these particular videos before. The high-quality sound and picture are explained because they’re from a concert he did for Irish television. Prine is the best poet-songwriter of his generation. Period.
This is the first time I ever heard John call “Hello in There” his favorite song, but I’m not surprised. I’ve seen more people cry during this than any other song. When we were dating, Chaz and I were on the highway and I slipped in the tape, and later I looked over and saw tears running down her cheeks.
In addition to being a song, this is a short story.
An earlier post on John Prine with more songs, and the first review he ever received.
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90 Years of history: 90 years of Time magazine covers in 120 seconds
Click here for the story: 90 years of history in 90 Time magazine covers.
They shot horses, didn’t they?
“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
Four Stars
Gloria Jane Fonda
Robert Michael Sarrazin
Alice Susannah York
Rocky Gig Young
Cinerama presents a film directed by Sydney Pollack. Screenplay by James Poe and Robert E. Thompson. Running time: 123 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG.
Review / Roger Ebert (1970)
Erase the forced smiles from the desperate faces, and what the dance marathons of the 1930s came down to was fairly simple. A roomful of human beings went around and around within four walls for weeks at a time without sleep, populating a circus for others who paid to see them. At the end, those who didn’t collapse or drop dead won cash prizes that were good money during the Depression. And the Depression, in an oblique sort of way, was the reason for it all. The marathons offered money to the winners and distraction to everyone else.
To be sure, some of the marathons got pretty grim. Contestants tried to dance their way through illnesses and pregnancies, through lice and hallucinations, and the sight of them doing it was part of the show. Beyond the hit tunes and the crepe paper and the free pig as a door prize, there was an elementary sadism in the appeal of the marathons.
Among American spectator sports, they rank with stock-car racing. There was always that delicious possibility, you see, that somebody would die. Or freak out. Or stand helplessly while his partner collapsed and he lost the investment of hundreds of hours of his life.
“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ is a masterful re-creation of the marathon era for audiences that are mostly unfamiliar with it. In addition to everything else it does, “Horses” holds our attention because it tells us something we didn’t know about human nature and American society. It tells us a lot more than that, of course, but because it works on this fundamental level as well it is one of the best American movies of the 1970s. It is so good as a movie, indeed, that it doesn’t have to bother with explaining the things in my first two paragraphs; they are all there and that’s where I found them, but they are completely incorporated into the structure of the film.
Director Sydney Pollack has built a ballroom and filled it with characters. They come from nowhere, really; Michael Sarrazin is photographed as if he has walked into the ballroom directly from the sea. The characters seem to have no histories, no alternate lives; they exist only within the walls of the ballroom and during the ticking of the official clock. Pollack has simplified the universe. He has got everything in life boiled down to this silly contest; and what he tells us has more to do with lives than contests.
Sarrazin meets Jane Fonda, and they became partners almost absentmindedly; he wasn’t even planning on entering a marathon. There are other contestants, particularly Red Buttons and Bonnie Bedelia in splendid supporting performances, and they are whipped around the floor by the false enthusiasm of Gig Young, the master of ceremonies. “Yowzza!Yowzza!” he chants, and all the while he regards the contestants with the peculiarly disinterested curiosity of an exhausted god.
There are not a lot of laughs in “Horses,” because Pollack has directed from the point of view of the contestants. They are bitter beyond any hope of release. The movie’s delicately timed pacing and Pollack’s visual style work almost stealthily to involve us; we begin to feel the physical weariness and spiritual desperation of the characters.
The movie begins on a note of alienation and spirals down from there. “Horses” provides us no cheap release at the end; and the ending, precisely because it is so obvious, is all the more effective. We knew it was coming. Even the title gave it away. And when it comes, it is effective not because it is a surprise but because it is inevitable. As inevitable as death.
The performances are perfectly matched to Pollack’s grim vision. Jane Fonda is hard, unbreakable, filled with hate and fear. Sarrazin can do nothing, really, but stand there and pity her; no one, not even during the Depression, should have to feel so without hope. Red Buttons, as the sailor who’s a veteran of other marathons and cheerfully teaches everybody the ropes, reminds us that the great character actor from “Sayanora” still exists, and that comedians are somehow the best in certain tragic roles.
And that’s what the movie comes down to, maybe. The characters are comedians trapped in tragic roles. They signed up for the three square meals a day and the crack at the $1,500 prize, and they can stop after all whenever they want to. But somehow they can’t stop, and as the hundreds and thousands of hours of weariness and futility begin to accumulate, the great dance marathon begins to look more and more like life.
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At this point, we all need a good laugh
Video by slickgigolo.
Internet Scout: Larry J. Kolb, ex-CIA.
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Harold Lloyd: A rare early short and an interview
This rare early short has been beautifully restored. Below it, a three-part interview on CBS in the early 1960s.
Harold Lloyd: Captain Kidds Kids by FMO-Movies
Thanks to my Far Flung Correspondent, Pablo Villaça in Brazil, for the CBS links.
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Helen Mirren’s breasts are the answer to everything
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