Roger Ebert

Ebertfest in Exile

Roger Ebert

April 24, 2008 — On Wednesday morning I became seduced by the idea that I would, after all, somehow turn up at the festival. I would get there by ambulance, limo, MediVan, who knows what? But at the present I can’t take a step with my fractured hip, so it would have taken two physical therapists to essentially haul me around. Thinking about it overnight, I decided it would be a great gesture to turn up and wave to my friends, but at what cost of pain and medical risk? The logistics just didn’t add up. So while the festival unwinds in Urbana-Champaign, I will continue therapy at this end.

Chaz told me lots of people with experience of hip injuries advised her a six-hour round trip by whatever means would likely be very painful. (Flashback to old Trevor Howard story: “Right you are, old chap! Bloody difficult! Damned painful! No sense in my going!”)

What goes around, comes around

Roger Ebert

Every writer hopes to see his book reviewed in The New York Times. The grand slam is to be reviewed twice, both daily and Sunday. On last Thursday, Janet Maslin reviewed “Life Itself” and it was the best review I could possibly hope for. On Sunday, Maureen Dowd reviewed it in the NYTimes Book Review. Another positive review–indeed, for Dowd, positively generous. (“A captivating, movable feast.”) But near the top it contained a zinger. “Ebert is a first-rate second-rate memoirist,” she wrote. I cringed, and then I smiled. If there was ever an example of snark that I fully deserved, it was this one. First of all, it is fair enough. If Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an example of the first-rate memoir, then the bar has been set pretty high.

The best documentaries of 2010

Roger Ebert

Documentaries became a box office factor with the rise of such films as “Hoop Dreams” and “Roger & Me.” Before then, there were hit music documentaries like “Woodstock” but most other nonfiction films could expect short runs in few theaters before dutiful audiences. What a small but growing minority of Friday night moviegoers is beginning to discover is that there’s a good chance the movie they might enjoy most at the multiplex is a doc.

In alphabetical order, these were the best documentaries I saw in 2010:

Making out is its own reward

Roger Ebert

Fifty years ago, a brief letter to the editor of a student newspaper led to a national furor over academic freedom. When it broke in 1959, the Leo Koch Case dominated front pages and newscasts. It remained a story for three years. Today it is so thoroughly forgotten that not even Wikipedia, which knows everything, has heard of it.

I was on the campus the whole time and later edited the same campus paper, but I don’t want to write about the case. I want to write about what was said in the letter.

It was published in the autumn of 1960. Let me take you back on a trip through time. That was a Puritan era by today’s standards.

Thank you for smoking

Roger Ebert

This stamp honoring Bette Davis was issued by the U. S. Postal Service on Sept. 18. The portrait by Michael Deas was inspired by a still photo from “All About Eve.” Notice anything missing? Before you even read this far, you were thinking, Where’s her cigarette? Yes reader, the cigarette in the original photo has been eliminated. We are all familiar, I am sure, with the countless children and teenagers who have been lured into the clutches of tobacco by stamp collecting, which seems so innocent, yet can have such tragic outcomes. But isn’t this is carrying the anti-smoking campaign one step over the line?

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart. I was first alerted to this travesty by a reader, Wendell Openshaw of San Diego, who wrote me: “Do you share my revulsion for this attempt to revise history and distort a great screen persona for political purposes? It is political correctness and revisionist history run amok. Next it will be John Wayne holding a bouquet instead of a Winchester!”

The great Chicago photographer Victor Skrebneski took one of the most famous portraits of Davis. I showed him the stamp. His response: “I have been with Bette for years and I have never seen her without a cigarette! No cigarette! Who is this impostor?” I imagine Davis might not object to a portrait of her without a cigarette, because she posed for many. But to have a cigarette removed from one of her most famous poses! What she did to Joan Crawford in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane” wouldn’t even compare to what ever would have happened to the artist Michael Deas.

Winners of the 2011 Toronto Film Festival

Roger Ebert

Nadine Labaki’s “Where Do We Go Now?” won the coveted Cadillac People’s Choice Award on Sunday at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. At the noncompetitive festival with no jury, this award is voted on by moviegoers on their way out of the theaters, and tallied by a formulas that equalizes for audience sizes.

My career in retailing

Roger Ebert

Now that I’ve been fired by Amazon, my brief career in retailing seems to be at an end. Was it only last November I was assuring Chaz I could make a quarter of a million, easy, in Amazon commissions? After all, between Twitter and Facebook I had 440,000 customers in the store every day, and if 2% of them bought a DVD, that would work out to…

Books do furnish a life

Roger Ebert

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. — Erasmus

One afternoon in Cape Town I sat in my little room at University House and took inventory. This must have been in June, winter in the southern hemisphere, and it had been raining steadily for most of a week. I was virtually alone in the student residence; the others had packed off for vacation. With an umbrella and plastic slicker I’d ventured out once or twice to the Pig and Whistle, where I favored the Ploughman’s Lunch, but to sustain life I’d laid in a supply of tinned sardines, cheddar and swiss cheese, Hob Nobs, apples, Carr’s Water Biscuits, ginger cookies, Hershey bars, biltong, sausage and a pot of jam. I had a little electric coil that would bring a cup of water to a boil, a jar of Nescafe, a box of sugar and some Instant Postum.

Not my office, but very close

I wrote in my journal: “I have not spoken to anyone since Monday. The radio is playing ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clerk. I’ve been reading some Shaw — Man and Superman. I’m wearing jeans, my cable knit sweater and my Keds. I’ve made coffee and am waiting for it to cool. Let it be recorded that at this moment I am happy.”

The new great American director

Roger Ebert

Ramin Bahrani is the new great American director. After three films, each a master work, he has established himself as a gifted, confident filmmaker with ideas that involve who and where we are at this time. His films pay great attention to ordinary lives that are not so ordinary at all. His subjects so far have been immigrants working hard to make a living in America. His fourth film, now in preparation, will be a Western. His hero will be named Tom. Well, he couldn’t very well be named Huckleberry.

The Old West, too, was a land of immigrants, many of them speaking no English. But Bahrani never refers to his characters as immigrants. They are new Americans, climbing the lower rungs of the economic ladder. There is the Pakistani in “Man Push Cart,” who operates a coffee-and-bagel wagon in Manhattan. The Latino kid in “Chop Shop,” surviving in a vast auto parts bazaar in the shadow of Shea Stadium. The taxi driver from Senegal in “Goodbye Solo,” who works long hours in Winston-Salem, N.C. [“Solo” opens March 27 in Chicago and New York.] These people are not grim and depressed, but hopeful when they have little to be hopeful about. They aren’t walking around angry. Wounded, sometimes. They plan to prevail.

Does anyone want to be “well-read?”

Roger Ebert

“Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind,” Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.

“The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive–dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer’s noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.

“Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged–the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?

The best films of 2009

Roger Ebert

Since Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain, lists have come in tens, not that we couldn’t have done with several more commandments. Who says a year has Ten Best Films, anyway? Nobody but readers, editors, and most other movie critics. There was hell to pay last year when I published my list of Twenty Best. You’d have thought I belched at a funeral. So this year I have devoutly limited myself to exactly ten films.

♬ It was a very good year ♬

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Report # 7

“There must be directors at Toronto other than Werner Herzog and Errol Morris,” one reader wrote impatiently. “Try reviewing someone else’s films for a change.” Point taken. I intend to do that below, and say in my defense that I have already written about eight films not by my heroes. Actually, that’s not so many, is it? I saw 26 of the films but feel no need to write about all of them; in a few cases, I don’t want to say negative things about those still searching for buyers.