Promethian panspermia
One of my Creationist friends recently questioned my enthusiasm for Ridley Scott’s new film “Prometheus.” He tweeted:
I tweeted in return:
He replied:
Roger Ebert
My career in retailing
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…
A great deal of solace
I’m double-posting my review of “Skyfall” to encourage comments, which my main site can’t accept.
In this 50th year of the James Bond series, with the disappointing “Quantum of Solace” (2008) still in our minds, “Skyfall” triumphantly reinvents 007 in one of the best Bonds ever made. This is a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon, with Daniel Craig taking full possession of a role he earlier played well in “Casino Royale,” not so well in “Quantum”–although it may not have been entirely his fault. I don’t know what I expected in Bond #23, but certainly not an experience this invigorating.
Books do furnish a life
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.”
Everyone knew Betty
I want to tell you about a woman named Betty Brandenburg. You’ve not heard of her, but her passing must not go unremarked. I’ve written many times about the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She made it run. She dealt with the most impossible man in Colorado. She was a young widow who raised two children on her own. I met her the first year I went to Boulder, in 1969, and saw her the last time a few years ago at one of the annual Wednesday night dinners our little group held at the Red Lion Inn.
The new great American director
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?”
“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?
A symphony of voices
The video on this page was an undercover project, I learn, at Ebertfest 2012. Most of my Far-Flung Correspondents and Demanders were there in person, and those who couldn’t be contributed their voices via audio files. The idea originated with Kevin B. Lee, who did the audiotaping and editing. It was the inspiration of Michael Mirasol to use the foreign languages of those who spoke one.
The man with his name
What exactly happened when Clint Eastwood was onstage at the Republican National Convention? The one thing we can agree on was that it was unexpected–by the Republicans, by the audience, perhaps even by Eastwood, who we now know was ad-libbing. It takes brass balls to ad-lib for 12 minutes in front of 30 million people on live TV, just working with yourself and an empty chair.
The best films of 2009
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 ♬
• 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.
The London Perambulator
I started walking around London in my mind. It started when I wrote the entry about Jermyn Street. In mentioning Wilton’s I should have mentioned that on my first visit there I ordered roast turkey with fresh peaches. I know, it sound like the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore routine about the Frog & Peach, but nevertheless that’s what I had, with a raspberry syllabub for dessert.
In my mind my walk didn’t stop when Jermyn Street ended at St. James. I imagined walking down St. James and into the park, and around the ponds. And admiring the view of Westminster Abbey from the bridge. And then perhaps out one end of the park toward Victoria or into Pimlico.
TIFF #11: A precious winner
“Precious,” the story of a teenage girl who seems to have everything going against her, won the coveted Audience Award here Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival. Toronto has no jury awards, but last January at Sundance, “Precious” swept both the jury award and the Audience Award. Both festivals invite audiences to vote as they leave after a screening, and use systems to correct for audience and theater sizes.
Gabby Sidibe as “Precious”
This could not be a better omen for the Oscar chances of “Precious;” it is all but certain to win a place on the expanded list of the Academy’s 10 “best picture” nominees. Its star, Gabourey (Gabby) Sidibe, is also a real possibility for an acting nomination.
Films that are not for the dying so much
There are two good films at Toronto about the same thing: Romance that begins during the last months of life for a person with cancer. I wrote earlier about Gus Van Sant’s “Restless,” and now here is “50/50” by Jonathan Levine, with a screenplay by Will Reiser that is said to be semi-autobiographical. As a person who has been in love while dealing with cancer, these films inspire introspection, and while I admire them I realize they are to some degree escapism–poised at the “Bargaining” position at the center of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief.
“Caché:” A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma
What if there’s not an answer? What if Michael Haneke’s “Cache” is a puzzle with only flawed solutions? What if life is like that? What if that makes it a better film? I imagine many viewers will be asking such questions in a few years, now that Martin Scorsese has optioned it for an American version. We can ask them now.
There’s only one way to discuss such matters, and that’s by going into detail about the film itself. I hesitate to employ the hackneyed word “spoiler” here, because no one in his right mind should read this without experiencing the film. I won’t even bother with a plot synopsis. You’ve seen it.
The mystery, of course, involves the identity of the person or persons sending the videos which disrupt the bourgeois routine of a Parisian family. The interim solution by many viewers seems to be that Pierrot, the evasive and distant son, is their source. This despite the fact that the movie also places suspicion on Majid, the childhood victim of Georges, and on Majid’s own son.
Hunt not the Snark but the Snarker
Snarking is cultural vandalism. I have arrived at this conclusion belatedly. I have been guilty of snarking, and of enjoying snarks. In the matter of snarking, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But it has grown entirely out of hand. It is time to put away childish things. I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule. No doubt there will always be a role for snarking, given the proper target and an appropriate venue, and I reserve the right to snark when it is deserved, as in certain movie reviews. But in general I must become more well-behaved. A snarker is one who snarks. The word is said to be a combination of snide and remark. There are slithering undertones of shark, bark, and stark. There is also, for me, an association with snipe. The practice involves holding someone up to ridicule not so much for anything they actually did, as for having the presumption to be who they are.
Some year-end thoughts from Chaz Ebert
Roger and I thank you for joining us as we talked about the movies each week this past year. We have enjoyed producing Ebert Presents At The Movies and hope to continue sometime in 2012. This week we produced our last show.
It is the Best and Worst Movies of 2011 and begins airing Friday night, December 30, at 8:30 pm on WTTW, Channel 11 in Chicago, and all during the weekend and next week on public television stations across the nation. (Check local listings to find out what time it comes on in your town.)
Who do you read? Good Roger, or Bad Roger?
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a friend have been debating about my qualities as a film critic, and they’ve involved a considerable critic, Dan Schneider, in their discussion. I will say that he has given the question a surprising amount of thought and attention over the years, and may well be correct in some aspects. What his analysis gives me is a renewed respect and curiosity about his own work.
¶
“The Hereafter,” “Casino Jack” and vengeance
• Toronto Report #2
Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter considers the possibility of an afterlife with tenderness, beauty and a gentle tact. I was surprised how enthralling I found it. I don’t believe in woo-woo, but there’s no woo-woo anywhere to be seen. It doesn’t even properly suppose an afterlife, but only the possibility of consciousness after apparent death. This is plausible. Many near-death survivors report the same memories, of the white light, the waiting figures and a feeling of peace.
The storyteller and the stallion
Bill Nack is a born story-teller. The author of the biography Secretariat has enveloped me time and again in the fascination of his tales. That process began nearly 50 years ago at the University of Illinois, when we were both working on The Daily Illini. I was the editor, he was the sports editor, and then the following year he was the editor. He was also a natural writer — and, perhaps more significantly, a natural reader. His taste was persuasive.
He approached literature like a gourmet. He relished it, savored it, inhaled it, and after memorizing it rolled it on his tongue and spoke it aloud. It was Nack who already knew in the early 1960s, when he was a very young man, that Nabokov was perhaps the supreme stylist of modern novelists. He recited to me from Lolita, and from Speak, Memory and Pnin. I was spellbound.
