Roger Ebert

TIFF #11: A precious winner

Roger Ebert

“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

Roger Ebert

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

Roger Ebert

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

Roger Ebert

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 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?

Roger Ebert

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

Roger Ebert

• 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

Roger Ebert

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.

Hell, no, I 80% wouldn’t pay for Twitter!

Roger Ebert

A survey by the Annenberg School for Communications polled some 1,900 subjects and asked them if they would be willing to pay for Twitter. The percent who said they would was 0.00%. I’m not sure that number requires two places after the decimal, but that’s what the report said.

This seemed improbably low to me. I tweeted with the same question to my 196,000 followers on Twitter, asking them not to forward or link so that the sample would be reasonably pure. The results are shown below.

They’re not great figures for Twitter. But they must be surprising news for Annenberg, suggesting their survey was

It’s sweltering hot out

Roger Ebert

A new movie is titled “The 500 Days of Summer.” That’s what it looked like on the last day of school, time reaching forward beyond all imagining. There was a heightened awareness in the room as the second hand crept toward our moment of freedom. We regarded the nuns as a discharged soldier does his superior officer. Here had existed a bond that would never be again. We didn’t run screaming out the door. We sauntered. We had time. We were aware of a milestone having passed.

Some kids would go to second homes, or visit relatives, or summer camp. My friends and I would stay at home. We would have nothing planned. The lives of kids were not fast-tracked in those days. We would get together after breakfast and make desultory conversation, evaluate suggestions and maybe play softball, shoot baskets, go down somebody’s basement, play cards, go to the Urbana Free Library for Miss Fiske’s Summer Reading Club, rassle on the lawn, listen to the Cardinals, play with our dogs, or lay on our stomachs on the grass and read somebody’s dad’s copy of Confidential magazine. Somebody’s mom was probably keeping an eye on us through a screen window.

Our fast new Yahoo! search

Roger Ebert

At last this site has a fast search engine. A Yahoo search can be found at the upper left corner of every page of rogerebert.com itself (not on this blog). The top line searches by movie title and performs almost instantly, although it demands an exact title: “G.I. Joe,” for example, not “G. I Joe” (“G.I.” is an abbreviation, not the initials of a name). To search the site in other ways, go to “Advanced Search,” To search the blog entries on “Roger Ebert’s Journal, there is a Search box at the upper right of every blog page. This will search by words or phrases, and, yes, will find you all the entries of any individual poster, although this takes a little time because of the millions of words involved. Comments are open on this new feature.

The Oscars are outsourced

Roger Ebert

The full-screen In Memoriam montage is linked below.

It was the best Oscar show I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty. The Academy didn’t bring it in under three and a half hours, but maybe they simply couldn’t, given the number of categories. What they did do was make the time seem to pass more quickly, and more entertainingly. And they finally cleared the logjam involved in merely reading the names of the nominees. By bringing out former winners to single out each of the acting nominees and praise their work, they replaced the reading of lists with a surprisingly heart-warming new approach.

I had a feeling Hugh Jackman would be a charmer as host, and he was. He didn’t have a lot of gag lines, depending instead on humor in context, as when he recruited Anne Hathawy onstage for their duet. His opening “low budget” song-and-dance was amusing, and we could immediately see how the show would benefit from the reconfigured theater.

My mighty hammering over “Thor”

Roger Ebert

If I had my piece on “Thor” to write over again, I think it would be more bemused and whimsical. My tone was off. I brought too much anger to a trivial entertainment. When I described it as “a desolate vastation,” I went perhaps one hyperbole too far.

I try to use a generic approach in my reviews. I approach a movie with some idea of their intention and the expectation of their target audience. I compared “Thor” to other movies based on comic book heroes, and found it lacking. But it doesn’t really intend to be good in the sense that “The Dark Knight” or “Spider-Man II” are good. It’s pitched at the level of a children’s movie, although the expensive scope of the production tends to conceal that.

The O’Reilly Procedure

Roger Ebert

Bill O’Reilly has been brought low by the same process that afflicted Jerry Springer. Once respected journalists, they sold their souls for higher ratings, and follow their siren song. Springer is honest about it: “I’m going to Hell for what I do, and I know it,” he’s likes to say. O’Reilly insists he is dealing only with the truth. When his guests disagree with him, he shouts at them, calls them liars, talks over them, and behaves like a schoolyard bully.

I am not interested in discussing O’Reilly’s politics here. That would open a hornet’s nest. I am more concerned about the danger he and others like him represent to a civil and peaceful society. He sets a harmful example of acceptable public behavior. He has been an influence on the most worrying trend in the field of news: The polarization of opinion, the elevation of emotional temperature, the predictability of two of the leading cable news channels. A majority of cable news viewers now get their news slanted one way or the other by angry men. O’Reilly is not the worst offender. That would be Glenn Beck. Keith Olbermann is gaining ground. Rachel Maddow provides an admirable example for the boys of firm, passionate outrage, and is more effective for nogt shouting.

Much has been said recently about the possible influence of O’Reilly on the murder of Dr. George Tiller by Scott Roeder. Such a connection is impossible to prove. Yet studies of bullies and their victims suggest a general way such an influence might take place. Bullies like to force others to do their will, while they can stand back and protest their innocence: “I was nowhere near the gymnasium, Sister!” A recent study of school shootings found that two-thirds of all the shooters were victims of bullying, and perceived themselves as members of persecuted minorities.

Sign the Social Contract

Roger Ebert

It has been argued that universal health care is an offense against individual liberty. I’ve been told by readers that they’ll deal with their own health care, thank you very much, and have no interest in government interference. At root this is a libertarian argument; conservatives are more likely to oppose it on the grounds that it undermines the free enterprise system. They warn of a Nanny State.

But what, I ask libertarians, about your families? Your children? What if the day comes that you lose your job-based health insurance and can’t afford your own? What if you’re denied coverage? That’s their business, they tell me. I should butt out.

But it won’t remain their business if a family member suffers a major illness. I know from personal experience that few people have the financial resources to deal with such an illness, and I suspect no one reading this is ready to deal with two. You and I will end up paying for them, even though they were unwilling to help pay for us.

Confessions of a blogger

Roger Ebert

I’ve had my own corner of the internet even before the days of the web, back when I logged on to all-text Compuserve with my DEC Rainbow or Tandy 100. But I never wanted a blog. Yes, I made some enduring friends through my Compuserve forum, Andy Ihnatko for example, but eventually the task of reading and responding to countless messages became too time-consuming. I knew I wouldn’t have to interact at such depth with a blog, but, frankly, most of the blog comments I read online were not ones I was eager too receive.

♫ In the chapel bells are ringing ♫

Roger Ebert

The first time I heard gay marriage mentioned, I was incredulous. Two gay people couldn’t get married! It simply…well, it wasn’t done. I wasn’t objecting to their homosexuality. I was objecting to the disturbance caused to my mental categories.

Love and marriage, love and marriage

Go together like a horse and carriage

Dad was told by mother

You can’t have one,

You can’t have none,

You can’t have one without the other!

In recent years, dad is being told something else by brother.

Cameron is recrowned King of the World

Roger Ebert

The thing about James Cameron is, he can get his mind around a project the size of “Avatar” and keep his cool. If it requires the development of untested technology, he takes the time to work on it. If he wants to create aliens human enough to be sexy and yet keep them out of the Uncanny Valley, he test-drives them. If it costs $250 million, as reported, or $350 million, as rumored, you reflect: That’s a lot of money, but after seeing the movie I guess I saw most of it up there on the screen.

Clinging to the rear view mirror

Roger Ebert

Marshall McLuhan wrote much nonsense. Embedded in it I find startling insights that help explain my experiences. Consider the phrase “the medium is the message.” These five words at a masterstroke explain the digital age we now occupy. One sign of a valuable insight is when it applies to developments its author could hardly have foreseen.

Like most people, I’ve long thought I knew what McLuhan meant by his phrase. I won’t bore you with what I thought that was. I’ve come across an explanation that explains what he meant with such blinding clarity that my own notions seem half-formed. I was poking around on the internet, and came across this passage from the Playboy Interview with McLuhan:

Midnight at the oasis

Roger Ebert

Everywhere I go, as much as I can, I listen to National Public Radio. It’s an oasis of clear-headed intelligence. Carefully, patiently, it presents programming designed to make me feel just a little better equipped to reenter the world of uproar.