Roger Ebert

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.

The man who didn’t sleep

Roger Ebert

I met a man who didn’t sleep. This was in the summer of 1988. I was in Toulouse, France, to visit a friend I’d made some years earlier in London, Dominique Hoff. Her sister, Marie-Christine, told me: “There is a man you must meet. He’s the smartest man I know. He was my professor in dental school. He invents dental tools, and he can fix anything with his hands. He and his wife have converted a big old barn in the country into a home and workshop and a place for his collection.” His collection? I said. The sisters laughed. “You’ll see.”

Toulouse à partir de la fenêtre d’Hervé

Paul Delprat and his wife Danielle Moog did indeed occupy a vast old barn somewhere in the countryside. They called it Cambolevet. They were a jolly middle-aged couple, waiting for us in the farmyard. A dog came to investigate. They exuded that sense of two people who know they belong together.

BP’s tree fell on my lawn

Roger Ebert

Help me out here. There’s something I’ve been spending a couple of months trying to get my head around. Why does BP enjoy such a peculiar immunity after having apparently been culpable in the Gulf oil spill? What is the nature of its invisible protective shield?

All I know is what you know. Like most other ordinary citizens, I try to keep up the best that I can with the news. I am not, as they say, walking in the corridors of power.

But you know, the more I read, the more I imagine those corridors smelling like those disinfectant cakes you see at the bottoms of urinals.

After 3D, here is the future of film

Roger Ebert

When I first saw it in 1999, Maxivision48 produced a picture four times as good as conventional film. It still does. With 3D fading and the possibilities offered by a new Red camera, its time may be here at last. 

Dean Goodhill, the inventor of MV48, laid low while seeking studio backing. Now, he tells me, the time has come to go public. After reading the recent letter from Walter Murch I ran on my blog, he wrote me one of his own. — RE

This is a dog

Roger Ebert

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

How pleasant to meet Mr. Lear!

Roger Ebert

The limerick’s a form metronomical,

For the telling of jokes anatomical.

Yet the best ones I’ve seen

So seldom are clean,

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

 

Auden, that very good man

Said a limerick need not merely scan.

But put up a struggle

And bend itself double

To be decent, and fail at the plan.

Oh, say, can you wear?

Roger Ebert

I interrupt my regularly scheduled programming to try explain again what I believe about the issue of the American flag t-shirts in California schools.

In my earlier piece, I made the mistake of using wit and irony. I found many readers who do not receive on those wave lengths. There’s a compulsion in some precincts of the Right to find others guilty of crimes out of proportion to the perceived offense. Anyone who is a liberal, as I am, must therefore be socialist, racist, and so on.

“Who Killed Bambi?” – A screenplay

Roger Ebert

This, for the benefit of future rock historians, is the transscript of a screenplay I wrote in the summer of 1977. It was tailored for the historic punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and was to be directed by Russ Meyer and produced by the impresario Malcolm McLaren. It still carried its original title, “Anarchy in the U.K.,” although shortly after I phoned up with a suggested title change, which was accepted: “Who Killed Bambi?” I wrote about this adventure in my blog entry McLaren & Meyer & Rotten & Vicious & me. Discussions with Meyer, McLaren and Rene Daalder led to this draft. All I intend to do here is reprint it. Comments are open, but I can’t discuss what I wrote, why I wrote it, or what I should or shouldn’t have written. Frankly, I have no idea.

Indie security alert level: Severe

Roger Ebert

Every year good films show at the Toronto Film festival that never open anywhere near you. This year some good films played that may never open anywhere, even if you live in Toronto–or New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin or upstairs over a Landmark Theater multiplex. Toronto is traditionally a lively marketplace for the purchase of film rights for new non-studio product: Indies, docs, foreign films. This year Harvey Weinstein paid $1 million for “A Single Man,” and that was that. One sale, one movie, one million — probably as little as Harvey has paid for a movie in some time.

Stands at yellow, rising toward orange

The makers of independent films don’t have to send to learn for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for them. The bottom fell out of the market. That doesn’t mean there were no other offers, but it means there were none that the sellers felt able to accept. It shows a collapse of confidence in the prospects of independent film distribution.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Anne Thompson, who always knows what she’s talking about. In her blog Thompson on Hollywood, she leads: “The old independent market is over.” She quotes the producer Jonathan Dana: “It’s a massacre. It’s the end of funny money.”

Thompson names a few of the films going home without deals, and it’s depressing:

In search of redemption

Roger Ebert

View image Kari Sylwan plays the maid who cradles a dead woman (Harriet Andersson) in Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers.”

One of the most prolific and intelligent contributors to the comments section of the blog is Solomon Wakeling. I wrote in curiosity, asking to know more about him. He replied that he is a 24-year-old law student from Australia, and that one of his problems is, “I read too many books.” There was one thing he said that I felt I needed to write about in the blog: “I find your work is filled with an essentially humanitarian philosophy, dealing with concepts like redemption.”