Roger Ebert

The New Yorker. No, The New Yorker.

Roger Ebert

The most perfect cartoon caption I’ve ever seen was created by James Thurber, and ran in the New Yorker in 1932. It showed two fencers. One had just sliced off the other’s head. The caption was: Touche! You may know some that are funnier. What bothers me is that I will have written none of them. I have entered the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest almost weekly virtually since it began, and have never even been a finalist. Mark Twain advised: “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.” I have done more writing for free for the New Yorker in the last five years than for anybody in the previous 40 years.

It’s not that I think my cartoon captions are better than anyone else’s, although some weeks, understandably, I do. It’s that just once I want to see one of my damn captions in the magazine that publishes the best cartoons in the world. Is that too much to ask? Maybe I’m too oblique for them. The New Yorker’s judges seem to live inside the box, and too many of their finalists are obvious–even no-brainers, you could say.

Example. An executive is seated at a desk, interviewing a giant lobster. Winning aption: “And why did you leave your job at Red Lobster?” I mean, come on! That’s level one. It’s obvious. It’s not even funny. Let’s work together on this. Let’s try lateral thinking. A perfect caption should redefine the cartoon, and yet seem consistent with it.

Arthur C. Clarke: Star hero

Roger Ebert

No teenager could possibly have hurried more eagerly to an Elvis Presley concert on that day in the late 1950’s when I led a delegation of the Urbana High School Science Fiction Club to attend a speech on the campus of the University of Illinois. The speaker was Sir Arthur C. Clarke, our hero not only for his great science fiction, but also for such concepts as the triangulated space satellite and the “space elevator.” The first has paid off already with global communication. The second is still seriously proposed as using infinitely strong strings of Buckyballs to link earth to a space station.

Clarke was erudite, witty, friendly, and signed all my books. It was years later that I met him in connection with his screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” still the greatest of all science fiction films. And years after that when I began receiving reproaches from his home in Sri Lanka that he had not received his quarterly update to the Cinemania CD-ROM. Cinemania, edited by Jim Emerson (now editor of this site), linked reviews, info and bios of movie people with the reviews of such as Pauline Kael, Leonard Maltin and myself.

It was a brilliant idea and became for a time the top-selling consumer CD, but Bill Gates was correct that the future of CDs was on the Internet, as the Internet Movie Database so abundantly proves. Also, IMDb got its content for free, and Cinemania actually paid for its reviews.

I explained sadly to Sir Arthur why there was not and never could be another update of Cinemania, but he died at 90 still unconsoled, and still writing indignant notes to Gates.

He was the most diligent of Answer Man sources. Once one of my reader’s complained that in the vacuum of space he should not have been able to hear a tiny “click” when the astro-stewardess grabbed a floating ballpoint pen.

Clarke invited two friends, one a space expert, the other a blind friend with acute hearing, to listen for the click. Just as he thought, he said, there was no click.

Clarke was in the great tradition of classic science fiction — converted by his first sight of Amazing Stories magazines, welding hard science speculation to robust adventures, and adding some whimsy in the form of “Tales from the White Hart.” He died convinced Bill Gates had made a big mistake in not keeping the Cinemania CD-Rom in print.

¶

Friends don’t let friends drink and drive

Roger Ebert

@BAM_MARGERA I just lost my best friend, I have been crying hysterically for a full day and piece of shit roger ebert has the gall to put in his 2 cents

@BAM_MARGERA About a jackass drunk driving and his is one, fuck you! Millions of people are crying right now, shut your fat fucking mouth!

To begin with, I offer my sympathy to Ryan Dunn’s family and friends, and to those of Zachary Hartwell, who also died in the crash. I mean that sincerely. It is tragic to lose a loved one. I also regret that my tweet about the event was considered cruel. It was not intended as cruel. It was intended as true.

Shall we gather at the river?

Roger Ebert

The first time I saw him, he was striding toward me out of the burning Georgia sun, as helicopters landed behind him. His face was tanned a deep brown. He was wearing a combat helmet, an ammo belt, carrying a rifle, had a canteen on his hip, stood six feet four inches. He stuck out his hand and said, “John Wayne.” That was not necessary.

Wayne died on June 11, 1979. Stomach cancer. “The Big C,” he called it. He had lived for quite a while on one lung, and then the Big C came back. He was near death and he knew it when he walked out on stage at the 1979 Academy Awards to present Best Picture to “The Deer Hunter,” a film he wouldn’t have made. He looked frail, but he planted himself there and sounded like John Wayne.

John Wayne. When I was a kid, we said it as one word: Johnwayne. Like Marilynmonroe. His name was shorthand for heroism. All of his movies could have been titled “Walking Tall.” Yet he wasn’t a cruel and violent action hero. He was almost always a man doing his duty. Sometimes he was other than that, and he could be gentle, as in “The Quiet Man,” or vulnerable, as in “The Shootist,” or lonely and obsessed, as in “The Searchers,” or tender with a baby, as in “3 Godfathers.”

Fanzines beget blogs

Roger Ebert

Fanzines were mimeographed magazines that were circulated by mail among science fiction fans in the days before the internet. They still are, for all I know, although now they’re generated by computer printers.

I first learned about them in a 1950s issue of Amazing Stories and eagerly sent away 10 or 20 cents to Buck and Juanita Coulson in Indiana, whose Yandro was one of the best and longest-running of them all. Overnight, I was a fan, although not yet a BNF (big name fan). It was a thrill for me to have a LOC (letter of comment) published on such issues as the demise of BEMs (bug-eyed monsters), and soon I was publishing my own fanzine, named Stymie.

Cannes #1: Up, up and away, in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon

Roger Ebert

As I have so often said, if Cannes ever opens its festival with a 3D animated feature, I’ll believe houses can fly. I am a doubter no longer. Cannes 2009 awarded the honor of its opening night, which traditionally goes to a French film, to Pixar’s 3D “Up.” I would have given anything to be there for the morning press screening, to witness the world’s movie critics, festival programmers, cineastes and academics fitting on their XpanD® Series 101 3D Active Glasses, which are, quote, “a stylish, eco-friendly, and completely immersive stereoscopic 3D experience.”

Alas, I was not at that screening. Our flight arrival was a day later. But I have had the great pleasure of seeing “Up” in 2D, which is how most people will see it. Faithful readers will know that I don’t at all miss seeing the 3D version. All I really miss is seeing the Cannes crowd put on the glasses. At the black tie evening screening, all the top design houses in Paris will have their hand-made gowns and formalwear complemented by the stylish and eco-friendly XpanD® eyewear.

The dying of the light

Roger Ebert

Do you remember what a movie should look like? Do you notice when one doesn’t look right? Do you feel the vague sense that something is missing? I do. I know in my bones how a movie should look. I have been trained by the best projection in the world, at film festivals and in expert screening rooms. When I see a film that looks wrong, I want to get up and complain to the manager and ask that the projectionist be informed. But these days the projectionist is tending a dozen digital projectors, and I will be told, “That’s how it’s supposed to look. It came that way from the studio.”

The candidates’ favorite movies

Roger Ebert

Everybody is making lists of the questions the candidates should be asked during the debates. My question would be: What’s your favorite movie? As my faithful readers all know, the answer to that question says a lot about the person answering. It could be used as a screening device on a blind date. Among other things, it tells you whether the person has actually seen a lot of movies, and I persist in believing that cinematic taste is as important as taste in literature, music, art, or other things requiring taste (including food and politics). I know the answers of the most recent Presidents: “High Noon” (Clinton) and “Field of Dreams” (Bush). What might this year’s candidates say? A Google search suggests their answers, (alphabetically):

See you at the movies

Roger Ebert

Yes, Chaz and I are still going ahead with our plans for a new movie review program on television. No, Wednesday’s cancellation of “At the Movies” hasn’t discouraged us. We believe a market still exists for a weekly show where a couple of critics review new movies.

I can’t prove it, but I have the feeling that more different people are seeing more different movies than ever before. With the explosion of DVD, Netflix, Red Box, and many forms of Video on Demand,

The Twelve Gifts of Christmas

Roger Ebert

The problem with gifts is that you almost always give something you want for yourself. There are obvious exceptions, such as a woman giving a man a tie, but even then he is almost certain to receive the tie she thinks he should be wearing. Most of the time the rule applies, as I’m reminded every time I use Chaz’s iPod, iPhone and MacBook Pro.

People give me books they want to read, music they enjoy listening to, and subscriptions to publications they value, such as the Weekly Standard, Organic Gardening, and Nutrition Action–an excellent publication, but less interesting to me, you understand, now that I don’t eat or drink. Asked by editors year after year to recommend a holiday gift

Of the feel of theaters and audiences, and eight films from Sundance

Roger Ebert

I saw my final film of Sundance 2010 here in Chicago. It was my best Sundance experience, and I want to tell you why. The film was “Jack Goes Boating,” the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It played here in the Music Box, as part of the “Sundance USA” outreach program, which has enlisted eight art theaters around the country to play Sundance entries while the festival is still underway.

The Music Box is the largest surviving first run movie palace in Chicago. It is deeper than it is wide, and has an arching ceiling where illusory clouds float and stars twinkle. Many shows are preceded by music on the organ.

Cannes #6: A devil’s advocate for “Antichrist”

Roger Ebert

Lars von Trier’s new film will not leave me alone. A day after many members of the audience recoiled at its first Cannes showing, “Antichrist” is brewing a scandal here; I am reminded of the tumult following the 1976 premiere of Oshima’s “In the Realm of the Senses” and its castration scene. I said I was looking forward to von Trier’s overnight reviews, and I haven’t been disappointed. Those who thought it was good thought it was very very good (“Something completely bizarre, massively uncommercial and strangely perfect”–Damon Wise, Empire) and those who thought it was bad found it horrid (“Lars von Trier cuts a big fat art-film fart with “Antichrist”–Todd McCarthy, Variety).

I rarely find a serious film by a major director to be this disturbing. Its images are a fork in the eye. Its cruelty is unrelenting. Its despair is profound. Von Trier has a way of affecting his viewers like that. After his “Breaking the Waves” premiered at Cannes in 1996, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice fled to the rest room in emotional turmoil and Janet Maslin of the New York Times followed to comfort her. After this one, Richard and Mary Corliss blogged at Time.com that “Antichrist” presented the spectacle of a director going mad.

TIFF #9: And so then I saw…

Roger Ebert

I always try to find at least one film at Toronto that’s way off the beaten track. I rarely stray further afield than I did Tuesday night, when I found myself watching “Wake in Fright,” a film made in Australia in 1971 and almost lost forever. It’s not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking, and rather amazing. It comes billed as a “horror film,” and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic.

Donald Pleasence in “Wake in Fright”

The story involves a young school teacher in the middle of the desolate wilderness of the Outback. The opening overhead shot shows a shabby building beside a railroad track, the camera pans 360 degrees and finds only the distant horizon. and then returns to find a second building on the other side of the tracks. One building is the school. The other is the hotel. To get to either, people must have to travel a great distance.

Sex and the City Dog

Roger Ebert

Gidget Gormley, “the world’s cutest dog,” stars in SATC.

In the Answer Man column for Friday, June 13, I write: “Oddly enough, searching the AM’s Google Mail account for questions about ‘Sex and the City,’ I found that all the messages, every single one, dealt only with matters of masturbating female dogs. But surely I was mistaken? Surely with such a popular film there would be messages about something else, especially since it was a popular movie, my review was negative, and my hit-counting software indicated that tens of thousands had read it? Was the only thing they wanted to write me about was the leisure activity of Samantha’s pet dog? Surely not. Then I had a brainstorm.

Irving! Brang ’em on!

Roger Ebert

My friend Billy Baxter passed away in his sleep, early on the morning of Friday, Jan. 20, 2012. He was 86. His son Jack wrote me:

“He didn’t suffer. I was with him when he was taken to the hospital by ambulance on Wednesday. He died in his sleep early this morning. His wake is Monday, January 23, at Barrett Funeral Home, 424 West 51st Street, from 2-5 and 7-9. His funeral mass is Tuesday at 10am at St. Paul the Apostle, 405 W 59th St, New York, 10019. He is being cremated.”

The 2012 Oscar lalapalooza

Roger Ebert

Do you expect “The Tree of Life” to be nominated as one of the best films of 2011? When I saw it last spring I certainly did. I assumed it was a done deal. If you’d told me then that “The Artist,” a black and white silent film, was stirring up enthusiasm at Cannes, I would have said it sounded like something I really wanted to see.

Winter is icumen in

Roger Ebert

It may be because I live in the city now, but I no longer see children playing for hours in the snow. I remember a pediatrician advising my parents to send me outside to play as a treatment for some “condition.” Of course, he later was found to be an alcoholic, so there’s no telling.

There were two kinds of snow, powder snow and packing snow. Packing snow was what you wanted for snowballs, snowmen and snow forts. We threw snowballs at one another and at the sides of passing trucks. We built snowmen, pleased by the perfect logic involved in their construction.

I’ve got the sweetest set of wheels in town

Roger Ebert

It is unthinkable that within a few years, there may be no more new Fords, no more Dodges, no more Chevys to drive to the levee. It is less than a year since the manufacture of Postum was discontinued. Meccano sets are made of plastic. Piece by piece, the American prospect is being dismantled. Will the pulse of teenage boys quicken at the sight of the new Kia or Hyundai? Will they envy their pal because his dad drives a Camaro?

The longest thread evolves

Roger Ebert

A week or so ago I began to receive feedback that posts weren’t being displayed on my entry “Win Ben Stein’s Mind,” from Dec. 3, 2008. That was my attack on Stein’s film “Expelled,” which supported Creationism against the Theory of Evolution. The comment thread, having reached 2,648 posts, many of them hundreds of words in length, was fed up, and wasn’t going to take it anymore. I consulted the web gods at the Sun-Times. I was told…uh…ahem…perhaps the thread was growing a tad long, and was maxing out the software? After 2,640 posts and 239,093 words, perhaps this was the case.