Roger Ebert

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.

Video games 13,823, Huck Finn 8,088

Roger Ebert

If they had their choice, 63.1% of people would value “a great video game” over Huckleberry Finn. That’s the result of a completely unscientific survey I conducted in two places: Twitter, and my recent blog about video games.

The choice approached the abstract, because I didn’t specify they had to play the game or read the novel. Like all web-based surveys, this one is a 100% accurate representation of whoever chose to vote, for whatever reason, whoever they were. In theory, no one could vote twice.

The best feature films of 2010

Roger Ebert

David Fincher’s “The Social Network”is emerging as the consensus choice as best film of 2010. Most of the critics’ groups have sanctified it, and after its initial impact it has only grown it stature. I think it is an early observer of a trend in our society, where we have learned new ways of thinking of ourselves: As members of a demographic group, as part of a database, as figures in…a social network.

Cannes #4: What were they thinking of?

Roger Ebert

There are few prospects more alarming than a director seized by an Idea. I don’t mean an idea for a film, a story, a theme, a tone, any of those ideas. I’m thinking of a director whose Idea takes control of his film and pounds it into the ground and leaves the audience alienated and resentful. Such a director is Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, and the victim of his Idea is his Official Selection at Cannes 2009, “Kinatay.” Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling “The Brown Bunny” the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.

After extensive recutting, the Gallo film was redeemed. I don’t think editing is going to do the trick for “Kinatay.” If Mendoza wants to please any viewer except for the most tortured theorist (one of those careerists who thinks movies are about arcane academic debates and not people) he’s going to have to remake his entire second half.

The chimes at midnight

Roger Ebert

Unless we find an angel, our television program will go off the air at the end of its current season. There. I’ve said it. Usually in television, people use evasive language. Not me. We’ll be gone. I want to be honest about why this is. We can’t afford to finance it any longer.

A prayer beneath the Tree of Life

Roger Ebert

Terrence Malick’s new film is a form of prayer. It created within me a spiritual awareness, and made me more alert to the awe of existence. I believe it stands free from conventional theologies, although at its end it has images that will evoke them for some people. It functions to pull us back from the distractions of the moment, and focus us on mystery and gratitude.

Not long after its beginning we apparently see the singularity of the Big Bang, when the universe came into existence. It hurtles through space and time, until it comes gently to a halt in a small Texas town in the 1950s. Here we will gradually learn who some of the people were as the film first opened.

TIFF #5: The man who didn’t land

Roger Ebert

It was two years ago on Saturday night that Jason Reitman’s “Juno” had its world premiere here at Toronto. The standing ovation that night was the most spontaneous and joyous I can remember. Still vibrating, Reitman stood on the stage of the Ryerson Theater and vowed, “I’m gonna open all of my films right here in this theater at Toronto.” True to his word, his new film “Up in the Air” played the Ryerson at 6 p.m., Saturday–same time, same place.

It stars George Clooney in one of his best performances, as a frequent flyer. His ambition is to pass the 10 million-mile mark in the American Airlines Aadvantage Program, something very few ever do. Asked on an airplane where he lives, he replies, “Here.” He’s a Termination Facilitator. He fires people for a living. When corporations need to downsize quickly, he flies in and breaks the news to the new former employees. In a lousy economy, his business is great.