Roger Ebert

The ten best documentaries of 2009

Roger Ebert

Some of the best documentaries of 2009 hardly seemed to exist. “What’s the matter with Kansas,” based on a best-seller, is still awaiting its fifth vote at IMDb. “The Beaches of Agnes,” a luminous film by the New Wave pioneer Agnes Varda, grossed $127,605. “Of Time and the City,” by a great British director, grossed $32,000. “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” a hit in terms of buzz and critical reception, brought in $666,659. “Tyson,” $827, 046.

Such figures come from IMDb, which may be wrong, but if it’s $1 million off, we’re still not talking big numbers. What we’re really talking about is eyeballs, or, as old Jewish exhibitors used to ask, “how many toochis on the seats?” The audiences for these films were found first at film festivals, and will now be found on DVD and video on demand. None

Having a wonderful time, wish you could hear

Roger Ebert

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I’m told it’s an animated film directed by “a girl from Urbana.” That’s my home town. It is titled “Sita Sings the Blues.” I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

I get an e-mail from Betsy, my old pal who worked with me on The News-Gazette. “Did you see the film by the mayor’s daughter?” This intrigues me. The daughter is named Nina Paley. I do a Google run and discover that Hiram Paley was mayor from 1973-1977. I am relieved. This means the “girl” probably didn’t make the film as a high school class project. In fact, by my rapid mathematical calculations, she may have been conceived in City Hall. I used to cover City Hall. Worse things have happened there.

Wall Street’s dirty, rotten scoundrels

Roger Ebert

I am but a naive outsider. I don’t fully understand the working of the “derivatives” and “credit swaps” that we have heard so much about in recent months. I’m not alone. But I’m learning. I gather that these are ingenious computer-driven trading schemes in which good money can be earned from bad debt, and Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe pocket untold millions at the same time they bankrupt their investors and their own companies.

McLaren & Meyer & Rotten & Vicious & me

Roger Ebert

“I need you out here,” Russ Meyer told me on the phone in 1977. It was 6 a.m. He could not conceive that I might still be asleep. “Have you ever heard of the Sex Pistols?”

“No,” I said.

“They’re a rock band from England. They got a lot of publicity for saying ‘fuck’ on TV. Now they have some money and want me to direct their movie.”

Put up or shut up

Roger Ebert

We already know the numbers. Pew finds that 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. A new Newsweek poll, taken after the controversy over the New York mosque, places that figure at 24%. Even if he’s not a Muslim, Newsweek finds, 31 percent think it’s “definitely or probably” true that Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.”

When the focus is narrowed to Republicans, a Harris poll finds 57 percent of party members believe he is a Muslim, 22% believe he “wants the terrorists to win,” and 24% believe he is the Antichrist.

These figures sadden me with the depth of thoughtlessness and credulity they imply. A democracy depends on an informed electorate to survive. An alarming number of Americans and a majority of Republicans are misinformed. The man who was swept into office by a decisive majority is now considered by many citizens to be the enemy. Some fundamentalists believe he is the Antichrist named by Jesus in the Bible. [Yes, I know Jesus never mentioned the Antichrist, but there’s a video online proving that he did. He was punning in Hebrew — or was it Aramaic? — on the name Barack Obama. ]

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done

Roger Ebert

Those who opened their eyes when I did are closing them now. Word reached me on New Year’s Eve of two friends, one who has died, another who has returned home from hospital for palliative care. The first memories that come into my mind is of them laughing. I believe anyone who knew them would say the same thing. In my exploring years, when I was young and healthy and life was still ahead, they were stars in my sky, who had always been alive and would always be alive, because that is how we must act if we are to live at all.

The films of our lives

Roger Ebert

I saw a movie recently in which an 80ish women has an unlikely photograph on her wall. It shows Anita Ekberg in the famous scene where she wades in the Trevi Fountain in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” She tells her elderly boyfriend: “I looked exactly like her when I was young.” Maybe she did and maybe she didn’t, but the photograph struck a chord. I saw Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” for the first time in London on the summer of 1962, in a little cinema on Piccadilly Square. I taught it a shot at a time at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1972, and again in 1982, 1992 and 2002, give or take a year. I’ve seen it countless other times, but those ten-yearly screenings have helped me measure the inexorable progress of time.

A quintessence of dust

Roger Ebert

An idle comment caught my eye: “After all, no one saw the Big Bang.” Somewhere else I read, “The universe has no opinion.” Then I read that the next Hubble telescope will be able to peer six times as far into space and time as the one now in orbit.

An issue of Discover magazine arrived with a cover story about astronomers struggling with the problem of information overload. The new telescopes have moved far beyond visual images, and monitor a flood of information picked up on many wave lengths. Not even super computers can adequately organize and assess their vast findings. Amazing discoveries may be buried within the data.

The universe is too large for me to comprehend how large that really might be. I’ve seen those animations where Earth shrinks to a pin point, and then the sun shrinks to a pin point, and then the Milky Way shrinks to a pin point. The whole map might as well shrink to a pin point, along with the horse it rode on.

The quantum theory of reincarnation

Roger Ebert

If you want to see fear in the eyes of a quantum physicist, mention the word “measurement.” — Folk saying

Is reincarnation possible from a scientific, rationalist point of view? For my purposes today I’m going to argue that it is. We will never, however, be aware of it, and indeed “we,” as we like to think of ourselves, will be completely out of the picture. I’m going to approach the problem from the point of view of quantum mechanics–a field about which I understand almost nothing, although discussing it permits others to assume I have gone mad.

Let’s begin, for the sake of argument, by saying that when you get right down to the bottom–under the turtles–everything, and I mean Everything, consists of quantum particles. These particles can as well be in one place as another, even at the same time. As Wikipedia informs us: The Everett many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a “multiverse” composed of mostly independent parallel universes.

The crucial word here is “simultaneously.” I take it to mean that Everything can be thought of as being in no particular place at any particular time. If you choose to think of it that way, be my guest. Whatever you think will be sublimely irrelevant, because places and times are concepts we bring with us to the quantum level. They do not seem to exist there. Or if they do, they are created only in the act of our applying them, and our measurements have meaning to us but not to them.

A Lightbox & the Case of the Manacled Mormon

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Report #1

I walk out the hotel door and don’t know where I am. I’ve spent almost ten months in Toronto, one film festival at a time, and I know my way around. So where am I? The concierge says the district is “near the Entertainment District.”

Not far away are some of the big Toronto legit houses. Turn a corner and I realize

The image of a man you do not see

Roger Ebert

Much modern architecture has grown tiresome to me. It does not gladden the heart. It doesn’t seem to spring from humans. It seems drawn from mathematical axioms rather than those learned for centuries from the earth, the organic origins of building materials, the reach of hands and arms, and that which is pleasing to the eye. It is not harmonious. It holds the same note indefinitely.

It was not always so. My first girlfriend when I moved to Chicago was Tal Gilat, an architect from Israel. She was an admirer of Mies. Together we explored his campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology. She showed me his four adjacent apartment buildings on Lake Shore Drive and said they looked as new today as when they were built. It is now 40 years later, and they still look that new.

The gathering Dark Age

Roger Ebert

Apparently unconnected items appeared within two days of each other in the Los Angeles Times, and together confirmed my fear that American movie-going is entering into a Dark Age. The first was in a blog by Patrick Goldstein, who said: “Film critics are in the same boat as evening news anchors — their core audience is people 50 and over, and getting older by the day. You could hire Jessica Alba to read the evening news — or review ‘G.I. Joe’ for that matter — and younger audiences still wouldn’t care.” The other was in a report by John Horn that despite “The Hurt Locker’s” impressive box office success, “younger moviegoers are not flocking to the film, which could limit its ticket sales.”

The obvious implication is, younger moviegoers don’t care about reviews and have missed the news that “The Hurt Locker” is the best American film of the summer. There is a more disturbing implication: word of mouth is not helping the film in that younger demographic. It has been Hollywood gospel for decades that advertising and marketing can help a film to open strongly, but moviegoers talking with each other are crucial to its continuing success. That has been Summit Entertainment’s game plan for “The Hurt Locker,” which opened in a few theaters and has steadily increased its cities, becoming a real success without ever “winning” a weekend or benefiting from an overkill marketing campaign.

Gatsby without greatness

Roger Ebert

Did it seem to you that The Great Gatsby was especially difficult to read? It’s a book that most American students encounter in high school. When I read it the first time, I certainly missed some of the nuances, but I didn’t stumble over any of the words.

Even at the time, I noticed the particular beauty of its conclusion. After the whole doomed scenario has played out, Nick looks once again across the waters of the Sound:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Tea and empathy

Roger Ebert

The Tea Party and the Wall Street demonstrators share the same conviction: They are the victims of theft by powerful institutions. The Tea Party blames government taxation. The demonstrators blame corruption in the financial industry.

The concern about taxation is perplexing, since U.S. tax rates are at a historic low. Indeed, there seems little chance that we can ever begin to pay off the American deficit without raising taxes. Many millionaires, led by Warren Buffet, have volunteered to pay higher taxes. A belief persists, however, that the middle class bears an unfair tax burden. In repeating this charge the other day, Mitt Romney included himself in the middle class.

The leisure of the theory class

Roger Ebert

I have lived more than nine months of my life in Boulder, Colorado, one week at a time. Here I am again. Here more than anywhere else I have heard for the first time about more new things, met more fascinating people who have nothing to do with the movies, learned more about debate, and trained under fire to think on my feet. So please don’t zone out on me because I use the zzzzz-inducing term “Conference on World Affairs.”

For 61 years, this annual meeting at the University of Colorado has persuaded a very mixed bag of people to travel to Boulder at their own expense, appear with each other on panels not of their choosing, live with local hosts who volunteer their homes, speak spontaneously on topics they learn about only after they arrive, are driven around town by volunteers, fed at lunch by the university, and in the evening by such as CWA chairman Jane Butcher in her own home. For years the conference founder Howard Higman personally cooked on Tuesday night. The hundreds of panels, demonstrations, concerts, polemics, poetry, politics and performances are and always have been free and open to the public.

All by ourselves alone

Roger Ebert

In Venice there is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps is a landing, and a little cafe has found its perch there. In front of this cafe is a table with two chairs. If you chose the chair with its back to the cafe, you can overlook the steps leading from the canal path, or rivetta, ahead of you. This is a quiet neighborhood crossroads, a good place to sit with a cup of cappuccino and the Herald-Trib you got from the newsstand behind Piazza San Marco.

Above: The Holly Bush, Holly Mount, Hampstead. Choose the corner next to the fire.

Werner & Errol & the images in their caves

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Report #3

Werner Herzog and Errol Morris have been friends for a very long time, from the days in the 1970s when Morris saw Herzog’s first films at the Univ. of Wisconsin and decided to become a filmmaker. Errol told Herzog of a film he wanted to shoot, but kept delaying. Herzog told him he needed more self-discipline. He added: “If you make this film, I’ll eat my shoe.”

TIFF #8: The protest: A change of mind

Roger Ebert

I’m writing this the day after first posting this entry. I now regret it. The point I make about artists is perfectly valid but I realize I wasn’t prepared with enough facts about the events leading up to the Festival’s decision to showcase Tel Aviv in the City-to-City section. I thought of it as an innocent goodwill gesture, but now realize it was part of a deliberate plan to “re-brand” Israel in Toronto, as a pilot for a larger such program. The Festival should never have agreed to be used like this. It was naive for the plan’s supporters to believe it would have the effect they hoped for. The original entry remains below. The first 50 or so comments were posted before these regrets.

¶ The tumult continues here about the decision to spotlight Tel Aviv in the City-to-City sidebar program of the Toronto Film Festival. The protesters say the festival is thereby recognizing the “apartheid regime” of Israel. The controversy shows no sign of abating, and indeed on Tuesday it was still big news in the Toronto newspapers, with the Star’s front page featuring lineups of those opposing the TIFF decision (including Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortenson, Julie Christie and Danny Glover) and those supporting it (including Jerry Seinfeld, David Cronenberg, Sasha Baron Cohen, Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Kudrow and Natalie Portman).