Roger Ebert

Whole lotta cantin’ going on

Roger Ebert

Can a film be great without question? Is it demented to find fault with “Inception?” Or “Citizen Kane?” Not at all. Scolds have emerged in recent days to smack at those critics who disapproved of “Inception,” but as a fervent admirer of the film I can understand why others might not agree. In fact, the reasons cited by David Edelstein in his much-attacked negative review seem reasonable. I don’t agree with him, but that’s another matter.

I’ve been trying to think of one film that everyone reading this entry might agree is unquestionably great. You might think I’d name “Citizen Kane” or “The Rules of the Game,” the two films that in recent decades have consistently been at the top of Sight & Sound magazines’ poll of the world’s directors and cineastes. But no. I’ve taught both shot-by-shot and had many students who confessed they didn’t feel the greatness. There are people Bergman doesn’t reach. And Ozu. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like Hitchcock, but I promise you I will in the comments under this entry. Many Hitchcock fans don’t admire “Vertigo,” which I think is his best film.

The agony of the body artist

Roger Ebert

In 1975 an artist named Chris Burden announced that he would lay down on the floor beneath a large sheet of plate glass on the floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He did not say what he would do then. I covered that story for the paper, not because it was assigned, but because the concept held an eerie fascination for me. It still does. I have no idea what he was trying to prove. But, surely, he was proving something?

I recently had occasion to read The Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka. It involves a sideshow performer who goes without food for long, long periods of time. This becomes a futile exercise, because while he’s starving there’s nothing much to see, and most people assume he isn’t really starving; a man need only be thin to lock himself in a cage and say he is fasting. Who watches him at night or when the show is moving to another town? The story has a famous ending that is savage in its implacability. I’ve linked to it below.

Bloodletting man, from the Calendar of Regiomontanus (1475)

Reading Kafka, I was reminded of the article I wrote about Chris Burden, and looked it up. It engaged and perplexed me. I will quote from it here, and then in italics I will think some more about Chris Burden.

A journey to the center of the mind

Roger Ebert

Spoilers abound.

I watched Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” again a couple of weeks ago, so I could add it to the Great Movies Collection. In 1997 I had some questions, but this time it was even more clear that the movie ends in enigma and paradox. Like many movies, that has little bearing on its effect.

Questions introduced from near the beginning seem to find answers at the end, and most viewers are satisfied–even exhilarated. For me, too, there was uplift. No matter that the scientific establishment scoffs; Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) knows what she saw, and we saw the same things.

The best damn job in the whole damn world

Roger Ebert

One of my editors at the Sun-Times once asked me, “Roger, is it true that they used to let reporters smoke at their desks?” This wasn’t asked yesterday; it must have been ten years ago. I realized then, although I’m only writing about it now, that a lifestyle had disappeared. When I entered the business in the autumn of my 16th year, newspapering seemed the most romantic and exciting thing I could possibly do with my life. “But honey,” my mom said, “they don’t pay them anything.” Who cared? It involved knowing what was going on before anyone else did, and putting my byline on top of a story telling it to the world. “Roger Ebert” is only a name. “By Roger Ebert” are the three most magical words in the language, drawing my eye the same way a bulls-eye attracts an arrow.

In the way some kids might be awed by a youth gang, I was awed by admission to the fraternity of newspapers. I adopted the idealism and cynicism of the reporters I met there, spoke like they did, laughed at the same things, felt that I belonged. On Saturday nights about midnight at The News-Gazette, when we put the Sunday paper to bed, we gathered around the city desk, tired, released, and waited for the first papers to be brought upstairs. Ed Borman, the news editor was in the slot; Bill Schmelzle, the city editor, had Saturday nights off. Borman would crack open a six-pack. I tasted beer for the first time. I was a man. My parents, my family, my friends at school, nobody, would ever really understand the fellowship into which I entered. Borman didn’t care that I was drinking at 16. We had all put out the paper together. Now we would have a beer.

To NSFW or not to NSFW? (now SFW)

Roger Ebert

This entry is safe for work.

I hesitated just a moment before including Miss June 1975 in my piece about Hugh Hefner. I wondered if some readers would find the nude photograph objectionable. Then I smiled at myself. Here I was, writing an article in praise of Hefner’s healthy influence on American society, and I didn’t know if I should show a Playmate of the Month. Wasn’t I being a hypocrite? I waited to see what the reaction would be.

The Sun-Times doesn’t publish nudes on its site, but my page occupies a sort of netherland: I own it in cooperation with the newspaper, but control its contents. If anyone complains, I thought, it will be the paper, and if they do I’ll take it down.

Getting out of the way

Roger Ebert

A 2009 story about a 12-year-old musical prodigy caught my eye today. His name is Jay Greenberg. He composes in his mind. It comes to him naturally. When we think of musical prodigies we imagine a child on a piano bench, or playing a violin. Not many compose. Greenburg has written five symphonies.

Sam Zyman, a composer who is Jay’s teacher at Julliard, told Rebecca Leung of CBS News: “We are talking about a prodigy of the level of the greatest prodigies in history when it comes to composition. I am talking about the likes of Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Saint-Sans.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Roger Ebert

It’s all coming to pieces, isn’t it — the world we live in, the continuity we thought we could count on, the climate, the economy, the fragile peace. The 20th century was called “the American Century,” with some reason. I do not believe the 21st century will belong to anybody, and it may not last for 100 years of human witness. There are nuclear weapons in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent, and if one is used, more will follow and who can say when the devastation will end?

The weather is unhinged. It is no longer a question of global warming. It is a question of what in the hell is happening? I do not have to rehearse for you the details of this horrible American autumn, and a winter not yet half over. The tornadoes, the hurricanes, the floods, the blizzards, the wild fires, the heat waves, the water shortages, the power blackouts. The White House declares “a state of emergency” and the federal government sends money. How many states of emergency are we still in? How much more money is there?

The ecstasy of the filmmaker Herzog

Roger Ebert

I saw “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” for the first time in a defrocked Lutheran Church in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, which Milos Stehlik had taken over for his newly-born Facets Multimedia. “It is a film you must see,” he told me. “Bring a pillow. The pews can get hard.”

I saw a great film, one of the greatest ever made. An essential film. In 1999, I made it one of the first titles in my Great Movies Collection. Now I wonder if I really saw it at all.

Leading with my chin

Roger Ebert

After surgery, I studiously avoided looking at myself in a mirror. In my mind my face was still whole. This was not the case, and one day in the hospital Dr. David J. Reisberg came to visit. He was a professor of craniofacial medicine at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and a specialist in facial reconstruction.

I suggested a false beard which I would wear suspended from hooks over my ears, like a kid playing Abe Lincoln in the school play. “It’s not like I think I’m fooling anyone,” I said.

The light in the tunnel

Roger Ebert

This is the best of times and the worst of times for the kinds of films we here in this blog find ourselves seeking. I’m talking about good independent films–which usually means films financed, released and marketed outside the big distribution channels. That’s a vague category which might also include foreign films, documentaries and classic revivals. These are the films where the future of film as an art form resides.

I have nothing to say against mainstream movies, the kinds that open on thousands of screens and are the only movies most people ever hear about. I like a lot of them–too many some of my readers say. They fend nicely for themselves. Sometimes they can be genuine art. Good for them.

I speak instead of films that make their own way in the world, inhabiting those few theaters that are booked with taste and independence. Or films available only on DVD. Or films finding their largest audiences at festivals. Or playing in video in demand. Or rediscovered after some years. Or lost.

Cannes #3: Greed may still be good

Roger Ebert

The way Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone explained it to me, modern Hollywood is doing the same thing modern Wall Street is: Trading for its own benefit, and not for the good of its customers.

“Let put it this way,” Stone said. “If you look at the figures at Goldman Sachs, 67% of their profit in 2008 came to their own house. They made most of their money for themselves and 11% for their customers. That’s a huge difference from

I admit it: I loved “Indy”

Roger Ebert

At noon Sunday, I attended a press screening of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” I returned to my laptop, wrote my review and sent it off, convinced I would be in a minority. I loved it, but then I’m also the guy who loved “Beowulf,” and look at the grief that got me. Now Indy’s early reviews are in, and I’m amazed to find myself in an enthusiastic majority. The Tomatometer stands at 78, and the more populist IMDb user rating is 9.2 out of 10. All this before the movie’s official opening on Thursday.

I’m still not all here

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Report #6

We now have it on Casey Affleck’s word that “I’m Still Here,” the film about Joaquin Phoenix’s apparent descent into self-destruction, was a hoax. We cannot doubt this. Well, perhaps we can; the possibility exists that Affleck caught so much shit after the release that he decided to back off from his devastating portrait of his brother-in-law. But let’s agree it is a hoax.

Secretariat was not a Christian

Roger Ebert

Andrew O’Hehir of Salon is a critic I admire, but he has nevertheless written a review of “Secretariat” so bizarre I cannot allow it to pass unnoticed. I don’t find anywhere in “Secretariat” the ideology he discovers there. In its reasoning, his review resembles a fevered conspiracy theory.

In this example , we do not find proof that Obama is a Muslim Communist born in Kenya. No, the news is worse than that. It involves Secretariat, a horse who up until now we innocently thought of as merely very fast. We learn the horse is a carrier not merely of Ron Turcotte’s 130 pounds, but of Nazism, racism, Tea Party ideology and the dark side of Christianity.

Oh, and I forgot the Ku Klux Klan: “The movie itself is ablaze with its own crazy sense of purpose,” O’Hehir writes, “…as if someone just off-screen were burning a cross on the lawn.”

Hooray! Hooray! The first of May!

Roger Ebert

When April with its sweet showers brought flowers to the lawns of May and birds filled the air with melodies, Dan-Dan the Yo-Yo Man made his annual pilgrimage to our playground at St. Mary’s School. He drove up in a dark maroon 1950 Hudson we all recognized on sight: It had the Step-Down Ride that allowed it to out-corner Fords and Chevys at the stock car races out at the fairgrounds. To own a car like that was to be a Duncan Yo-Yo professional.

Dan-Dan dismounted on the far side of the big Hudson, and when he walked into view there were already two Yo-Yos spinning in the air before him, making a whirl of red and yellow. He walked smiling toward home plate, let the yo-yos bounce off it, and snapped them on the fly into his pockets. He took out one, and rocked the baby, walked the dog, skinned the cat, made the monkey climb the string, and went around the world. Then he pulled out a Camel, lit up, and passed out flyers for the city-wide Duncan Yo-Yo contest that would be held on the stage of the Princess Theater on Main Street in Urbana for the following three Saturdays.

A slow boat to anywhere

Roger Ebert

I came across a statistic the other day that claimed only about ten percent of Americans have traveled outside their country. There is no reason for this. The recession is not an explanation; the survey was taken back when Bear, Sterns was still paying its rent. This is the richest and least-traveled of “developed” nations, and I have a feeling many Americans thank heaven every day that they have never had occasion to leave it.

But this will not be a column boasting about my travels to every continent except Australia and Antarctica, and how as a wee lad I saved up my 75-cent an hour salary and boarded a DC-6 that took me to London by way of Gander, Reykjavík and Aberdeen. No, not even though I just googled Antarctica and this is all I found on the page: “stu is a legend and the good guy has cheap sales.” That piece of internet vandalism, no doubt created by a friend of Stu’s, was authored (I somehow know) by an American [1] who has never walked three steps outside his own state–of mind. I am enlisting a cyber-posse to track him down and airlift him to the South Pole with a hooded sweatshirt bearing the legend “I’m With Stupid” and an arrow pointing to a penguin. We will leave him with two cans of Ensure and a match.

Claude Chabrol, RIP. The death of a master

Roger Ebert

Claude Chabrol, who died Sunday, Sept. 12 at 80, was a founder of the New Wave and a giant of French cinema. This interview, which took place during the 1970 New York Film Festival, shows him at midpoint in his life, just as he had emerged from a period of neglect and was making some of his best films.

Claude Chabrol’s “This Man Must Die” is advertised as a thriller, but I found it more of a macabre study of human behavior. There’s no doubt as to the villain’s identity, and little doubt that he will die (although how he dies is left deliciously ambiguous).

Unlike previous masters of thrillers like Hitchcock, Chabrol goes for mood and tone more than for plot. You get the notion that his killings and revenges are choreographed for a terribly observant camera and an ear that hears the slightest change in human speech.