Roger Ebert

My vocation as a priest

Roger Ebert

It was my mother who decided I would be a priest. I heard this beginning early in my childhood. It was the greatest vocation one could hope for in life. There was no greater glory for a mother than to “give her son to the church.” I speculated that my mother had given me birth with the specific hope of passing me on to the church.

There was a mother in our congregation at St. Patrick’s, Mrs. Wuellner, who had achieved the enviable distinction of giving two sons to the church, Fathers Frank and George, and these two good men came once to visit us at our home, possibly to inspire me.

The blogs of my blog

Roger Ebert

One of my favorite pastimes, especially when I should be doing something else, is moseying around the blogs of my readers. You may have noticed that when the name of a poster is displayed in blue, that means it’s a link — usually to the author’s blog, although you might be surprised. Assembled here is a distinctive readership of interesting people, not least because I am vigilant about never posting idiotic or perfunctory comments. A certain civil tone is (usually) maintained, avoiding the plague of flame wars.

More than a year ago, when the blog was somewhat new to me, I wrote: “Your comments have provided me with the best idea of my readers that I have ever had, and you are the readers I have dreamed of. I was writing to you before I was sure you were there. You are thoughtful, engaged, fair, and often the authors of eloquent prose. You take the time to craft comments of hundreds of words. Frequently you are experts, and generous enough to share your knowledge.”

How Studs helps me lead my life

Roger Ebert

I got caught in the Indiana Jones whirlwind and allowed an important anniversary to pass unremarked: On May 16, Studs Terkel celebrated his 96th birthday. One of the great American lives continues to unfold. If I know Studs, the great day passed with calls and visits from friends, and the ceremonious imbibing of one (1) gin martini, very dry. I hope he has eliminated the daily cigar, but I’m not taking odds. If you don’t know Studs, there are few people you can meet more easily in print. He is the greatest conversationalist I’ve met, the author of a shelf-full of books in which he engages people from all walks of life in thoughtful conversations about their own lives.

TIFF #1: Darwin, Herzog, the Coens and the Antichrist

Roger Ebert

I’ve just finished combing through the list of films in this year’s Toronto Film Festival, and I have it narrowed down to 49. I look at the list and sigh. How can I see six films a day, write a blog, see people and sleep? Nor do I believe the list includes all the films I should see, and it’s certainly missing films I will see. How it happens is, you’re standing in line and hear buzz about something. Or a trusted friend provides a title you must see. Or you go to a movie you haven’t heard much about, just on a hunch, and it turns out to be “Juno.”

Nicolas Cage in “Bad Lieutenant”

I can’t wait to dive in. Knowing something of my enthusiasms, faithful reader, let me tell you that TIFF 2009’s opening night is a film about the life of Charles Darwin. The festival includes the film of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” And new films by the Coen brothers, Todd Solondz, Michael Moore, Atom Egoyan, Pedro Almodovar, Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Alain Resnais and Guy Maddin–and not one but two new films by Werner Herzog. Plus separate new films by the three key talents involved in Juno: The actress Ellen Page, the director Jason Reitman, and the writer Diablo Cody.

Okay, I’ve already seen two of those. They were screened here in Chicago (Page as a teenage Roller Derby in “Whip It,” Cody’s script for “Jennifer’s Body,” starring Megan Fox as a high school man-eater, and that’s not a metaphor). I already saw more than ten of this year’s entries at Cannes, including Lars on Trier’s controversial “Antichrist,” Jane Campion’s “Bright Star,” Gasper Noe’s “Enter the Void,” Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces,” Bong Joon-Ho’s “Mother,” Lee Daniels’ “Precious,” Mia Hansen-Løve’s “The Father of My Children,” and Resnais’s “Wild Grass.” A lot of good films there. Not all of them, but a lot.

The third most important story of the year

Roger Ebert

HYDERABAD, India, Nov. 8 (UPI) — About 6,000 Muslim clerics from around India approved a fatwa against terrorism Saturday at a conference in Hyderabad.

The Muslim world has not been eager to hate America. For many Muslims, America with its religious freedom represented for decades a refuge against what all were pleased to call “godless Communism” and the USSR persecution of its Islamic republics. After the 9/11 attacks, there was a candlelight march in the streets of Tehran in mourning for the victims.

American flags were waved. No flags are waving now. I visited Tehran once, in 1972, for the film festival. My Iranian guide took me home for tea with her parents. There was a point that her family members wanted to make. “We are not Arabs,” her mother said. “We are Persians. We speak a different language. We are Muslims, but we are modern Muslims. You do not see our women covered up in the streets or locked up in their houses. America is our ideal, where all are left to worship in peace.” Then the Shah was overthrown, and the fundamentalists took over. Moderate candidates have been elected to national office in recent years, but the ayatollahs have veto power over moderation.

That was an Iran I hope still exists beneath the hostile stance they are taking against us. When we sent an army to Kuwait to throw back Saddam, Iran rejoiced, because Iraq was their ancient enemy. It was after we invaded Iraq after 9/11 that feelings began to sour. The sight of our occupation of a Muslim country disturbed the entire region. If we would invade its neighbor of our own volition, was Iran next? Until very recent months it seemed as if Iran was next. The White House reportedly ordered a military plan to be drawn up.

Stream a little stream with me

Roger Ebert

With the entry of Facebook into the field, an 800-pound gorilla has entered the room where we stream movies via the internet. If nothing else, this will introduce untold millions who have heard about live streaming but never tried it, in many cases because they assume it’s somehow difficult.

Just about everyone seems to be on Facebook, but for some people getting a FB account seems to represent the limit of their online expertise. Now streaming will come to them, on their very own page, and all they’ll have to do is give Mark Zuckerberg their credit card and buy some Facebook Credits.

No animals were Uncanny Valleyed in the making of this movie

Roger Ebert

A reader named Zig writes me from Cliffside Park, New Jersey: “What is your opinion of Amy Kaufman’s LA Times piece about animal use in films, the subject in general, and whether digital technology, like in ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes,’ can currently capture the natural personalities of individual animals, or will we have to wait for technology to advance just a little further?”

Raising free-range kids

Roger Ebert

I wrote recently about my childhood growing up in Downstate Illinois. I mentioned me and my friends roaming all over town on our bikes, walking to the movies and the swimming pool on our own, and riding our bikes through rain water backed up after thunderstorms. Also, for that matter, through piles of burning leaves. One of my classmates wrote to mention that the Boneyard, the creek running through town, was a drainage canal. “What?” I asked. “Where we caught crawdaddies?”

One of the comments on the entry was from a reader in Florida who said, rather sadly, that his 15-year-old son had just taken his first unsupervised bike ride through the city park. When he was growing up, he said, things were different. But not “today.” We use that word today as code for the dangers lurking everywhere in modern society. Another reader sent me a link to a web site advocating the raising of Free Range Children. I learned this has become something of a movement, cheered by a book by Lenore Skenazy. The movement believes we are punishing our kids by over-protecting them.

Certainly today we take for granted things that we never imagined in our own childhoods, like child car seats, bike helmets, bottled water, security guards, sunblock, hand sanitizer and childproof bottles. I mentioned my childhood memory that we boys would pee behind trees, shrubbery, or garages (“If you run home, your mom might grab you and make you do something”). I forgot to mention that one of the reasons we needed to pee is that when we got thirsty we drank out of garden hoses–our own, and anybody else’s.

Smash his camera, but not immediately

Roger Ebert

He is a viper, a parasite, a stalker, a vermin. He is also, I have decided, a national treasure. Ron Galella, the best known of all paparazzi, lost a lawsuit to Jackie Kennedy Onassis and five teeth to Marlon Brando, but he also captured many of the iconic photographs of his era. At 77, he is still active, making the drive from his New Jersey home and his pet bunny rabbits through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan, the prime grazing land of his prey.

I had an idea, as many of us do, about Gallela and the species of paparazzi. It was a hypocritical idea. I disapproved of him and enjoyed his work. Yes, he comes close to violating the rights of public people, and sometimes crosses the line. He certainly crossed the line with Jackie’s children.

We’ll have to get used to this idea

Roger Ebert

The first time I met vegetarians I assumed they were risking their lives in some cockamamie cult. The first vegetarian I got to know well was Anna Thomas, author of the classic cookbook The Vegetarian Epicure. Her husband Greg Nava had been out collecting wild mushrooms for our dinner.

“Wild mushrooms! We’ll all die! You eat yours first!”

The autumn leaves of red and gold

Roger Ebert

One day not long ago in the country I gathered a small pile of dried leaves and started a little fire. Then I closed my eyes and remembered. The aroma was a trigger as intense as the taste of Proust’s madeleine, the little cake from childhood that summoned his remembrance of time past. It evoked nostalgia but it also evoked curious excitement and desire.

For me it is not spring but autumn that is the season of new beginnings. Spring, in school, is a time of taking final exams and saying goodbye to friends. Autumn is the start of a new year, and for me at least it always held the promise of new romance. I was now a freshman, or a sophomore, or whatever, and had left behind childhood things, and perhaps Marty would be at the Tiger’s Den on Friday night and we could slow-dance to “Dream” by the Everly Brothers.

The best art films of 2010

Roger Ebert

This is the last of my lists of the best films of 2010, and the hardest to name. Call it the Best Art Films. I can’t precisely define an Art Film, but I knew I was seeing one when I saw these. I could also call them Adult Films, if that term hadn’t been devalued by the porn industry. These are films based on the close observation of behavior. They are not mechanical constructions of infinitesimal thrills. They depend on intelligence and empathy to be appreciated.

They also require acting of a precision not necessary in many mass entertainments. They require directors with a clear idea of complex purposes. They require subtleties of lighting and sound that create a self-contained world. Most of all, they require sympathy. The directors care for their characters, and ask us to see them as individuals, not genre emblems. That requires us to see ourselves as individual viewers, not “audience members.” That can be an intimate experience. I found it in these titles, which for one reason or another weren’t on my earlier lists. Maybe next year I’ll just come up with one alphabetical list of all the year’s best films, and call it “The Best Films of 2011, A to Z.”

The best foreign films of 2009

Roger Ebert

Look at it this way. We have the chance to see virtually every American film that’s released, and many of the English language films in general. But with the crisis in U.S. distribution, the only foreign-language films are those someone paid hard cash for, and risked opening here. “You always like those foreign films,” I’m told, often by someone making it sound like a failing. Not always, but often. They tend to involve characters of intelligence and complexity. If

Why 3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed.

Roger Ebert

I received a letter that ends, as far as I am concerned, the discussion about 3D. It doesn’t work with our brains and it never will.

The notion that we are asked to pay a premium to witness an inferior and inherently brain-confusing image is outrageous. The case is closed.

This letter is from Walter Murch, seen at left, the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema. As a editor, he must be intimately expert with how an image interacts with the audience’s eyes. He won an Academy Award in 1979 for his work on “Apocalypse Now,” whose sound was a crucial aspect of its effect.

E. E. Cummings was not a racist

Roger Ebert

Was E. E. Cummings a Racist?

That was the provocative HuffPost-style headline May 27 on Brow Beat, a culture blog on Slate.com. The author, Nina Shen Rastogi, reported that a lost poem by e. e. cummings had been discovered. The poem, named “(tonite,” was published in the Awl, whose editor, Choire Sicha, tweeted that it was “reeeeaaaal troublesome!!!”

Her tweet linked to an excellent essay by James Dempsey, which is about a long-running correspondence between Cummings and his friend Scofield Thayer, the publisher of the important literary magazine The Dial.

“You give out too many stars”

Roger Ebert

That’s what some people tell me. Maybe I do. I look myself up in Metacritic, which compiles statistics comparing critics, and I find: “On average, this critic grades 8.9 points higher than other critics (0-100 point scale).” Wow. What a pushover. Part of my problem may be caused by conversion of the detested star rating system. I consider 2.5 stars to be thumbs down; they consider 62.5 to be favorable. But let’s not mince words: On average, I do grade higher than other critics.

Now why do I do that? And why, as some readers have observed, did I seem to grade lower in my first 10 or 15 years on the job? I know the answer to that one. When I started, I considered 2.5 stars to be a perfectly acceptable rating for a film I rather liked in certain aspects. Then I started doing the TV show, and ran into another wacky rating system, the binary thumbs. Up or down, which is it?

Gene Siskel boiled it down: “What’s the first thing people ask you? Should I see this movie? They don’t want a speech on the director’s career. Thumbs up–yes. Thumbs down–no.” That made sense, but in the paper it had the effect of nudging a lot of films from 2.5 to three stars. There is never any doubt about giving four stars, or one star. The problem comes with the movies in the middle. Siskel once tried to get away with giving thumbs up to a 2.5 star movie, but I called him on it.

The human race on a key ring

Roger Ebert

Richard Dawkins observed in The Selfish Gene that from the point of view of a gene, a living body is merely a carrier to transport it into the future. I believe we are now entering the century of the Selfish Mind. Man has always been a creature restlessly seeking a reality beyond himself. We cannot know what a chimpanzee thinks about when he gazes at the stars, or what ideas a dolphin has about air. But we know what we think, and we have traveled so high in the atmosphere we cannot breathe and then beyond. We have placed humans on the Moon, sent our devices to other planets, and our signals reaching out to the universe, not to be received until after our extinction, if then.

The earliest hominids must have had complex ideas, but they were trapped inside their minds. Out of the desire to share those ideas with other minds, they devised symbols, sounds and speech. I see you, I see this, I think this, I want to tell you. Many species make sounds–at first to warn or to frighten, then to express more complex needs. We don’t know if speech itself was a goal, because we cannot be sure if they had a conception of what that might be. But from its first “words,” mankind found itself driven to improve and extend its self-expression. I will not rehearse here the forms that drive has taken. A short list will do: Symbols, drawings, signs, writing, printing, analog information, now digital information. The storage, manipulation and transmission of digital data was a threshold step as crucial as the bone used as a tool in “2001.” The bone became our key to the physical domain. The transistor chip became our key to the digital domain.

Heteronormative vampires

Roger Ebert

You read the word and without skipping a beat you know what it means. I am so clueless that I became aware of it for the first time in the past few days, in reviews of “Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1.”

The observation is made that Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling series of novels is profoundly heteronormative.