David Mamet’s recent “Redbelt” is an example of a kind of movie that needs a name. It’s not precisely a thriller, or a suspense picture, or a police procedural, and although it occupies the territory of film noir, it’s not a noir. I propose this kind of film be named a Twister, because it’s made from plot twists, and in a way the twists are the real subject.
A depression has descended upon me. I look at the blank screen, and those are the words that come into my mind. I do not believe for a second that Mitt Romney will win the election. I do believe that at this moment he is tied, 50-50, in various national polls. Many of my fellow Americans have at least temporarily disappointed me.
This is an apology, and a cause for celebration. First, I want to apologize to the reader John B. In the previous version of this entry, I announced that his caption entry had won our contest in a landslide, and then went on to lament that he had left no e-mail address, and that a similar caption had appeared earlier on another website. Therefore, the implication was that he had “borrowed” it.
Some fair-minded readers wrote to argue that the difference between the two captions–John used the word “omniscient,” and the other blog used “omnipotent”–was significant, and that in fact John’s caption was funnier. This is true. I began to doubt my rush to judgement. Who, after all, would cheat just to win shiny new dime? On the other hand, where was John to step forward and claim his prize?
John, or “John B.,” has now stepped forward. Today he posted this, which is quite civilized, under the circumstances:
I woke up at about 3:30 a.m. and went online to see if Obama had pulled a victory out of Indiana. He had narrowed Clinton’s head to two points by midnight and later added a few more votes, but the story was basically about the same: Clinton’s winning margin was so small that it didn’t much count, and Obama would be the likely Presidential nominee. Then I started wondering, in the vaporous midnight hours, about how you could make a movie of this primary campaign.
“Death panels” is such an excellent term. You know exactly what it means, and therefore you know you’re against them. Debate over. This term more than anything else seems to have unified the opposition to the Obama health care proposals. It fuels the anger that has essentially shut down “town hall” meetings intended for the discussion of the issues.
Of course the term is inspired by a lie. There are no conceivable plans to form “death panels” or anything like them. The Obama plan, which has some bipartisan support, doesn’t seek or desire to get involved in any decisions about who should live and who should die. But now we hear “death panel” repeated so often that the term has taken on a sort of eerie reality, as if it really referred to anything.
It’s a good thing Ebertfest is no longer called the Overlooked Film Festival. One of my choices this year, “Frozen River,” was in danger of being overlooked when I first invited it, but then it realized the dream of every indie film, found an audience and won two Oscar nominations. Yet even after the Oscar nods, it has grossed only about $2.5 million and has been unseen in theaters by most of the nation.
Those numbers underline the crisis in independent, foreign or documentary films–art films. More than ever, the monolithic U.S. distribution system freezes out films lacking big stars, big ad budgets, ready-made teenage audiences, or exploitable hooks. When an unconventional film like “Slumdog Millionaire” breaks out, it’s the exception that proves the rule. While it was splendid, it was not as original or really as moving as the American indie “Chop Shop,” made a year earlier. The difference is, the hero of “Chop Shop” wasn’t trying to win a million rupees–just to survive.
As I sat in a Toronto hotel room and watched those first images of 9/11 playing over and over again, there was an eerie mixture of fact and fiction. Television showed panic in the streets, as people ran screaming toward the cameras. Behind them, the unthinkable: the vast towers crumbling in fire and smoke, and clouds of debris filling the canyons of the streets.
Every time I see a dog in a movie, I think the same thing: I want that dog. I see Skip or Lucy or Shiloh and for a moment I can’t even think about the movie’s plot. I can only think about the dog. I want to hold it, pet it, take it for walks, and tell it what a good dog it is. I want to love it, and I want it to love me. I have an empty space inside myself that can only be filled by a dog.
Not a cat. I have had cats and I was fond of them, fonder than they ever were of me. But what I want is unconditional love, and therefore I want a dog. I want to make its life a joy. I want to scratch behind its ears, and on its belly when it rolls over. I want to gently extend its tail so the dog can tell it’s a fine tail indeed. I want to give it a shampoo, and sneak it bites from the table, and let it exchange the news with other dogs we meet on the street. I want it to bark at the doorbell, be joyous to see my loved ones, shake hands, and look concerned if I seem depressed. If I throw a ball I want the dog to bring back the ball and ask me to throw it again.
Photographs, left to right: Bullwinkle J. Moose, Jonathan Swift.
Some days ago I posted an article headlined, “Creationism: Your questions answered.” It was a Q&A that accurately reflected Creationist beliefs. It inspired a firestorm on the web, with hundreds, even thousands of comments on blogs devoted to evolution and science. More than 600 comments on the delightful FARK.com alone. Many of the comments I’ve seen believe I have converted to Creationism. Others conclude I have lost my mind because of age and illness. There is a widespread conviction that the site was hacked. Lane Brown’s blog for New York magazine flatly states I gave “two thumbs down to evolution.” On every one of the blogs, there are a few perceptive comments gently suggesting the article might have been satirical. So far I have not seen a single message, negative or positive, from anyone identifying as a Creationist.
APRIL 25, 2008–Every year I keep meaning to include “Joe vs. the Volcano” in Ebertfest, and every year something else squeezes it out, some film more urgently requiring our immediate attention, you see. The 1990 John Patrick Shanley film, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was about a wage slave in a factory where dark clouds lower o’er the sky; he is told he has a Brain Cloud, with only five months to live. How this leaves him to become a candidate for human sacrifice in the South Seas follows a long and winding road, in a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it.
It was Gene Siskel who introduced me to the concept of Lip Flap. By this he meant the practice of speaking without saying anything of use. Its primary purpose, he explained, was to allow people to sneak up on the moment when they would sooner or later have to actually engage their minds. Siskel was an impatient man. In that and other ways we were allies.
There is no such thing as a ghost. And even if there was, would they have enough physical presence to show up in a photograph?
I say this with full knowledge that 245,000 images are linked by Googling “photographs of ghosts,” and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the pragmatist Sherlock Holmes but a fall guy for spiritualists, endorsed the reality of the famous Cottingley Fairy Photographs, a hoax which inspired the 1995 movie “Fairy Tale: A True Story”).
Perhaps you believe in ghosts, fairies, elves, leprechauns, hobbits and other mythical or mystical creatures. This is your privilege. That’s not the question here. The question is, was there a ghost in a photograph of a deer I recently took in the woods in Michigan?
The possibility never occurred to me. In fact, I didn’t find the photograph itself worthy of a Tweet. I’m not exactly like,
Why not fold documentaries into my list of the “Best Films of 2011?” After all, a movie is a movie, right? Yes, and some years I’ve thrown them all into the same mixture. But all of these year-end Best lists serve one useful purpose: They tell you about good movies you may not have seen or heard about. The more films on my list that aren’t on yours, the better job I’ve done.
That’s particularly true were you to depend on the “short list” released by the Academy’s Documentary Branch of 15 films they deem eligible for nomination. The branch has been through turmoil in the past and its procedures were “reformed” at one point. But this year it has made a particularly scandalous sin of
Even as I write on Thursday night, a screening of “Bully” is taking place in Washington that may or may not result in the film’s MPAA rating being changed from R to PG-13. Jen Chaney suggests in her Washington Post blog that a compromise might even be possible. The film is a documentary about how bullying affected five families, and led to two suicides. It was slapped with an R, because of its use of the F-word. Chaney asked Lee Hirsch, the film’s director, “whether there was any chance he would consider bleeping out one or two of those expletives if that guaranteed a PG-13 designation for the movie, thereby allowing teen audiences to see it.”
The notion for this blog has been rattling about on my to-write list for months. It many ways it should not need to be written. All the same, again today another of Those Comments came in: “Just stick to movie reviews. you have no idea of what you’re talking about. You love socialism? Move to Europe.”
• Toronto Report #4
About 32,000 years ago, in a limestone cave above the Ardèche River in Southern France, humans created the oldest cave paintings known to exist. They spring from the walls with boldness and confidence, as if the artists were already sure what they wanted to paint and how to paint it. Perhaps 25,000 years ago, a child visited the cave and left a footprint, the oldest human footprint that can be accurately dated. At some time after the child’s visit, a rock slide sealed the entrance to the cave. In 1994, French archeologists, searching for air plumes that might reveal the presence of a cave, found it again.
How would I feel if I were a brown student at Miller Valley Elementary School in Prescott, Arizona? A mural was created to depict some of the actual students in the school.
Let’s say I was one of the lucky ones. The mural took shape, and as my face became recognizable, I took some kidding from my classmates and a smile from a pretty girl I liked.
My parents even came over one day to have a look and take some photos to e-mail to the family. The mural was shown on TV, and everybody could see that it was me.
Here I was all set to go Elitist on the country singer Lee Greenwood, and I pulled the rug out from under myself. I shared Rachel Maddow’s incredulity that the limping duck George W. Bush had appointed Greenwood to the National Council of the Arts. I even had my first two sentences written in my head: “Remember how the Bush takeover squad at the White House complained the Clintonites had unplugged all the PCs on their way out the door? As he steadfastly marches toward his own sunset, it is Bush himself who seems unplugged.”
Zing! Totally unfair, but snappy, Bush had two vacancies to fill on the NCA, one for three years, one for six. Greenwood got the six-year term. He’ll be the gift that keeps on giving every day during Obama’s first term. The Council’s job is to advise the National Endowment for the Arts on how to spend its money. I assume Greenwood will support the endowment’s Shakespeare in American Communities Initiative, but you can never be sure about those things.
Da-ding! I was just getting warmed up. I was going to sympathize with Bush because fate has set a limited table for conservatives in the arts department. Liberals get Paul Newman, conservatives get Chuck Norris. We get Bruce Springsteen, they get Cousin Brucie. Does such a thing as a conservative dancer even exist? To be sure, Greenwood was a member of a dance ensemble, but that was when he was nine. Look at Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic party, who was a philosopher, author, architect, violinist , inventor, sketch artist and culinary expert, and still found the time to found another branch of the family. JFK told an assembly of U.S. Nobel Prize winners: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House — with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” I imagine George whispering to Laura: “Why didn’t anyone want to eat with him?”
The bottom line: Casey Affleck thinks of it as a performance and not as an act, and he thinks of “I’m Still Here” as a film, and not a hoax. In an interview where he revealed details behind the making of his controversial film with and about Joaquin Phoenix, he also said:
• David Letterman was not in on the performance, and what you saw on his show was really happening.
• Phoenix dropped out of character when he was not being filmed or in public.
• The drugs and the hookers were staged. The vomiting was real.
She is the small, determined center of Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which opens July 6 and seems destined for a Best Picture nomination from the Academy. Quvenzhané Wallis was six when she filmed the role. She and all of the other actors were non-professionals. Incredible.
I interviewed Quvenzhané, her co-star Dwight Henry and her director Benh Zeitlin during their Chicago visit. This video was edited by Paul Meekin. My print interview with Quvenzhané follows.
