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!”
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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
