Roger Ebert

The best documentaries of 2011

Roger Ebert

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

Hey, kids! Anybody here not heard the F-word?

Roger Ebert

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.”

Humans passed this way long ago

Roger Ebert

• 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 do they get to be that way?

Roger Ebert

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.

Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven any more

Roger Ebert

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?”

Casey Affleck levels about “I’m Still Here”

Roger Ebert

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.

My old man

Roger Ebert

Until the day he died, I always called him “Daddy.” He was Walter Harry Ebert, born in Urbana in 1902 of parents who had emmigrated from Germany. His father, Joseph, was a machinist working for the Peoria & Eastern Railway, known as the Big Four. Daddy would take me out to the Roundhouse on the north side of town to watch the big turntables turning steam engines around. In our kitchen, he always used a knife “your

grandfather made from a single piece of steel.”

Roger’s little rule book

Roger Ebert

We critics can’t be too careful. Employers are eager to replace us with Celeb Info-Nuggets that will pimp to the mouth-breathers, who underline the words with their index fingers whilst they watch television. Any editor who thinks drugged insta-stars and the tragic Amy Winehouse are headline news ought to be editing the graffiti on playground walls. As the senior newspaper guy still hanging onto a job, I think the task of outlining enduring ethical ground rules falls upon me.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

Roger Ebert

My previous blog item, “Hillary and Bill: The Movie,” has inspired a lot of comments, and some of them utterly baffle me. They take it for granted that I am pro-Hillary, if not necessarily anti-Obama. I’ve read the item again and believe it is neutral, as it was intended to be. I’m a political creature, but I intend to keep partisan politics out of this journal, which will, and should, deal only with the movies in various ways. I think those comments do, however, reveal something about how we watch movies.

King, you’re one of the best!

Roger Ebert

I met John McHugh in the autumn of 1966, when I was a cub reporter on the Sun-Times and he was a rewrite man, two years my senior, on the Chicago Daily News. We are still best friends. He worked the overnight shift, and among his duties was taking calls from readers.

After midnight, they wanted to settle bets. “And what do you say?” McHugh would ask. He would listen, and then reply,

“You’re 100% correct. Put the other guy on.” Pause. “And what do you say?” Pause. “You’re 100% correct.” If he was asked for his name, he said, “John T. Greatest, spelled with three Ts.” He explained, “They can never figure out that that means.”

The birds of prey are circling

Roger Ebert

Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail? Why are so many showbiz journalists like hyenas circling a crippled prey? Why do so many gossip columnists behave like jilted lovers or betrayed investors, livid with anger at what they once valued so highly? Why are a few stars singled out like the victims of school bullies? Why do the box office receipts of “Australia” appear in almost every news outlet, but an actual review of it appears in so few?

Here is a recent headline: “Australia” Another Nicole Kidman Letdown. We learn in the attached story from Reuters:

Twentieth Century Fox appears to have given up on director Baz Luhrmann’s latest period epic in North America, and is hoping that foreign sales will rescue the costly picture. The movie has sold just $44.3 million worth of tickets at the U.S. and Canadian box office after five weekends, and is shaping up to be the latest in a line of disappointments for its star, Nicole Kidman.

Fancy that. A mere $44.3 million. An attached chart documents Kidman’s previous movies and their grosses, to document her “line of disappointments.” I have left out two titles where she only did voices. Here are the rest of the titles, going back to 2002:

Cannes #5: Even now already is it in the world

Roger Ebert

There’s electricity in the air. Every seat is filled, even the little fold-down seats at the end of every row. It is the first screening of Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist,” and we are ready for anything. We’d better be. Von Trier’s film goes beyond malevolence into the monstrous. Never before have a man and woman inflicted more pain upon each other in a movie. We looked in disbelief. There were piteous groans. Sometimes a voice would cry out, “No!” At certain moments there was nervous laughter. When it was all over, we staggered up the aisles. Manohla Dargis, the merry film critic of The New York Times, confided that she left softly singing “That’s Entertainment!”

Whether this is a bad, good or great film is entirely beside the point. It is an audacious spit in the eye of society. It says we harbor an undreamed-of capacity for evil. It transforms a psychological treatment into torture undreamed of in the dungeons of history. Torturers might have been capable of such actions, but they would have lacked the imagination. Von Trier is not so much making a film about violence as making a film to inflict violence upon us, perhaps as a salutary experience. It’s been reported that he suffered from depression during and after the film. You can tell. This is the most despairing film I’ve ever have seen.

If, as they say, you are not prepared for “disturbing images,” I advise you to just just stop reading now.

Shall we gather at the river?

Roger Ebert

The first time I saw him, he was striding toward me out of the burning Georgia sun, as helicopters landed behind him. His face was tanned a deep brown. He was wearing a combat helmet, an ammo belt, carrying a rifle, had a canteen on his hip, stood six feet four inches. He stuck out his hand and said, “John Wayne.” That was not necessary.

John Wayne died 30 years ago on June 11. Stomach cancer. “The Big C,” he called it. He had lived for quite a while on one lung, and then the Big C came back. He was near death and he knew it when he walked out on stage at the 1979 Academy Awards to present Best Picture to “The Deer Hunter,” a film he wouldn’t have made. He looked frail, but he planted himself there and sounded like John Wayne.

John Wayne. When I was a kid, we said it as one word: Johnwayne. Like Marilynmonroe. His name was shorthand for heroism. All of his movies could have been titled “Walking Tall.” Yet he wasn’t a cruel and violent action hero. He was almost always a man doing his duty. Sometimes he was other than that, and he could be gentle, as in “The Quiet Man,” or vulnerable, as in “The Shootist,” or lonely and obsessed, as in “The Searchers,” or tender with a baby, as in “3 Godfathers.”

“The Artist” and the new Herzog

Roger Ebert

• Toronto Entry #2I have not quite become jaded. Sometimes I fear that I am so familiar with movie formulas that some films don’t have a fair chance. Then I go to see Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist” and it tells a story that would have been familiar in the late 1920s, when it is set, and I begin by admiring its technique and am surprised to find, half way through, that I actually care how it turns out.

Cannes #10: And, at last, the winners are…

Roger Ebert

Now I understand why Cannes 2009 opened with Pixar’s “Up.” They knew what was coming. Has there ever been a more violent group of films in the Official Selection? More negative about humanity? More despairing? With a greater variety of gruesome, sadistic, perverted acts? You know you’re in deep water when the genuinely funniest film in the festival is by a Palestinian in today’s Israel, whose material includes a firing squad, a mother with Alzheimers, and a hero with dark circles under his eyes who never utters a single word.

And most of these films were not over quickly. Not that there’s something wrong with a film running over the invisible 120-minute finish line, if it needs to, and is a good film. I regret that not all the 21 films in this year’s selection were good. And that’s not just me. The daily critics’ panel for Le Film Francais was as negative as I’ve seen it, even giving a pas de tout (“worthless”) to a film I would defend, von Trier’s extreme but courageous “Antichrist.”

In the past I have felt the elation of discovery at Cannes, seeing for the first time films like Kielowski’s “Red,” Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” Spielberg’s “E.T.”–and premieres by Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Chen Keige, Fassbinder, Altman, Herzog, Scorsese. Titans bestrode the earth in those days. This year the only ecstatic giants, love them or hate them, were Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino.

Cannes #6: Of emotion and its absence

Roger Ebert

Of the 12 films I’ve seen at Cannes, the most warmly cheered has been the South African “Life, Above All.” That’s possibly more significant than in other years.

The audiences at Cannes this year have been oddly restrained, and there’s less clapping at the names of directors; even Jean-Luc Godard received only perfunctory applause. Is this becoming less a directors’ festival and more a trade fair?