I’m delighted with the elegant and more user-friendly re-design at rogerebert.com, where I serve as assistant editor and critic. Editor in chief Chaz Ebert has generously used the re-launch to pay tribute to our writers, including a link to my appreciation essay about Carl Reiner. It is one of the great honors of my professional life to be a part of the site founded by Roger Ebert, whose work has been an inspiration for me since his first review in the Chicago Sun-Times when I was in high school.
As Ebertfest begins to prepare for its 20th anniversary in 2018, it has released a video from Shatterglass about last spring’s festival. It is always one of the highlights of the year.
Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” turns 50 this week. Rogerebert.com critics pay tribute, fitting as the film was one of Roger Ebert’s favorites and his review of the film helped to make his reputation as a critic of seriousness, insight, and influence. He wisely and accurately wrote at the time that the film was “a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance” and predicted “years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.” Later, with some perspective, he included it as one of his “Great Films” and wrote, “It was a film in which all of the unlikely pieces were assembled at the right time. And more than anything else, it was a masterpiece of tone, in which the actors and filmmakers were all in sync as they moved the material back and forth between comedy and tragedy.”
“Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate,” she wrote. “The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.” And with that, she’s off and running, not only drawing us in with the breathless urgency of her praise, but vibing on what would become one of her signature preoccupations: the wild notion that this commoner’s entertainment could also be considered art, even when functioning outside the rigid confines of the “art film.”
She tackles this idea sideways, in considering and refuting the key argument of the film’s detractors (chief among them, Crowther at the Times): its violence. “To ask why people react so angrily to the best movies and have so little negative reaction to poor ones is to imply that they are so unused to the experience of art in movies that they fight it,” she surmises, and expands upon that notion thus:
Though we may dismiss the attacks with “What good movie doesn’t give some offense?,” the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it—perhaps a law should be passed against it.
These were fairly radical notions at the time (for an American critic, anyway), that a popular art form like film should not only be provocative, but was better for it – and at the very least, it was a radical idea for the tony pages of the New Yorker. But the film’s volatile relationship with its audience, how it turns our expectations and reactions (to violence, to sexuality, and especially to humor) back on its viewers, make for both the essay’s most compelling ideas, and its most astonishing writing.
Get Roger Ebert’s Great Movies eBook for $1.99 Until May 24, 2015
Posted on May 14, 2015 at 1:17 pm
Roger Ebert’s Great Movies ebook is on sale through May 24 for only $1.99. Whether you are a long-time film fan or just looking for something new on Netflix, you will want to have Ebert’s wise and witty appreciations of the best of the best.
Greetings from the campus of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where the 17th annual Roger Ebert Film Festival is underway. I am delighted to be appearing on a panel of very distinguished film critics this morning and will post a link when it is online. Yesterday I was thrilled to see one of my favorite films, “Moving Midway,” followed by a discussion with the director, Godfrey Cheshire and, via Skype, his cousin, Professor Robert Hinton.
Copyright Nell Minow 2015
We then got a special treat, a pre-release screening of “The End of the Tour,” directed by James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “Smashed”), and starring Jason Segal as David Foster Wallace. Ponsoldt and Segal discussed the film afterward with Rogerebert.com editor Brian Tallerico and festival director Nate Kohn. Segal told us his biggest challenge in making the film was in the scenes with Wallace’s dogs — “having to do serious acting with salmon down my pants.”
Today I am especially looking forward to one of my favorite Ebertfest traditions — a silent film with live musical accompaniment from the Alloy Orchestra.