Ebertfest, Part 2

Posted on April 28, 2009 at 3:58 pm

It took me nearly 48 hours to get home due to weather and other delays, but I am back with some more from the Ebert festival.

I was on a panel called “Film Criticism and the Web,” with 10 critics including Richard Roeper, the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips, radio and television stations WGN’s Dean Richards, Time Out Chicago’s Hank Sartin, Ain’t-It-Cool’s Steve Prokopy (aka Capone), Kim Voynar of Film Essent and Movie City News, Lisa Rosman of US Weekly and Flavorpill, and eFilmCritic’s Eric Childress and Peter Sobczynski. We spoke about our concerns that print film criticism was shrinking, but the very make-up of the panel demonstrated the reach and variety of voices available through other media.

Following his treatment for cancer, Ebert cannot speak. But he is marvelously expressive, his enthusiasm for these marvelous movies communicated with his every gesture. He has a laptop that synthesizes text into speech and he thought as long as he could not speak with his own voice, why not have a very classy British accent? You can hear him introduce the young Romanian star of “The Fall,” Catinca Untaru, standing with her mother and step-father, in this clip. Prokopy and I interviewed her before the audience following the screening. She appeared in the film almost half her life ago — she is now 12 — and it was a lot of fun to see that while she is very grown up, she is still as unaffectedly charming as she was in the film. I thought it was very funny that she said she wanted to see the Swedish vampire film on the schedule, “Let the Right One In,” because in Romania they know a lot about vampires!

Standing next to him is Chaz Ebert, Roger’s wife, who served as the very gracious mistress of ceremonies throughout the festival. I was very touched by all she and Roger did to make me feel especially welcome.

The theme of the festival is a quote from Roger: As film exhibition in North America crowds itself ever more narrowly into predictable commercial fodder for an undemanding audience, we applaud those brave, free spirits who still hold faith with the unlimited potential of the cinema. There was no more touching moment in the festival than in the discussion following the stunning documentary about the damage caused by Katrina and by the failure of government and humanity that followed. The young woman whose own footage was in every sense the heart of the film, Kimberly Rivers Roberts, spoke about how the movie helped her to pursue her dream of being a recording artist. “I didn’t know what I could do until I saw myself on screen,” she said. At their best, movies reflect back to us a self we hardly dreamed we were capable of becoming. The 14 films at this festival left the audience filled with new ideas of what we can be.

The first person who sends me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Ebert in the subject line will get a baseball hat and t-shirt from the festival.

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Ebertfest, Part 1

Posted on April 25, 2009 at 7:42 am

I won’t be able to post pictures until I get home, but here is a quick update on Roger Ebert’s festival at the University of Illinois. Unlike many festivals, which have a dozen or more choices of events every minute of the day, this one has just one panel or film at a time, which creates a marvelous shared experience and sense of community. The screenings take place in the magnificent Virginia Theatre, an historic space that has served as a vaudeville house and as an enormous cathedral of film. Thursday night, we saw “Trouble the Water,” a stunning, infuriating, heart-breaking, and uplifting documentary about Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. The film-makers were there to talk about it afterward, including the young couple whose home movies and journey are at the heart of the story.
Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion that included writer-director Ramin Bahrani of “Chop Shop” and the upcoming “Goodbye Solo,” Misty Upham of “Frozen River,” Carl Molider, producer of “Let the Right One In,” and Andy Ihnatko of the marvelous blog Celestial Waste of Bandwidth. Upham, a Native American, spoke of being told in auditions to come back when they do a western. “I can play a regular person! I can play a taxi driver. I will do anything that does not involve a teepee or buckskin!” The debate on whether we should “let” people see pure popcorn films like “Wolverine” was very spirited and I especially enjoyed a teacher from Downer’s Grove in the audience who said that she loved it when the kids in her film class tell her she has spoiled movie-going for them because they can’t “just watch” anymore.
Then I was on a panel of critics — 10 critics, 90 minutes, you can do the math. But at least from where I was sitting at the end of the long, long table, it was surprisingly substantial and a lot of fun. We represented print, radio, television, and the internet. Many of us have done them all. We have appeared in every possible form of media except perhaps cuneiform tablets and notes in bottles. We had the obligatory mourner’s wait over the state of newspapers and how hard it is to make money as a movie critic. But I really enjoyed the variety of voices and the unquenchable passion for movies and for thinking about them, writing about them, and especially helping the good ones find their audience. I especially liked the comments from Time Out Chicago’s Hank Sartin and it was a great pleasure to meet for the first time my email friend Eric Childress, of the withering CriticWatch, which takes on the “critics” who will call anything “the feel-good film of the year” to get their names in the ads.
After a couple of hours at the University’s Center for Professional Responsibility in Business and Society, where I serve as an adviser, I returned to the Virginia Theatre to see “The Last Command,” a 1928 silent film directed by Josef von Sternberg. Emil Jannings plays a Russian general, a cousin to the czar, now reduced to trying to find work as a Hollywood extra for a few dollars a day. A very young William Powell plays the director who hires him to play…a Russian general. It was a thrill to watch it on the big screen, with the live accompaniment from the Alloy Orchestra, which specializes in music for silent films. The film is an artifact in its tone and context — it was re-enacting events of the Russian revolution only a decade later — but it is utterly immediate in its themes and Powell, especially, gives a performance of timeless grace and humanity.
I also had the quintessential festival experience of sharing an elevator ride with one of my filmmaker heroes, Guy Maddin. Bliss.

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Debate: Is ‘The Reader’ Great Art or Hackneyed Tripe?

Posted on February 22, 2009 at 8:00 am

“Don’t Give an Oscar to ‘The Reader'” is the headline of an angry Slate essay by Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. Rosenbaum says it is “a film in which all the techniques of Hollywood are used to evoke empathy for an unrepentant mass murderer of Jews.” He argues that “This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.”

I’ve argued that most of the fictionalized efforts either exhibit a false redemptiveness or an offensive sexual exploitiveness–what some critics have called “Nazi porn.” But in recent years, a new mode of misconstrual has prevailed–the desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of the Hitler era. I spoke recently with Mark Weitzman, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s New York office, who went so far as to say that The Reader was a symptom of a kind of “Holocaust revisionism,” which used to be the euphemistic term for Holocaust denial.

SPOILER ALERT: Based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling The Reader, an Oprah book selection, the movie stars Kate Winslet as a German woman in the early 1950’s who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy. Years later, the boy has become a law student and he sees her in court, being tried for atrocities during the Holocaust. He discovers that she cannot read and that her humiliation and efforts to hide her ignorance
On the other side is Roger Ebert, who says “The Reader” is not a Holocaust movie; it is a movie about the consequences of not speaking up. He agrees with Rosenbaum that Winslet’s character “was responsible for inexcusable evil.” But he does not feel that the movie excuses her or redeems her in any way. He believes the movie’s point is that Michael was guilty of worse not because the consequences were as bad but because his education and circumstances gave him more of a choice.

Who committed the greater crime? Michael, obviously, although few audience members might see it that way. He was more mentally capable than she was. She is deeply, paralyzingly ashamed of her illiteracy. It has led her a lifelong neurosis. She worked for the Nazis, as many other Germans did with much less reason, or none at all. What did she go through to keep her secret? What lies did she tell, what intimacies did she betray? Has she never been able to have a relationship with a man without using sex and her greater age to prevent the man from learning of her shame? What kind of a monster was she, that she helped innocent victims to go to their deaths because of a secret that seems trivial to us?

Smoking in Movies

Posted on October 14, 2008 at 11:13 pm

davis stamp.jpg
Roger Ebert hates smoking — except in movies. And he really objects to the kind of revisionism that has produced one of Bette Davis’ iconic images from “All About Eve” for a new postage stamp but left out her ever-present cigarette.
Ebert’s parents died from smoking-related diseases. He does not permit smoking in his home. But he cannot resist the romanticism of cigarette smoking in movies, especially classic movies.
Two of the most wonderful props in film noir were cigarettes and hats. They added interest to a close up or a two-shot. “Casablanca” without cigarettes would seem to be standing around looking for something to do. These days men don’t smoke and don’t wear hats. When they lower their heads, their eyes aren’t shaded. Cinematographers have lost invaluable compositional tools. The coil of smoke rising around the face of a beautiful women added allure and mystery. Remember Marlene Dietrich. She was smoking when she said, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.”
Everybody smoked cigarettes in the movies. Even Katharine Hepburn. Even Loretta Young. Ronald Reagan posed for Chesterfield ads. On the radio, it wasn’t “The Jack Benny Program,” it was “The Lucky Strike Program with Jack Benny,” although in that PBS documentary you only see him smoking cigars. Robert Mitchum smoked so much, he told me, that when the camera was rolling on “Out of the Past,” Kirk Douglas offered him a pack and asked, “Cigarette?” And Mitchum, realizing he’d carried a cigarette into the scene, held up his fingers and replied, “Smoking.” His improvisation saved the take. They kept it in the movie.
My favorite smoking scene is Lauren Bacall’s first on-screen moment in “To Have and Have Not” — she was an instant star with her first line: “Anybody got a match?”

Ebert acknowledges that in today’s world it almost seems absurd to have a character smoking anywhere but standing outside a building on a brief break. Even James Bond no longer smokes. And we no longer need the lighting of a cigarette and the softly rising smoke to demonstrate gallantry and symbolize romance and seduction. in this era of overshares and TMI, perhaps it isn’t the cigarettes we miss so much as the metaphors.