Six years ago, as a sophomore at the University of Colorado, I went to visit a career counselor. It was a time in my college career - the "sophomore slump," I suppose - when I no longer wanted to be in school. Instead, I thought, I should just find out now how to become a film critic, as I'd wanted to be forever. I went to a career counselor who recommended I take an interest inventory, which I demurred, as I knew what I was interested in. I wanted to know how to get started.
"Well, I hear Roger Ebert's in town," she said, referring to Ebert's annual appearance at the Conference on World Affairs, every April at CU. "Maybe you could ask him at one of those movie screenings he does."
The movie screening that year was more hopeless to get into than usual. "Those movie screenings he does," or did, before cancer operations sidelined him in 2006, and, earlier this year, permanently robbed him of his ability to speak, were five day screenings. On day 1, Ebert would show the movie, and on days 2-5, he and the rapt, overflowing auditorium in Mackey Hall would go back shot by shot and interrupt with any questions or thoughts the movie brought up. That year, 2002, Ebert showed Fight Club, by then one of the most popular movies in the world for disaffected college students, and I, really, didn't even like the movie all that much. I instead went to see a bizarre panel that included Ebert and three others (including on very eloquent stripper, who spoke all week) talking about sexual fetishes. Ebert, the writer of Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, came out as, unsurprisingly, a lover of huge breasts.
It would have been nice to have talked with Ebert that year, or the following year, showing Mulholland Drive (a movie I'd have even less of a chance of getting into). It would be more nice to talk to him now, whatever form that would take. In any case, I never met him nor asked him anything, and today, I am no longer a critic, except on here, which doesn't really count. For me, my thoughts on art, on movies, on writing often circle back to something he wrote in 2005. Then, Ebert had posted a no-star review to a movie called Chaos most have forgotten or never heard of in the first place. Ebert had found it repugnant and nihilistic, as did most everyone else who saw it, but the filmmakers had objected and written him at the Chicago Sun Times. Ebert posted a full page response, to which he climaxes with this paragraph:
>>>"Animals do not know they are going to die, and require no way to deal with that implacable fact. Humans, who know we will die, have been given the consolations of art, myth, hope, science, religion, philosophy, and even denial, even movies, to help us reconcile with that final fact. What I object to most of all in "Chaos" is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers and theologians more than ever."
What a magnificent piece of writing, and perhaps, it allowed me a sliver of insight as to why I've seen so many strange and different movies over the years, sought them out, fallen in love with them, been bored by so many I felt did nothing, giggled at some I shouldn't. We, as people, have the power to combat the knowledge that we will die by declaring our experiences now, and none do so more than movies.
I wanted to get some of this out while Ebert was still with us, because I suppose his reviews have left some questions for me over the years, as, with only Ebert and Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, I read his reviews for pleasure, for argument's sake, and for the sake of hearing the love of movies delved into with eloquence and wit and excitement. I want to know why he wrote of the end of Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. that "the ending is a cheap shot." There are two plotlines tied up at the end of L.I.E., one ends bluntly with a gun shot, one ends eloquently with a declaration of personal strength and hope. L.I.E. is a movie I love because of the depth of the discomfort it brings me, and how it gives me hope through that for its main character, and though much of it doesn't work, some of it that does work haunts me, like that ending. I know Ebert knows what I mean - to me, if I can't watch a great movie, what I'd love to watch is a good movie that fails because of over-ambition, but gives us so much to soak in. I'm thinking of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, which has too much plot, or Oliver Assayas's demonlover, which is too deliberately abstruse, or Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, which is too whimsical and disconnected, or even Scorsese's King of Comedy, a rather facile indictment of pop culture with endless great moments.
Ebert comes to life when movies make him talk about life, and those movies have so much life to discuss. I loved the scenes he chose to discuss in his 1991 review of Jungle Fever, highlighting an extraordinary scene of a group of African American women discussing what dating has been like for them. I loved his dead-on statement of The Life Aquatic: "But it does so many other things, does it really have to work?" Ebert did not like demonlover, and has not liked many other movies I've loved. He does like movies, all the time, that I can't stand. So be it. I remember reading a fairly positive review he wrote once of another forgotten indy - James Mangold's 1996 debut feature Heavy. Of the sad lives depicted in it, he wrote, as his final sentence that we can be thankful - "We're not like that, are we?" What a question for movies to make us ask. I don't have people to discuss my thoughts of these movies with - most haven't seen most of these movies, and certainly no one saw them like I did then. Ebert's archive has been my friend to discuss every movie thought I've had.
And why not, since they've been his forum too. I love it when he gets snooty and mocking and mean (saying of the awful Evening last year that it follows a woman "who is dying in a Martha Stewart bedroom. She takes a very long time to die"), and I like it more when his reviews of good movies aren't full of superlatives and meaningless platitudes - they're dissections of what living and life means. His Great Movies column does that every week so successfully, it wound up in two published volumes. He once discussed Krzyzstof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, a story of a woman who glances herself, for a fraction, on a bus, heading to a different reality - in the beautiful essay, he writes of being in a cafe in Paris, "I wouldn't be suprised to have missed myself by so little."
Across the country, film critics are disappearing, or consolidating, and while they probably won't go away, and piece after piece laments the loss of banal, glib asides, I hope we get a chance to say to our leading critic while he is still with us what he has meant to us - or, myself, to me. When he goes, we'll lose the greatest resource we have not simply on the movies that are available to be seen, but what it means to have seen them.
"Well, I hear Roger Ebert's in town," she said, referring to Ebert's annual appearance at the Conference on World Affairs, every April at CU. "Maybe you could ask him at one of those movie screenings he does."
The movie screening that year was more hopeless to get into than usual. "Those movie screenings he does," or did, before cancer operations sidelined him in 2006, and, earlier this year, permanently robbed him of his ability to speak, were five day screenings. On day 1, Ebert would show the movie, and on days 2-5, he and the rapt, overflowing auditorium in Mackey Hall would go back shot by shot and interrupt with any questions or thoughts the movie brought up. That year, 2002, Ebert showed Fight Club, by then one of the most popular movies in the world for disaffected college students, and I, really, didn't even like the movie all that much. I instead went to see a bizarre panel that included Ebert and three others (including on very eloquent stripper, who spoke all week) talking about sexual fetishes. Ebert, the writer of Beyond The Valley of The Dolls, came out as, unsurprisingly, a lover of huge breasts.
It would have been nice to have talked with Ebert that year, or the following year, showing Mulholland Drive (a movie I'd have even less of a chance of getting into). It would be more nice to talk to him now, whatever form that would take. In any case, I never met him nor asked him anything, and today, I am no longer a critic, except on here, which doesn't really count. For me, my thoughts on art, on movies, on writing often circle back to something he wrote in 2005. Then, Ebert had posted a no-star review to a movie called Chaos most have forgotten or never heard of in the first place. Ebert had found it repugnant and nihilistic, as did most everyone else who saw it, but the filmmakers had objected and written him at the Chicago Sun Times. Ebert posted a full page response, to which he climaxes with this paragraph:
>>>"Animals do not know they are going to die, and require no way to deal with that implacable fact. Humans, who know we will die, have been given the consolations of art, myth, hope, science, religion, philosophy, and even denial, even movies, to help us reconcile with that final fact. What I object to most of all in "Chaos" is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers and theologians more than ever."
What a magnificent piece of writing, and perhaps, it allowed me a sliver of insight as to why I've seen so many strange and different movies over the years, sought them out, fallen in love with them, been bored by so many I felt did nothing, giggled at some I shouldn't. We, as people, have the power to combat the knowledge that we will die by declaring our experiences now, and none do so more than movies.
I wanted to get some of this out while Ebert was still with us, because I suppose his reviews have left some questions for me over the years, as, with only Ebert and Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, I read his reviews for pleasure, for argument's sake, and for the sake of hearing the love of movies delved into with eloquence and wit and excitement. I want to know why he wrote of the end of Michael Cuesta's L.I.E. that "the ending is a cheap shot." There are two plotlines tied up at the end of L.I.E., one ends bluntly with a gun shot, one ends eloquently with a declaration of personal strength and hope. L.I.E. is a movie I love because of the depth of the discomfort it brings me, and how it gives me hope through that for its main character, and though much of it doesn't work, some of it that does work haunts me, like that ending. I know Ebert knows what I mean - to me, if I can't watch a great movie, what I'd love to watch is a good movie that fails because of over-ambition, but gives us so much to soak in. I'm thinking of Spike Lee's Jungle Fever, which has too much plot, or Oliver Assayas's demonlover, which is too deliberately abstruse, or Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, which is too whimsical and disconnected, or even Scorsese's King of Comedy, a rather facile indictment of pop culture with endless great moments.
Ebert comes to life when movies make him talk about life, and those movies have so much life to discuss. I loved the scenes he chose to discuss in his 1991 review of Jungle Fever, highlighting an extraordinary scene of a group of African American women discussing what dating has been like for them. I loved his dead-on statement of The Life Aquatic: "But it does so many other things, does it really have to work?" Ebert did not like demonlover, and has not liked many other movies I've loved. He does like movies, all the time, that I can't stand. So be it. I remember reading a fairly positive review he wrote once of another forgotten indy - James Mangold's 1996 debut feature Heavy. Of the sad lives depicted in it, he wrote, as his final sentence that we can be thankful - "We're not like that, are we?" What a question for movies to make us ask. I don't have people to discuss my thoughts of these movies with - most haven't seen most of these movies, and certainly no one saw them like I did then. Ebert's archive has been my friend to discuss every movie thought I've had.
And why not, since they've been his forum too. I love it when he gets snooty and mocking and mean (saying of the awful Evening last year that it follows a woman "who is dying in a Martha Stewart bedroom. She takes a very long time to die"), and I like it more when his reviews of good movies aren't full of superlatives and meaningless platitudes - they're dissections of what living and life means. His Great Movies column does that every week so successfully, it wound up in two published volumes. He once discussed Krzyzstof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, a story of a woman who glances herself, for a fraction, on a bus, heading to a different reality - in the beautiful essay, he writes of being in a cafe in Paris, "I wouldn't be suprised to have missed myself by so little."
Across the country, film critics are disappearing, or consolidating, and while they probably won't go away, and piece after piece laments the loss of banal, glib asides, I hope we get a chance to say to our leading critic while he is still with us what he has meant to us - or, myself, to me. When he goes, we'll lose the greatest resource we have not simply on the movies that are available to be seen, but what it means to have seen them.
1 comment:
Hey Ethan, I loved this entry! You are, as ever, extremely eloquent and very engaging. I sound like part teacher, I suppose, but I really enjoyed reading this!
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