Now here’s a proper celebration of Roger Ebert’s life. Tilda Swinton, dressed like David Bowie and channeling Ellen DeGeneres rouses 1,500 people at Ebertfest in Champaign, IL to shake their money makers to Barry White’s “My First, My Last, My Everything” at the Virginia Theater on April 20. (That’s Ebert’s widow Chaz introducing the actress.)
The film festival, which is organized by the College of Media at the University of Illinois where Ebert was an alumnus paid tribute to its namesake, who succumbed to cancer on April 4.
When he was alive, his prose danced just like Swinton.
<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/64683468″>Ebertfest 2013 Dance Along</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user17148437″>Ebertfest</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>
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I’ve never been much of an obituary-writing guy, but Roger Ebert deserves to be celebrated. So, rather than add to the hundreds of thousands of words that are about to be spent reexamining his remarkable life and career following his death today, I’m going to make one observation about his contribution to movie culture and then leave you with a clip that, I hope, will make you smile when you think of him.
My introduction to Ebert, and his equally mouthy partner in movie criticism, Gene Siskel, came via their thoroughly enjoyable syndicated television show At The Movies, which began as a PBS series in 1975, Sneak Previews, and eventually became Siskel and Ebert and The Movies from 1986 until 1999. (The year Siskel died.) And though I’m quite aware that a) these guys were operating on television and b) blog culture was a long way off, there’s a real argument to be made that Siskel and Ebert are the real forefathers of the movie blog culture that exists today.
Siskel and Ebert: Proto-Movie Bloggers
Each week, they candidly curated a subjective list of movies that were opening that week. They told the television audience which films were worth seeing and why, which ones should be ignored, and which movies were worth actively seeking out at the video store if they weren’t shown at the local cinema. And, by the way, their thumbs up or down system of rating movies was the proto-Rotten Tomatoes. As Roadside Attractions tweeted on Thursday afternoon: “Siskel & Ebert almost single-thumbedly made Hoop Dreams a thing. If they’d never done anything else, they’d still be indie film legends.”
Siskel and Ebert lavished attention on obscure movies; they taught their audience how to look at crowd pleasers with a critical eye, and they fought and bickered…
Full Story »The Oscar season enters its last weekend, but one suspects it is far from over. Even if Academy members ultimately hewed to tradition and voted Lincoln and Steven Spielberg Best Picture and Director, respectively — as is the customary coronation for films with the most Oscar nominations — this outlier season will be studied and debated. For at least days to come.
The Final Countdown To The 2013 Academy Awards
The final week of voting saw pundits and bloggers get in their final shots, filibuster like Jefferson Smith for their lost causes (“the only causes worth fighting for”), issue their final predictions or revise earlier forecasts. Roger Ebert backtracked slightly from his self-described “cocky” “Outguess Ebert” boast that he had guessed every (contest category) correctly.
“Every year it is the same,” Ebert wrote. “I came out of the gate filled with certainty, and as the deadline draws near I begin to falter.”
Several enterprising writers persuaded some Academy members from various branches to share—anonymously—their Oscar ballots, and the results might give pause to anyone convinced that any of the major categories (except perhaps Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress) are locks.
The Oscar Index views and duly notes these ruminations objectively. The reported (conjectured?) groundswells make for compelling Oscars storylines, last-minute cliffhanging drama and even, perhaps, better ratings for the telecast. The Index admits to a conservative risk tolerance here, but on Monday morning will probably say it knew De Niro would win Best Supporting Actor all along.
Let’s look at how the Gold Linings playbook plays out on Oscars eve.
Academy Award For Best Picture
In Oscar season, as in war, the first casualty is truth.
Three of the Best Picture nominees, frontrunners at various stages of…
Full Story »With less than two weeks before the Academy Awards, the Oscar conversation is veering from “What now?” to “What if?” Amid all the talk of frontrunners and inevitabilities, some pundits are pondering the inscrutable. What if Oscar voters suddenly ignore all that Argo mojo (which got a further boost last weekend with Best Picture and Best Director wins at the BAFTAs)? What if the Best Supporting Actress race isn’t fait accompli, but instead, as Roger Ebert observed, asserts, as in years past, its independence as the category “where the voters like to throw a curve ball?” What if a BAFTA win earned Emmanuelle Riva a little Oscar Amour?
Let’s check out the Gold Linings Playbook to see how the pundits are calling the races this week:
Academy Award For Best Picture
A producer, an actor and a director — that sounds like the beginning of a joke, but this anonymous trio shared their Oscar ballots with The Los Angeles Times’ Glenn Whipp. The results are another indication that several of the major Oscar races are at this late date, too close to call. They also hint that Oscar voters might want to, in the words of the Director, “reward the wealth of great work.”
For Best Picture, the producer chose Zero Dark Thirty, the Director Argo, and the Actor Silver Linings Playbook. The latter should please Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, who this week issued a provocative call to arms against Argo to Oscar voters:
“At this stage of the game, a vote for Lincoln or Pi is effing wasted…. Why stick to your guns at this stage? To what end? So you can say to yourself “I refused to budge!…I stuck by my…
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There are Top 10s galore this time of the year, but no doubt Ben Affleck is taking a bit of extra notice on this one. Uber critic Roger Ebert gave Argo his choice for the Best of 2012.
He called the year “one of the best recent years in cinema,” noting that he wrote over 300 reviews over the year, which is a personal record. He also noted that it was “unusually difficult” to leave out films in the top ten.
Picking Argo, Ebert noted that the feature had the “classic values of a Hollywood thriller” and noted the story, based on true events, “reveals surprises about a story we all lived through. It is told with classic comedy and tension.”
Oscar power-house Lincoln placed third on Ebert’s list after Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. He called Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance “powerful,” while describing Pi as a “miraculous achievement.”
Also making the list was Sundance winner Beasts of the Southern Wild and perhaps surprisingly considering the momentum of the Oscar race, End of Watch Oslo, August 31 and A Simple Life.
Notables not making the cut in the top ten at least include Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained, Les Misérables and Silver Linings Playbook.
Ebert has long taken a course of his own. You can see his comments on his Top 10 here.
Roger Ebert’s Top 10:
1. Argo by Ben Affleck
2. Life Of Pi by Ang Lee
3. Lincoln by Steven Spielberg
4. End Of Watch by David Ayer
5. Arbitrage by Nicholas Jarecki
6. Flight by Robert Zemeckis
7. The Sessions by Ben Lewin
8. Beasts of the Southern Wild by Benh Zeitlin
9. Oslo, August 31st by Joachim Trier
10. A Simple Life by Ann Hui
As Hollywood processes the apparent suicide of filmmaker Tony Scott reports — included a report that he jumped to his death wearing the lucky (faded) red baseball cap that he first donned on the set of his blockbuster his Top Gun — I prefer to dwell, not on Scott’s tragic death, but his life in movies. In Roger Ebert’s review of Scott’s essential True Romance, the critic wrote: “This is the kind of movie that creates its own universe, and glories in it.” I actually think that assessment applies to most of Scott’s work and is what made him special as a filmmaker. Even when his movies weren’t cohesive — Domino or The Hunger come to mind— they were still worth watching and impossible to dismiss because they were filled with provocative ideas, images and themes that amounted to something more than a collection of scenes, acts and dialogue. Below, my list of Scott’s best movies. If you have a different list in mind, check out our Movieline poll where you can vote for your favorite Scott movie.
1. True Romance (1993): Quentin Tarantino usually gets the lion’s share of the credit for this adrenaline-stoking orgy of action and violence because he wrote the script, but it was Scott who shaped QT’s words and the performances of a killer cast — Christian Slater (at his peak), Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken (both memorable), Brad Pitt and an undiscovered James Gandolfini — into a sexy, bloody rocket ride that, almost 20 years later, still thrills and still influences filmmakers.
2. Top Gun (1986): Arguably the movie that defines American confidence — and cockiness — during the Reagan era. Full of hard bodies, fast aircraft and Tom Cruise’s beautifully…
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Also in Monday morning’s round-up of news briefs, Daniel Radcliffe is set to return to fantasy playing a rape suspect. A trio of titles lead the specialty box office’s newcomers over the weekend. And Roger Ebert breaks down the stats on upcoming dueling The Hobbit and Avatar blockbusters and theaters’ ability to show them.
The Absence Wins Top Prize at Comic-Con
The sci-fi thriller by writer/director Alex DeMille won the judges’ choice award at Comic-Con. It also won Best Film in the science fiction/fantasy film category.Natural 20 centered on the interactions between four people playing a Dungeons & Dragons-esque game won Best Humor. Glow: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling won Best Documentary and Lost Rites took “best cosmic-oriented film,” THR reports.
Seth MacFarlane: “I’d be open to making Ted 2“
MacFarlane told fans at the American Dad panel during Comic-Con over the weekend that he’d be open to making a Ted 2, but didn’t elaborate on any possible reunion with co-star Mark Wahlberg. It has become one of the biggest R-rated comedies at the box office, Deadline reports.
Daniel Radcliffe to Grow Horns for Next Role
The British-born actor will return to fantasy for his next project, starring in Horns, a supernatural thriller directed by Alexandre Aja (Piranha 3-D). He will play the lead suspect in the rape and murder of his girlfriend, The Guardian reports.
Imposter, Farewell My Queen, Easy Money Lead New Releases: Specialty Box Office
A slew of new specialty rollouts hit theaters over the weekend with mixed results. Indomina’s Sundance documentary The Imposter came in as the per-theatre-average winner, with a single location in New York. Other strong specialty openers include Farewell My Queen and Easy Money, Deadline
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It’s not as though Peter O’Toole died this week when he announced his retirement from acting, but contemplating the Irish great’s absence from stage and screen alike nevertheless yields a bittersweet fog of remembrance through which our hearts and souls must now navigate. I think they call it a “hangover.”
Thankfully, there is video (to say nothing of the gloriously soggy moment in time, above, when Roger Ebert and Jason Patric found themselves supporting the legend). For my money, nothing beats his epic entrance on a 1995 episode of The Late Show, where David Letterman welcomed O’Toole and a thirsty camel named Topsy to the stage in London. What happened next put Lawrence of Arabia to shame.
Previously, during a drunken stint on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, O’Toole had confessed to… another drunken stint on The Tonight Show.
And who will ever forget (ahem) O’Toole’s celebrated performance as the sodden title character in Keith Waterhouses’s play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell? (Dialogue NSFW, though under the circumstances what could possibly go wrong with slowly turning your chair to your boss and/or any other objecting parties and woozily sputtering, “It’s Peter O’Fucking Toole. Listen!”)
Here he is duetting with — and tackling, naturally — his late, lamented contemporary Richard Harris ahead of a rugby match in Ireland.
It’s not quite O’Toole, but back on The Late Show in 2011, you can practically taste the sauce in Ryan Gosling’s tale of confronting the actor on Oscar night a few years earlier.
And just for fun, here’s Bill Hader helping to cement O’Toole’s legacy, SNL style:
Oh! And he acted in a few things en route to becoming the losingest (0-for-8, ouch) acting nominee in the history of the Academy Awards. He did,…
Full Story »It seems Roger Ebert was unable to make the trek to Cannes, but his wife (and Ebert Co. VP) Chaz sends a report from the South of France with a fantastic breakdown of the fest’s offerings — and sweet words for Rog back home: “Today there may not be starlets jumping nude in the ocean, but we are still being given stories of young love and old love and passion and feelings and ideas that make life worth living. Thank you for introducing me to this world. Now I just want you to hurry back to it.” [Chicago Sun-Times]
