ERROL MORRIS: Do you think a woman can rape a man?
JOYCE McKINNEY: No. I think that’s like puttin’ a marshmallow in a parking meter.
We saw Tabloid last night and it has to be my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year. The less you know about it going in, the more you’ll enjoy it (although I’m not so sure that my better half would second that opinion).
As Ebert began his review by noting:
If “Tabloid” is a love story, it is one only Errol Morris could film. He says its subject, Joyce McKinney, is his favorite protagonist, which means she places ahead of Robert McNamara, Stephen Hawking and the expert on naked mole rats. Certainly she is the most enigmatic.
“Gene Siskel, who was a wise man, gave me the best investment advice I’ve ever received. ‘You can never outsmart the market, if that’s what you’re trying to do,’ he said. ‘Find something you love, for reasons you understand, that not everyone agrees with you about, and put your money in it.’ The stocks I thought of were Apple, Google and Steak ‘n Shake. I bought some shares. That was a long time ago. Reader, if I had invested every penny I had on Gene’s advice, today I would be a Master of the Universe.”
Michael Phillips on the cancellation of “At the Movies”:
Is there room in a churning marketplace for a movie review show on this unreadable pie chart called television? Roger Ebert certainly thinks so. Already my colleague and friend, as he is to Tony and so many others, has claimed his old show’s “At the Movies” title (one of many titles through the years) for his own, to be affixed to his new TV venture, currently in development.
Who knows? He may have some competition. I suspect another version or two of the show will pop up somewhere, very likely in Chicago, because it is the city of Roger and Gene and Oprah and Studs Terkel and Irv Kupcinet and so many others who have sustained Chicago’s reputation as a city that talks, and listens, and argues, and challenges a lame or blowhard assertion when it hears one.
The internet has come full circle today for all of the right reasons.
That’s awesome.
Lovely.
“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it? It was also well written, I thought. When I turned to it in the magazine, I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It’s just as well it’s out there. That’s how I look, after all.”
Roger Ebert’s Last Words, con’t. - Roger Ebert’s Journal
Ebert on Esquire on Ebert
(finally read the piece last night and it’s awesome. so…personal and fascinating.)
(via peterwknox)
Esquire profiles Roger Ebert, who lost his lower jaw and his ability to speak four years ago and has transformed into a prolific online presence:
Roger Ebert can’t remember the last thing he ate. He can’t remember the last thing he drank, either, or the last thing he said. Of course, those things existed; those lasts happened. They just didn’t happen with enough warning for him to have bothered committing them to memory — it wasn’t as though he sat down, knowingly, to his last supper or last cup of coffee or to whisper a last word into Chaz’s ear. The doctors told him they were going to give him back his ability to eat, drink, and talk. But the doctors were wrong, weren’t they? On some morning or afternoon or evening, sometime in 2006, Ebert took his last bite and sip, and he spoke his last word.
Now his hands do the talking. They are delicate, long-fingered, wrapped in skin as thin and translucent as silk. He wears his wedding ring on the middle finger of his left hand; he’s lost so much weight since he and Chaz were married in 1992 that it won’t stay where it belongs, especially now that his hands are so busy. There is almost always a pen in one and a spiral notebook or a pad of Post-it notes in the other — unless he’s at home, in which case his fingers are feverishly banging the keys of his MacBook Pro.
Still can’t find where I left this issue.
“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
Roger Ebert, in an article not yet available online from Esquire’s latest issue (and I can’t find it now!!!), but Deadspin had even more golden stuff from:
Our eyes would meet, the voice reads from Ebert’s journal, unspoken words were between us, but we never spoke openly about his problems or his prognosis. That’s how he wanted it, and that was his right.
Gene Siskel taped his last show, and within a week or two he was dead. Ebert had lost half his identity.
He scrolls down to the entry’s final paragraph.
We once spoke with Disney and CBS about a sitcom to be titled “Best Enemies.” It would be about two movie critics joined in a love/hate relationship. It never went anywhere, but we both believed it was a good idea. Maybe the problem was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.
Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: “Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted.” Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what’s happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it’s not sadness surfacing. He’s shaking. It’s anger.
Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. “Those fu—” she says, catching herself.
They think it’s Disney again — that they’ve taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation.
This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.
I guess if there was ever a Wednesday to run this photo, it might as well be the day that I learned Roger Ebert has been sober for the past three decades:
The problem with using will power, for me, was that it lasted only until my will persuaded me I could take another drink. At about this time I was reading The Art of Eating, by M. F. K. Fisher, who wrote: “One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough.” The problem with making resolutions is that you’re sober when you make the first one, have had a drink when you make the second one, and so on. I’ve also heard, You take the first drink. The second drink takes itself.That was my problem. I found it difficult, once I started, to stop after one or two. If I could, I would continue until I decided I was finished, which was usually some hours later. The next day I paid the price in hangovers.
Occasional exception aside, it appears I’ve got a lot more in common with Ebert than I originally thought.
Ugh. The retooled Ebert & Roeper show premiering September 6th will be co-hosted by Ben & Ben — a Generation Why duo who only got the gig due to nepotism. Ben Lyons is the nobody son of Jeffrey Lyons, the film critic world’s biggest hack and quote whore with zero credibility, while Ben Mankiewicz is the slacker host on Turner Classic Movies, whose only claim to fame is that he’s a watered-down member of the famous film family. Now, there’s a working definition of the death of film criticism for you.
Siskel & Ebert Outtakes. Really worth it if you watch the whole thing. Jumps from them hating eachother, to hating protestants.
The Sun-Times ran Ebert’s thoughts regarding “Best of” lists today in the print edition and when I hopped on Tumblr to see if somebody else already posted it (as is usually the case), I instead stumbled across this and proceeded to laugh my ass off. VERY worth watching.
Oh, and the bit of wisdom from Ebert regarding those lists I came across today was more or less an edited version of his recent journal entry on the subject:
But to quibble with specific titles, as I said, is a waste of time. We look at these lists for what we find on them, not what we don’t find. Any list of great films helps breaks the hammer-lock of box office performance that grips too many American moviegoers. I can’t tell you how many people responded to my attack on “Transformers” by telling me how much money the movie was grossing, as if that had the slightest relevance. A great movie acts like a window in our box of space and time, opening us to other times and other lands. The more windows we open, the better.
“If nuclear war breaks out, the average citizen of a Western democracy will be better informed about Britney Spears than the causes of their death.”
“I said some years ago that the genius of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes was to have discovered a niche market in American broadcasting — half the American people. The reason Fox News has thrived and grown is because it offers a vibrant and honest alternative to those who could not abide yet another day of the news delivered to them beneath layer after layer of often undisguised liberalism. What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.”
Charles Krauthammer (via azspot)
“The Darth Vader of Commentary,” I once read, but I’ve come to think of him as Ebert’s favorite conservative columnist.
I always assume that this is the ideal girl for those types. “Skin like beef jerky,” I believe, was how Ebert put it.
