APRIL 25, 2008--Every year I keep meaning to include "Joe vs. the Volcano" in Ebertfest, and every year something else squeezes it out, some film more urgently requiring our immediate attention, you see. The 1990 John Patrick Shanley film, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was about a wage slave in a factory where dark clouds lower o'er the sky; he is told he has a Brain Cloud, with only five months to live. How this leaves him to become a candidate for human sacrifice in the South Seas follows a long and winding road, in a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it.
It's the kind of film that offends the Movie Police, a shadowy group that lurks about proclaiming, "They can't do that that in a movie--can they?" In this year's Ebertfest, there are two particular candidates for the category; Sally Potter's "Yes" and John Turturro's "Romance and Cigarettes.' Both break any number of rules I will not list here, and both are delightful while doing so. They are above all delightful in the way they assume what we have been taught (by the study of movie cliches) is impossible in the movies.
In no particular area, and combining the two movies, these violations involve dust motes, iambic pentameter, deliberately audacious set design, domestic class warfare, smoking, Cuba under Castro, and sex in restaurants. What I appreciate about them is that they don't do what we expect them do do. They break the rules. By this I don't mean they "surprise" us, but they they show us what by all rights should not be showable. They are, in other words, alive.
I predict that both screenings will produce sizable groups of viewers who leave vaguely restless because the movies have pulled the generic rug out from under their feet. Even among critics, who are always complaining about "formula films," there will be resentment that the movies behaved as if formulas did not exist. For myself, I kept thinking, They can't make Tom Hanks a human sacrifice...can they?
A movie opening April 25 that will call out the Movie Police SWAT team: "The Life Before Her Eyes."
April 24, 2008 -- On Wednesday morning I became seduced by the idea that I would, after all, somehow turn up at the festival. I would get there by ambulance, limo, MediVan, who knows what? But at the present I can't take a step with my fractured hip, so it would have taken two physical therapists to essentially haul me around. Thinking about it overnight, I decided it would be a great gesture to turn up and wave to my friends, but at what cost of pain and medical risk? The logistics just didn't add up. So while the festival unwinds in Urbana-Champaign, I will continue therapy at this end.
Chaz told me lots of people with experience of hip injuries advised her a six-hour round trip by whatever means would likely be very painful. (Flashback to old Trevor Howard story: "Right you are, old chap! Bloody difficult! Damned painful! No sense in my going!")
Photos and blog entries are pouring in to the Ebertfest in Exile. Apologies to Peter Sobczynski, by the way, for making him a blogger without his knowledge. Chaz calls this morning with a long report on opening night, during which she found Timothy Spall a really nice guy, to which we all agree. I heard both he and Rufus Sewell were distinguished on the "Hamlet" panel, led by critical giant David Bordwell and military historian Ed Tracy, and I hope someone remembered to mention Sewell in the masterpiece "Dark City," which was honored in the festival's earliest days.
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You know time has passed... when they want to put up a sign in front of the Childhood Home of Roger Ebert, 410 E. Washington St., Urbana. So voted the Urbana City Council on Wednesday. I was touched by the gesture, but said I would agree only if they included signs for other famous Urbana natives like George Will, Mark Van Doren, etc. One of London's charms for me is the Blue Plaque program, in which little plaques inform us, "George Orwell lived here," or "From this house Samuel Pepys observed the London Fire." They could include signs indicating where people worked as well as where they were born. That would widen the net to Dave Eggers, Tagore, William Maxwell, Stravinsky, Harry Partch, Hugh Hefner, Red Grange, Larry Woiwode, many Nobel winners, etc.
For me, the most notable thing about 410 E. Washington is that a young married couple, Walter and Annabel Ebert, brought their new son home to it. I remember with more emotion now (than then) that my mother made the final payment on the house in 1961, and tore up the mortgage.
The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not be prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip.
Sigh. I was really happy with this one. The films, the guests, the friends. Chaz, Nate Kohn, Mary Susan Britt and I had all the pieces in place. The only tweak I didn’t have time for was a proper full-length review of “Shotgun Stories.” It was on the to-do list. What I’m using now is what I wrote after seeing it at the Chicago Film Festival. The rest is almost a turn-key operation---the little festival that runs itself, with the help of countless volunteers.
It’s hard to express what it means to me that the festival is in my hometown. People never seemed to think I quite had a job. “And how is Roger?” my mother’s friends would ask. “Is he still just… going to the movies?”
Illness has been playing an unwelcome role in my life these days. After unsuccessful surgery in January, I ended up back in the friendly confines of the Chicago Rehabilitation Institute. Graduating from there in good shape to attend Ebertfest, I went to the wonderful Pritikin Longevity Institute for more exercise. I was there one day and -- whoops! -- my shoe caught on a rug and I fell and broke my hip. Nobody’s fault.
A broken hip adds to my tour of medical adventures. My current plan is to take it easy, obey the doctors orders, and start writing reviews again.
In the meantime, my heart will be in Urbana. Old friends like Bill and Carolyne Nack, Richard and Mary Corliss and Barry Avrich and Hannah Fisher will meet new ones. Chaz will be the Emcee. Again, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson will add their gravitas and wit to the proceedings.
My “Ebert & Roeper” colleagues Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips will be on board. And damn, I wish I could be there for Michael Barker, Christine Lahti, Tom DiCillo, Paul Schrader, Timothy Spall, Rufus Sewell, Bill Forsyth, Ang Lee, Joey Pantoliano, Aida Turturro, Farmer John, Tarsem Singh, Jeff Nichols, Eran Kolirin and the great designer Eiko Ishioka.
But there will be the sad absence of Dusty Cohl, who the festival is dedicated to.
Jim Emerson, the editor of this site, will be blogging from Ebertfest for rogerebert.com, and also check out the blogs of David Bordwell, David Poland, Lisa Rosman and Peter Sobcynski. I will.
No teenager could possibly have hurried more eagerly to an Elvis Presley concert on that day in the late 1950’s when I led a delegation of the Urbana High School Science Fiction Club to attend a speech at the campus of the University of Illinois. The speaker was Sir Arthur C. Clarke, our hero not only for his great science fiction, but also for such concepts as the triangulated space satellite and the “space elevator.” The first has paid off already with global communication. The second is still seriously proposed as using infinitely strong strings of Buckyballs to link earth to a space station.
Clarke was erudite, witty, friendly, and signed all my books. It was years later that I met him in connection with his screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” still the greatest of all science fiction films. And years after that when I began receiving reproaches from his home in Sri Lanka that he had not received his quarterly update to the Cinemania CD-ROM. Cinemania, edited by Jim Emerson (now editor of this site), linked reviews, info and bios of movie people with the reviews of such as Pauline Kael, Leonard Maltin and myself.
It was a brilliant idea and became for a time the top-selling consumer CD, but Bill Gates was correct that the future of CDs was on the Internet, as the Internet Movie Database so abundantly proves. Also, IMDb got its content for free, and Cinemania actually paid for its reviews.
I explained time and again to Sir Arthur why there was not and never could be another update of Cinemania, but he died at 90 still unconsoled.
He was the most diligent of Answer Man sources. Once a reader complained that in the vacuum of space he should not have been able to hear a tiny “click” when the astro-stewardess grabbed a floating ballpoint pen.
Clarke invited two friends, one a space expert, the other a blind friend with acute hearing, to listen for the click. Just as he thought, he said, there was no click.
Clarke was in the great tradition of classic science fiction -- converted by his first sight of Amazing Stories magazines, welding hard science speculation to robust adventures, and adding some whimsy in the form of “Tales from the White Hart.” He died convinced Bill Gates had made a big mistake in not keeping the Cinemania CD-Rom in print.
