Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail? Why are so many showbiz journalists like hyenas circling a crippled prey? Why do so many gossip columnists behave like jilted lovers or betrayed investors, livid with anger at what they once valued so highly? Why are a few stars singled out like the victims of school bullies? Why do the box office receipts of "Australia" appear in almost every news outlet, but an actual review of it appears in so few?
Here is a recent headline: "Australia" Another Nicole Kidman Letdown. We learn in the attached story from Reuters:
Twentieth Century Fox appears to have given up on director Baz Luhrmann's latest period epic in North America, and is hoping that foreign sales will rescue the costly picture. The movie has sold just $44.3 million worth of tickets at the U.S. and Canadian box office after five weekends, and is shaping up to be the latest in a line of disappointments for its star, Nicole Kidman.
Fancy that. A mere $44.3 million. An attached chart documents Kidman's previous movies and their grosses, to document her "line of disappointments." I have left out two titles where she only did voices. Here are the rest of the titles, going back to 2002:
The Golden Compass, $70,107,728; Margot at the Wedding, $1,959,420; The Invasion, $15,074,191; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, $223,202; Bewitched, $63,313,159; The Interpreter, $72,708,161; Birth, $5,095,038; The Stepford Wives, $59,484,742; Dogville, $1,535,286; Cold Mountain, $95,636,509; The Human Stain, $5,381,908; The Hours, $41,675,994
Is this the record of the destruction of a career? Kidman won as Best Actress for "The Hours," but what about the others? Of the lowest-grossers, "Fur" was probably doomed because only my friends know who Diane Arbus was. If you know, that makes you a friend of mine. "Margot at the Wedding" was an indie film good enough to premiere at Telluride. "Birth," IMHO, was a intriguing film that treated reincarnation in a skeptical and adult way, instead of as New Age lunacy. "Dogville" was an impossible Lars von Trier film just about everyone hated, including Kidman, who at least had the nerve to work for the founder of the Dogme 95 movement.
What do we see here? Some good movies, some bad ones. Some that we agreed on, some that we didn't. Some daring choices, some "safe" ones. A willingness to take chances on projects where Kidman obviously accepted a salary far less than her agent's earnest advice. And as nearly as I can guess, no titles which she was expected to "open"--that is, lure opening weekend crowds solely on the basis of her name.
My notion is that the "disappointment" allegedly reflected by this list was experienced primarily by the distributors, when their budgets exceeded their grosses. This is the Sam Zell Effect, when an unwise or excessive investment is blamed on the property that was invested in. For example, the Chicago Tribune company was forced to declare bankruptcy when it could not pay the interest on the debt Zell acquired by buying it.
Even then, factoring in the revenue from the global market, DVD, airlines, cruise ships, cable and pay-for-view, most of Kidman's movies may have turned a profit. I submit that an actress who in six years has made films grossing 70, 63, 72, 59, 95 and 41 million dollars and won an Oscar has done nothing to deserve a headline announcing "Another Nicole Kidman Letdown." I am carefully not even talking about the quality of her movies, because that would be the last thing on the mind of Reuters.
"Australia," where the women are strong and the men are good-looking (click)
This is another example of shabby journalism separating a victim from the pack and creating scandal so it can be covered. The Reuters story is not attributed, is not fair, is misleading, and doesn't belong in a newspaper, on TV or on the web. Those are some of the reasons it got wide play.Now consider the case of Tom Cruise. Did you read the buildup before the release of "Valkyrie?" The picture was widely predicted to be the nail in the coffin of his career. On Nov. 18, 2008, before the film was first publicly screened, Courtney Hazlett of MSNBC.com breathlessly reported:
...those who've gotten an early glimpse say not only is the film nowhere near as exciting as a thriller, but Cruise's performance elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs. Among them: A scene where Cruise's character, Claus Von Stauffenberg, is forced to give the infamous "Heil Hitler" salute. "It's an unsettling scene but you almost start to laugh," the source says. "His character is resisting it but you never forget it's Tom Cruise saying 'Heil Hitler.' It's funny and shocking at the same time." Sources also described a scene where Cruise's character Claus Von Stauffenberg removes a false eye. "It was disgusting," said one person who saw the film. "It was like watching someone pluck their contacts out."Hazlett did not see the film, and apparently did not see her first sentence ("the film elicits uncomfortable and inappropriate laughs") before writing her second one ("you almost start to laugh"). The story lists three sources: (1) "Those who've gotten an early glimpse;" (2) "Sources;" (3) "One person who saw the film." Help me out here. Are we referring to three different people, or the same person three times? How many of us find it disgusting to see someone remove a contact lens? Did the Source(s) notice that Cruise had his back turned when he removed the eye? Does MSNBC employ anyone meeting the description of a copy editor? This story would disgust and be laughed at by a competent one.
Apparently Cruise's mistake was to play a Nazi in the first place. To be sure, he was playing a Nazi who led a plot to kill Hitler, but the gossips don't sweat the small stuff. When you get on a hit list, every decision you make is the wrong one. On Jan. 8, 2008, a year ago, Roger Friedman reported on Fox News: "The burgeoning price tag on 'Valkyrie' could turn out to be a big headache. Most Cruise movies have not made much more than $100 at the box office, with the exception of the "Mission: Impossible" series. And that series was trending downward." Let me be sure I get this straight: "Most Cruise movies have not made much more than $100?" I would assume that's a typo, but it has remained uncorrected on the Fox News web site for 12 months.
Entertainment Weekly, a splendid print publication, relaxes its standards on its website. On ew.com's "popWatch" in early November, the usually sensibleMichael Slezak committed the cardinal sin of reviewing a trailer. Everyone knows the trailer usually has little to do with the movie. I learned that from Mad magazine when I was nine years old. Slezak reports:
Tom Cruise's latest flick, Valkyrie, is set in Nazi Germany, and it's not a comedy, so why does its new trailer (embedded below, or streaming in a higher-quality clip at Yahoo) leave me snickering? Is it the eye patch? Or the way the lightning crashes as Cruise declares "We have to kill Hitler" in his Serious Thespian Voice? Maybe it's that awful line, "When the S.S. catch you, they will pull you apart like warm bread." (Mission: Carbs!) Or maybe I can no longer separate the tabloid staple from the actor.You know, maybe that's it. EW.com lists Slezak's item in the following "categories:" Film, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, Movie Trailers. Katie Holmes does not appear in either the film or the story, but if you are interested in her of course you would want to know that the "Valkyrie" trailer left Michael Slezak snickering.
Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator:" I just want to set the world on fire
But wait. Tom Cruise's trouble are not over. Here's another headline: Cruise May Face Legal Action Over Hitler Globe. Ohmigod! As my Aunt Mary wisely instructed me: "Honey, when it rains, it pours!" She taught me to read those words off a box of Morton's salt. The story appeared on the New York Post's Page Six. It says "the couch-jumping star used a replica of one of Adolf Hitler's prized possessions in the movie without permission." The possession was Adolf's world globe. If Page Six had ventured a few more pages deeper into the paper and consulted the Post's movie critics, Page Six no doubt would have been informed that the globe became world-famous after Charlie Chaplin did a ballet with it in "The Great Dictator" (1940). They could also have reported that the collector's attorney does not foresee a big lawsuit but simply an acknowledgement. And even a 9-year-old would know that Cruise will face absolutely no legal action, because an actor can hardly be sued because of the props he uses.But now the gears have suddenly shifted. You've probably already absorbed this from the ether, but I'll say it anyway: After "Valkyrie" actually opened, no one laughed at the eye patch. No audiences were disgusted by the glass eye. It grossed $52 million domestically in its first nine days. Cruise will live to fail another day. Movie critics didn't do back-flips over either picture. On Metacritic, "Australia" scored 53, and "Valkyrie" 56.
As is often the case with a movie, I wrote one of the most useful lines about "Australia:" "The kind of movie that is a movie, with all the word promises and implies." I didn't give it four stars, objecting to the way it seemed to seriously believe in Aborigine magic. I do not believe in magic.
A friend emailed me: "Don't understand people being so down on 'Australia.' Thought it was a grand, messy entertainment." I wrote back: "It was a god-damned MOVIE! Have people forgotten what those are? I regret now even bringing up the Aborigine mystical thing. Who cared but me? I should have said, 'Looking for a movie where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average? Here you go!' "
Of course that would have been wrong. My task is to express my opinion, not compose blurbs. But wish I'd done a better job of conveying the movie's sweep and energy. It drew undeserved nit-picking. Yes, I know, in the scene where the little Aborigine stands at the edge of a cliff and single-handedly turns back a herd of stampeding cattle, you can see it's special effects. What the hell else was it going to be? Trained cattle?
New York magazine: Now this is just mean. (click)
I think there may have been an unspoken conspiracy under way. What's this? Baz Luhrmann wants to spend $130 million (or 100, or 75 million) on an Australian "Gone With the Wind?" It's being produced by a studio owned by that Australian Rupert Murdoch? We hate him, don't we? And it will star that Australian Nicole Kidman? What folly! Where's the fly swatter? Throw another star on the babrie!If David Lean were in business today, he'd be out of business. American opening-weekend audiences are driven by gossip and "box office winners." Not enough people trust their instincts. Which family movie would you rather see? An epic set in Australia, or one about a crazy dog? The kids see the trailer on TV, and say: "We want to see the dog!" Well, I sorta liked "Marley" too, except for the dog. But I offer this advice for parents: The kids will see the movie you choose for them, not the movie they choose for you. If you don't lay down the law, you'll end up seeing "The Spirit." You mark my words.
Never mind the "weekend winner" charts. Everybody wants to back a winner. If you're one of 50 people in a theater, that may mean you are more discriminating than the people who are not filling the other 300 seats. It doesn't automatically mean you're (a) a loser; (b) one of them Elites; (c) looking like a nerd in front of your date. Young people, heed this advice: Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you. I could go even further, and quote the great French cineaste Pierre Rissient, who instructs us: It is not enough for you to love a movie. You must love it for the right reasons.
The bounty hunting goes on. Who is the current reigning female star? Angelina Jolie, without a doubt. She might as well find a calendar and start marking off the days until she reads learns of her "box office dive" and "comeback attempt."
¶
Chaplin's ballet with the globe in "The Great Dictator:"
The average non-celebrity sees stars as being drowned in money, freebies, luxuries, and attention solely because they were born with good bone structure. Stars (the perception goes) don't work hard, don't work much, don't need to be good at what they do, and don't even have to try: all they have to do is show up and look right. And for that they earn more in one year than a firefighter or a police officer could earn in forty lifetimes.
There's also the perception that stars rarely have to accept responsibility for their actions. A star can kill; a star can rape; a star can drive drunk; a star can abuse their children; a star can do almost anything (other than steal memorabilia) and get 100% away with it with no repercussions whatsoever.
The perception of utter unfairness and entitlement makes people hunger for stories where the tin gods are pulled off their pedestals and the sordid underside exposed. It's hard to accept that a decent man could make $80 million a year just for standing in front of a camera; it's much easier to accept that he may be making that $80 million specifically because he is not a decent man, or because he's had to figuratively make a pact with the devil.
Ebert: That makes perfect sense, and I understand it. But let me just observe: Once you have enough money to live comfortably (which most people in the world do not, but that's a different subject), or even to live in what, growing up, we imagined as luxury, then additional money buys nothing except for additional money translated into material terms. You can only sleep in one house a night, drive one car at a time, eat one meal at a sitting, and send your kids to one school, however good it may be. You can only be happy inside your own body right here and now. Having been on a lot of movie sets, I have observed that movie actors work harder than you might think for a living. That includes physical work. It also includes waiting (Jack Lemmon: "My career consists of thousands of crossword puzzles, interrupted from time to time by acting"). When we hear that an actor had to rise at 3 a.m. for five hours of makeup every day for two months, do we reflect that it would drive us mad? And movie actors (who these days have to be at least good, if not great) earn their money with what they actually do, and it brings us pleasure and sometimes important experiences. If you see the Vanity Fair with Tina Fey on the cover, read the article about the meltdown of the new Gilded Age. There you will learn about obscene wealth. Wall Street CEOs who always order the $2,000 wine, who like the $36 an ounce Kobe beef, who even this year thought they deserved $100 million bonuses for making people's savings evaporate and driving their companies into bankruptcy by insane leveraging. Who use a private jet to commute every three or four days among six vast homes. It gets a lot worse. I actually wouldn't mind seeing them given the gossip treatment. Lots of people, have good cheekbones. But the Kate Winslets and Sean Penns, the Meryl Streeps and Robert Duvalls, the Woody Harrelsons and Jeanne Moreaus, are rare. You want to see a movie star working? See "The Wrestler."
Love this post. Roger, you've touched on a huge peeve of mine. It has to do with film reviewers who are more impressed with themselves than with the medium they review. But the 'reporting' trend, to be clever at the expense of the topic being covered, goes beyond film reviews to political coverage and even hard news at times. It is at its worst in entertainment news.
I'm bit idealistic and perhaps naive. In my mind journalism is a noble vocation. They are our truth-tellers, who carry the new from village to village. They ought not behave like roaming packs of petulant Mean Girls; flexing their pens in attempt to destroy the 'mighty' for (perceived) hubris.
As for the box office obsession, it's crazy! Particularly in these days when box office numbers have less and less relevance to the profitability of a film. I didn't agree with the increasing coverage in the news (to the exclusion of all else) of opening weekend numbers, when the trend began. But these days, it's just pointless. Personally, I think it's laziness. To research a story, taking the time to make the calls and contacts, is far more difficult than grabbing numbers from a website.
Finally, I love, love, love your admonition, not to marry someone who doesn't love the same movies (for the right reasons). You're absolutely right. Our taste in film says a lot about our inner life and the way we think. It goes right to the heart of who we are. I know for instance, I could never love, truly love; someone who doesn't find the sermon preached by Amos Starkadder (Ian McKellan) in "Cold Comfort Farm" funny.
If he can't get a belly laugh out of, "There's NOOO BUTTERR IN HELLL!!", he's not the man for me.
Ebert: Courtesy of IMDb:
Ye miserable, crawlin' worms. Are ye here again then? Have ye come like Nimshi, son of Rehoboam, secretly out of your doomed houses, to hear what's comin' to ye? Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins, if there be any virgins amongst you, which is not likely, the world being in the wicked state that it is. Have ye come to hear me tell you of the great, crimson, licking flames of hell fire? Aye! You've come, dozens of ye. Like rats to the granary, like field mice when it's harvest home. And what good will it do ye? You're all damned! Damned! Do you ever stop to think what that word means? No, you don't. It means endless, horrifying torment! It means your poor, sinful bodies stretched out on red-hot gridirons, in the nethermost, fiery pit of hell and those demons mocking ye while they waves cooling jellies in front of ye. You know what it's like when you burn your hand, taking a cake out of the oven, or lighting one of them godless cigarettes? And it stings with a fearful pain, aye? And you run to clap a bit of butter on it to take the pain away, aye? Well, I'll tell ye, there'll be no butter in hell!
Dear Roger!
That's quite something to say about a film with a 7.9-rating at the IMDb (no other feature film Kidman made has a higher rating on the IMDb) and a '70% Fresh'-rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I also can't quite remember Nicole Kidman saying she hated the film (though she probably did not really enjoy the experience of making it).
Wouldn't you on second thought rather agree that a very vocal minority (that included you) hated the film vigorously, even though the majority of people watching it (that - you probably guessed it - included me) seems to have appreciated it?
Yours truly
-- Christof
Ebert: Certainly a majority of the people voting.
Roger, films now days are much poorer than what they use to be. In some ways I don't blame some news sites for dishing out harsh criticism on some of these films. I'm soooo tired of these obnoxious big budget films. These films are the worst. They are all style, but no REAL substance. The writing quality in almost every film that comes out of Hollywood now days is pathetic. They always have actors and characters act and behave in a way that real people wouldn't in real life. They also place them in situations that would never happen in real life. I truly HATE this! And I won't even get into the issue of plot holes. Whatever happened to decent film making, quality writing, and good film structure? Films from the 80's and 90's weren't all perfect, but they were never as bad as the films now days. The last good films I saw were No Country for Old Men, The Visitor, and Ratatouille. And the last epic film I saw, loved, AND purchased was The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I haven't purchased a DVD since. It seems Hollywood is satisfied with cranking out good looking (in terms of resolution), but low quality films and remakes. So I have no sympathy for them. What we need is some good old fashion filmmaking. Now THAT is something I would pay to see.
For a new biography of CHAPLIN go to;
http://www.chaplinalife.com/reviews.html
You may have overstated the point about "Fur." Any respectable film fan knows the line, "To me it was straight out of Diane Arbus, but it had none of the wit."
P.S. Just out of curiosity. Did you reject my comment on the last post or did it disappear into the ether?
Reply to: Ebert: And as nearly as I can guess, no titles which she was expected to "open"--that is, lure opening weekend crowds solely on the basis of her name... Bewitched, $63,313,159
Should Ms. Kidman bear the brunt of the public's backlash over "Bewitched"? Probably not.
LINK: In the mid-1990s, producer/director Penny Marshall’s team at Paramount... a 1996 stage reading cast Cynthia Nixon (Miranda on Sex and the City)... Marshall later teamed with producers Lucy Fisher and Douglas Wick’s Red Wagon Entertainment at Sony/Columbia Pictures. In 2003, life-long Bewitched TV show fan Kidman expressed genuine interest in playing Samantha. Sony/Columbia Pictures’ chairman Amy Pascal called Nora Ephron and pleaded for a pitch…a plot…anything to ensure Kidman would commit to the film. ...Kidman signed a “play-or-pay deal” for $17.5 million – ensuring that even if the film stalled again, she would still get her star salary. (end)
http://www.harpiesbizarre.com/movie.htm
I see no reason to blame Kidman for "Bewitched." Sony wanted to make movies with glitz, glamour and A-list actors. Between Penny Marshall, Amy Pascal and Nora Ephron, there was plenty of estrogen-fueled "we're gonna make a movie OUR way" in the room.
Tom Cruise, on the other hand... do we really want to get started on Tom Cruise? After taking over United Artists, he was on a mission: make a Tom Cruise film that works. It didn't happen with "Valkyrie" because the role drained away all of his charisma. However, now he's re-making a British TV series called "The Champions" and if he nails the script, Cruise will be back. Three heroes crash-land in the mountains of Tibet and have their brains re-wired by aliens or monks (it was never clear in the series.).... means that Cruise won't be the only Scientologist on the screen.
Tom Cruise is a victim of a religious cult called Scientology. They preach that psychiatrity is a fraud, and the drugs psychiatrists prescribe have too many side effects. It's very difficult to rescue a person like Cruise from a cult, because they play to his psychological weaknesses. They treat him like a god. When you step off a private jet in Tokyo for a premiere, and thousands of teenage girls scream your name, it's hard to say "Oh, that's not real."
I think Keira Knightley is more "current reigning female star" than Angelina.
Just read that Paramount handed the "Star Trek" people another $30 million, so the budget is up to $160 million. Fans are lining up. We expect highly-paid A-list actors like Cruise to hit the ball out of the park every time, and they don't. Why? My own personal theory is, we like Coming of Age stories. We like a hero who changes, and when the hero starts as a teenager, it's easy for us to grow up along with him. As long as Tom Cruise was young enough to play that role, he was a star in our eyes. Now, we're waiting to see Mr. Spock as an Academy graduate. That's what we WANT to see, the journey when the greatest amount of change takes place in a person's life. The defining moment that shapes our character. The difficult moral choices with no easy answers.
I once made a list of "Movies that couldn't be made today" and it was depressingly long. Blade Runner was on it, as was The Road Warrior and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Almost every movie made in the 60's and earlier could qualify actually. French Connection? That'd be a TV movie at best. Marathon Man would be an episode of CSI and American Graffiti would be a sitcom. Could you imagine "To Live and Die in L.A." made today? "An Officer and a Gentleman"? "Iceman"? Or even "The Silence of the Lambs"? Never in a million years. One might squeak through but that's it.
I once posted here that I kind of like movies that fail in a huge and spectacular fashion because at least it shows that the people making them tried. I'd rather see an organic human-made failure than a pre-packaged success. I'd rather see a Zardoz than an X-men anyday, despite the fact that I think Zardoz is a ridiculous mess and X-men is pretty good.
I've also never understood the wrath against an actor's work simply because their personal life is a bit giggidy at times. Tom Cruise is a lot of things, but he is not a bad actor. Nicole Kidman's record is a bit spottier and she either has horrible taste or uses her star power to screw around with films because she's been in at least 3 films (Bewitched, Invasion, Stepford Wives) that show obvious and massive post production tampering. But she's still a good actress most of the time, and it would be a horrible injustice to condemn a film just because she was in it.
I loathe how entertainment journalism has turned into mean spirited gossip about stars personal lives as opposed to being about art and/or love of films. Sometimes gossip can be amusing or funny, most of the time it's just crass and gives wayyy too much attention to non-artists. Hell, I could compose a flipside of my previous list called "Today's stars who could never have been stars yesterday." and if you guessed that Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears would be on it, you'd be right. Adorable sloppy drunks maybe, not stars.
Know who I blame the most for this sort of BS though? Not the public and not the journalist. The average joe will watch anything and the average entertainment journalist only writes what sells. No, I blame the fanboys. You know who I mean. Those people who like NOTHING, who spend all their time tearing a movie apart instead of you know... watching it. I'm not talking about movie buffs, you're a movie buff and I'm a movie buff. There's lots of us out there. But the fanboy is a different animal. I'm talking about someone who can tell you every goof in a film but hasn't the first clue about it's subtext or themes. About someone who loves specific film(s), director(s), actor(s) and refuses to watch anything unfamiliar like some sort of film savant. Fanboys don't love film, they don't love the pure joy of discovering something new, something interesting. They don't even really love the films that they so fanatically worship, they love the past and are trying to re-experience that first moment where they felt a film move them. Irony at it's finest.
Movies may not be specifically tailored for them (although the merchandise often is) but all those crappy online gossip pieces masquerading as journalism certainly are. Fanboys are all over the interwebs and they love this sort of thing.
Personally, I'm having a ball telling the fanboys that I love how the new Star Trek movie looks. They're so cute when they're mad.
The real question is: why do some people feel the need to defend multi-millionaires who have fabulous, blessed lives like Nicole Kidman, when you could also spend that time defending/looking out for the interests of those that actually need it, like war victims, the terminally ill, the homeless, political fugitives, the abused, etc. etc...
Ebert: People like me, right? Maybe because I thought the entry was about journalism. Or maybe because I thought I'd give a break to those people who are always complaining that I should stay away from leftist politics and write about the movies.
My grandparents, mostly untouched by entertainment criticism, argue over Australia in the way that real people argue about movies. They do not make sweeping statements about Nicole Kidman or Tom Cruise. They say things like, "The beginning was a little slow, but it picked up" or "It was way too long" -- because all this business of Nicole Kidman and her "box office failures" have no place in reviews. The review should be about the movie, right?
" "Dogville" was an impossible Lars von Trier film just about everyone hated, including Kidman, who at least had the nerve to work for the founder of the Dogme 95 movement."
Dogville has a 7.9 rating on IMDb. I would say many people, myself included, enjoyed it.
Ebert: Metacritic, 59. Tomatoes, 70. Of course no rating means anything to the person who has seen a movie, including you and me, because then our rating is the only one that's relevant. As it should be.
Roger,
I find it a little ironic that the media tries so hard to elevate actors/actresses into a "movie star" so quickly just to bring them back down from the lofty perch that they were just placed upon. Its almost like "journalists" are attempting to ensure a never-ending supply of gossip-fodder for future articles.
Unfortunately, there is plenty of blame to go around from the 24 hour news channels, the celeb-cult shows (Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, etc) as well as a channel dedicated to reporting the goings-on in celeb's (and psuedo-celeb's) everyday lives, E!. I hate to admit this, but some fault must also be put on the actors themselves with their sky-rocketing salary requirements in an economy thats clearly in recession. The two featured above are among the highest paid in the profession (Cruise: $20M+ Kidman: $17M+ per picture)... High investment, yields high expectations. Combine the perceived "inflated" salary demands with "odd" behavior (Scientology, arguing with Matt Lauer over pharmacuetical drugs, etc...) and people want to see them brought back down to earth.
I'm not saying its right or fair (I'm a capitalist at heart - let them earn whatever someone wants to pay them), I'm only saying what I believe to be the cause. I think people want to see the Tom Cruise from Risky Business or Top Gun (when America fell in love with him) not the Tom Cruise of today strangely jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. Which is the real Cruise? Stay tuned to E! to find out.
Thanks for another interesting post!
Regards,
Chris
What a great commentary! One of my beefs is that once a star gets "big" in Hollywood blockbusters they immediately take a nosedive with the press if they decide to do some quality smaller budget films. Unless of course they turn from a swan to an ugly duckling and gain 40 lbs - everyone knows THAT is the formula to winning an Oscar.
I agree with you that the youth of today (I myself am 16) generally are interested in terrible movies. I have a running argument with someone who believes "Epic Movie" is better than "No Country For Old Men." He calls "No Country for Old Men" a boring horror movie. Were teenagers always into movies like "Epic Movie?"
Ebert: No, not movies that bad. Ask your friend how it feels to know that out of all the bad movies ever made, his favorite has been voted one of IMDb's 100 worst movies of all time, with nearly 40,000 votes, most of them from teenagers.
I agree with you that the youth of today (I myself am 16) generally are interested in terrible movies. I have a running argument with someone who believes "Epic Movie" is better than "No Country For Old Men." He calls "No Country for Old Men" a boring horror movie. Were teenagers always into movies like "Epic Movie?"
This reminds me of a story Peter Guber tells about talking to executives at Sony, after they had purchased Columbia Tri-Star.
After informing them (paraphrasing here) that his studio would make ten movies a year, two of them would be blockbusters, eight of them would be profitable, and two of them would be flops, the bewildered Japanese executives responded, "why do we have to make the flops?"
Because gossip sells like hot cakes, Many journalists ignore the art in the films and project the other issues of the film,for example the critics(or the journalists) are more interested in making statements which attract instant viewing,there are hardly any critics(not of your generation,i am talking about the present generation) who write about CINEMA.Instant money,instant popularity,controversy,scandal are the words which are liked by film critics and film columnists of this generation.The meaning of "film criticism" is dead.
In fact i dont read reviews given by many critics of my generation(i a just 23,i mean around 25-40)i only follow YOU and Richard Corliss because by reading every single review i get to know more about CINEMA.
Interesting post. How much is the first post (no personal offense to the poster) on this entry like the venom spewed by the 'critics' listed above? Only it does it with a veneer of civility, because it uses a guilt trip to say the same thing.
So why the hate towards these movie stars? You see this in sports as well. I think most people can't stand success if it is not their own. Or maybe it is part of the American drama. One reaches the heights only to be cast down through mistake and pathos and then scale the heights again. Or yet maybe these journalistic 'tools' have nothing better to do in order to justify a paycheck. It reminds me of the 24 hour news channel; it's just endless repeats and stuptifying minutia.
I appreciate the fact that you understand what 'capitalist' like Sam Zell do. It's disgusting and reprehensible.
Thank you for writing this. I couldn't agree more. And I love your comment, "It was a god-damned MOVIE! Have people forgotten what those are?"
I find it discouraging that movies are reported like hockey teams and NHL standings. "It made a lot of money. Must be good!" To the extent that it is possible, I try to avoid all reports etc. on movies that open and I usually don't see a movie till long after it has been released, hoping I'll have forgotten whatever nonsense I may have heard about it. Seeing and judging a film on its own merit is what I hope for - not always possible, however. But it's interesting how many "awful" movies are quite good. (The reverse is also true.)
It depresses me how much we love to hate.
Great post. Here's my take -
Many people in our society have never mentally graduated from the high school mentality of putting other people down to make themsevles feel better. (This can be a conscious or subconscious thing. The difference now is that they don't know the people they are gossiping about.) These criticizers are unsatisfied with themselves and their lives, so it makes them feel better to knock people like Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise - who have great success and the seemingly enviable freedom to do pretty much what they want. (Most people forget the hard work and lean financial times that many stars endure to achieve this kind of career - and the fact that the majority of people seeking a sustaining career in entertainment don't make it.) So movie stars, whether they make good movies or not, are resented to a certain degree from the get-go.
The media (which is also made up of many unsatisfed people who probably feel the same way as their viewers and readers) is desperate for ratings and circulation so they report and print stories that feed into this obsession. It doesn't matter if the movies are good or bad, or if people even have seen them. Since most people keep score by the shallow and often misleading way of revenue and income, the minute someone doesn't live up to their "expectations" in the media, everyone is ready to pounce, tying in unnecessary personal stories that add insult to injury -- thus making their viewers and readers "entertained and happy" about themselves by comparison. Stupid.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and others like them have made great movies, as well as good and bad ones. That is their right, and if they try to take chances to grow as an artist or present a new kind of idea or film, more power to them. (Cruise and Kidman during their careers have obviously tried to make a few art/independent movies. For people to have the same box office expectations of these films as a "Mission Impossible" is ludicrous.)
Like you, I have always said I am happy to see great or good movies, and more than happy to avoid bad ones. If Cruise jumps on a couch on Oprah, or Nicole Kidman marries a country music star with addiction problems, I could care less. Likewise about box office receipts. The only thing that should matter is what's up there on the screen, since that is what will ultimately stand the test of time.
P.S. - I want to see Valkyrie. I don't care about the mixed reviews or the box office take. I'm a history buff and it looks interesting to me. So there, Fox News.
Thanks for taking this serious look at journalism, even if it's "only" the entertainment business.
Here's hoping that by starting with a skeptical eye towards shallow and biased journalism in movie commentary, readers who have not lived for decades as newspapermen can become better at detecting it in the "real" news.
I see this issue as part of a bigger problem that leads similar sloppiness in reporting war, corruption, famine, genocide, climate change etc. etc. and our desire to find shortcuts in this information overload. Unfortunately, it's easier for many of us to go to the blockbusters rather than the good old trial and error method.
I love this part:"Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you." I actually want every person to be tagged with a list of his/her "will-love-for-eternity" movies. I think it will really save us time.
Thanks for pointing out the absurdity of this "journalism". People who want to know how much money a film made in its opening weekend are probably the same people who were asked by their kindergarten teacher what they wanted to be when they grew up and answered "an accountant". I don't ever want to think of the movies as a business, I just want to see something good.
Are these articles supposed to deter people from seeing these films? I can imagine people reading them and then wanting to see how much money was wasted making the Australian Gone With the Wind.
You're also 100% correct about not marrying someone who doesn't love the movies you love. I can still remember her falling asleep during Casablanca...
Thanks for taking this serious look at journalism, even if it's "only" the entertainment business.
Whether or not the Kidmans and Cruises need to be taken down a peg, the journalistic principles still apply. Tom Cruise does plenty enough as it is to hurt his public perception. No need to add on disgust and derisive laughter imagined by hacks at MSNBC who don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Here's hoping that by starting with a skeptical eye towards shallow and biased journalism in movie commentary, readers who have not lived for decades as newspapermen can become better at detecting it in the "real" news, which of course is not far removed from the entertainment.
Thank you for this commentary,I couldn't agree with you more.I am amazed at the vindictive and sometimes hateful critiques that actors and their films face.The obsession with 100m movies and the 18 and under male audience will hopefully wane as we enter a differant era.Maybe true value will be equated with excellence.
Thank you for this blog,it is one of my favorite stops in my day.
"I could go even further, and quote the great French cineaste Pierre Rissient, who instructs us: It is not enough for you to love a movie. You must love it for the right reasons."
I think I've said some parallel of this to friends of mine on various occasions. If you love a movie mindlessly, because you like to put it on and laugh at it every once in a while, you should at least be able to cop to that as being the limit of your involvement with it. There's this Hong Kong movie named "I Love Maria" that is about as deep as a pie plate and nevertheless gets laughs from me every time I see it; I don't try to defend it as anything other than a good time. On the other hand, I'll be defending the importance of "Scenes from a Marriage" and "Floating Weeds" (both of which I have you to thank for introducing to me), and reintroducing them whenever possible to generations who have neither heard nor can spell "Bergman" or "Ozu".
And sometimes all the stars converge at once. I love "Casablanca" both as a great story and as a fun movie I can watch every week, so there's neither harm nor foul there. (I was watching it this weekend on BD, with your commentary track, and you're right: there is no one shot, save maybe for Bogey pounding his fist on the table in the half-dark, that calls attention to itself. I wonder sometimes if the showy "David Fincher School" of moviemaking has made it all but impossible for a film with a simple, functional style to be taken seriously by movie lovers.)
"I could go even further, and quote the great French cineaste Pierre Rissient, who instructs us: It is not enough for you to love a movie. You must love it for the right reasons."
I think I've said some parallel of this to friends of mine on various occasions. If you love a movie mindlessly, because you like to put it on and laugh at it every once in a while, you should at least be able to cop to that as being the limit of your involvement with it. There's this Hong Kong movie named "I Love Maria" that is about as deep as a pie plate and nevertheless gets laughs from me every time I see it; I don't try to defend it as anything other than a good time. On the other hand, I'll be defending the importance of "Scenes from a Marriage" and "Floating Weeds" (both of which I have you to thank for introducing to me), and reintroducing them whenever possible to generations who have neither heard nor can spell "Bergman" or "Ozu".
And sometimes all the stars converge at once. I love "Casablanca" both as a great story and as a fun movie I can watch every week, so there's neither harm nor foul there. (I was watching it this weekend on BD, with your commentary track, and you're right: there is no one shot, save maybe for Bogey pounding his fist on the table in the half-dark, that calls attention to itself. I wonder sometimes if the showy "David Fincher School" of moviemaking has made it all but impossible for a film with a simple, functional style to be taken seriously by movie lovers.)
Roger, I cannot agree with you more.
I wonder if any reporter for any of the outlets you mentioned above (including, sadly, EW) will write about the fact that "Australia" will probably break even when overseas box office is factored in. "Reporters" have jumped on the film and said that critics said it was atrocious, despite the fact that a large number (including yourself) liked or loved it. In fact, according to rottentomatoes, over 50% of critics liked it. Not enough for a "Fresh" rating, but still a majority, both in the "regular" review section and the "top critics" section.
Doubly sad is that "Australia" contained one of the best performances of Nicole Kidman's career. Despite the fact that she was sometimes dealing in cliches, Kidman shined throughout the entire movie. Look at the scene where she sings "Over the Rainbow" to Naala, or when the boy is taken from her. Brilliant work. I see no ink on that.
Where "Valkyrie" is concerned (the film is still unseen by me), I found it very interesting/suspicious/odd that rottentomatoes.com held back writing the short "consensus" for the film until after the film premiered. The movie was "fresh" up until then, but suddenly the consensus was not so endearing and the critical masses were at 58% for regular and 59% for Top Critics. Almost as if the editors of the site wanted the film to fail critically and waited until they could find one or two more reviews to tip the scale. Someone should check their math.
The herd mentality (the accidental reference to "Australia" was just that) of the public is sickening. Why decide for yourself about ANYthing when you can be told what to do? Why support a performer when you can rake him or her over the coals? It doubly sickens me that mainstream entertainment media has lowered their standards to reach the same level of those scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I wrote a blog on the destruction of entertainment journalism earlier this year, and instead of copying and pasting most of it, I'll simply link it here:
http://bobtaylorrocks.blogspot.com/2008/07/day-entertainment-journalism-died.html
Isn't this rabid media attention in part responsible for their fame and their earnings? Early in a career a star can rely on charisma and the films they play in, but at a certain point their fame overshadows anything they might do on screen.
At that point, media saturation, whether good or bad is what determines whether they're "stars" or not.
roger, i'm with you. the focus is rarely on the film anymore. i'd like to see a poll done of "entertainment journalists" that have actually seen the films they mention in their writing. my guess is that they know far more about the actors' homes, affairs, and clothing than they do their latest role.
Ebert: Yes, and care more.
Isn't this rabid media attention in part responsible for their fame and their earnings? Early in a career a star can rely on charisma and the films they play in, but at a certain point their fame overshadows anything they might do on screen.
At that point, media saturation, whether good or bad is what determines whether they're "stars" or not.
Well, because we have the crave, Roger. I think our species has an inherent knack for schadenfreude, these are the same people who you see knocking over old ladies, talking in movie theaters. and running for political office, but they can be you and me too, if we would let ourselves be assholes. I believe it's everyone's responsibility to be good to one another, even if you don't feel like it or you hate their guts. I find that you go further in life, not up or down, but forward, when you do.
The real question is: why do people feel the need to separate the rich and the poor as if they were separate species? Especially regarding people they really know nothing about? It’s because it makes schadenfreude easier. Most people also have good in them, and so they can only really indulge in schadenfreude if they dehumanize their subjects. John Travolta's son passed at such a young age. I don't know Travolta, I will likely never meet John Travolta, but whether it was John Travolta or my neighbor, or even a family member, I would mourn the loss of young life just the same, more or less personally in each regard, but mourn just the same.
But (and I know this is not unexpected), the boards on imdb are probably more full of vultures than anything else. Something about the internet acts like a real truth filter. Under the false guise of anonymity, people express what they would never say out loud amongst others. And this is a very sobering thought, that these are perhaps the true faces of too many people. But then again, this torch and pitchfork personality is more common perhaps than I would like to admit.
I learned a long time ago that waiting for some kind of worldwide eureka moment where everyone grows up and learns to be good to one another, not because you want to, but because it’s the right thing to do, I’d have wasted a chunk of time I’m not willing to give up. The good people should just do their thing and smack the vultures away as much as possible.
I would rather not get started going on about the pitfalls and pratfalls of celebrity "journalism." It's like bacon grease, with only the arterial clogging and none of the flavor; it gets everywhere, coats whatever it lands on, and is almost impossible to scrub out. Plus, it's generally badly done, as you have so ably shown. These are people, too. Let them experience their tragedies (not a Travolta fan, but I don't have to be to wish he and his wife my condolences) and triumphs with a little space.
I really wanted to talk about Diane Arbus. I learned about her a few years back when I was taking a photography course, and fell in love with the way she shot her subjects. There was always a quiet dignity in their poses, like she had just told them that she knew that whatever they did, the whores or the housewives, that they were an integral part of life.
From Steve Martin's "Born Standing Up"
"My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contraction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful."
A friend just showed me a website of her friend's photos. He's very talented, and has gotten the kind of work that proves it. http://www.homeofthevain.com/index.php
Have a good day, Roger. Happy New Year.
Ebert: Steve Martin is such a very, very good writer.
I think that is one aspect of a part of this culture of "exceptionalism" we live in, where everything is either totally awesome or absolute dreck. So, for the publications that you mentioned, if they don't "deem" Tom Cruise totally awesome, then he must be absolutely dreadful. It's this trying to keep people indifferent, so they keep mindlessly buying things and trudging along with the masses. If you're having a "conversation" with someone in this "exceptionalist" mindset, there is no room for thought in the middle. It's a culture of selective hearing, and they only want absolute greenlights and absolute redlights or to frown upon or get gay with. If they get that tiny little buzzing going on called thought, they will just arbitrarily, you see, pick option (a) absolutely good or (b) absolutely bad. Let's just not think altogether, eh?
Here's how a conversation with those aforementioned gossip columnist would be like as you walk out of "Valkyrie":
Hazlett/Slezak: So, moviegoer, what did you think of this moviegoer-with-nice-fashion-sense?
Moviegoer: Well, there was one part that was coo--
Hazlett/Slezak: (laughing) --One part? One part, One eye...right?
Moviegoer: What?
Hazlett/Slezak: Does my fashion sense indicate that the publication I work for would have to be totally awesome, as well?
Moviegoer: Well, you do look nice but..
Hazlett/Slezak: There you have it folks: News is only news when you have a gay dress department...buy lemony cola: (laughing)we're all whores, right? (solemnly) Well, my fashion sense redefines the term (snaps a Z, then looks around at street corner) Wouldn't mind being that whore..
Camera man: We're still rolli--
Then go to commercial.
I remember pretty early in high school becoming a Woody Allen fan and one of my "friends" said "Don't you know that Woodly Allen is a sick perve"? And I said, "what"?. And he said, "He married his own daughter". And I made that-can't-be-true-but-he-seems-oddly-sure-about-it-face, then said "Well, I love his movies. But by then the conversation had ended, when I really wanted to tell him about "Love and Death"--a movie I loved--and Woody Allen, a character I loved who shared my love of astronomy...(well, interest, at least) and reminded me of myself in a humorous way.
Charlene said: "Stars (the perception goes) don't work hard, don't work much, don't need to be good at what they do, and don't even have to try: all they have to do is show up and look right. And for that they earn more in one year than a firefighter or a police officer could earn in forty lifetimes."
That is SO true, and such a grossly inaccurate perception. I'm a semi-normal guy and sometime actor (I do other things and acting isn't and has never been my ultimate goal in life) who got the opportunity to make a very small low-budget horror film. The process was GRUELING. You wait for lighting, for shots, for the camera, for other actors, for the background people, for any and everything. When everything is FINALLY ready to go, you do the same scene over and over and over again. Then you do it a few more times. You do the scene for your close-ups, and for those of everyone participating in the scene. You do it for wide shots, for close shots, you do it for the sound people, you do it for the director. You do it OVER AND OVER AND OVER again and try to maintain the same level of energy and intensity, to make sure you're giving the director what he/she wants, to make sure you're giving your scene partner what they need, to make sure you're hitting your marks, to make sure that everything is just as it was for continuity purposes, to remember your lines, to remember emotion, to react to something that won't exist until post-production is complete. There is a perception that film acting is easy, that it is all glamour and no work. It's the same one I had before I did this. Take it from someone who is one of you: it ain't. It's hard work, and from my one tiny little experience I can't even imagine doing something on the scale of an "Australia" or "Titanic". The experience made me admire the real actors all the more.
One closing thought: If Nicole Kidman is getting $15 million per movie or whatever, does anyone think about who is signing her checks?
Even though I often disagree with you, I love reading your reviews as well as your blog, the primary reason being they make me think. This post is certainly no exception.
I do take exception, however, to your characterization of Michael Slezak, as a "fanboy/fanboy wannabe." It may be that you didn't intend it as a low blow, but that's how it came across to my eyes; it seemed unnecessarily snide.
I do think it does well to note that, while it is indeed represented by a "splendid" (as you say; I call it the best out there) print publication, the PopWatch Blog is just that -- a blog. A blog, by definition (at least in my experience), does not get held up to the same journalistic standards as a print publication intent on presenting content of journalistic integrity -- which, for the most part, I think Entertainment Weekly does.
I will admit to being a big fan of Slezak and so maybe this is a knee-jerk reaction on my part. But I will say that it never seemed inappropriate to see a review of a trailer on a blog. First of all, EW has had a regular feature in which they rate trailers, so longtime readers of the publication would be unsurprised by it. And second of all, it's all about context, both in the magazine and on the website -- in the magazine, such a feature is always found in a "fun" section clearly intended to be less serious, far from their actual movie review section, which has always been taken very seriously and presented with integrity.
But on the website, and on the blog in particular, they employ writers who were never intended to be perceived as producing tightly polished content. It's just a group of industry writers expressing their opinions, presumably with the intent of reaching a wider range of readers at a more accessible level, just like anyone does on any blog. To me, in its context, it was completely appropriate.
I essentially agree with everything else you wrote in this post, however.
.
Ebert: You're right, I'm wrong, and I have removed the "fanboy" description from the entry. However, I stand by my comments about the premature decapitation of Tom Cruise.
I would rather not get started going on about the pitfalls and pratfalls of celebrity "journalism." It's like bacon grease, with only the arterial clogging and none of the flavor; it gets everywhere, coats whatever it lands on, and is almost impossible to scrub out. Plus, it's generally badly done, as you have so ably shown. These are people, too. Let them experience their tragedies (not a Travolta fan, but I don't have to be to wish he and his wife my condolences) and triumphs with a little space.
I really wanted to talk about Diane Arbus. I learned about her a few years back when I was taking a photography course, and fell in love with the way she shot her subjects. There was always a quiet dignity in their poses, like she had just told them that she knew that whatever they did, the whores or the housewives, that they were an integral part of life.
From Steve Martin's "Born Standing Up"
"My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contraction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the breathtakingly romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful."
A friend just showed me a website of her friend's photos. He's very talented, and has gotten the kind of work that proves it. http://www.homeofthevain.com/index.php
Have a good day, Roger. Happy New Year.
Mr. Ebert, I see your post as reflecting one of the most damaging parts of our society: meanness sells. Like sex, people are drawn to cruelty. I think you thoroughly defend your position about journalism but don't think that journalism has anything to do with why those things are written or read. While it may seem more sophisticated that Jerry Springer, is it really? To write as though you have seen a movie instead of just the trailer is ignorant. To give credence to those reviews is to. I fear that such ignorance and bashing will only grow since misery loves company. If I can't live as comfortably as I used to, maybe I want the super-celebs to suffer, too. Here's hoping that we can pull back to the big picture of realizing that their is honor to be had in all professions and a life lived with honor can help us overcome temporary disappointments. Happy New Year to you and yours.
Box office receipts should be moved to the business section, leaving the Arts pages to talk about art. (Wait - are there "Arts" pages anymore? I mean "Entertainment".)
Roger, your excellent article bought to mind David Merrick's remark: "It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail." It's not enough for the fanboys to champion a movie or a star. They most also see all other films crash and burn. Tom Cruise wasn't in the Dark Knight, therefore he most fail to make the Dark Knight even more spectacular. There has always been the deep seeded mythology much enjoyed by those of us in the great unwashed that wealthy successful people and lottery winners are really unhappy. This is something different. There is a weird advocacy now, which is as much about being against as it is being for.
Note to Marcus above: Yes, teenagers have always liked bad movies. But think how excited you'll be when you meet people your own age who like the ones you do! Alas, it will probably have to wait until college, when your friends feel they have been given permission to be smart.
Right on, Roger. The lack of journalism has not only reached this repulsive low with entertainment reporting, it has infected "real" journalism as well. The famous line from Fox News, "Some have said..." has now entered the lexicon at the other cable news outlets. Nothing is attributed to anyone and no one will take responsibility for anything they say.
I love movies. I love them for the right reasons, I hope. One night, while I was living with my dad, I was going out to see "Agnes of God." He knew that movie starred Jane Fonda. He hated Jane Fonda for what she had done during the Viet Nam war and asked me why I was going to see it. I said, "It's a movie." We never had that conversation again.
I completely agree with you on the subject of rude, manipulative newspapers, magazines, tabloids etc. Its hard to ever find something unbiased when reading about movies, whether it be their box office revenue or reviews. But towards the end there you kinda got a little dark, with the whole don't marry someone who doesn't like the same movies you do, eventually they may not love you anymore... what was that? No offense intended here, but I have an aunt and uncle who have COMPLETELY different tastes in movies, so much different in fact that when peering into their dvd cabinet, you can determine which of them bought almost every single movie in there. And they've been married for eighteen years now. Could it be a loveless marraige? Yes, very possible. Its obvious that those kind of marraiges are common today, one might even say the majority. But when it comes to my aunt and uncle, I doubt it. I don't know if you're depressed or something (please forgive me if that was a little blunt) but what happened to your ability to see the good in life, no matter how rare it may be? I know staying confident and cheerful in times like these is nearly impossible, but how does focusing on the bad make it any better? Because no one can ever see the future, so despair is pretty much pointless. Of course, I'll end up looking like an idiot if all my assumptions are just that: assumptions. Sorry for being so... forward.
Box office receipts should be moved to the business section, leaving the Arts pages to talk about art. (Wait - are there "Arts" pages anymore? I mean "Entertainment".)
Roger, your excellent article bought to mind David Merrick's remark: "It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail." It's not enough for the fanboys to champion a movie or a star. They most also see all other films crash and burn. Tom Cruise wasn't in the Dark Knight, therefore he most fail to make the Dark Knight even more spectacular. There has always been the deep seeded mythology much enjoyed by those of us in the great unwashed that wealthy successful people and lottery winners are really unhappy. This is something different. There is a weird advocacy now, which is as much about being against as it is being for.
Note to Marcus above: Yes, teenagers have always liked bad movies. But think how excited you'll be when you meet people your own age who like the ones you do! Alas, it will probably have to wait until college, when your friends feel they have been given permission to be smart.
It's a vicious game. I belong to Bombay (Mumbai) and see a similar deal in 'Bollywood'. The way I see it:
- it's typically, a 'kick' to see someone fall (especially, as majority of us don't have it in us to make it, or...to strive)
- the 'professionals' (journalists in this case), don't want to work hard enough to get to the 'truth', or opine with honesty, even if that subjective 'honesty' maybe in contrast to other's take-away from that object/film; Scott Peck said, 'Man by nature is lazy', and that kinda applies every where.
- my impression of the powers-that-be at most of the places is that they want something big and yeah...the 'stars' are easy prey.
I also have a problem with the opposite, when sometimes stars are praised for their 'superlative' performance (of course, that's my 'subjective' opinion!) But there is a sense of exaggeration - to build the Gods; I can understand for the star-value they bring-in, but when they relate it to acting, which is wanting at times, it seems weird.
Like in Bollywood, it's interesting, how a 'social' film, with lot of messages, move the audience; i realize they have a history for that; films with 'sermons' can move them a lot; more interesting is how in that scenario...appears good.
But then...the Box Office does tend to reveal the true picture eventually. Opening-weekend is almost like a sham, and I find it amusing how 'smartly' the distributors and producers celebrate the success of their film based on that, and sometimes even before the 2nd weekend, the film goes down under.
(Just discovered your blog on Sita Sings the Blue; since am in usa for some months, i was fortunate to catch it in the Denver Fest, and it was interesting to note that the best 2008 films on India, were not by Indians! This one and Slumdog. The irony is that Sita Sings...will not be released in our country; i hope not, but i know that no distributor will have guts to play a film that shows one of the true sides of the Lord Rama. Well, that's the way it is...)
Ebert: On the other hand, some of the best English-language novel of recent years are by Indians. There's much disagreement among my (surprisingly many, nearly 16,000 last month) Indian readers about whether "Sita" is affectionate or disrespectful.
Great points as usual on the general topic, and the specific stars -- I'm a big fan of Kidman and Cruise and the other fine actors you cite, and will always be interested in seeing films they're in -- but I can't help but wonder if the choice of 'Australia' to make your case was motivated at least a TEENY bit by a slight regret for the (basically) glowing review you gave it? I dragged my $50 bucks and teenage kids to the cineplex insisting "Ebert thinks it's really good!" and then had to endure their jeers(eventually joining them) for days. I've got work to do with building your credibility back up with those kiddees. They (and the vast majority of critics -- check out MRQE) were right-- it sucked, artistically. It was "just a goddamn movie!" It just wasn't a very goddamn good one.
Ebert: Je ne regrette rien.
Valkyrie isn't a masterpiece or a revolutionary event in cinema, but just a good movie. I enjoyed it and found myself caught up in the story above all. The problem with a lot of criticism is that "average" isn't good enough for a lot of people. A good film at least draws your attention, is interesting, and is worth spending either money for a ticket or the time spent watching it. I'm definitely going to give Valkyrie a second look when it comes to DVD.
I do think it's unfair how Tom Cruise's personal life has been stressed so much in coverage. You'd never know he had such eccentricities from seeing the film.
Roger,
About marrying someone who likes the same movies etc. It's not so much they like the same movie, but they like you inspite of the movies you like. Case in point, my child bride of thirty four years who continues to love me even though I faithfully line up for Godzilla movies, even though I know who Princess Dragon Mom is and scroll through the tv channels and settle on an Audie Murphy western. She loves me because she knows the chambers of my movie loving heart have also ample room for To Kill A Mockingbird and Key Largo and La Dolce Vita and Amacord and Wild Strawberries and The Wild Bunch (uncut) and Claire's Knee and _________ (insert any Truffaut film in the blank). And on and on.
About Tom Cruise...
I cannot get myself worked up to see Valkyrie. Perhaps I am already comparing it to another fictitious assasination flick, Day of the Jackal (the Edward Fox version) which was such a terrific experience I even began doubting my own knowledge of history as the film approached it's climactic moments. I get the impression the Cruise film falls shy of that standard. Perhaps that is unfair of me.
And for what it is worth--
It's bad enough that everything we buy as consumers comes from China. Now I suppose we will have to go to them for issues of mental health! You don't believe me? Just look at the headline I found on Yahoo news this morning.
"CHINESE MANUFACTURING SHRINKS IN DECEMBER"
Peace,
kerry of inframan (I'm just sittin' here snackin' on soylent green)
Ebert: I know, it's bad. An Onion headline:
Buchanan Reveals Thousands Of Americans Made In China
The public loves success, and they love failure, but what they love most is someone once successful who is now failing. I have no idea why this is. Some sort of schadenfreude appears to be at work here, or perhaps it's just so that people can look forward to the inevitable comebacks and cheer them when they happen. I'm sure the audiences will rave when, at the age of seventy, Tom Cruise gets his Best Actor Oscar for some Titanic-style 9/11 movie.
I love that you addressed all this nonsense of Nicole Kidman's career becoming bust. Thank you. You literally took the words out of my mouth (yet again).
Your blog is a must-read.
This was a great read, all of it true. It reminds me of the press surrounding '7 Pounds'. Now, I haven't seen the film (Mainly because I haven't been able to figure out what the hell it is about from the incessant airings of the trailer!), and I see you gave it 3 stars which generally means it's completely watchable. But, Will Smith has had very few flops in his career, and the minute mixed reviews began to surface on this one, everyone began to pile on. Suddenly, this wasn't movie wasn't flawed or decent, it was unwatchable, terrible, and "one of the worst movies I've ever seen" (I actually saw that written somewhere). My father said to me "I hear that movie's supposed to be really bad," and I said, "I really don't know. The reviews are definitely mixed, but I can't help but shake the feeling that everyone's just excited to see Will Smith fail and are all piling on the hate." I wonder if it were '7 Pounds' starring anyone else, if we would see the same deal of negative press.
"The bounty hunting goes on. Who is the current reigning female star? Angelina Jolie, without a doubt. She might as well find a calendar and start marking off the days until she reads learns of her "box office dive" and "comeback attempt"
Jolie is already despised by the tabloids for what she did to tabloid-darling Jennifer Aniston (Which is strange because Brad Pitt has escaped relatively unscathed even though, if you believe the scuttlebutt, he'd be the most to blame), so you better believe the pointed sticks are already sharpened. The fact that she doesn't work very often works in her favour.
Also, re: Australia. I said to my dad after seeing it "I've seen a movie about ranch-hands who have sex with each other, I've seen a movie about a girly samurai whom all the other samurai want to have sex with, and THAT was maybe the gayest movie I've ever seen" but it's also a completely entertaining one. I like your assertion that it's a MOVIE. That is exactly what it is. You never find yourself absorbed by the characters, or as if you're experiencing Australia yourself, but it's a grand, entertaining movie. I wish there were more of them.
Ebert: Without a spoiler, I will say "Seven Pounds" is a movie about a man who wants to help people who deserve it, and who is very persuasively crazy. If his intention was to do the exact opposite of what he does, I have an instinct that the same movie, with a different punch line, would have been hailed.
I don't care at all about Cruise's & Kidman's personal lives. But I understand why some people might be interested in that — nearly everyone loves to gossip and this a way to gossip about people that everyone "knows" but almost nobody knows. I suppose it makes you feel less dirty than if you gossip about friends and neighbors. Not to mention that we live in a society that delights in schadenfreude.
But I don't understand how their actual work — the movies they make — plays into this. It seems like the media creating the stories. They cram these people down our throats so that when the movies bomb they can declare that the public is officially sick of them.
I look at Cruise and Kidman and I see actors who, once they got big enough to choose their own projects, have opted to work with a diverse mix of consistently engaging collaborators on a wide range of material, and who gave years of their lives to a Stanley Kubrick film (no small deal when you earn a hundred million a year).
And I'm supposed to not like them?
Well I'm out here just waiting on evolution to catch up with me, and you too of course. Its a slow process, happening at the individual level instead of across the board. We have to be patient and merciful.Seems like every time I go out into the world the people I run across inspire me to think "Have you no decency sir?"
Roger, I'm sure you've heard of a little German phrase called Schadenfreude. It literally means "pleasure taken from observing the misery of another." This phrase seems to apply to the societal OBSESSION these days with celebutantes (Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, etc.), drug-addled (though lovely and talented) singers like Amy Winehouse (a personal favorite of mine), and, yes, actors who make bad choices once or twice and end up paying for it for the rest of their careers (Nicole Kidman, Al Pacino, Tom Cruise, etc.)... This palpable desire to bear witness to the failures of the famous, successful and talented IS largely fueled by the media (who should be ashamed of themselves) - Shakespeare said, "First kill all the lawyers." Had he lived into this past century, he might've amended that with "Next, kill all the Billy Bushes, E! 'news' correspondents, and every a--hole that thinks they can just swoop in and take a respectable critic's TV work, splash a few unholy blurbs on movies, and call themselves a film critic." ;) ... We all have a tiny bit of a sadistic side in us, and we must all endeavor to be better people, but this madness over what latest bit of momentary insanity Cruise exhibits on talk shows and the film choices made by Nicole Kidman, and whether or not Lindsay and Britney are wearing underwear or sleeping with female DJ's is ridiculous and careening us ever closer to an apocalypse of, I fear, our own creation... Say a little prayer to whatever you believe in that it ain't over till the fat lady sings - then hope there ain't a fat lady in the vicinity.
Roger, the down-with-Jolie campaign has already begun... and guess who is leading the charge? The critics.
I honestly feel - based on various reviews I've seen this year - like this 'birds of prey' attitude has breached film criticism too. Look at the reviews for "Changeling" (which were almost as bad as the unfair reviews for "Lakeview Terrace" that complained Jackson was 'chewing up the scenery... like he always does'... as if that's always a bad thing...) Here are some "Changeling" quotes:
"But no one in "Changeling" is saved from his or her worst impulses, not even Jolie. Part of the problem is that Jolie just has the wrong look for the role: She skulks through too much of the movie like a ghoul, her heavily mascaraed eyes glowering from beneath a series of cloche hats -- she's more vamp than grieving mom."
That's not what would pop in my head if I met that character in real life. Now her character in "Wanted"... that's different. But in "Changeling"? Seems like there's an assumption that Jolie simply can't play that character.
"Briegleb is one of movie's good guys, but Malkovich plays him as a slithery villain, maybe because that's the easiest kind of performance for him to phone in."
Yeah, what he did in "Ripley's Game" was easy. Anybody could do that... And, absolutely, he came across as a badguy in "Changeling"... *rolls eyes*
But there's more...
"The way Eastwood shoves Jolie’s suffering in our face is like a threat to the Academy: 'And the Oscar WILL go to … ' She’s a great actress. She doesn’t need his domineering chivalry."
So he pushed her in our face. Another critic says...
"We understand that hell hath no fury like a mother protecting her cub, but the feeling you get here is that Eastwood stepped aside and told his leading lady to just let 'er rip."
So he just let her do her thing. So maybe it's her they don't like?
"Normally, Jolie is an actress capable of both intensity and subtlety, but her performance here is too amped up to register as anything more than a star turn. Did nobody notice that the real Angelina had been snatched?"
No, I just noticed a mother trying not to lose it because she had lost her child.
"She's so assertive that even her demure seems pushy."
...He's right. A mother desperate for her child, and confronting a corrupt police force... is pushy.
I get the feeling that people just don't like her and Eastwood here because they are big stars in a Hollywood movie about real events... and we all know that means it's gonna feel fake. Then again, this has been true since 2001 (and before) when critics said of "Monster's Ball" that...
"All roads lead to acting-award nominations, but none lead to truth."
It will be nominated therefore it cannot be truthful.
"Has everything you could want in an American independent film. It's daring, sexy and redolent with regional atmosphere. All the actors work well above their heads. Many of you will probably hate it anyway."
...Yup. Gives us everything we want but it's totally hateable.
But back to "Changeling". The critics make damn sure their love of Eastwood comes to an end... (until "Gran Torino" came out of course... then it's back on the bandwagon...)
"Eastwood, who has made fine movies in recent years, has got hold of a humdinger of a story. But he's too detached and lazy here."
Also known as restrained...
"Eastwood can't bring himself to go in that tawdry direction. Instead, he keeps coating the picture with layer after layer of semimatte prestige gloss -- even though this is a movie based on a chilling real-life crime case, it's also a work of good taste and distinction, and Eastwood doesn't want us to forget that."
Or maybe he just wants us taking it seriously?
Which brings me to this quote from A. O. Scott:
" Why do opportunistic, clever young novelists -- I won't name any names -- gravitate toward magic-realist depictions of the decidedly unmagical reality of the Shoah? For the same reason that actors shave their heads and starve themselves, or preen and leer in jackboots and epaulets. For the same reason that filmmakers commission concrete barracks and instruct their cinematographers and lab technicians to filter out bright, saturated colors. To win prizes of course."
Or... maybe they actually care and think doing these things will make a better movie that audiences will appreciate more, whether consciously or unconsciously?
Why are critics assuming the worst intentions in the filmmakers instead of just responding to the film on an emotional level? Do they really have to keep that much intellectual distance between themselves and the film?
Or are they just that cynical? I don't like how vicious some of these critics are becoming in terms of fearing the worst. Although I think it might have something to do with many Gen Xers (who are used to being lied to) currently coming into prominence amongst the critical community...
For fun, here's a few quotes about "Lakeview Terrace"...
"Neil LaBute hasn’t made a really good film in 8 years."
What does that have to do with this movie?
"Despite his Mason/Dixon-stoking diva stylings, I sincerely doubt Sam Jack will gain as much eventual YouTube infamy as LaBute's last leading man."
Because that's why Jackson made this movie. To get on youtube... where he is already in countless uploaded clips and trailers.
"Abel is not your average white bigot but rather a righteously angry, or at least seriously crazy, black one, played by (who else?) Samuel L. Jackson. Mr. Jackson’s glowering, bellowing performance is so close to self-parody that I had to check the end credits to make sure I hadn’t been watching Dave Chappelle doing an extended version of his Comedy Central impersonation."
Now try saying that Abel Turner's face. You might want to take your glasses off first...
"But no, it was indeed Mr. Jackson, who is nothing if not enterprising. Whether he’s chasing snakes on a plane, chaining a wayward young lady to a radiator or persecuting newlyweds in the suburbs, Mr. Jackson can always find a new application for the snarling, sarcastic fury that has come to define his range as an actor."
Yeah and what's with Eastwood always playing the tough, silent type? He's useless!
Not that he should try doing anything else. Look at what happened when Jolie tried to do something else... she's called a vamp.
Seems like there's no satisfying critics these days.
Except you of course Roger. You're the only guy with the balls to have a "20 best films of the year" list... and then separate lists for foreign films, documentaries, animated et cetera.
As an aspiring James Berardinelli type critic myself, I have many friends who are wannabe critics too and they're always making fun of how you give out so many 4-star reviews. It's as if they believe there should be a quota of negative reviews one must give out. And, when I look at the response to "Changeling" and "Lakeview Terrace", I wonder if the pros think the same way...
Ebert: Berardinelli is fair, knows his movies, gives his reasons, is authoritative, writes with great clarity, and doesn't care if he votes with the crowd. He is an example of a self-published individual entirely outside the usual channels who by simple quality and continuity has become more widely read than most of the mainstream critics. Look up a movie at MRQE sometime, click on "popularity," and see who he ranks above. Also, he's a hell of a nice guy.
I wouldn't want that headline written about me, but it is true. With the average gross of her last year's pictures, Nicole Kidman was paid $1 for every $1 that the movie grossed. That means that the pictures lost 50 cents for every dollar she was paid. That factors in neither DVD sales nor advertising costs. Now, this isn't her fault. If a studio pays Nicole Kidman $15 million to do "Birth" (source imdb) then they shouldn't be surprised when they don't turn a profit. If they wanted to make back that $15 million they needed to cast Will Ferrel as the kid, and make it about how a reincarnated man child burps loudly in fancy restaurants. Box office gold.
Happy New Year.
I enjoyed the post and mostly agree, but I want to also throw my hat in the ring as a fan of "Dogville." Dave Kehr, Andrew Sarris, and J. Hoberman put it on their yearly top 10 lists. My mom liked it, too.
Ebert: "Dogville" entirely aside, I will guess you mom isn't a typical mom.
Mr. Ebert,
Whenever I read your posts I usually find myself agreeing with them. The problem is I then become frustrated with the way many things are going in our culture. I search for the appropriate response but struggle to find one that matters. We can criticize trends in the media or society all day long, but really, what can be done? It's hard to challenge something that isn't tangible or concrete.
It's hard to fight a war against gossip.
Just to weigh in... I think in general our society feels guilty for making celebrities so successful. Deep down people know our priorities are screwed up. Pop stars who can't sing will become a joke and then get paid lots of money to appear in a commercial making fun of themselves. Meanwhile people who work important jobs (soldiers, teachers, etc.) are underpaid. Everyone knows this and understands their own contribution to it. So maybe obsessing on the flaws of celebrities is a way of exercising that guilt.
Stars do not get paid so much just for the acting work (which at times can be very demanding).
I believe there is another downside to stardom.
It's the loss of anonymity.
I doubt Nicole Kidman can just walk in a restaurant and order something from the menu.
It's funny how people hold the main actors responsible for the failure of a movie when in reality movie making is a collective process.
I also believe that most movies loose money regardless of whose in it.
I just watched Casino on blu ray and at the end of the commentary track Martin Scorsese compares the rise and fall of the Tangiers described in the movie to the Hollywood system in which movie budgets are driven to such extremes it becomes extremely difficult to make these movies profitable until the day the system is going to collapse.
Angelina Jolie is the premiere Hollywood action actress, but I've been scratching my head for the last decade over just about every action picture she's made.
Surely one of the leading Hollywood action stars has their pick of scripts better than Wanted, Tomb Raider (twice!), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (which I admit most people liked, but I thought was toothless) and Gone in Sixty Seconds.
Compare that with the new action man Christian Bale: Batman (twice), 3:10 to Yuma, and now he's in Terminator.
What's going on here? Are the studios only interested in interesting action pictures for boys, or are writers only writing what they know sells?
And regarding the comment about Kiera Knightley above, I don't think even she believed what was going on in those Pirate films. It was so far off the rails the train was taking ski lessons.
I wish the women in the film industry weren't required to just 'act like a guy' in order to play these action roles. It's very dull. Actually, it's dull when a man does it.
I don't know how much box office has to do with it. I remember most of the movies you cited were critical disappointments. Of the ones I've seen, "Birth" was just okay, both "Cold Mountain" and "The Golden Compass" were big letdowns and "The Interpreter" was a competent thriller that I enjoyed and promptly forgot about. Critics I trust warned me away from "Fur" "Margot at the Wedding" (Which I still mean to go back to) "Stepford Wives" and "Bewitched." The miscasting of the leads in "The Human Stain" And the trailer for "Australia" overloaded my bullshit detector.
I think after winning her Oscar, Nicole Kidman had her pick of roles, and made a series of choices that for one reason or other didn't work out. Luck of the draw.
Now about Tom Cruise. I used to say "I hate him like I hate the '80s." As a star, he's a phony. As an actor, the only times he's impressed me were when (in "Magnolia" "Collateral" and most recently "Tropic Thunder") he tapped into a self-centered hardness verging on nihilism. I think his troubles began when he started to let that hardness into his public persona.
Roger, you wrote - some of the best English-language novel of recent years are by Indians. Could you please name some of those? Perhaps, i have been too ignorant to follow international literature but i really respect your judgment. Thanks.
Ebert: The first one I always mention is A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. Then try Mr. Sampath: The Printer of Malgudi or The Painter of Signs," by R.K. Narayan.
Narayan also adapted the Ramayana to his charming English, here:
http://www.amazon.com/Ramayana-Shortened-Version-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039679/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231109155&sr=8-12
This may sound strange, but consider his fictional Malgudi to be the Indian version of Lake Woebegon.
Roger,
Good post. It brought back some very negative feelings I began having in, say, 2003 about the treatment Mel Gibson received from the media. His persecution seemingly began before The Passion had even wrapped principal photography, and then intensified before anyone had seen it, then rose to a crescendo leading up to the Ash Wednesday release (Feb '04). Then the movie came out and everyone possessing both halves of their brain saw how assinine the antisemitic label-slappers had been regarding Gibson or his film.
Fast forward to 2006. Gibson had got the last laugh with the Passion; no one had had the guts to invest in the film, so both the investment AND the profit (which was mega) were his. In the summer of '06, months before Apocalypto's release (Dec), they were at it again, wondering VERY OUT LOUD whether Apocalypto would finally derail Gibson's career. They had no business even thinking like this: for over two decades Gibson made us laugh and cheer as he played some of the ballsiest and funniest action heroes, as well as successful turns at serious acting (as in Zefferelli's adaptation of Hamlet). When he turned to movie-making, he gave us Braveheart. Score again. And to a fair and democratic mind, The Passion must be regarded as a good choice on his part--the box office alone shows that the snob critics were way off. So why oh why did they WANT to see Apocalypto fail? Still sore from having made asses of themselves in '04? Most likely.
Then of course in August he got drunk and said that stupid stuff and everyone jumped on him like he was a trampoline. They retroactively attributed antisemitism to everything he'd ever done. THEY WERE VINDICATED. (Of course, anyone who had received the unjustified treatment he'd recieved at first couldn't be blamed for being a trifle antisemitic as a result...). So then of course they wondered OUT LOUD if his new movie would even be released, and were VERY CERTAIN that this, finally, was the end of his career.
And of course, when the movie came out (and did reasonably well), the very critics YOU'D THINK wouldn't like it DIDN'T like it, in fact, could barely sit through the whole thing, so dark and disgusting and abhorrent it was to them...they pointed out that it's maker must possess some serious personal flaws (as if any of us don't).
So much for a man who follows his artistic vision without compromising. At least Gibson apologizes when he has screwed up (something his critics never did in '04); and at least he stands his ground when he hasn't.
(Out of curiosity, why have you ignored Apocalytpo?)
Someone above reminded me of a news story I read recently: Paul Reiser ("Mad About You") was pronounced dead on his Wikipedia entry and the story was belatedly corrected. Similar fates have recently befallen Tom Cruise and Sinbad. What gives? Can you possibly imagine having to correct reports of your own death in the press/online media?!? Has this ever happened to you?
Ironically, I just saw Charlie Kaufman's masterful "Synecdoche, New York" and early in the film Philip Seymour Hoffman, you may recall, reads the paper and says "Harold Pinter died. Oh..wait. No, he won the Nobel Prize." The audience gave a little awkward chuckle/gasp of recognition since, you know, Pinter DID just die a week or two ago! :)
Thanks for your thoughts as always.
Well I am just going to irritate you here. I do let my feelings about an actor interfere with my enjoyment of the picture, which may be what has happened with these writers. It's okay for me, I'm just an opinionated schmo, they should be less opinionated if they are going to print their ideas. Americans love winners, but winners that fail are of a higher interest. By all means save that bus load of kids, but if you could rob a bank next week that would be fantastic.
Me, I don't let gossip rule my choices, I use three factors, sometimes four. One, doe the trailer show me anything I would like to see more of, two, what does my gut say, and three what does Ebert think. You were dead f-ing wrong about Kill Bill, but other than that your taste seems to jibe with mine alright. The fourth is if my ex-wife wants to see it, I don't.
this post reminds me of something William Goldman once said about how people reacted to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's writing of Good Will Hunting - "They're young and beautiful - let's kill the f-ers".
people love train wrecks. they're drawn to it. things like TMZ show just as many shots of stars showing their panty lines or colesores as they do red carpet extravaganzas. it disgusts me, really, but i understand the appeal - they're young and beautiful, let's kill the f-ers. they have everything we want - mansions, supermodel girlfriends, abs of steel, millions of dollars....why wouldn't we want to see them crash and burn?
hopefully, because we're human. some of us, anyway.
cheers
KZ
You could not be more right. This is why I don't bother reading reports on movies. I just go for the critics, at least they may have seen the movie first. And don't these reporters know, or even care, that a star can't be on top forever? Does anyone remember Burt Reynolds' last hit movie? There is something to be said about a star such as Tom Cruise to be apart of a business such as show business and still manages to remain relevent.
Hi. I'd like to thank you for putting me in the "Answer Man" column last week. It feels good to be validated by people one admires, even on a simple opinion.
I'd like to add another point that seems relevant to this post: cinema is a worldwide competitive medium, now more than ever.
Celluloid is and most likely will always be expensive and even if high-definition video is cheaper, the recording equipment isn't. If you add to that all the planning, materials and effort it takes to make a movie, not to mention all the cast and crew members, most of which belong to guilds and unions, and it's not surprising even the more modest indies end up costing millions (a number that only sounds huge in the present-day economy). And when they finally premiere, those little films have to compete with both bigger and smaller ones for a slice of the pie.
Is it hard to fathom that the people praying their flicks make a profit might actually consider a little "dirty marketing" against their competitors on any given release date? They plant a story in the web, a few reputations are hurt in the process, but who cares? What matters is winning that weekend box office.
Whether or not I think it's true is beside the point, since I don't let the gossip hounds influence my tastes anymore. I would have missed so many great films had I listened to them throughout my life, including a few with Tom Cruise and/or Nicole Kidman. So my girlfriend and I will go see "Valkyrie" and "Australia" when they get released in my country, no matter what the media says.
Hi Roger,
I think your blog is a monument to rational, clear thought.
I'm not particularly knowledgeable on the Nicole Kidman/Australia matter, but on a basic level the person(in this case, a journalist) who seeks to rejoice at another's failures should surely reflect on his/her motivation. It seems so lacking in simple decency, while also being a pointless pursuit.
Is personal integrity "uncool" in a world where screwing people over (Madoff, Enron etc) has become almost acceptable in many circles?
Thanks for provoking thought,
John
Dublin,Ireland
As someone of modest means, I can understand the source of the schadenfreude directed at wealthy stars, but at the same time, I am completely in agreement with "RLS" above on just how grueling the filmmaking process is, and not just the interminable waits between setups.
Good example: Heath Ledger, who was the target of much criticism even after his accidental death (especially by right-wing homophobes who hated him for having starred in Brokeback Mountain), was, from what I saw while working four days as a background extra on The Dark Knight, hard-working and certainly more tolerant than I would be.
It was the funeral procession and related scenes that were shot on LaSalle St. the last weekend of August, '07. While many of us Gotham City PD extras had done some rehearsing (marching, scattering, staying away from the horses so they didn't get spooked and kick anyone, etc.) the day before in Soldier Field's south parking lot -- and gotten absolutely drenched when they kept us too long under lowering skies -- there were hundreds who hadn't been there; they were relegated to the back rows of the procession. While those of us who'd rehearsed the post-(real)-gunshot scattering (repeatedly) when the honor guard fires at the podium had an idea of where we were going, hundreds didn't; they just scattered randomly.
As it turned out, the day we filmed the scattering, one of my fellow extras, who seemed to entertain delusions about his prospective Hollywood stardom, took it upon himself, in the spirit of his cooperative view of our "creative" roles, to accost Heath Ledger (by staying in place and grabbing him as he ran past, rather than scattering like the rest of us) repeatedly as we shot the scene over and over (6-8 times). Mind you, this is someone who the day before, between takes while we were slowly marching south on LaSalle numerous times and I would "hiss" sotto voce corrections -- "Slow down on the left," "Speed up on the right" -- to those in my row who were out of line, actually informed me that my speaking was "interfering with (his) process." Anyway, this guy actually bragged about grabbing Ledger and informed us that Ledger had looked at him and smiled in a conspiratorial, "we're all in this together" kind of way. His version. The truth? I asked others who'd seen the initial exchange, and the look that Ledger gave him was more of incredulity than camaraderie. But he didn't have him removed from the set, testament, I think, to the fact that he had to be a pretty nice guy.
Keep in mind, also, that Ledger was a smoker, and he ran full-bore from Jackson to Adams every time we shot the scattering scene. To a smoker who ran a hell of a lot less than he did that day -- although in more uncomfortable goddamned shoes, probably -- that was impressive in terms of how hard it can be.
After we wrapped shooting that day, Ledger got into an SUV which proceeded to make a U-turn on LaSalle right in front of me as I was walking back to wardrobe to change out of costume. I could see that he already had his lit cigarette dangling out the window and, in recognition of our shared smokers' suffering (going without for long stretches, running), I told him "Good job, Heath," while saluting him with my cigarette to the brim of my "uniform" cap. In reply, he too saluted with his cigarette and winked (begging the question of whether it was incorrect of me to feel somewhat ambivalent about one of the stars of Brokeback Mountain winking at me -- :p ). Nice guy, hard worker, tragic loss.
Ebert: And he did it with all that makeup, and in a frenzy. This memory tells me more about Heath Ledger than anything I read in the obituaries.
Dear Uncle Ebert,
I believe you have touched on something important in society, and not just in movie reviews and celebrity-watching culture.
When I was a child, it bothered me that celebrities were often quoted giving their opinions about politics and foreign affairs. As I grew older, my opinion softened as I came to support discourse in a general way (meaning that I liked the idea if not the practice). My mind changed to a place of supporting the celebrity pulpit after the invasion of Iraq.
The press turned a blind eye to any who expressed any opinion that did not reflect the president’s with the singular exception of movie and music celebrities. While I will agree that the celebrity commentary was not all pertinent or incisive, it was the only other voice in the room. The reaction of many in our country was that celebrities should entertain and leave the important discussion to professionals. [Shut up and sing.] It would have done my teenage spirit good to hear so many important people agree with me, but now it only embarrasses me that I once had such a shallow view of society.
Let’s walk through the arguments against celebrities, shall we?
“Celebrities are not knowledgeable enough to have informed opinions about politics. Politics should be left to the professionals”
I ask, “who is a political professional?” Anyone elected to politics? Politicians are trusted less than any other profession in America, with the possible exception of lawyers. Yes and most politicians were lawyers first. Anyone appointed to a political position by a politician, perhaps? Are they talk show hosts? A talk show host must present and package material in a way that elicits strong response from the audience. This person is, in fact, a celebrity. They often do not have to have education, experience, or any other qualification they demand of Hollywood celebrities. They just have opinions.
“Celebrities are not in-touch enough to have informed opinions about politics.”
This is, I believe, part of the larger debate about whether the leaders of this country should be elitists or average Joes. Rather than following that argument into its well-trod rabbit warren, let’s view a larger canvas. Are celebrities less connected to society or reality than politicians? Celebrities are perceived as feeling they are above the law. Politicians are. Many laws passed to apply to the rest of the nation specifically exempt Congress. The President co-signs a letter exempting him from every law he signs. Read the headlines about celebrities. Celebrity foibles are so common among politicians that they have ceased to become news.
“Celebrities are not intelligent enough to have informed opinions about politics.”
To these statements I say think of the dimmest bulb in Hollywood who has expressed an opinion about anything. Don’t overwork this question; this should not be a difficult exercise. Lock this person in your mind and now compare them to what we now know about the President of the United States and his intellectual curiosity. Painful, isn’t it? Honestly, who would you rather have a beer with?
I am not saying all of this in support of celebrities. Their personal lives are their own. I ask why we hold celebrities to a higher standard than politicians and corporate executives. We pay celebrities to entertain- we pay politicians to lead- we pay executives to make investors money by poviding viable products and services. Where is the mark falling father from reality and where should we really be focusing our energies?
Third to last paragraph, beginning "If David Lean[...]," towards the end:
"[...]you'll end of seeing "The Spirit." You mark my words."
GRAMMAR NAZI ATTACK!
of --> up!
*removes eyeball*
Ebert: Fixed. *replaces*
Couldn't agree more, Roger. I find attention to movie profits on the opening weekends, etc., absolutely ridiculous. Thanks for calling out the whole questionable process.
Also- I think that people who won't go to a good movie because they don't care for the personal life or actions of it's star do a disservice to themselves.
Roger,
1) {People who know who Diane Arbus is} = Subset {Roger Ebert's friends}
2) {People who know who Diane Arbus is} intersect {People who care about weekend box office and all the above nonsense} = empty set.
Therefore,
3) If you stick with the Arbus fans in your life, you'll be fine.
P.S. I tried to find a link to a beautiful image of Arbus's that featured in a New York Film Festival poster some years ago, and link to it, but I couldn't find it.
Sorry Sir, I can't help it that I just do not like Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise except when she is playing an icy princess (Flirting, The Others) or when he is playing a cocky SOB (Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, Rain Man). I do believe that those two are probably very nice people who do not deserve the scrutiny and bad gossip they receive. The media has not made me feel this way about these two actors. I came to this myself many years ago when they were supposed to be universally beloved...
Marcus -
Yes, teenagers have always been into silly movies like Epic Movie - but not to the exclusion of good movies! I was a teen from the late 1960s to the early '70s. Here's a link to the best/most popular movies of 1970 and 1971 - years when I was in high school. I went to nearly all of these movies on dates. These were the movies we talked about, raved about.
http://movies.toptenreviews.com/list_1970.htm
http://movies.toptenreviews.com/list_1971.htm
However, I was forced to see Willard several times on different dates, so teens did like silliness, even back then. ;-)
On to Roger's points - Vicious "entertainment reporters" are nothing new. Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, etc.? They did their best to make and break careers. Maybe there are more entertainment gossipmongers now, or maybe they just have more access to the public through television and the 'net. The public ate that stuff up back then; there are more people to eat it up now. More mouths mean more "entertainment reporters" to fill them. I may blame the media for catering to our tastes, but I never blame them for our tastes.
At least yesteryear's gossipmongers were a bit clever, and made fine grist for characters in some great movies.
Good journalism is lacking in a lot of sources that I used to rely on for news and analysis, and I notice it most often when I'm looking at entertainment sites or food columns.
I don't think there's anything wrong with celebrity bashing per se (I agree with other readers that you should expect some heckling when you put your face on a big screen for $20M). The problem is that there is a type of celebrity bashing that's been very popular, and recently particularly lucrative. Sites such as perezhilton.com or gawker.com get thousands of hits, despite the good possibility that they don't research a large part of what they write. More established media outlets want to mimic that success. Out goes the news and analysis, in comes bald speculation, cat-calling, and ... just general meanness sometimes. And reviews of movie trailers.
BTW - I loved Australia. I turned to my date twice and mouthed the words, "I love this movie!"
Sad thing is, the infonewstainment biz covers politics exactly same way it covers Movieland.
Jon Stewart said it best. Watching today's "journalists" is just like watching a soccer team of six-year-olds. The ball is the narrative-du-jour.
I know you don't like discussing celebrity gossip but I would actually appreciate feedback on this.
Remember the furor some years ago over Katie Holmes' and Tom Cruise's relationship and engagement (before they had a child and married)? The endless discussion of the couch jumping incident, the big displays of public affection, her gushing about him on national TV, him gushing about her, the rumors he was homosexual, the questioning of the genuineness of their relationship (even the questioning of whether they ever had sex!), the rumors her family wasn't happy with him, the rumors that he had "brainwashed her" and was keeping her under lock and key, etc.?
Richard Roeper named Cruise and Holmes the GOOFs of that year and criticised them for "smiling like maniacs and behaving as though they had discovered a higher plane of happiness than the rest of us mere mortals"(paraphrasing from memory).
Watching their behavior on television, I'd concur but I happened to have briefly met Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes in person at that time and at the height of this madness and I actually had an entirely different impression of them. It's nothing they did or said differently that I can think of; maybe it's that in person, some things have a completely different effect than seeing the same behavior in the news.
To me, they seemed very much in love and adoration and very happy with one another- not a fake or alarming happy, either. A real and infectious happy. Tom Cruise was genuinely jovial and enthusiastic and his energy and goodwill seemed to magically rub off on everyone he met. Katie was less talkative and more reserved and demure but handled all the attention with class and politeness and a little quiet resignation. He was clowning around and goodnaturedly mocking his own shenanigans on "Oprah" but beamed whenever she was around and she could hardly take her eyes off him. Hardly a person there did not sincerely congratulate them.
In the media, they came off as bizarre freaks but in person, they came off as a good-natured and charming jokester and his slightly boring but sweet girlfriend.
The same with the couch jumping incident- the people who were in the studio audience thought it was charming and cute or saw it as an understandable spontaneous outburst of joy done in the heat of the moment, while everyone who saw it at home thought it was strange and laughable.
Why is it that some things don't translate to the mass media? I guarantee that Tom Cruise's behavior some years ago would not have raised an eyebrow in the age before YouTube, 24-hour news cycles and serious news outlets reporting on celebrity gossip. What he did would have happened and it wouldn't have existed outside those moments. Instead, it lived on and on and on online and on cable.
Ebert: There has never been even an ambiguous "celeb sighting" with another guy to hint that Cruise is homosexual. This is a rumor perpetuated entirely by the wishes/fears of its carriers.
Ebert: And he did it with all that makeup, and in a frenzy. This memory tells me more about Heath Ledger than anything I read in the obituaries.
Actually, his makeup that weekend was minimal, just the scars at the corners of his mouth. I saw him the next day at the craft services trailer where I was finagling the purchase of my Dark Knight commemorative t-shirt ( http://flickr.com/photos/jackknife_juggernaut/2680877612 & http://flickr.com/photos/jackknife_juggernaut/2680878272) -- which was supposed to be for "real" crew only, not lowly background extras -- but about which a PA with whom I'd been chatting between setups told me. I debated whether to approach Ledger and make my little winking-Brokeback-Mountain-star-ambivalence joke, figuring he'd appreciate the humor, but decided instead to leave him alone. I did not, in any way, wish to be akin to the delusional extra I mentioned previously, although a less intrusive and deluded one.
And thanks.
Ebert: I doubt he would have appreciated it. It might have been the 10,000th time he heard it. Siskel once said, "Whenever anyone asks me how many movies I see in a week, they always say it like I've never been asked before.'
I see what you're saying and mostly agree with it, but there is this: I can't warm up to Kidman (never have), and I now look askance at Cruise (who is my age). I've watched his career from whatever movie was just before Risky Business to now--he's talented, but well, odd (and I know the ending to Hitler, as I knew the ending of the Titanic-if I know how the story turns out, I need a compelling reason to get me into a theater. An eyepatch is not enough). Neither one of those names is enough to get me into a theater.
I will most likely watch Australia when it comes out on DVD and I can rent it. Our new flat screen TV makes this very likely; renting movies has been a wonderful solution to the "I kinda want to see it but don't want to waste $10+ on a movie" blues. So, in my own way, I contribute to this perception of " the demise of a star", like so many other people today. I do deplore the hateful gossip, though. (and also don't understand how Brad Pitt gets a pass on his behavior, but that's been an accepted thing for many a long year and a popular premise for the Jerry Springer crowd).
Taking those particular names out of the equation and I completely agree with you. Unfortunately this approach to "journalism" is not limited to entertainment. What is disheartening and irksome in "Hollywood" becomes disgusting and manipulative in politics and current events.
I think our need to see movie stars thrown into the fire has to do with their visibility.
In response to an early comment you said that you wouldn't mind seeing some Wall St. fat cats get the gossip treatment. I agree. I think most all of us agree. But how many of them do we recognize? How many of them play out our fantasies for us on giant screens? Do most of us recognize athletes? Not unless you're an avid sports fan. But movies are for everyone.
I think it comes down to the fact that we are a jealous people. I believe that week in and week out we lay down hard earned money at the theater to watch stars act out scenarios and fantasies that we can only dream of. We do it because we are addicted. And I think that some of us want the pleasure of seeing these gods hurled back down to earth. Most of us will never have the face of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. Most of us will never be able to earn as much as they do, even though we work just as hard as them for our piece of the pie. We'd love to see them brought back to our level. It may also be frustrating for some when an actor is snide or rude to his/her fans. After all, isn't it us-the moviegoing public, that gives them what we have?
It's a silly game we play. We'd be better to understand that actors, and other celebrities are only human. They work hard, and most of them are very good at what they do. Without them, our movies would never be what they are. We should learn to let them be. We should learn not to put all our fantasies into them.
I love movies deeply, but I will never understand the person who watches TMZ and enjoys it.
One of the funniest criticisms that I read of Cruise's performance in Valkyrie was his lack of a German accent. Pretty absurd when one considers the premise that English is substituted for German for the benefit of clarity and avoidance of sub titles. It is a device after all so it would be absurd to expect Germans speaking perfect English with German accents.
One of the most gripping Nazi themed dramas in recent memory was the HBO movie Conspiracy performed to great effect by excellent British actors all speaking British accented English with nary any Germanic inflections to be heard.
Ebert: There used to be a convention in war movies that the Americans spoke with American accents and the Germans spoke in British accents.
2009
Dear Roger,
As always I look forward to reading your latest entry. My mind shifts back to the previous one and there is a linkage of ideas which expresses many sentiments that mirror each other. How can one hope for a better world when the global community as well as the narrow CELEBRITY CULTURE seeks to destroy rather than rebuild? It is only in the quiet dawn, when all is still, that the mind can restore itself from the futile chatter of an angry and rapacious crowd seeking to tear down individuals and societies with one huge bite. Juices drip down into the sewers and the hunger seems to be insatiable.
The age of quiet reflection is gone, perhaps it never existed. For myself, I need to be still and read a good book or watch a movie that I experience without anyone telling me what to think because of box office receipts. For the last five years I have been taking film classes and I love to be a part of the group experience. The joy of intense concentration and focus on a particular genre of film, the techniques of movies and sometimes just listening to a classmate exclaim "ARE YOU CRAZY, THAT WAS JUST CRAP", while my lovable professor shows patience and tolerance towards everyone is pure heaven!
I am now reading your book AWAKE IN THE DARK. Roger, this blog of yours is a dream come true because somehow the flow of ideas connects me with you and your funny, sad, surprising and always
brilliant intellect. When time permits, I go back and read all the comments and find that this is a place of kindred spirits and in a strange and wonderful way you are my distant and most distinct professor of FILM AND LETTERS.
Tell me why in a large city one can't find the tantalizing films listed in NYT? Waited too long to see A CHRISTMAS TALE and now I am left with Marley (cried like a baby). Oh well, my friend I am now going back to read your book!
Judy Shuster (will send you the ingredients for the NEWLYWED TROTS for your POT BOOK
Ebert: The amazing thing is that I receive 99% civil and sincere comments. A week will go past without my having to kill one. I think the knowledge that the comments are vetted discourages the drive-by jerks.
Send that recipe--send as many as you like--there is now actually going to be a cookbook.
Roger, I'm really surprised to hear you say that no one enjoyed "Dogville". The exact opposite is true- it got good reviews, awards at festivals and received alot of acclaim from people who praised Von Trier's vision and message. You are in the minority if you dislike the movie and find it impossible. This is true for both European and American audiences. I was very glad when you disliked it and said so cause that made two of us.
You were right to mention the magic in "Australia" and complain about it. I know exactly what you mean about the fake progressive and actually very condescending portrayal of natives as "spiritual"; it is how Native Americans have been portrayed in American movies for years.
The wild rumors of stars' personal lives, the casting of them as wackos and weirdos and the unchallenged narratives of celebrities "falling" and having "comebacks" can be attributed to the media's love of a narrative, the bandwagon effect (all news outlets following one another's lead because of the reluctance to be the odd man out), jealousy of the rich and famous, our perception of all famous people as one-dimensional caricatures and not as human beings and the difficulty of expressing a complex truth in the news media and the ease of conveying a one-dimensional shorthand.
When Nicolas Cage married Elvis' daughter, the only thing you heard is what an Elvis freak he was and that he was only marrying Lisa Marie to experience Elvis. The only person I ever heard contradict this one-note joke was Barbara Walters when she remarked that she had interviewed Nicolas Cage at his home and had not noticed a single piece of Elvis memorabilia anywhere in the house.
That Nicolas Cage is an Elvis fan but not a fanatic who made a simple human mistake by marrying a woman who was simply wrong for him is apparently too hard of a concept for the press to grasp; far easier to portray him as a lunatic.
Ebert: You never heard him say he was an Elvis freak. He's one of our best actors, and although he has played Elvis on film, that's just his job. In the gossip mill, it is a short step from "he must be an Elvis freak" to "he is an Elvis freak."
A friend of mine who is an independent filmmaker went on a local talk show a couple of years back to discuss the Oscars. Sitting next to him was a columnist from one of our city's newspapers who wrote about celebrity gossip. My friend talked about the Oscars the way sincere film fans do, with plenty of knowledge of history. He also goes to the movies every week.
When the columnist was asked about what she thought about the nominees, her answers usually begun with the sentence "Well, I haven't seen the film but..."
We seem to be living in an era where too many people are employed to write or talk about movies and don't seem to know very much about the subject.The current young co-host of At The Movies is only a few years older than me and I can assure you I know far more about cinema than he does. But that doesn't matter because he does the studios a service by providing them juicy blurbs for their ad campaigns. He seems more like a PR man than a critic.
Film reviewing is too irrelevent or non existent for many people. Film criticism is also considered a form of elite snobbery by many people. Yes, people want to make up their own minds and not listen to a critic but a good critic can open your mind a little bit more and have you consider something about a movie you might have missed. A good critic is someone who makes the reader feel like an intelligent person. A bad critic is someone who has contempt for the readers and their opinions. A gossip columnist doesn't seem to know what a critic is.
Michael Caine and Morgan Freemen went on The View to promote The Dark Knight They were asked questions by the hosts that displayed their lack of knowledge about the movie, even though they were probably given press passes to see it for free. When the trailer for Oliver Stone's W premiered, they reviewed the trailer. Elizabeth Hasselbeck then went on to talk about the movie as if she had seen it already.
These gossip hacks have the privilege to see free movies and they either ignore it or abuse it just so they can tear Tom Cruise a new one in their badly written, edited and unresearched columns.
Ebert: And audiences accept it. People who haven't seen a movie talk about it to other people who haven't seen it.
It happens that right before reading this blog entry, I was reading Frank O'Hara, specifically his poem "To the Film Industry in Crisis," from Meditations in an Emergency and which, I think, neatly ties your current post with your previous 'End of Days'-one.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20380
Lately, I have been wondering if with this, the supposed second coming of the Great Depression, there might be a return of a certain type of movie. So many of the great films of that period (I'm thinking of comedies like It Happened One Night, My Man Godfrey, Easy Living, Bachelor Mother, Merrily We Live...) depend on the class differences exacerbated by the Depression, the follies of the rich, the basic goodness of "everyday folk." There's also the frothy Art Deco musicals that existed in a world wholly without poverty or suffering, the gangster movies that lived squarely in that world, or the dramas that sought to present it humanely like The Grapes of Wrath or Our Daily Bread.
As for the star machine, I can't help but wish that actors might return a little to that time, too, though your criticism of celebrity "journalism" is well-justified. Still, there was a time when Joan Crawford, the former Lucille LeSeur, never left the house unless she looked like Joan Crawford. Couldn't Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears take a page from this book? It certainly would provide less fodder for the rags. Stars sometimes seem a little too eager to prove they are "just like us," when really they can't be by virtue of their professions and lifestyles. Maybe they could work just a little more to preserve the illusion, for both their sake and their audiences'? I admire someone like Will Smith, not for any particular movie, but because he seems committed to the idea of "Will Smith." Now, of course, it would seem based on Christina Crawford's recollections, and that of some of her co-stars, that Ms. Crawford was a bit of a nutbar. That's a shame and a pity, but maybe best left for those who knew her, and leave the rest of us the movies. That being said, I can also understand the point of view that one who privately has suffered at the hands of someone who, publicly, has been lionized. Its sticky. That being said I don't delight in the raking of Nicole Kidman over the coals, but was happy to hear that she had a healthy baby. I don't know her, but she and Keith Urban seem decent enough. It's so much easier just to be happy for them; we're sharing the same space at the same moment in time, what harm is there in taking a moment to relish in their happiness?
Straying from the topic, but recently I have been thinking that today's country music industry and its stars are not totally unlike the Old Hollywood. Images are, for the most part, meticulously cultivated and carefully maintained and product is generally mass-produced, but the best of it is (I believe) of a very high quality. Most importantly, it connects with the "everyday folk" that it celebrates, not unlike, say, an Andy Hardy movie. Bear in mind, however, that this observation comes from someone far removed from its supposed fan base, New York City, where we don't have so much as a country music station and, at best, most regard it as a quaint novelty.
Ebert: I didn't realize NYC was that provincial!
What I think, is that it might be time for another version of Bonfire of the Vanities, now that we've seen some real Masters of the Universe at work. Read that "gilded age" article in Vanity Fair.
I don't let my feelings against an actor color my perception of a film--I just don't see it. I have a short list of actors that I don't like the way they act (on screen). Tom Cruise is one of them. I get to see so few films in the theater, so why go see a performance that I know I'm not going to care for. Yes, I will probably eventually miss a good performance, but there are so many I won't get to see anyway.
And the less said about Mel Gibson, the better.
Ebert: There used to be a convention in war movies that the Americans spoke with American accents and the Germans spoke in British accents.
In a Media Studies class I took at college, my professor attributed the "British" Stormtroopers in Star Wars to the bitter effects of colonialism. I will now be looking for "British" baddies in movies outside of the Star Wars universe.
I can remember as young film fan (mid-teens) being intensely curious about film grosses. I didn't know anyone else who was the slightest bit interested. A film was either a hit, or it wasn't. That was the extent of anyone's interest, it seemed to me. There were no personal computers, so I couldn't do a search to see what such-and-such film had made. Occasionally, buried deep in an syndicated news article would be a line like, "and 'Psycho' has pulled in $23 million to date." And I would think, where the hell do they get that information?
Now of course, it's in every newspaper every Monday, the weekend box office receipts. When did people become so interested?
I'm glad to see the question I sent you a week ago for your ANSWER MAN column is being answered in such detail in this blog. I thought that your answer made plenty of sense in helping us understand what the "wolves" in the press gain by picking on someone (in general, simply having something to write about when in reality, nothing worthy exists in their world).
Further, I would like to know your thoughts one the much mentioned Los Angeles Times "most hated film critic" article. The following is the link but, seeing your daily web reading is very similar to mine, I'm pretty sure you're already aware of it:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-lyons28-2008dec28,0,3485043.story
I realize giving your opinion on this matter may constitute some sort of conflict of interest as they're talking about your old show, still, I hope it will be possible for you.
Ebert: You have to be really somethin' for the LATimes to run an article like that.
Marie-Antoinette faced a similar ordeal after it was "booed" by critics at Cannes. It seemed the media was determined to bring the film down for whatever reason possible. Sofia Coppola had made her first "critically-panned" film after winning an Academy Award for Lost in Translation! What folly! Francis Ford Coppola's daughter had only been a one-hit-wonder with no talent!
But, wait...
Metacritic show's Marie Antoinette review score was 65/100, classifying it as having "generally favorable reviews".
To my understanding the film was a success but it seemed that celeb-whoring "journalists" like Perez Hilton, who apparently disliked Kirsten Dunst (for ludicrous reasons I bet), spiraled this negative campaign against the film. Acquaintances of mine disregarded the film and refused to see it because it mostly "bad" reviews.
But it didn't. Some were negative, some were enthusiastically positive.
It seems that most articles focusing on the demise of actors come from personal dislikes. I always get so flustered when people like Perez Hilton comment that a film has gotten "shiteous" (yes, such words exist in his vernacular) reviews. He gives a link to the article in where some shady magazine publication denounces a film.
Then again, I should not waste my time by reading Lavaindera's blog in the first place. Shame on me.
Ebert: I enjoyed my review...
I hate the stories that hound celebrities even after death (Heath Ledger) or into a nervous breakdown (Britney Spears). I don't understand how we lose sight of the fact that these are human beings and that doing their job (acting, singing) doesn't mean they must be forced to give up every semblance of human rights to stoke the frenzied fandom. One of the most admirable things I ever saw a TV host do was empathize with Ms. Spears and promise to not use her self-destruction as comic fodder, as the host - Craig Ferguson - was a recovering alcoholic himself and understood the terrible struggle. His audience applauded his decision loudly, and his vow made the news - until eclipsed by the next alleged Britney gaffe.
South Park ran an episode where the attacking of young celebrity females was attributed to an ancient need for the community to offer up a virgin sacrifice for the promise of a successful harvest. It was a nasty, brutal, biting satire that went beyond funny and beat its way into personal ethics and shame.
The problem is, ratings show that even if we hate these stories, we are drawn to read them. Even if more disgusted by the messenger than the message, we click on the webpage, tune in to the infotainment show. And it shows in hit counts and Neilson ratings. And the dreck keeps coming.
I've made a resolution that, no matter how curious I am, I will not click on stories that attack people in a way I would be embarrassed and appalled to see a neighbor or friend attacked. I'm doing pretty well but as one of those obnoxious humans, I have to admit to being sucked in once in a great while.
One last thing. Why must some people whip their keyboards out and use up precious print space just to whinge about how this or that issue isn't comparable to the suffering of people in third world nations, or the health care crisis, or what's going on in Gaza? Nobody said it was. But for the sake of the decency of the human race, it's important too. Anything that makes us better people should be pointed out, critiqued, have words spent on it. And I'll bet a dollar to a donut those people aren't testing in from their satellite phone in their grass hut in Darfur, where they are living by their own words and trying to make that difference they want everyone else to hop to.
Ebert: Did you read the two posts higher on this thread indicating what a nice guy Heath Ledger seemed like to an extra on TDK?
"If David Lean were in business today, he'd be out of business."
That's a heartbreaking thought, but I'm afraid you're right. Thank goodness for great movies, no matter how and when they come about. I just recently saw "Doubt" and "Slumdog Millionaire," and I can't wait to see "Frost/Nixon" and "The Wrestler." I hope that there will always be viewers who enjoy great films, and studios brave enough to release them.
There have always been people who watch movies because they hate them--and say/write terrible things about the people who make/star in them because they hate them even more than the movies themselves. Valentino was hated. Welles was hated. Eventually, Chaplin. And before the French New Wave opened our eyes, American intellectuals tended to hate the movies in general, and genre pictures in particular. Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon captures this love-to-hatred perfectly: His tone is simultaneously mournful, disgusted and delighted, a fey alternative to the acid pens of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.
And Hollywood has always fed derision with derision. Consider Keaton in Sherlock Jr. and The Cameraman; Sullivan's Travels; Sweet Smell of Success; Sunset Boulevard; Day of the Locust; The Stunt Man; Swimming with Sharks; The Player; Barton Fink--and on and on.
That's why we love you, Roger: You write about movies because you enjoy them. You're not lying in wait for a movie to expose a weak flank or to surrender to its own worst impulses; you're just happy when a movie succeeds at its own level--jeez, even when you really really hate a movie you seem filled with a kind of cinephilic joy, as though the bad movie itself somehow will lead us back to a good one.
The trick is to ignore everything that--to paraphrase Yeats (doesn't he ever go home?)--can tempt us from this craft of film, from post-Heaven's Gate grosses-watchers to tomato-throwing percentage mavens to ALL trailers of all kinds--and just keep watching, hoping for the best but taking what we can get.
Ebert: I confess to reading Anger with fascinating and not nearly enough guilt. The death is Lupe Velez was tragic, but its manner was the very stuff of irony. In many cases, Anger was just revealing the facts, as in Gable's hushed-up auto accident. One thing about Anger: He didn't hate movies and celebrities.
I used to pay attention to box office reports. I used to care. Not sure why. Nowadays, I only notice the instances where a markedly bad film makes a conspicuously large amount of money, or where a markedly superior film makes a conspicuously small amount of money. Hollywood goes where the money is, and if "300" makes $200 million at the box office, that means we will only be seeing more of them. Conversely, there are not enough films like the great "Stephanie Daley," and because the movie grossed a mere $25,000 at the box office it is likely there will continue to be not enough films like it.
"The X-Files: I Want to Believe" was considered a failure. The reviews in general were unkind, but it was also considered a commercial flop. When I caught up with it recently through Netflix, out of curiosity, I looked up its box office gross. It made $20 million in the US, but almost another $50 million overseas. That puts its total just shy of $70 million. Now, according to Box Office Mojo, the film cost $30 million to make, a relatively small amount by summer-movie standards. I don't purport to understand the ins and outs of marketing costs, distribution costs, etc., but even under the worst circumstances, doesn't that mean it made an extremely respectable profit? And that doesn't even factor in DVD, where the TV adaptation may find a more accepting audience. But all the press about the movie is that it was a failure. That's all I remembered. Nobody reports the successes. Unless of course you're "The Dark Knight" and you make so much money you cause structural damage to cash registers.
Now, I have limited sympathy for rich, successful celebrities taking a few knocks from the press. Tom Cruise made a very public show of himself, the couch-jumping being embarrassing but less egregious than his anti-psychiatry tirade. He's a big boy, he can take care of himself. Of course, that doesn't excuse the vulture press. It is unfortunate that you wasted brain power in researching the subject, but lucky I guess that you missed the more egregious bottom-feeders like Perez Hilton and TMZ. (Though I must stand up for Michael Slezak, one of EW's wittiest writers, who was perhaps imprudent to jump on the Cruise backlash bandwagon but doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the worst offenders.)
Ebert: Robert Altman never stopped talking about how, goddammit, "Popeye" made a pile of profit but everyone "heard" it was a loser.
Dear Roger,
A wonderful post about the overinflated power of the hollywood gossip mill.
'Australia' was a fine film that even in the land down under has been sunk at the Box Office by some very vindictive critical reviews and press. The Australian media has long had a knack for cutting down 'tall poppies' and as soon as the average opening weekend take was reported there were headlines (based on a Lurhmann interview taken so out of context that it almost seems libelous) that Lurhmann would 'not be working with Kidman again', or words similar to that effect. While those who took the time to read the interview would find that this was not a criticism of Kidman in any way the initial impression was certainly one of a director hanging his star out to dry.
I have found the media's treatment of Australia to be an interesting contrast to that of Benjamin Button. I can only imagine what the headlines would be like if it were Cruise and Kidman in that film instead of the critically unassailable Pitt and Blanchett. Despite being, in my humble opinion, a heavy handed and clunky piece of sacharinne story telling this film seems destined for Oscar nominations and box office success. While its success may be the simple result of people liking the film I could not help but shake the feeling, as I eavesdropped on my fellow cinema goers while exiting, that at least half the audience was talking themselves into having enjoyed a film that had recieved high critical praise. Just as I think that a kinder press surrounding Australia would have compelled audiences to see what was a far more entertaining and moving film than dear old BB...
Ebert: I get pretty good feedback, whether I want it or not, about how people really feel about movies ("You owe me a refund," etc). And by looking at the daily "most popular pages" on my website each Friday, I can guess how films will do. A success that's flying under the radar right now is "Seven Pounds." Right now, this long after its opening, it's still the fourth most-visited film on my site, after Benjamin, Rev Road and Valkyrie, and ahead of Marley and everything else.
Interesting post. I'm just going to go into a little detail here about the Valkyrie scene where Tom Cruise has to remove a false eye and the reporter apparently found that disgusting. If I remember right, didn't Cruise's character in Minority Report (my favourite of his movies) have to remove both his eyes and replace them with a new pair, to avoid being detected by his retinal pattern by ubiquitous cameras? You are right in pointing out such glib criticism as meaningless; without a `disgusting' scene like that (it wasn't shown graphically I believe), maybe Minority Report wouldn't have been such a believable, harrowing movie.
Hi Mr. Ebert,
i wish that i knew who diane arbus (more than she is a photographer), then i would be your friend! but i always consider you mine. reading your words i get to pretend i know you very well. this blog has been a wonderful gift to all your fans.
part of me wishes that there are more stars as sublime as jimmy stewart, cary grant, clark gable, audrey hepburn, jean harlow or gregory peck etc. but those were the days of studio's iron fist on controlling the media and the stars.
so much is involved in the making of a film-that to blame the success/failure on the star is to give the star too much credit. tom cruise and nicole kidman both have had beautiful stunning moments in film and that is their achievement. to take joy or pass judgment in their personal tragedies or downfall is tempting as they are viewed as royalties and live like one but that childish human behavior says more about those who do than the movie stars.
thanks for your words and thought. your blog and film reviews gives me a break from my boring pharmacy textbooks. take care.
Ebert: Pharmacists know a lot more in a practical way about how drugs really work than a lot of doctors do. A very wise doctor once tapped his PDR and told me, "There are 12 drugs in here that really work, and the best of them is aspirin." I asked a pharmacist friend about that, and he said, "He's revealing trade secrets." They were both sort of joking...sort of...
Roger, please tell me that you didn't just defend actors in commercial Hollywood films as hard working people.
I, too, have spent many hours on movie sets. That is not hard work. It is tedious work. It is a long day. It is occasionally physically demanding.
Working on an assembly line is hard work. Cleaning a toilet for 8 hours is hard work.
But acting? Mercy.
If there is any overpaid celebrity that comes close to deserving a humongous paycheck, perhaps it's a pro athlete. They punish their bodies, typically year-round, for a career that, if they're lucky, last a decade.
But it's perfectly fair to enjoy the fall of celebrities -- just as it would be to rejoice in the foibles of a Fannie Mae executive.
And let's be realistic. No one wishes true calamity on an actor. No one is celebrating the news of John Travolta's son.
But a millionaire whose latest endeavor fails to make him more millions?
Come on. Is there seriously a need to defend these guys?
I wanted to follow up on what Marcus said - "I agree with you that the youth of today (I myself am 16) generally are interested in terrible movies."
You can almost replace "generally" with "solely" in that statement. I am 20, and from my high school graduating class, there were probably about 10 people (out of ~ 200) who understood movies even a little bit. Each new installment of the "Saw" series was treated as a must-see, and in the days after, you could hear pretty much everyone talking about it (and never a bad word did I hear).
Even when they like good movies, it is for the wrong reasons. I always hear people describe Goodfellas as "badass" or "sweet", and I've seen people laugh out loud when Pesci shoots Spider.
America's youth have the lost the ability to be critical. Everything that happens on screen is simply accepted, no matter how moronic or convoluted it may be.
The most glaring example of this lack of a critical eye is how 'The Boondock Saints' is regarded as a classic. I am not usually so blunt, but that movies is an absolute piece of crap.
It is depressing.
A lot of the controversy involved with Tom Cruise and Valkyrie is that the German government was engaged in a pretty high profile battle with Scientology at the time, and was even trying to expel the cult from their entire nation. German people didn't want the poster boy of Scientology to be playing one of their national heroes.
I always liked Tom Cruise as an actor and liked most of the movies and roles that he's done, but Scientology really is a dangerous cult and as far as I'm concerned, any backlash or criticism he receives as a result of being a part of ripping people off for millions of dollars is pretty much deserved.
Ebert: Scientology is no more preposterous than many belief systems. It is just more expensive.
All right! Rice Cooker Cookbook! That's great news. I must admit to being a bit reticent about a recipe for "Newlywed Trots." It sounds like a bad honeymoon experience... I'm glad you liked the Steve Martin excerpt earlier. The man's talents continually amaze me. This clip was from a show that is only ten months younger that I am... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwsPcn4381g
Who knew?
Ebert: Steve Martin is a very, very smart man. One of the rare intellectuals in showbiz.
Now send in a recipe. If it's not for The Pot, I'll adapt it (i.e., add "throw everything in The Pot").
This article brings to mind a quote from a famous producer: "Hollywood is a bank." This may be true, but unlike a bank, the salaries of key employees become public knowledge. I'm sure there are many other jobs where people make truckloads of money doing a lot less work than movie stars. What lazy journalists fail to mention is that agents, producers and executives negotiate those A-list salaries, not the stars. It's just easier to perpetuate the myth that the big stars waltz into a producer's office and demand a fat paycheck. The public then pictures these people running out with a suitcase of cash buying expensive cars and sitting by the pool sipping martinis. While that may be true after the first week of your first major blockbuster (uh...that's what I'd do) most serious actors who paid their dues just want to keep working.
A big star like Tom Cruise seems to work hard to maintain his career. He did well at a young age and was, as they say "bankable". Hollywood wanted him to keep the money rolling in, and I'm sure he did too, and after 25 years of this it's probably what he knows best. Along come the hateful "entertainment monkeys" who seem to be saying "off with his head!" What is he supposed to do? Make a public announcement that he's retiring? Using the analogy of Hollywood as a bank, it's like the the clients walk in and say to their employee-of-the-month "You've done a good job, but you make too much and we're tired of you, so just quit already."
By focusing on the cash and the private lives of stars, the stories of the public lives are beginning to overshadow the stories we want to get lost in. The Tom Cruises and Angelina Jolies of the world need to work harder than ever to make you believe in the characters they play. I'm sure they wish their lives weren't under the microscope so they could just do what they do best. Makes me sad.
Ebert: Who make the really big bucks are the CEOs of the corporations that control the studios, networks, and all big media.
I think the "thirst for stars to fail"may just be basic human jeolousy. I remember when Tom Cruise was a synonym for a good-looking, ultimate fantasy for women. It may just be a sad human trait to want to destroy those who are better than you in some way.
It also seems that the media expects people to stay within the mold given to them. That "couch jumping" incident, for example. Cruise wasn't really "out of countrol", or a "maniac". The audience roared with delight, and Oprah didn't appear the least bit uncomfortable. Here's a thought: suppose it was Robin williams jumping on that same couch? Everyone would've thought, "What a funny, energetic guy". Or if it was Jim Carrey jumping around, it would've been regarded as just another of his zany TV interview moments.
Anyone time an actor breaks the mold expected of them, there will be hell to pay.
It's not just actors/movie stars either. Mary Carey, after over ten years of number one songs, Grammy award-winning albums, and being one of the top selling female artists of all time, one bad album and film called "Glitter", resulted in her being dubbed as "washed up". The late night and sketch comedy shows were ruthless on her. Now she's back on top after a string of hit songs. how sad that a woman of her legendary status---or any well established star--- can have thier career determined by one failure.
All right, I'll ante up.
Tomatillo sauce, aka Salsa Verde
I've never been very precise with this.
Makes a lot - good for two or three pans of rolled enchiladas, with some left over for dipping.
Ingredients:
2-4 lbs tomatillos, with outer paper removed, and rinsed. Can be kept whole.
one large white or yellow onion, quartered.
1-3 serrano peppers, depending upon how spicy you like it. Some like it hot. I prefer classical music. I usually use two.
handful of fresh cilantro, finely chopped.
6 Oz. plain yogurt or sour cream.
water.
salt and pepper to taste.
Hardware:
A rice cooker.
A blender or food processor.
A colander or slotted spoon. The type for pasta, with the teeth, works best for this purpose.
Usually, I just toss the tomatillos, onion, and serranos in a pot with the water and bring them to a boil. When the tomatillos turn a shade of pea-soup green, they're done. It'll just take a bit of extra vigilance to get it right.
When the tomatillos are cooked, strain the contents of the pot, or scoop them out with a slotted spoon, and put the contents in the blender or food processor, with the cilantro and yogurt. If you don't want as much spice, remove one or all of the serrano peppers. Blend until smooth.
I usually make this sauce for enchiladas, like my mother always did when I was a kid. It's a nice change from all of the red chile sauces that most everyone else uses for theirs. Next time I make a batch, I'll tape it and post it on youtube for all the world to see. Until then, I hope that this works.
And, to complete the "Steve Martin is Amazing!" trilogy, I present to you this appearance on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show." People sometimes forget, with the banjo playing, and playwrighting, and tap dancing that he started it all in a little magic shop... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hixIKtSWHXk
Very well said. Everytime I read Roger Friedman's commentary about Cruise, I snort. This guy just can't wait to bash Cruise every chance he gets.
Now, Cruise gets the LAST LAUGH. Friedman had categorized Valkyrie as one of the worst films of 2008 when it wasn't even released yet. Is that what you call responisble journalism? Friedman even said that SOMEONE (here we go with the SOMEONE) told him the "movie wont make ten (or was it four?) cents". It's so obvious that it is personal for him. FOX needs to put him on a short leash. I'm starting to doubt their credibility.
VALKYRIE is a box office success. A humble one, but nevertheless, a success.
Roger,
First of all, happy new year! I'm not sure how relevant this is to the current topic, but I was just browsing my television guide and decided on an episode of South Park. I always manage to get a good laugh from South Park, so it was a no-brainer, but something about this episode caught my eye.
The title of the episode was "Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods". I had literally just finished reading your excellent review of 'Revolutionary Road', and when I saw this I almost fell out of my chair. The funny thing is, the episode had nothing to do with you. It was quite confusing, and as someone who considers you a man deserving of the highest respect, I was a little turned off, especially when you weren't even given a cameo! The episode aired in 1998, so it is obviously quite outdated. I simply had to ask, did you know anything about this?
Ebert: Didn't see the episode, but the title was correct.
"Celebrity Journalism" today shows the opposite side of the coin from the old C-J, which had the same relationship with the studios that Pravda had with the Kremlin; their job was to stifle information, not spread it. Old style C-J made sure you never learned which stars were gay, which ones were habitual adulterers, and which ones had multiple DUIs expensively flushed down the memory hole. Now the studios (such as they are) have no control over the process at all, people who have never heard the adage "If your mother says she loves you, check it out!" are relaying anything they come across onto the InterTubes as quickly as they can, and apparently many moviegoers attend to this stuff and seem even to believe it. Worse yet they seem to let it determine their judgment of the movies these actors appear in. I try to avoid this stuff but today's turbocharged publicity engines throw it in my face almost faster than I can click past it. Your interviews, Roger, stay mainly on track with what went on during the filming, what they do as actors, and this fascinates me. It's like listening to Marian McPartland talking with her guests on "Piano Jazz" about how they got through the duet they just played. But I don't need this other rubbish at all.
Don't you think, though, that some actors participate in their own victimization? When stars send out press releases on every possible event in their lives and end with a plea for us to respect their privacy it does look a bit like jumping in front of a bus and then wondering why they got hit. I'm reminded of Patrick Troughton, one of those old reliable British actors who had a long, successful, quiet career of disappearing into a character. The closest he came to Fame and Glory was when he played the Second Doctor on Doctor Who. He kept a clear line between public and private. His attitude was: My job is acting. I come to work, learn my lines, put on my costume and give my best performance for your enjoyment. I owe you that. After work I take off the costume, punch out and go home to my own life. I don't owe you that part, too. He didn't enjoy giving interviews and tried to avoid them because he didn't feel that anybody needed to know the real Patrick Troughton; the important thing was the performance.
So you know, I stand by your defense of movie stars and celebrity of this day in age. People like Tom Cruise, worthy of working under the lights of Scorsese in, THE COLOR OF MONEY (No matter how good a picture it was or it wasn't), and then there's Nicole Kidman who delivered a gripping performance in Kubrick's final picture, EYES WIDE SHUT. Point in fact, if these actors were simply not good at there jobs, they wouldn't have been offered roles such as those. Yet for whatever reason, these so call journalists project opinions without clarrifing or coming up with the dignifiable sources to back them up. Maybe people should be harrasing them for not doing there jobs right. We've all watched the news lately. Did you hear about the puppy who got a scratch on its foot and cried for nine days straight. Meanwhile there's terror in Gaza, genocide around the world like in Darfur, etc. Oh! And did I mention, Poverty in America. I just can't understand why some of them feel the right to impose on peoples lives merely because there faces show up on the silver screen. Where money is, the butcher follows I guess. I propose an all out battle royale (wit' cheese) between all the celebrities who've been victims of nonsense and an unsophisticated form of parody. Maybe you can help me set it up... I'll call US weekly magazine and tell them Andy Kaufman is alive again. Jim Carrey can stay home and have a break with his kids instead of running from the press to find some solace, if there is any.
Very interesting read. I've felt this way about the mainstream media for quite sometime, so it's nice to see an article like this. I'm not sure why so many have such a desire to see others fail. I suppose it makes them feel good about their own failures? (Is that from a movie? I can't remember...) I don't know Kidman personally, but I hope she has some respect for herself and does pictures she beleives in. Even if they aren't all record-breakers, they can still be worthwhile. As for critics, it would be pointless if everyone praised every movie; but, as you said, I would hope they would at least give a review of the movie and not of some pointless box office numbers. That's one reason I appreciate your reviews and stay away from so many different sources out there. I said box office numbers are pointless, but that's just in my opinion. I suppose they are important to some people, but that should be the producers (who have invested money in the film), not the viewers. It seems odd that a news source, with no vested interest in the profect, would specifically want it to fail (or have a reason to claim that it has based on box office numbers). The Valkyrie review is worse, imho, since it was all based on speculation.
When I was reading this article, it reminded me a bit of what happened to Mel Gibson several years ago with "Passion." Someone has already talked about that, so I won't say much. Reading that person's comment, though, I noticed that you had never reviewed "Apocolypto." I must say, I'm curious as well to know if that was a movie you were avoiding, or if it just came out at a bad time where you weren't able to review it and hadn't gotten back to it yet.
Your paragraph about being in a theater with a small number of people was interesting as well. Nowadays movies doing well in the theater has become more important than anything else. The quality of movies as a result almost makes me afraid of some movies that do well at the box office. I love going to movies where nobody else is. I saw "Slumdog Millionaire" a few days ago with 7 people in the theater. In fact, not more than 2 weeks ago, I saw "Happy-Go-Lucky" with my sister. And nobody else. In fact, I just got back from "Doubt" tonight and there were maybe 20 people in the whole theater there. (Speaking of "Doubt," it was the conclusion of a great 5 days of (mostly) new movies for me: "Requiem for a Dream," "Man on Wire," "Slumdog Millionaire," "Dark Knight (2nd viewing)," "Streetcar Named Desire," "The Apartment," and "Doubt" - most all because of great reviews like yours that expose a movie for what it is, not because of Box Office figures or anything of the sort.)
I wonder what kind of effect the media of today would have had on actors like Brando or Lemmon if people with a little bit of power and a pedastal would have wanted their careers to end prematurely. Not all of Brando's films were perfect, I'm sure, but what if he had never even been given a chance near the end of his career to do something like "Godfather" or "Apocalypse Now"? Not sure if Cruise or Kidman has a movie of that calibur left in them, but it seems odd that the media gets to decide when their careers are going to end.
Ebert: "Apocolypto" was off my radar during illness.
Technological accessibility lends itself to cynicism and schadenfreude.
Nicole Kidman is my favourite contemporary Hollywood actress. I cannot understand all of the negative publicity she is getting. I thought she was great in "Australia," which I thought was a really good film. Whilst she has been in some average and not so good films in the past few years, she has also been in some great ones. I loved "Birth" and "Fur" and before that "The Others", "The Hours" and "Moulin Rouge".
Kidman is a star in the old sense of the term. She completely dominates her films and the pleasure you get from her films comes from watching her develop her character/persona. I believe in this way she is comparable to the Hollywood stars of yester-year: Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davies, Joan Fontain and Olivia DeHavilland.
Films such as "The Others", "Moulin Rouge", and "Australia" are comparable to old Hollywood films, and "Birth" and "Fur" old French films (in particular, "Fur" to the films of Jean Cocteau). These films are all based around fantasy and romance and take a psychological approach to the construction of the characters. This is achieved primarily through the film's visual construction. In "The Others", "Fur" and "Birth" the sets, cinematography, costumes and style of acting (in particular Kidman's facial expressions) are essential in communicating the emotions and message of the film.
I find it disapointing that films such as these are no longer embraced and celebrated. There seems to currently be a preoccupation with gritty realism which I do not understand. I like films that are stylised (eg, Classical Hollywood and French Poetic Realism), but also naturalistic films that maintain an element of fantasy or poeticism (eg, Jean Renoir and Joseph Losey). This seems t have been lost not only in Hollywood but also France.
Further, I do not only agree that David Lean would be in trouble today but also great directors such as George Cukor, Jean Cocteau, Frank Borzage, F.W. Murnau and maybe even Hitchcock! And that actresses like Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Crawford, Fontaine and Davis would probably have no place in contemporary Hollywood.
Ebert: Not a chance. They were all grown-ups. But Hitchcock? Good gravy, maybe you're right. Too slow. Subtle. Not enough action. Requires some thought and a useful attention span. No teenagers.
Great article.
The real problem isn't Kidman or her failure to "open" films; it's the fact that, at the turn of the millennium, she was being unfairly touted as "the" female screen icon of her generation -- simply due to a string of successful pictures. "Moulin Rouge," "The Others" and the intense tabloid gossip following her split from Tom Cruise had brought her to the forefront of celebrity pop culture. Hollywood apparently decided that her name's dominance in pop culture at the time was relevant to her status as a Hollywood star.
But Kidman's never really been a traditional celebrity actress, i.e. she doesn't just look for the blockbusters. She has *always* split time between Hollywood films and independent pictures -- something that tabloid writers and industry "insiders" apparently failed to note at the time. And if they had looked past a couple recent successes, they would have seen that many of her studio films weren't exactly major hits for their time, either.
So after a string of successes, Kidman made the "mistake" of pursuing more low-budget, risky independent features like "Dogtown," "Birth," "Fur," "The Human Stain," and "Margot at the Wedding." If anyone in Hollywood expected these films to open above $10 mil domestically, they should be out of a job. Yet apparently people did, because I have seen the films referred to as "flops" -- I'd just like to know which journalists really thought the arthouse indie flick about the woman whose husband comes back to life as a child was going to smash records.
She's had five genuine flops -- "Bewitched," "The Stepford Wives," "Australia," "The Invasion" and "The Golden Compass," although it's worth noting the last of the group did quite well internationally. They were her big studio pictures. But is it her fault? No, it's Hollywood's fault for evidently not paying close enough attention to the type of actress she is, as well as ignoring her track record.
I think Kidman is a very good actress. I do think it's a shame that the few studio pictures she's done lately have been of (IMHO) average or downright poor quality (Stepford Wives in particular was rather awful), but overall, I believe -- at least from an artistic standpoint -- she has plenty of pictures to be proud of.
Oh, and I totally agree about the Tom Cruise stuff. "Valkyrie" was being torn down from the very start, and I've seen everything used against it -- Bryan Singer's "faltering" career, Tom Cruise's "bizarre" behavior, the troubled shoot and re-shoots, the poor test screenings. Yet this all seemed to come out of nowhere, out of context, fed into the media circuit. Think: how many blockbuster films typically have scenes re-shot? Many. How many great films have initially exhibited poor test screenings? Many. (Remember -- there were reports last year that WB was cutting "The Dark Knight" because of poor audience reaction to the scene with Ledger's Joker faking his death, which turned out to be IMO one of the most powerful scenes in the film; their plans were reportedly scrapped after protest from Nolan and the negative fan reaction online.) Interesting albeit outdated (from 2000) article via NY Times here: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B04E7D81331F936A15755C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
"Valkyrie" opened in 4th place during the biggest Christmas weekend in years; did anyone really expect a WWII film about an assassination plot against Hitler to beat a family dramedy about a dog or a Brad Pitt Oscar bait? It has half the budget of "Benjamin Button" (admittedly not including the additional $30 mil marketing costs) and considering the international market for action pictures and period films as well as Tom Cruise's appeal overseas, it's likely that the film will perform well above the studio's expectations.
Long story short: there's a bit of truth to people labeling Kidman's films as flops, but it's always out of context, with a bitter edge that -- like you mentioned -- seems as if they're rooting for her failure. She may have finally dropped off the list of Hollywood's top paid actresses, but that's probably for the best: now she can continue embracing intellectual or artistically provoking films without having to deal with all the "failure" backlash when the pictures don't open to staggering numbers.
And all the bad press about "Valkyrie" is utter rubbish that is easily refuted.
Thanks for the article.
I am trying to see if I can remember off the top of my head when Speed 2: Cruise Control came out... One second, let me look it up real quick... 1997 (I was thinking 96'). My father started bringing home advanced copies of magazines such as People and Entertainment Weekly. I remember starting to read EW that whole summer. This mainly had to do with me checking on the status of the movie The Lost World: Jurassic Park. I remember that I thought it was going to be the biggest movie ever released (of course some aliens and that one kid that was added on Growing Pains later in the series had to ruin my parade). The only part I cared about was the weekend gross numbers from a prior week. Every issue I would see how much money was added to Speilberg Sequel and by labor day I realized that Men in Black was going to be the biggest movie that summer despite The Lost World's record breaking opening weekend (later that year Titanic would out gross both summer flicks put together). My dad was at one point not able to bring EW magazines and it was then that I switched to Yahoo. For a little over ten years I have checked the box office receipts every Sunday a little past noon (Sunday nights are easily predicted) to see if the current year is on pace to out do the previous year. Since I started this box office fetish I have longed for the one movie to surpass Titanic and become the next champ. This past summer I reached clarity. This was thanks in part to something I read of yours I believe and The Dark Knight (side note: TDK extra post made me smile). I really thought The Dark Knight had the best shot. And right around the time it passed Star Wars I knew it was going to fall just short of the mark. I was not seeing the whole picture because I forgot about ticket prices and how every year they rise. When I read that The Dark Knight had to make over 900 million dollars in North America alone I only then realized that you were right in saying that box office numbers are just for the studios to have bragging rights among other studios. Do I still do my Sunday ritual? Why yes I do. I want to know how well a movie like Synecdoche, New York does because I fear studios would not endorse another Kaufman helmed feature due to prior efforts. As a moviegoer I would like to know how many people went to the movies last year despite all of our country's economic downfalls. I don't want to be reminded how much we gave to the studios to watch their films. I want to know who had a seat for Indy's next crusade after his Last Crusade, who went to see The Dark Knight multiple times because they did not warn their own bladder of its 152 minute runtime, or who has so far seen possibly Eastwood's last leading role on the big canvas. All of the bad press Tom Cruise got for Valkyrie turned out to be good publicity for the movie because although it will probably never be number one at the box office it is making a lot of holiday money (for a movie starring a three-year-retired couch dancer, 60 million dollars in eleven days is not too shabby). So let them trash Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman all they want: if I were either of the two I am probably too busy to read all the negative articles.
I too get that sinking feeling when I see the vultures circling their celebrity prey in what passes for entertainment journalism.
But I'll take this opportunity to air a related irritant. Having grown up on Walter Cronkite leading us through difficult and tragic times, it has been continually hard to stomach the entertainment tone used by our "serious" journalists in their newscasts through similarly difficult times. Not to mention their entrenched pandering to their own ratings as their highest (lowest) common denominator.
I've got to say this: I hate Tom Cruise. I've never enjoyed a Tom Cruise movie. I am not able to suspend disbelief when he is on the screen, and I don't think he's particularly good looking. Valkyrie may be good, or it may suck. I'll never know because I'm not interested in seeing him anymore. And I disliked him before his Scientology leanings were public knowledge.
Do you ever have similar feelings, Roger? How do you deal with trying to write a review if you have an inherent bias against one of the actors?
Ebert: I hope I'm not biased against any actor. After I've panned someone, I hope for the opportunity to admire something of theirs. I am offended by the film, not the filmers.
I haven't read through all the comments (time waits for no man, or so I've been told), so I apologise if this has been said before.
The thing that gets me most about these hatchet jobs is that these 'journalists' (I use the term very loosely) are attacking actors and actresses who don't seem to have done anything wrong in the first place. As you noted, the box office grosses for the films Nicole Kidman has been involved in, bar Fur, have been quite respectable, and certainly indicative of the type of film each one of them is (Dogville, The Human Stain and Margot at the Wedding could hardly be expected to make $100million domestic, could they?). Likewise, she seems a switched-on, intelligent woman who hasn't done anything salacious in her personal life, and she can hardly be blamed for the occasional crapness of a film she's involved in. I like her as an actress, so that may have something to do with my opinion (I also like Dogville, for the record), but at times it often seems like hatchet-jobbing for the sake of hatchet-jobbing. It's the kind of behaviour you expect of highly reactionary forum types, not of (once again, loosely used) 'journalists'.
The same can be said of the Tom Cruise hatchet-jobbing. He's a very committed Scientologist who happens to be married to Katie Holmes (but God forbid they might actually like each other, that doesn't get internet traffic), so what? The man makes good movies, for the most part, and he's actually a very nice guy - when he was here in New Zealand filming The Last Samurai, he struck up a friendship with some national radio DJs and they ran a promotion where, for every dollar the station received to give to a primary school in the are Cruise was filming, Cruise would match that dollar. Cruise instigated this promotion, I believe, and can't remember how much they raised, but it was a good amount.
It's annoying how 'journalists' think they can spout lies and act like the celebrity cult (which I believe you've made your feelings known on before) affects the quality of a film. Was Collateral a crap film because Tom Cruise was playing against type? Hell no, it was a great film, one of my favourites! It didn't matter that Cruise was Cruise, because Cruise made me believe he was Vincent. As the poster above said, the stars may need to work harder from time to time, but their presence shouldn't be a bad thing - it should be their performance the film hinges on. It's a simple case of how good the film is, not the history of the stars involved (and if they held to their standards on ripping on those with past indiscretions, Robert Downey Jr. would be getting hell right now). If Lindsay Lohan were to come out and make an AMAZING film right now with her in an AMAZING performance, I would gladly say that it was an amazing performance (the closest she's ever gotten to that is Mean Girls, which I like a lot, but she hasn't done it yet). But you know the 'journalists' wouldn't.
Once the 'journalists' start distinguishing between films and their stars, maybe things will get better and the studios will be willing to take more creative risks. But I doubt that'll be any time soon.
"We don't want her to die Stanley. We need her to die... for the corn."
I know they're not your favorite satirists but Trey Parker and Matt Stone really hit the nail on the head with a parody of the ugly lust the media machine and the people have for celebrity "tragedy" on one of last season's South Park episodes. http://www.southparkstudios.com/ (Season 12, Episode 2)
It's blunt yes, but it's sickeningly on target and the laughs stick in the throat.
And really, "The Corn" is as good of an explanation as any for why people obsess over this junk.
Ebert: Onion headline: Collectible Plate Industry Calls for Death of Barbra Streisand.
Concerning your charge to "not marry someone who doesn't love the same movies you do." In another life or another world....if one of you were born the opposite gender, could you have married Mr. Siskel?
Ebert: Too many split votes.
Re: Steve Martin. Love him in almost everything, but, most of all, I love him in Bowfinger. Love is not a big enough word for how I feel about Steve Martin in Bowfinger. Steve Martin is living proof that white hairs do become a fool and jester quite well, thank you very much.
Cynical e-journalistas like to snark about Steve Martin, interspersing their constipated prose with pompous adjectives(you can’t polish a turd, guys) while relating how terrible a time they had watching his most recent film. But it’s never about Steve Martin’s new film – it’s always about Steve Martin the star, or Eddie Murphy the star, or Robin Williams the star. Taking potshots at the person has become the norm – the work goes unnoticed, or, as in Shopgirl, for example, unappreciated.
Anyway, sorry, don’t get me started on the sheer brilliance of Steve Martin.
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I saw Seven Pounds this weekend. That’s a surprisingly good film, no? And wasn’t Woody Harrelson just wonderful in it? In fact, that first exchange between Will Smith and Harrelson, and the look on both men’s faces after Harrelson hangs up the phone… Definitely one of my favourite scenes of the year.
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Lauren O – Re: The accents in Star Wars
In the Original Trilogy, the stormtroopers do not speak with British accents - they have very distinct American ones. In fact, in the first film (Star Wars to normal people, A New Hope to weirdos, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope to me), many of the imperials on the Death Star, too, have American accents. The guy who has “Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader,” the one whom Vader chokes, has a bizarre Mid-Atlantic-crossed-with-Belfast accent. The decision to give all Imperials British accents was taken during the production of the second film (The Empire Strikes Back to normal people, Sta… well, you get the "joke") by Irvin Kershner, the director.
In the most recent DVD boxset of the Original Trilogy, the stormtroopers now all have Kiwi accents to keep them in line with the prequels.
Suddenly, I am reminded of an exchange between McBain and Kent Brockman from one of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons where the former is talking about his next movie.
McBain: My son returns from a fancy East Coast college, and I'm horrified to discover he's a nerd.
Kent Brockman: I'm laughing already.
McBain: It's not a comedy.
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Reading about the plight of many of these young stars, pushed headfirst into showbiz by overzealous parents looking for cash, or a vicarious sense of fullfilment, or both, I doubt I am the only person reminded of Philip Larkin.
Ebert: This be the verse:
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/6538-Philip-Larkin-This-Be-The-Verse
Andi: You may have overstated the point about "Fur." Any respectable film fan knows the line, "To me it was straight out of Diane Arbus, but it had none of the wit."
"Space Chimps," right? What do I win?
As I read message boards around the internet such as the Internet Movie Database, I am always amazed at how much people hate and mistrust celebrities. There are of course conservatives who dislike many celebrities for being liberal, but that has nothing to do with my point. As you already know, celebrities are hated because they are wealthy or were born with silver spoons in their mouths. People on the internet often give celebrities negative criticism for doing charity work or helping the sick and the poor. They believe celebrities are phony and do not really care about the needy or less fortunate. People think that celebrities do charity work and other forms of community service to get exposure and to boost their careers.
One of the more important and reliable magazines (I am positive it was Time Magazine) did an article a few years ago about this topic. They gave several possible explanations as to why celebrities do charity work. One possibility is that celebrities feel guilty about being wealthy. It is an interesting idea and one that can be taken more seriously.
Perhaps some do charity work to boost their careers, but I think many of them feel it is their right as citizens to get involved with politics, do community service, and become active members of organizations that set out to help the less fortunate.
Ebert: Most movie stars come from ordinary starts in life and have earned their own money for their own work. Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?
Great post (again), Rog. When I flip through the channels and come upon one of the gossipy infotainment shows I cannot change the channel fast enough. If I linger longer than 5 seconds I feel as if the intelligence is being sucked out of my brain. I love movies (and reading reviews about them by people who share my passion) because they allow me to experience other cultures, worlds, and to witness great acting (at times) by professionals at the top of their craft. I don't care how much money they make, who they sleep with, or what they name their children. That adds nothing to the quality of my life, but their ability to convey convincing emotions on the big screen provides great pleasure and richness to me as a film lover. I can choose which movies I spend my money on, but I had no hand in the runaway greed of some CEO's, even though we all are now forced to pay for their unbridled mendacity. This is something real to get riled up about, not which star is doing whatever with whomever off screen.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
Your piece centers on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, once Hollywood's own Charles & Diana....
Admit it. You're still upset that they parted ways and you are taking it out on the meanies in the press who you feel were responsible. [g]
Ebert: I hope I'm not biased against any actor. After I've panned someone, I hope for the opportunity to admire something of theirs. I am offended by the film, not the filmers.
Case in point: A bouquet arrives... One of my favourite articles by Roger Ebert.
The movies are finished... Make no mistake about it my friends!
Or at least, the movies are "finished" being the way I remember them to be. God were they beautiful. A force of nature to be reckoned with, part of the intangible stratosphere of our popular culture.
"The Golden Age" (as I see it) was the 70s. Movies made us think again. The Deer Hunter saddened us with its unflinching honesty. Movies like All The Presidents Men are exhilarating reminders of the kind of dangers lurking among our backyards. Movies like McCabe and Mrs. Miller are more than just films, they are works of art. Films like The Conversation and Klute are wondrous displays of mood and craft. Star Wars lifted us out of our depression, long before the days of digital enhancement, corny revivals and pointless re-makes. Simple adventures reminded us why we were once children. And the list goes, on and on and on. Movies would never again be quite the same as they were near their beginnings, up until that time back in the 1970s; no matter what the advancement in craft, thought or technology. Perhaps they have a long way to go, but the undeniable virtual reality culture we must embrace in the future will ensure their demise.
Each person could go on and on and on as to what experiences they found noteworthy, but chances are your future neighbors aren't going to give a damn. Nobody wants advice or knowledge; we have become a culture obsessed with: "I" and "Me".
Nowadays of course are different. Nobody is allowed to be a child anymore. Everyone is connected, economically-versed with their text messages, internet boards and Starbucks that they can hardly call themselves human beings. When was the last time that you actually sat down and appreciated something, be it a movie, a novel or God forbid a book? And I'm not talking about Martha Stewart living, Oprah Magazine or Tiger Beat. And moreover, not just literally but figuratively as well. Wherever we shop, work or contemplate; depending upon where we are; unless your a cow worshiper old-lady in India, chances are you can't go 2 seconds during the day without succumbing to some form of digital torture. Perhaps you stopped to smell the flowers, that is, without first consulting your doctor, your friend or that wonderful my Space page; so as to ensure that you were still a functional thinker. Maybe you (not you, but the public) don't appreciate art, perhaps you're a minimalist. Or worse, a hermit? Nobody's perfect, still, you should check out these things called the movies.
Make no mistake, that singular love for them is still ever present. But it has become an increasingly losing battle between art and commerce, optimism vs. reality, dreaming vs. waking.
Much like life itself, movies are not a passive experience, like anything else that deserves to improve with age and exposure; they require a lot of love and constant attention. Active engagement if you will. If you're a true movie lover you'd understand. Life in general is made up of too many people who do not engage into "active engagement"; no matter what it is. This kind of passive-thinking will be our downfall. I do not include the heads of large corporations and drug dealers into this mix; because they will never truly understand what it means to be an ordinary person. You know, the kind that goes to the movies on the weekends. How could they? They have a much different outlook on life. It usually involves: $$$$$$$$$$. Such people will not be responsible for the prosperity of our future generations--but I'm getting off topic.
I remember watching "It's A Wonderful Life" as a child, and being genuinely swept up in the majestic sentiment of the whole thing. Sure, It’s a Wonderful Life is a wondrous flaw of a film. Its rather corny, shares a tad taste of propaganda in its midst; but by golly it was honest. Unflinchingly honest. It has a powerful and resonant message. Today, the only way it survives is once a year on ABC; and through the memories of our parents.
It is for this reason alone that movies like "Australia" cannot really exist in today's world, simply because we have grown too cynical as a culture. It’s not so much that movies are finished. It's the movie goer that's finished.
Yeah, yeah, don't give me that crap that everyone can enjoy the movies. True storytelling can permeate through all barriers right?.. WRONG! Being a movie goer entails many things, one is that you should be an intelligent, active human being with a capacity for abstract thought and personal exploration. One of the qualities that make the movie industry continue to thrive is that it has continued to be fueled by the enthusiasm of avid fans trying to figure out and decipher what makes what, and why life is so beautiful and such a deep mystery. In terms of human survival, its genes and not gene pools. Quality, not quantity. The strongest survive and the weak diminish. The intelligent will succeed and the ignorant will perish (at least, that's how it would be in my world). If you wish to start off and get all preachy with me and say its something else, say God, then you're barking up the wrong tree. For sake of argument, let's just say that I like to keep my feet on the ground when it comes to these sorts of matters.
Now before you start thinking I'm nuts, consider what I'm getting at here:
You know those young people who sneak into a crowded screening of "Slumdog Millionaire" with a bunch of old farts, rather than going to the midnight showing of "The Spirit". The films of the imagination cater to those whose deeper understandings about the world around them help to flex their creative muscles. Indeed, isn't life fuller when it is expressed with a sense of purpose? These people are you film dorks, if you will, rather they are well-rounded people. And are not simply visiting the multiplex to escape the kids or to act up in front of their friends.
Sure, I know what you're thinking; this is nonsense, there are more important things in life than trying to figure out why one watches films. Which films are truly great and which ones are actually bad. Does anyone really know? Why should going to the movies be like going to a class, don't they merely entertain? The fact of the matter is, it does take a certain amount of knowledge and skill. You could go your whole life thinking the movie "Mortal Kombat" was the end all classic of drama, but deny yourself the pleasure of watching "Schindler's List" or "Double Indemnity". (A girl in my college class is so young she never heard of "Forrest Gump"!) But seriously, apply this reasoning to anything else in life. Who would you rather be? The A person, or B person. If you said A, then sorry pal, I feel sorry for you. You know who you are. There are generally two kinds of people in the world. Those with an open mind, and those with a shut off mind. A person with an open mind on a given weekend will go see "The Spirit" as well as "Slumdog Millionaire", despite what he/she might think. A close minded person will stick to only one kind of film, thus he will see "The Spirit" for its action and sex. These are simplistic analogies, but consider their potentially deeper breadth... Indeed, life is made up of the kinds of people who will never go to see "Slumdog Millionaire". Think what you like. Not everyone has to like movies.
I believe that it all went down the drain when multiplexes stopped becoming like public libraries, and instead became like corporate experiments. The audience would enter the auditorium only to be bothered by some High School kid with a clip board, who is writing down how many seats are empty; thus calculating to the theater owners how much money each screen takes in on a given day. At the onset we are paraded with endless ads, are bothered by aggravating employees who insist that we try the new $7.00 candy. I remember when allowing perfect strangers in a dark room to enjoy themselves was enough. The internet didn't need to track our progress like rats in a lab experiement in order to figure out what that pimply college kid might see that weekend as opposed to your middle-aged college professor (no personal offense to both). Nowadays of course, Library late charges have sky-rocketed. ('Sigh'...remember the good ole days).
If it sounds like I'm tragic and that I'm suggesting that there isn't any good in the world anymore I assure you I'm not. I'm simply illustrating how I feel things are headed.
In speaking of "Australia": I have been a Nicole Kidman fan for years. The criticism of her acting, like many actresses elude me to an almost incomprehensible degree. Sometimes I think those things are just manufactured dreck meant to elicit a negative response. Sometimes I think her grace and beauty inhibits her potential to be taken seriously. When I first saw Baz Lurhman's "Australia", I was spellbound. Not by its sweep or its commercial pull (like ad stints on Oprah praising the actors) but the film's honesty. For once, here's a movie of sheer vision that is not afraid of what it is, knows exactly what it is and does not miss a step. Anyone dismissing its "magic" elements or directorial flourishes is severely missing the point. The film is a wondrous love story which takes place amidst the glorious canvas of Lurhman's world. This is a world that he created on his own. It is evident in his films of "Moulin Rouge" and "Romeo and Juliet". Lurhman is a painter, his canvas is the dramatic space; and he is playing both the atmosphere and the audience like a piano. The results are exhilarating. For example: recall that brilliant scene at the party when everyone is dancing in the rain. Each character at that moment exists in a space in time, which seeks to illuminate their emotional transformation. Hugh Jackman wears a tux while dancing in the rain with Kidman (whom is in a kimono garb-unusual for her). Since it is unusual for him to be dressed-up and her to be dressed-down, the fact that they are in the rain purely evokes a metaphoric image. Similarly is the evil Tycoon who requires that his servant hold an umbrella over his head as he joins the rest of the party (an ironic image of high-social status vs. innate frivolity). Dave Winham on the other hand is dressed rather nice but is engaged in drunkeness. The entire scene plays like a microcosm of the entire emotional landscape of the plot. The performances are done in a precise manner, meant to elicit a certain transcendent emotion and not necessarily a realistic action. Sure the film has realism too, but it moves with the harmony of a fantastical allegory played out in historic landscape (of course the kid can't stop a damn cattle stampede on a high cliff--that's not the bloody point!) Indeed, the archetypal natures of the characters may not be "Real"; but their dramatic struggles and relationships are. The film is like a giant poem. One, giant, beautiful poem about life, the incredible journeys we have and the people we meet along the way. Heck, it even echos the great battles of prejudice in films like "Giant". It is for this reason that we identify with the characters because their purposes serve Baz's world. Again, I know what you're thinking. He doesn't know what he's talking about, Australia is terrible, he's crowding the page with pointless adjectives. Everything I've said about the film I believe to be true. I grow tired of defending the movie, I'm satisfied with my personal opinions of it.
I recall seeing ReelTalk.Com's top ten lists of the year. I have in the past found the views of certain critics problematic. They appear to be honest but other times I just shrug my head and say: "They've been bought out too!". "Australia" was made by Twentieth Century Fox, which has not always had the greatest track-record in money making history. Wall-E is owned by Disney. Bales named Wall-E the best film of the year, while "Australia" ranked among her worst of the year along with the fodder of 08. Although in my humble opinion Wall-E is a great movie, Australia is not a terrible one; not by a long shot. Do I smell a conspiracy by one corporation to shame another by having to buy out critics, by forcing them to hate all the films of their parent competition?... You decide. I remember when some critics meant something. Nowadays, everyone's a critic. And everyone's usually wrong. I fear that not many of us are right. Not by a long shot.
Ebert: Well, you're right, right, and right again. But now I'm more depressed than when I wrote my original entry.
Roger,
I must confess, the first time I heard the name Diane Arbus was upon reading your original review of "Fur." However, I take pride in recognizing "Where all the women are strong, etc..." as Garrison Keillor's sign off to his stories of Lake Wobegon. I wonder how many of your readers appreciated the reference as I did.
Ebert: They didn't appreciate it half as much as I did because you remember my review of a movie I didn't review. Damn, I'm good.
I’d argue that the significance of box office numbers equals a bigger or lower budget for the director’s next picture. For instance, “The Dark Knight” hit astronomical numbers and will probably give Christopher Nolan a little more leeway next time around. But considering the quality of a film off of those earnings alone is irrelevant and pointless. “Wild Hogs” made $168 million at the box office, but we all know that any one of us could’ve written a funnier, more thought out film than that, even on a shoestring budget.
I've always been perplexed by statements that actors "don't deserve" their wealth. It works like this: if you have the ability to get hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of butts into movie seats by virtue of standing in front of the camera, you deserve whatever people are willing to pay you. The same argument applies to professional athletes. These are not an aristocracy of trust fund babies whose wealth springs out of thin air no matter their personal merits or lack thereof. These are (largely) hard-working and very talented human beings who have used that talent and hard work to get to their positions at the top. To wish to see them fail is nothing more than empty schadenfreude.
Do I agree with Tom Cruise's personal beliefs? Of course not. I think he's kinda nuts, as is his chosen religion. Then again, I don't agree with someone like NFL quarterback Kurt Warner, whose constitutional incapability to stop babbling about Jesus I find no less indicative of mental imbalance than that of a dedicated Scientologist. That doesn't mean I'd take any pleasure in seeing him fail. As with actors at the top of their game, I respect his talent and his work ethic.
Every so often I'm asked by a friend "How can you go see so-and-so's movie? You know he/she is a dedicated ______" (fill in the blank with a political-persuasion/religious-affiliation/personal-belief of your choice). My response is usually something along the lines of "If I only saw movies made by people I agreed with, I wouldn't see many movies."
Unfortunately I'm in the minority, and even more unfortunately the media has tapped into the schadenfreude that most people seem to seek by creating an endless cycle of the rise and fall of celebrities. Perhaps even more depressing than that (which amazingly passes for "journalism") is the celebrity response, which has seemed to be to cultivate as bland a personal image as possible so as never to risk saying or doing the wrong thing and thus maximize one's time at the top. Something tells me that celebrity interviews were not always as bland as they are today.
Someone should invent new subcategories for film journalism, something like:
- Film financials, to discuss box office performance
- Trailer reviews, to comment on the technical aspects of a trailer, and how well they think it will impact box office performance
And so on... just so that these so-called film journalists can have consistent employment, and leave serious film reviewing alone.
I think it's weird that the very same boy-ish charm that put Tom Cruise in America's heart contributed to his fall from our good graces. He jumped on a couch and declared his love for a girl on TV. Isn't this something we expect from him? This is the same guy that rode a firetruck all across New York City during his Mission Impossible 3 PR Blitz; and I have friends who were there -he never let that energy and excitement level fall. In fact, truth be told, wasn't Mission Impossible 3 the most exciting and satisfying of the series?
What's even stranger is that we hated this guy now. He was a weird cultist, brainwashing, closeted homosexual, monster. And then he played the buffoon not four months ago in Tropic Thunder and the collective Perez Hilton gave him a pass: Maybe he can laugh at himself (note: He always has been)?
Flash-forward to this Christmas and we're back to hating on him. Is this a case of national media schizophrenia? Alzheimers? Are we going mad?
I find 'Entertainment News' shows to be the most ridiculous waste of time. I'm sure the demand for such triviality would still be there if they were gone, but I couldn't live with myself if I did that job. I would go home every night and think, "I report the news... on celebrities." Then maybe I'd look at my paycheck and rest easier, but maybe not.
I can't any more than what you have on the beast of consumer celebrity culture, but a question on how you think this relates to your last post: If our ongoing meltdown takes a bite out of all box office grosses (and there's every chance it does, as the toll of all this consumer debt hasn't really hit consumer spending like it will), and some of these large-scale movies go away, do you think we see a renaissance in filmmaking (and film watching), as the biggest and loudest forms of distraction disappear, or is it too late, baby? Some of the best years for movies (30s, 40s, 70s) were in the worst of times.
Roger, I agree with your advice to teenagers. Alas, I did not know of it when I was a young person choosing my mate. You can guess where it led me. However, may I amend it your statement?
Do not marry someone who doesn't respect your choice of movies or of music. My version allows for a healthy disagreement. I want to stress "healthy".
What I find especially telling is that headline wasn't "Australia: Another Hugh Jackman Letdown". After all, when he's not playing Wolverine, his career has been just as hit-or-miss as Nicole Kidman's has been, and it's not like he ever won an Oscar. And no doubt the failure of Austrailia was every bit the disappointment to him as it was to her. But in the eyes of the author of the Reuters article, it was Nicole Kidman that needed to be taken down another peg, not Hugh Jackman. And it could have easily been the other way around if the anonymous author had decided leave Nicole alone and that it was Hugh Jackman that had gotten too big for his britches and needed to be humbled. But in this case, Reuters had Ms Kidman in their sights, so Australia's failure became hers as well. Every time I read a thinly-vieled hatchet job like this one, I think "all this tells me is that 'so-and-so' doesn't like 'blank' and is working in their opinion as fact". It's really petty, and saldy, this trend will only get worse.
Ebert: And audiences accept it. People who haven't seen a movie talk about it to other people who haven't seen it.
Confession time: until recently, I admit I was one of those people, to my shame. My love for film was a roller coaster; I was blindly reading many "reviews" and taking a hit-or-miss approach to new releases. The rising cost of movie-going started to change that.
Although I occasionally lapse into saying "I heard it wasn't that good," I am a reformed character, and honestly, it's thanks to your well-written reviews-- which I enjoy for their own merits as much as I do their help in making decisions.
Learning to be satisfied with the very best,
I thank you.
One of my favorite past times when I worked as a grocery store cashier was to take a few tabloids with me to my lunch break and look through them and find all the discrepencies. Really, the way they are written you'd think a child of two could easily see how blatantly they twist, exaggerate, and even make up stories about the stars. To read them, you'd think every star lived a life of constant melodrama.
I think--and perhaps you will agree with me--that it all boils down to money. The tabloid/gossip show industry knows that people will be attracted by drama in the lives of the stars, and so they try and find as many dramatic stories as possible. And when there's none to be found, why, they just make them up. If a star's life isn't enough like a soap opera, heck they'll make it a soap opera! Plus, the fact that tabloids are sold on a weekly basis, and many gossip shows are almost daily, means that they have to constantly search for enough stories that will intrigue people and bring in money. I'm guessing this isn't easy, which is why they've resorted to either wildly exaggerating or making up stories rather than reporting on facts.
As a cashier I was often surprised at how gullible many of my customers could be when they were in line looking at the tabloid covers. For awhile there was a running series of covers about a vocal Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie "feud" and I never once heard anyone say "What a crock, they probably never even have contact with each other," but rather something along the lines of "Hmm, they're fighting, huh? Looks pretty bad". A few times I would point out how those magazines love to make things up, but of course no one's going to take the opinion of a young cashier very seriously--at least, not most of the time!
And by the way, as a person who knows of and admires Diane Arbus's work, I feel lucky to count myself as a friend.
I noticed about the time Waterworld was being released that several of my friends were complaining about the budget of the movie. I told them that unless they had stock in the studio, how much the movie cost should not matter to them.
Another friend of mine refuses to see John Travolta movies because he hates him so much. I don't think it's the Scientology thing because he'll still see Tom Cruise movies. Maybe he has a thing for Kelly Preston. I just don't get hating someone you don't know.
I do, however, look at the box office lists. It's mostly to root for movies that I like. I used to try to see all the movies that make over $100 million dollars thinking that if I see the hits, I'll be more in touch with regular moviegoers. But, that just causes me to see bad movies, like Charley's Angles or Santa Clause 2.
I don't really have any words of my own to comment with, so I won't try and pretend I do. However, this did remind me of a recent blog post over here, regarding our relationship with stars:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/12/what_happens_to_an_action_hero.html
(Some spoilers are there for some movies in current release, just so other readers don't hate me).
If his blog isn't on your regular reading list, you are seriously missing out.
This reminds me of a passage from The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders where he is discussing the shortcomings of our news media:
"A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them."
Must've been a compulsive winker, then (not to be confused with wanker).
Happy to help, Julian. (But was it the delusional extra tale, or the nice-guy-Heath part?)
Somehow, Roger, I suspect that the course you've taken over the last few years would not have been your preferred method for laying off fatty foods, n'est-ce pas? That also reminds me of your infamous "I will one day be thin but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny" line in response to his calling you a "fat pig." Classic!
On a related chair-falling note, when I wrote my TDK recollection, I wanted to double-check that I was using "lowering skies" correctly, so I went to Wiktionary. What did I find there (other than confirmation that my intended usage was fine)? Only one citation on its usage ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Citations:lowering ), by some guy named...Roger Ebert.
Ebert: You're kidding! I love that word. From my blog entry "Siskel & Ebert at the Jugular:"
I turned away mute from this crushing warning, and wandered lonely as a cloud 'neath lowering skies in Lincolns' Inn Fields.
With thanks to W.W. I'm sure we've all seen clouds wandering in Lincolns' Inn Fields.
Almost perfect post. You missed the opportunity to work Katharine Hepburn in somewhere.
My beautiful friend Roger,
I agree and disagree, let's start with the latter... I'm not sure that it's a hard and fast rule that you shouldn't marry someone who doesn't love the movies you do. Marry someone you love. Of the year experience i've had I think that this seemingly unusable piece of information is what really counts. I watched my favorite movie for the first time "Sunset Boulevard" early in our relationship and we both loved it, though i don't think she loves it as much as I do. Now, perhaps my number 2 "The passion of joan of arc"? I'm not sure she would last five minutes... I'll take my life trying to convince her of it and show her the beauty of film i've found, but it's just a much deeper existential question that I suspect is different for everyone...
Now, yes, I agree 100% that we are getting about the lowest level of journalism from 99% of the source at this point in history. I really do hate money. It's such a petty, annoying and ultimately, if you really think about it, i-m-a-g-i-n-a-r-y entity. It doesn't actually exist. I make money I pay bills and feel sorry for people who like to spend more time than that thinking about it. Mass delusion. Let's be honest money isn't what counts but who (ultimately) you can get to do what you want to do... this is what money does... And THIS is how we measure movies? Business is taking over our mass consciousness and it's this boring, grown up game that tires me. "Show me the movie!" (okay, sorry that was baaaaaad!)
Reductio ad absurdum: My wife and I loved, and I would say, had a significant experience watching last year's "Once"...
"Once" (2007) Cost of Production: $150,000... Worldwide gross: $14.6 million.
Thank you Roger for speaking up! Like yourself I have been sick and tired of this negative way of thinking. I think that we need to abandon the notion of "star power". I honestly believe that the success of a film is based upon it's determination and overall appeal (but heavy advertising helps out too). This belief that a film succeeds solely based upon what actor headlines it is nonsense. How long has it been since people have stormed the theaters just because of the lead actors presence? Has it ever been that way? But this is the way of thinking Hollywood has programmed eager fans. A film's success is measured in 100's. If a film grosses $50 million, it's a "meager" success. Can you even imagine all that money?! I work with a steady paycheck, but I'd sure enjoy it if my weekend report turned into a $50 million paycheck!!
So I think there's two things that need to change. Both concern perception. The first one is the perception of "star power", being that a star's popularity or power translates into box office success. This exists, but not in the terms Hollywood imagines. They need to set the standards at a fair rate. If Hollywood keeps thinking in its super-star power terms, Will Smith will be the only actor left.
The second element is the perception of box office success. Again, Hollywood has set the standard for "success" way too high. IMHO, a film is a success if it matches it's budget. Then it creates a profit, then the film company is happy, then the press is happy. Stop thinking in terms of $100 million. If we cut that in half, 7 out of the top 10 films at the box office right now are successes (all data from boxofficemojo.com of course!).
Tom Cruise has had a steady lifelong career, and Valkyrie has grossed $60 million so far. Not successful enough according to many journalists. I think for all the bad press that Valkyrie has faced, it has stood the test of gossip and came out shining. Do you realize that while the press may regard the success of "Marley & Me" to be on Jennifer Aniston's shoulders, it's really the appeal of cute and cuddly Marley alone that sells it? The movie poster for "Marley & Me" is simply a picture of the adorable yellow pup. Jen Aniston's name is not even on the bill.
I so wanted to thank you for articulating so well what has become an burgeoning concern of mine for years: the decline of basic reasoning in journalism.
Yes, there has always been the gossip-laden muckraker; it's a profession and position unto itself But with the advent of the 24/7 news cycle -- AKA, the beast that must be fed – the loss of reason, coupled with unattributed writing (both from "sources" and the actual article itself) is worrisome. Equally worrisome is the increasing inability (based on the comments left on message boards and the mere necessary existence of snopes.com) of many readers to discern the, often wide-open, holes in logic.
So thank you for noticing that the Emperor has no clothes on.
I've noticed too, several posts here taking you to task for championing the "wealthy" and "privileged". Aside from missing the point about journalism and public confidence, I'm also puzzled by the concept that, based on one's income, it's OK to treat some humans differently and that the concepts of reason and fair-play need not be applied in actions involving them. Personally, I would appreciated knowing what the cut-off line is so that I may be sure not to cross it.
Yes, I understand that some people can't separate an actor's personal life from screen and that Cruise's scientology is off-putting to some writers and he's lost his human right to fairness because of his "religion." ( As an agnostic, it's not my intention to defend any religion, but really, I could do hours on the cult of the tax-free Catholic or Mormon church and don't even get me started on drinking wine and pretending its blood or the ritual hacking off of part of a baby's penis. In the end, I find Scientology not much freakier than any other previously established religion in the world. In my view, the passage of time doesn't legitimize and somehow magically make the illogical, rational. But I also recognize that if some belief system works for some people in any form, good for them. But let's not pretend that any of it makes any sense!)
I don't know what the rationale is behind the Kidman slags is other than she's a woman and its best she not be too powerful, even if facts and logic are twisted into a pretzel to give the perception that some of that power is lost.
Or maybe that's giving too much credit as to motivation. It may just boil down to, "because I can." In truth, I often wonder if the writer is purposely pushing the envelope because they can get a ego-stroking head rush knowing they successfully jerked people's chains. Again.
It's odd and interesting times in which we live. I always look forward to your comments about them.
Great Read! I couldn't agree more but...
Don't movie stars benefit from the opposite of this negative hailstorm on their way to stardom? There are times when Actors receive too much praise for what they do. Case in point: Ellen Burstyn being nominated recently for a movie she was in for a whopping 12 seconds (in her defense she was reported to have said 'are you kidding?' when she learned the news).
I don't have it out Ms. Burstyn either. I'm sure she made a lot happen in 12 seconds.
Tom Cruise has gotten his fair share of good publicity too. Most of it earned... but some of the good things written about him are the product of the same lazy journalism as the bad things are (though nothing as egregious as the nom for Burstyn).
To be fair I think Tom is a great movie star and a great actor. I think that he really appreciates the position he has attained and that the bad publicity has stemmed from his becoming too good at the publicity machine. For a few years leading up to his recent backlash he has seemed a little bit too psyched to be interviewed about his new film, a little too in love with his wife and kids etc... People thought he was being disingenuous. Now he's paying for it.
And if he can't take it then I guess he can curl up with his beautiful wife and cry himself to sleep on a big pile of money.
Let me stick up for the stars a minute. Way up at the top of this conversation, there was a discussion about the seemingly insane salaries that top stars get for their work. I have a few thoughts on what these stars actually do, and give up, for that money.
In becoming a star one loses a very precious thing: anonymity. I can imagine that, for the very famous, the ordinary, day-to-day activities that the anonymous of us take for granted- walking around our neighborhood, driving our own car, going out to eat when and where we want- involves the constant awareness that one is being literally watched and photographed by professionals whose job it is to pounce on any foible. Any activity done in public is complicated by the constant need to graciously deal with average people who are, by nature, curious. Even if only a small percentage of the population works up the nerve to ask for a photograph or autograph, that means that one's day is literally filled with constant entreaties. A star no longer entirely owns his or her own life.
I, for one, would hate this.
The simple act of carving out an enclave for oneself and one's family that is free from this constant barrage of attention, where one can take control of one's own life, must cost quite a bit of of the money that these stars are receiving. John Travolta owns a private beach in the Bahamas not just because it is nice to have a private beach in the Bahamas, but because only a private beach would allow him the precious ownership of one's self that the rest of us enjoy as a matter of course.
The apparent strangeness of the lives of top stars might be both a result of the constant adulation, and a result of the fact that any one of us under similar scrutiny would reveal quirks and foibles. God help us if we were to pick our nose, get angry, deflect am overzealous fan in anything but a very gracious manner.
That said, Scientology is pretty messed up.
Why is "Australia" considered a Nicole Kidman disappointment instead of a Hugh Jackman disappointment? Why is Will Smith annointed Box Office God Numero Uno when any movie of his which does not contain an alien, a robot, a zombie or some other sci-fi trope bombs, comparatively? Why is the word "actress" ever associated with Angelina Jolie when "home-wrecker, professional adoptive parent and green-screen-stander-in-front-of" would be more accurate? (Think I have a future in this sort of thing?)
Roger, you aren't really that confused are you? The showbiz machinery routinely overhypes the most mundane, aiming at the perceived lowest-common-denominator as if their treasure map has a big red X etched over a drawing of a drooling nincompoop. And, when the machinery fails, those cogs make a loud, grinding, annoying sound.
Movies as spectator sport! You've been at a sporting event where "fans" loudly boo a player on their own team, haven't you? You've seen those booing fans? Nevermind the vast majority of that group never played the sport they're watching. I digress.
If we have to watch Tom Cruise jump up and down on a couch (and, no, I never watched the episode of the Oprah show, but, still, the image has been ingrained through a bizarre form of modern "news item" osmosis), if we have to listen to Tom Cruise blathering about scientology or psychiatry, if we've noticed Katie Holmes looks less like she did on TV and more like a Stepford wife everyday, then, I figure, we've put in our due dilligence - we're entitled to have a laugh. The entire idea of a Scientologist performing the role of a hero standing against the cult of Nazism is HILARIOUS. "Valkyrie" should've been directed by Mel Brooks.
I've got an idea. Celebrities, you don't want the papparazzi interrupting your sidewalk stroll? Don't have your publicist announce it ahead of time. If you don't want people to bring their awareness of your real life to the movie theater, don't drag your real life onto Oprah's couch. You want your children to be raised normally and out of the spotlight? Don't have them photographed and put on gossip magazine covers.
As for Nichole Kidman, I worry not. She has proven herself to be an actress who continually challenges herself with her roles. That some of her movies are less rewarding than others is to be expected. Even Meryl Streep has been in a handful of stinkers.
P.S.
Roger does have a cameo in the "South Park" episode entitled "Roger Ebert Should Lay Off Fatty Foods." As a constellation. With down-turned thumb.
Eh. This obsession with "The Sta's! The Sta's!" is what ruins movie experiences for me. The stars themselves are fine, even the ones I find myself disliking for no apparent reason. I follow some stars: Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour-Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis usually star in good films.
No, it's the obsessive community I can't stand, just like I love Miyazaki's films but can't stand the anime-obsessed, odd-romantic-pairing community around them.
So I just ignore it. It's not a cancer: it's one of those things you can ignore. Just don't open the last part of your local newspaper, then sit back, relax, pop-in a good movie and enjoy. Suggestions based on movies I saw recently: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Three Colors: Blue, Doubt, Adaptation.
Roger, concerning your advice about finding someone who loves the same movies, nine years ago, I took a girl to a screening of Citizen Kane for a first date. It was the first time either of us had seen it, and both left in awe. A few years later, we got married, and have loved and hated the same movies ever since. If every city in the world just had an arthouse movie theater, we could all put marriage counselors and divorce lawyers out of business.
Ebert: People don't realize it, and I'm too modest to say, but my reviews are a form of therapy. I cure the problems you don't know you have, and then they go away and leave no sign, so that proves it.
My closest friend is a screenwriter and has often related stories to me regarding the sometimes vast differences between the public perception of various movie stars and their private persona. The Ledger story above reminded me of Bernie Mac (for whom you wrote a quite touching and elegent tribute a few months back) who always exuded energy and charisma in front of camera while quietly battling illness off screen. Much like Ledger, he fully engaged in his work. Many entertainment "journalists" were shocked at his passing, not having witnessed what family and co-workers had seen for years.
By the way, this friend co-wrote the story and screenplay for one of Bernie's final films called "Pride". One of our greatest disappointments was that our favorite critic was sidelined by his own illness at the time and we were unable to hear your take on the movie. In my opinion it's quite enjoyable but certainly nothing earth-shattering (hopefully a solid "three stars"). Some of the Tomato and Meta critics seemed to enjoy it, Mr. Roeper among them. And Bernie really elevated the material.
Me, I think those wandering clouds, like vicious dogs and intolerant Republicans, ought to be licensed and leashed and never allowed to wander free.
You are just a shameless adapter, aren't you? Your quote having rung a distant high school poetry bell, I had to look up who W.W. was (Shameful, isn't it, that my poetry recollection is so deficient?). And wouldn't you know it, the page I found that named Wordsworth as author of "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud" also included "High Waving Heather 'neath Stormy Blasts Bending" by Emily Brontë, a poem which includes the word...lowering!
Ebert: (Cue "Twilight Zone" theme.)
Great article Roger, but there is hope for Tom Cruise just yet, looks like with the Golden Globe nod, we might start hearing about the great "comeback" of Tom Cruise. People forget that he's a great actor who's always been a little quirky, nothing has changed except our perception of him.
I bet someone could find an article blaming Jolie for Changeling not being a blockbuster hit.
How things have changed since the golden-era of hollywood, when actors and actresses were cherished for the roles they played rather than destroyed for their personal problems or flaws in their character. Its sad really. I don't believe that actors are any better than ordinary people, but I also believe that the characters they inhabit onscreen should be judged as separate from the actors themselves. They present their art for all to see in the hopes of creating an experience that transcends the job of acting or directing. When they achieve this goal, it is a magnificent moment, when the audience catches a glimpse into the realm of emotions that define our humanity. These emotions can be sadness, anger, happiness, and hope, and they all are able to make us feel something. But these moments can never happen while people are intent to tear apart the actors that we see on screen. I admit that sometimes actors don't succeed at what they are trying to achieve, but thats what makes it so much more wonderful when they do. And slanderous journalism does nothing but destroy the possibility of experiencing something powerful from an actor on the "hit list".
I know this isn't a chat room, but I don't care if you print this or not, Roger. This is for you. In response to "Zeiram" above. Mark Twain once said there are two kinds of people in the world. One that thinks there are two kinds of people in the world and one that doesn't.
Dear Roger,
I have enjoyed reading your reviews for 30+ years. What you say about a movie usually agrees with my opinion, but not always. That's okay - no one is right all of the time!
I am dropping you a line to let you know that after accidentally seeing your journal article on rice cookers, I ordered the brand that you use. I keep telling myself that I need to wean myself off frozen dinners and eat more healthfully. I have made rice twice with the new cooker. I will try to remember I have this new appliance when I visit my grocery store this week. Maybe continuing to visit your journal more regularly will inspire me to cook. It's just so darn easy to pop a dinner into the micro-nuker.
All the best,
Beverly
Ebert: Be sure to send a recipe to the rice cooker blog. A cookbook is coming out!
OK, now I'm getting weirded out! As I typed that ellipsis, the music I imagined playing in my head was The Twilight Zone's theme! Whenever I run across odd coincidences, I tend to use that line (perhaps even here in the comments on one or more of your blog posts). I'll email you the most recent example...
Interesting topic. I look at actors and actresses as salespeople vying to sell me a product knowing that I have a limited budget. We see so much of these entertainers on TV, in newspapers, on the net, there is no escaping their personas. Coupled with the fact that these celebrities like to bloviate and political and social issues, and convince me to buy certain products that we all know full well they don't use, I make a value judgment regarding the character of the persona, not the person. I take that judgment with me in selecting movies that I may want to see.
Regarding Tom Cruise, I am not a fan of his, so I will be less likely to see a movie he is in, unless the movie subject sparks my interest and after some research, critics find it to be an acceptable piece of art (not how good the movie is, but how good the movie was made). Now, if Tom Cruise is in Star Wars Episode VII: The Next Ripoff, I will go see it. But I don't feel the need to solicit the works of people that I probably would not want to have a drink with (as if they would with me, anyway).
I make exceptions, of course. Alec Baldwin and I likely do not see eye to eye on most policital or social issues. But I find him an interesting and gifted actor. Doesn't mean that I would see every movie he is in, but the man has never mailed a performance in.
Natalie Maines spouted off on President Bush at a concert in Britain. I liked the Dixie Chicks and their music. But, when she made her comment, I decided not to purchase any cds, tickets, etc. She had every right to say what she did to be sure (though I don't think it is a wise strategy to air dirty laundry on a neighbor's clothesline) and I have every right as a consumer to not purchase anything she is associated with. Doesn't mean she is not talented. It also doesn't mean that everyone I choose to support are sympatico with my worldview.
So, I think the right strategy for any celebrity is to keep your mouth shut, look good on the red carpet, try not to get a dui, overdose, strike a spouse, or run for political office. Unless, that is, you have something to sell in which case do all of the above and don't forget to burn a flag, have a home sex video released by an anonymous "third party", and lead the Beverly Hills Police Department on a chase. Because the media will not cover you otherwise.
I agree that when movie stars get on someone's hit list - look out!
I love all kinds of movies and all kinds of actors, so I watch many, many films each year. I have recently joined a video service which give me access to just about anything on dvd. What a treasure-trove for a movie nut like me! I worked my way through the old British tv mini-series of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and am now enjoying all the past episodes of ER year by year.
Thanks again, Roger, for continuing to give us your honest opinion every day.
Last week while looking at the movie listings, I was very disappointed to find out that in my area, Australia was only showing at one theatre, once a day. So on New Year’s Day, I went to see it. I loved it. It made me sad to think that there were plenty of less-deserving movies with multiple showtimes, while Australia was regulated to one early show in the smallest auditorium. The show that I went to was sold-out. However, the audience was almost exclusively old ladies. Again I was sad. Something this good should be seen by everyone – not just be an “old lady” movie. I’m not an old lady and my boyfriend certainly isn’t! We both enjoyed Australia. I am NOT a fan of “chick flicks”, but I am a Baz Luhrmann fan. However, I think that Australia is certainly his most accessible film, so it’s not something just for Baz Luhrmann fans. Anyway, I was thrilled to read the last line in your review: “The kind of movie that is a movie, with all that the word promises and implies.” That was almost exactly what I had said about it! Or maybe what I said was closer to the comment in your blog: “It was a god-damned MOVIE!” That is (or should be, or used to be) why movies exist. For spectacle and adventure and romance and beautiful people and beautiful scenery. I want to be entertained! I think maybe part of the problem was the length – but then I heard that Benjamin Button is long, so who knows? Well, Australia is still playing in its one early matinee. I’m trying to get my mom to go see it with my grandma. My co-worker doesn’t work on Thursday and she liked Moulin Rouge, so I’m trying to get her to see it. I wish I had seen it earlier so I could get more people to see it; but I don’t think I waited too long. I blame all the Christmas opening movies for pushing it aside.
I like your comment: “Young people, heed this advice: Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you.” I don’t think I agree with it 100% -- but you should at least like the movies your partner loves and understand why he loves them. And have a similar taste in movies. I happen to be a horror movie fan, so I think it’s funny when we go to the theatre and buy two tickets for Quarantine; while the couple in line next to us is some girl dragging her (ahem) whipped boyfriend to see Sex and the City or Bride Wars or some other girly boyfriends and shoes piffle. Also we are both movie buffs, so neither one has to force the other to do some crazy thing like go to the annual Best Picture nominee marathon that our local AMC theatre has. (Or on a baser level – to see all “8 Films to Die For”.)
Don't worry, Mickey, I picked up your slack and purchased the Dixie Chicks' entire catalog when the "shut up and sing" contingent -- like you -- started their boycott, none of which I'd previously been inclined to buy, not being a big fan of country.
So tell me, Mickey, did you vote for Reagan, or would you have voted for Schwarzenegger (assuming you're not a California resident), despite their breaking the celebs-can't-speak-their-minds-about-politics rule?
"Why do the box office receipts of 'Australia' appear in almost every news outlet, but an actual review of it appears in so few?"
Reminds me of what was said about Titanic in Godard's Eloge de l'amour.
I did not see "Australia" for a very simple reason: It just didn't look like something that I would want to see. I came to this conclusion after I saw the trailer, saw a few clips, read the synopsis and then read four or five positive and negative reviews from critics that I trust. This does not mean that I think that the film is going to be bad, it just mean that I don't think that I would have enjoyed it in the theater. It does, however, look like something I want to check out when it comes to DVD in a few months.
As for "Valkyrie", I didn't see that film because I am not a fan of it's director, Bryan Singer, who has disappointed me on far too many occasions with terrible films like "The Usual Suspects", "Apt Pupil" and "Superman Returns". For this one, I am judging it by the track record of the creative mind at the helm. I could care less what Tom Cruise did on Oprah's couch.
Whatever these people do off-camera is of no concern to me when I am deciding where I want to spend my entertainment dollar. Do they do quality work? That's what is important to me. I know people who stopped going to Woody Allen's films because of the scandal but, for me, that doesn’t reflect Allen as an artist. Film is too important to be manipulated by tabloid nonsense.
Dear Roger,
I believe I know the reason for this kind of irresponsible, second-rate journalism. The seed was planted in the 1970s, slowly spreading across the country, rapidly multiplying while continuously flicking whiplike poison stingers on unsupecting readers. We are now their prey. They are an army, marching in unison behind one leader. He is all-powerful and unstoppable. He is: Rex Reed.
Roger,
One of the best articles on the entertainment industry I have ever read in my life - thank you so much! You expressed so perfectly all the built-up resentment I've had over the years over these vicious vultures, particularly re Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman of late. They are both EXCELLENT and hard-working actors, and obviously nice people to anyone who cares to look. Your article was not only interesting and accurate (and based on FACTS, not opinions), but also IMPORTANT. I hope its repercussions are far and wide. Jerks like Roger Friedman are eventually going to get theirs - what goes around comes around. But articles like this can certainly help open people's eyes sooner. Thanks for a job well done. I've always been a fan, but this gives me a new perspective on how great a movie critic can be. Have a GREAT 2009!
A little more digging from the links in the "most hated critic in America" LA Times article led me to its relation with the "critic's rulebook" blog you published a few months ago. I can't believe none of your blog readers were able to catch who it was mostly aimed at. (I would have never done been able to do it as your old show hasn't been shown on TV in Mexico in many years and the only use I currently have for the atthemoviestv.com site is searching in the vault for old reviews).
My advice: stop sending the guy advice. From what I gather, it's pretty much a hopeless cause. Hard to believe Disney could make a mistake of that magnitude. In the real world normal people would get fired for much less than that.
I knew there would be negative buzz about both Australia and Valkyrie. They are ambitious narratives. We are in the age of telling things slant, from a microcosm, in a fractured manner. I like the experiments. I am not being a crank. But, there seems to me to be a certain amount of laziness when critics don't really name the spirit of the time, the mood, the climate of opinion that they are working within.
Ebert: I can enjoy ambitious narratives and fractured experiments.
I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am large; I contain multitudes.
It seems so many people have an opinion about Fur without having seen it. I saw it and thought it was an inspired take on Beauty and the Beast, exploring the allure of the seemingly grotesque that can become beautiful when we get over our fear.
"If Lindsay Lohan were to come out and make an AMAZING film right now with her in an AMAZING performance, I would gladly say that it was an amazing performance (the closest she's ever gotten to that is Mean Girls, which I like a lot, but she hasn't done it yet). But you know the 'journalists' wouldn't."
Are you so certain? If AMAZING could be objectively defined and Lindsay Lohan were spotted anywhere in ITS vicinity, I dare say that's ALL we'd be hearing about. If she smeared some green grease in her hair and emoted all boggle-eyed and drooling in front of Christopher Nolan's over-rated camera as The Joker's Daughter, all her "Girls Gone Wild" excesses would be excused. I've read more about Heath Ledger's AMAZINGNESS and niceness in THIS THREAD than I ever wanted or needed to read in order to make up my own mind.
Meanwhile, I became aware of the greatest acting performances of the year - Richard Jenkins in THE VISITOR and Alejandro Polanco in CHOP SHOP - only after having to do RESEARCH.
Thank you, Roger, for your recommendations. Don't waste any more of your time empathizing with the poor, poor mistreated celebs.
Ebert: Who make the really big bucks are the CEOs of the corporations that control the studios, networks, and all big media.
Thank you for both the article and this comment. I read and clipped out a wonderful little opinion peice a few years ago about Robert Downey Jr. (before his Iron Man comeback) about how people were baying for his head on a stick and his corpse to be roasted in the public square, because he was apparently the only person in the continental US with a drug problem. The writer pointed out that much of this antipathy comes from the notion that someone who is as successful and talented as Downey has no right having any problems in life, and since we paid to see his movies, we own him, and have complete say over how he lives. As the writer said, no matter how much money Downey has made over the course of his career, the movie studios and producers made a hundred times more. Otherwise he couldn't get cast. So anyone who wants to lock Britney Spears or Lindsey Lohan in a convent or some such, remember, there are several industries making more money than those stars could ever dream of off of their pain.
Mr Ebert
I have wondered for some time now if there is a conspiracy going on in the media to disparage everything certain stars do or say. But then I have to remember that the media is controlled by people-people who may have their own agendas, people who have flaws, just like say Tom Cruise.
One of the greatest flaws that may be driving our obsession over seeing stars fail is envy. They have all that we lack and we want it and we want them to stop having it. For some people this is so intense it drives them to do the childish and sometimes vicious things I've seen members of the media do and say.
Each day, siting in some little cubicle, is some reporter(if you can call him/her that) pressed to write something interesting to ensure that he is worthy of retaining the spot in said cubicle or that might give him a chance at moving up to supervisory or corner office level. He has bills to pay, relationships to salvage and myriad other concerns while these people apparently live perfection-money, beauty,glamour, fame and the adoration of millions of fans. What does he have-two kids at home, a dog, two loving parents wishing he could do better career-wise?
It's hard to watch one man make in one year what you will never see in a lifetime-despite what all the pundits and gurus peddling self help programmes like "The Secret"will tell you. If I was offered as much as $100 000 for the first shots of a budding celebrity romance or bouncing baby I might be tempted to take that shot though it may mean forgetting the manners my mother taught me and infringing on someonelse's right to privacy.
John Travolta was one of many celebrities with his jets and out of this world lifestyle that has been the subject of tabloid gossip. I was shocked recently when I read some of the rumours posted about him on the net with nothing but hearsay to back them up. Today he is standing in the midst of a horrible tragedy and I wonder how many of us could envy his jets or his lifestyle right now. Heartache is never good, and never to be wished on another.
I suspect many tabloid and gossip columnists will offer their condolences but will their remorse last? Will it influence the tone of subsequent columns as the months pass after he buries his son. I doubt it.
Death reminds us that we are all human but it should not take such a tragedy to remind us to show common decency to others-even if they are seemingly out of this world celebrities.
My prayers and condolences to his family.
I see this differently: as a paying moviegoer, I feel I help to pay part of these actor salaries. Therefore, my question is: why do the studios keep giving millions and millions of dollars to actors and actresses that have never carried a film on their own and/or haven't had a hit film in years (Kidman, Jackman (as if X-Men was a hit because of him???), Ed Burns, Cameron Diaz (as if Shrek was a hit because of her???), Robin Williams, on and on and on). Some actors make bomb after bomb after bomb and still get over $10 million a picture? I don't think so.
Dear Roger !
You should give us the box-offices with more detail, like worldwide, not just in the states, it count as much in other countries, you know ! ;)
See ya !
I have yet to see Australia but I have seen a few trailers, read a few reviews, good and bad, and I have decided that I love it and what it promises to be.
That might make me as bad as Michael Slezak. But as a potential audience member, I make irrational snap decisions about films.
At some point I will snap out of the movie reality - it is inevitable that something will jar me back to reality, it happens in all films - and think of Nicole Kidman's tabloid history, or Australian race relations, or the fact that Baz Luhrmann looks nothing like what I expected him to. Those thoughts will affect my opinion of the movie to some degree, but I've already bought a ticket by then.
It's interesting to think about how many people would avoid a film based on an uninformed EW article or similar, and how many people would steer clear of a Cruise movie merely because the guy might be insane.
Those people are the swing voters that bring election campaigns to the centre. They don't want to pay to have their worldview challenged, or to listen to an intellectual with a fetish for Manhattan, (where they don't live) talk about photography. They don't want to leave the cinema wondering if they got it, or if it was meant to be a satire. They sit in a room at work all day and then sit at home in a room all day, and don't want to be confronted by the claustrophobia of a jury room.
They should stop making movies for them. The industry should scale down. Modern big budget films sprawl to appeal to as many people as possible. This makes sense at a micro, film by film, level, but at a macro level it results in fewer film studios, making bigger and bigger movies and demanding larger audiences to support them. Scale down. Make movies on lower budgets, so audiences can be smaller. The smaller audiences will be happier, and more likely to buy the DVD.
Okay, so it'll probably kill cinemas in small towns, but nobody lives in small towns anyway, certainly nobody interesting - except in movies, and in the movies they're only interesting because they lost a parent and they do things that are actually pretty normal in the city, but seem interesting in a small town.
Movie stars are movie stars because people like watching them (except Ashton Kutcher.. I'll never understand that). People don't like watching them because they're stars (They like reading about them instead). So you've gotta bank on the quality of the film, not the number of big names. I'm a huge Nicole Kidman fan, and I like Baz Luhrmann, but that's not why I want to see Australia. So to blame a star for its failure makes no sense unless they also wrote, produced or directed.
Ebert: You know, I actually believe interesting people can and do live in small towns. I recommend A Step from Death, the latest memoir by the remarkable American novelist and poet Larry Woiwode, who with his family farms his own land in North Dakota, and is almost too interesting for his own good.
Ah, someone beat me to the Katharine Hepburn reference. I still find it amusing that anyone uses the "box office poison" phrase considering its original context.
The whole box office cult of celebrity gossip thing, I don't quite get. Gossip never seems to really give you heroes to admire or stories to love, just people doing bad things or being slightly ditzy or having career troubles so you can feel superior to them. It's so ancilliary to the process of filmmaking.
Like, I have my issues with the Church of Scientology, in the control it exerts over its members and the way it tends to respond to criticism. However, I still looked forward to VALKYRIE because Tom Cruise can be good at times, and I like Brian Singer as a director and hope his career continues to go well (unlike you I thought SUPERMAN RETURNS was a good movie.) And surely the director is more important than the guy in the lead, right? I haven't been able to catch it yet but I'm glad to see it doing well just to prove that "toxic" buzz is sometimes completely wrong. If there's one thing that I hate about the movie business it's that movies can be declared flops even before anyone gets a look at them.
Makes me think of the immortal line from Ace in the Hole
"Bad news sells best. Cause good news is no news."
Dear Roger,
After 37 years of therapy I don't feel a bit better, so your modesty as a therapist becomes you.
All writing is therapy, though, at least for the writer. For the reader it can be therapeutic, as you and many of your posters demonstrated by sharing favorite passages from favorite works. I think that is what Humbert hoped , though as we know and he did not, it was already too late.
I thoroughly enjoyed your article, which is nothing unusual. However, it brought to my mind another finger of the argument of being a hungry vulture for public demise-whether real or fictional or really fictional.
Having seen the film "Milk", I could not help but notice the lack of a scene that I had hoped would be included. Dan White (the one who killed Harvey Milk--oh no, a spoiler!) was found dead in his car after committing suicide from exhaust asphyxiation shortly after the trial. On the radio, playing on a loop, was the song "The Fields of Athenry". What a great scene that would be! Maybe a slow track through the house (with the song rising on the soundtrack), leading up to an open door to the garage, closing in on the window.
Of course, that is missing the whole point of the film, which is about Harvey Milk's life and not about his death. I have read your review of "The Times of Harvey Milk" and understand why you only gave it 3 1/2 stars. On the other hand, I just simply wanted to see the simplest scene there could have been to "understand" Dan White in the end: that desolate death-which is an oxymoron, but so true in White's case. That scene was there in my head when I sat down to view the film and was still there when I left the theater.
Ebert: But...why that particular song?"
Dear Roger,
I'll bet that you have or can get this information. Is there a database that breaks down or one that rates and ranks performers by, say, the frequency of their films on cable, download, etc. I bring this up because it seems to me that Keanu Reeves is on ALL THE TIME, and not just Point Break ( then again, I'd like to see Patrick Swayze's numbers, too, Road House is on even more than Point Break). My daughters assure me that Keanu is the most-watched star, if you put it all together. An LA Times columnist (not worth naming ) did a similar anti-Kidman piece and it got me to thinking that, since she has never been big US box-office but gets paid a lot, there probably is a reason, and that reason may be related to home video, long-term performance. the last picture of hers that I saw in a theatre was Eyes Wide Shut, but I've watched her subsequent films, even Arbus and Dogville, some more than once.
P.S. When I saw Dogvile, my first thought was " Kubrick lives!" I like it a lot, but even if one hates it, Nicole is very good in it. She's even good in that creepy picture with the kid, which in my opinion fits into your category of something that just is, like the weather, or Pink Flamingoes.
Ebert: Wouldn't you prefer "Birth" to be creepy, with an intelligent, articulate heroine who doesn't believe in reincarnation, than a sentimental exercise in New Age soppiness?
Dear Roger,
in re:Birth
I prefer not to accept either of the offered choices. As my therapist, I beg you not to ask me whom I identified with in the bathtub scene.
Kidman should have pulled out of the movie, let them sue her, and let Sherilyn Fenn ( or Sheryl Lee?) play the roll.
It is my personal opinion that no matter how risque or crazy the filmmakers or actors or artists in general are. If the work they produce is great then it will be recognized as such, eventually. No matter their circumstance or vendettas against them. That is why people like Roman Polanski, no matter what he may has done in the past, something for what I may add I do no condone in any way shape or form. Can be recognized even by the Academy for, THE PIANIST. even though he lives in exile from the U.S. The same people that for the most part look at people like Jim Carrey as merely just another comic actor. Not paying attention to his more recent work in, "Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind." and others like, THE MAN ON THE MOON. Point being, time is the only thing people should be worrying about. Not some silly reporter, who gets paid to slander. (NOT referring to all just the kind you were talking about)
I've been joking for years that Diane Arbus must have been hired to take my high school photograph! I never know what to say when people mispronounce her name. It seems pretentious to correct someone, but also disrespectful to allow someone's name who is no longer with us to be continually mispronounced.
How much money a movie makes means nothing to me, nor does how much the movie cost to make. I've wondered for a long time why people live through movie stars' falls and downfalls. I understand tabloids now offer top dollar for photos of the stars' kids. Why in the world would anyone care about this?
You are the only person posting here (I think) who can offer a unique insight, though. I know you aren't going to be opening a movie soon, but the birds of prey would certainly be around you had you not beat them to the punch by allowing yourself to be photographed after your surgery. How do you approach being famous, Roger?
Ebert: I found it would always work if I stood next to a movie star.
Thanks for the great post Roger. I've always liked ambitiously messy movies (Kubrick's/Spielberg's "AI " comes to mind). Even if they fail as entertainment, you have to admire the craft and risk that appears in such films. I'll see "Australia" because I've always liked Luhrmann's vision, even if I've walked away disliking the film as a whole ("Romeo+Juliet").
Dear Roger,
In re:in re"Birth"
1) Ouch.
2) Marge-" You liked Rashomon"
Homer-" That's not the way I remember it"
Re. Neal Buckley's comment:
Several sites online say that Dan White was found in his car with 'The Fields of Athenry' playing on a loop. More (but still without absolute corroboration) say it was 'The Town I Loved So Well.'
Either way, it fits well enough from Dan White's twisted perspective. He was more or less Irish American, and both songs are Irish ballads. 'The Fields of Athenry' is about a man imprisoned for a righteous act---trying to feed his starving family, which fits into White's family and money problems, and his lifelong perception of righteousness.
'The Town I Loved So Well' is about the ruin of the singer's beloved hometown as it becomes a military outpost---fitting into White's nostalgia, his faith in conservative San Francisco, his perception of the city's moral decline, and perhaps his perception of the riots that followed his sentencing.
Really, it all fits much too well into his public personality, so it's probably a completely false rumor.
"Okay, so it'll probably kill cinemas in small towns, but nobody lives in small towns anyway, certainly nobody interesting"
Same to you, buddy.
Considering the overall bankruptcy of the culture, and the general decadence, it's entirely possible, and even likely, that small(er) towns now contain about the same amount of interesting people, proportionately speaking, as do major cities. I live in a smaller (not small) city (not town), and I'm pretty interesting, even perhaps as interesting as the inherently interesting big-city commenter quoted above. And most of the people I know from our very uninteresting high school who ended up in cities were cookie-cutter, efficient, professional people, and people who only affected coolness and depth, but were actually pretty shallow, and now use the city (Chicago, btw- I'm in a NW Indiana suburb) mostly to meet other people who want to party or persist in otherwise immature lifestyles indefinitely, in a setting where such things are less likely to attract negative attention, or become as obviously and undeniably pathetic as they actually are. Cities are not any better, and may be worse than smaller cities and towns, at breeding genius - check the birthplaces of great authors sometime. Salinger is the exception, not the rule. But even he ended UP in a small town (where better to hide? knowing the Jasons of the world wouldn't even bother looking there). I will say, as someone now interesting who spent a great deal of his youth as, essentially, a tourist of the city (weekends and summers), that for someone with money, and taste, the big city affords countless cultural opportunities. But so does Walden Pond, provided one has a library card.
Still, thank you Jason for making that deeply offensive, ignorant comment. It was the only spice in your entire post, the rest of which was such that one might well have missed your casual dismissal of most of the world population.
Ebert: Ever notice how so many of the most interesting people in big cities come from small towns where they have Steak 'n Shakes? David Letterman pines, literally pines, for a Supersteakburger. Ever notice how he leans over and says something in a guest's ear when they're going to commercial? A lot of the time, he would tell me, "I'm pining for a Supersteakburger right now!"
My contention is that movie stars are an uncommonly intelligent lot. Admittedly I have never engaged any known actor in any meaningful conversation. I did cross paths with Claude Akins once at the bar in an Atlanta restaurant. He was a very open,likable guy and was amiably fielding questions that I was sure he'd been asked numerable times before. When my turn came,I asked him who the smartest actor he ever worked with was? Thought a second and said drolly "probably Slim Pickens." More questions and I didn't get a follow up, so don't know for sure if old Claude was kidding around or not. But, as one who would know, Roger, have you ever met a truly dumb movie star? Would you consider them an uncommonly intelligent lot?
Ebert: I honestly never have. Some of them do truly dumb things, to be sure.
Ebert: People don't realize it, and I'm too modest to say, but my reviews are a form of therapy. I cure the problems you don't know you have, and then they go away and leave no sign, so that proves it.
I'm going to read all your reviews as an insurance policy..wait insurance for what? Thanks again.
Ebert: If nothing happens, you'll know it works. I gar-an-tee it.
Oops..."The Town I Loved So Well" instead.
Hype begets negative hype. I actually like that.
Mr. Ebert, earlier you wrote to a commenter who alleged that no one interesting really lives in small towns:
You know, I actually believe interesting people can and do live in small towns.
Good for you, and I agree 100%. But (and apologies for another threadjack) what about the suburbs? I especially note in mind your praise for Revolutionary Road, American Beauty, The Ice Storm... it just seems you've never seen a suburb-knocking flick you didn't love.
I'm from Lakewood, California, the small town where this notorious early 1990s scandal erupted. However, at almost exactly the same time, Lakewood also inspired this beautiful and lyrical book, which has been praised by the likes of Joan Didion, no less. (And also, which I personally wish someone would turn into-- you guessed it-- a movie.)
It just personally irritates me that while some stereotypes are (deservedly) dismissed, others are embraced and reinforced again and again, even by those as erudite as movie critics. Why is the "suburbs=hell" meme so seductive?
Ebert: I believe I was referring more to the movies than to their locations. American suburbs have grown more diverse and complex, as I know from personal observation. Small town movie: "Junebug." Suburb movie: "Juno." All kinds of people, all places. But see "Revolutionary Road" for the suburbs when new, post- War.
Your post reminds me of a realization I had a number of years ago. After seeing "The Mothman Prophecies", it occurred to me that I no longer hated Richard Gere as an actor -- which made me wonder why I hated him in the first place.
The best I can figure is, as a kid, I received via osmosis a pop-culture backlash against Richard Gere which followed the massive success of "Pretty Woman".
It seems to me that popular actors/actresses get this sort of backlash when their success exceeds some sort of broadly perceived level of talent. DiCaprio seemed to get similar resentment after "Titanic"'s success. Tom Cruise seems to have become undeserving of success because of his widely publicized 'craziness'.
Personally, it all seems to result from people's own insecurities. Once people get the "I could do that, too" attitude, they get resentful of another's success*.
* See Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing".
Ebert: Richard Gere is a smart man and a good one, IMHO.
Ebert: Not a chance. They were all grown-ups. But Hitchcock? Good gravy, maybe you're right. Too slow. Subtle. Not enough action. Requires some thought and a useful attention span. No teenagers.
There are no doubt a lot of teenagers nowadays who couldn't handle a movie like that, but I'd like to hope Hitchcock would have absolutely no chance. My dad introduced me to Hitchcock before I was 13 even, and I think I handled him just fine even then, 10 years ago. Though, I suppose, look at how different "Disturbia" was from "Rear Window." No doubt, there has been at least some change in tastes over the years. Look at Connery's Bond vs. Craig's Bond. Still, I'd like to blame the studios just as much for Hitchcock not working nowadays as I would the viewers. But, that begs the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Also, not that my opinion means much, but if you get a chance this Spring during the slow movie season, I would suggest "Apocalypto." I recently watched it for the second time and enjoyed it as thoroughly as I remember enjoying it in the theater.
We have become fanaticized as a nation by celebrity and wealth - it practically dominates our news nowadays. We love to put people up on pedastals and then watch them fall - it always makes for great headlines. Honestly, how many Niclole Kidman, Lindsay Lohan articles or tv coverage do we need for a day? The news today isn't neccessarily interested in the artistic quality of a persons work - they are interested in the trappings of a lifestyle that people want to see.
Roger, I'm really pleased you wrote this, particularly the comments in deference to the continued barrage of contempt being hurled at Tom Cruise. Reading this piece, I was reminded of a conversation I had back in the summer of 2005, when the updated version of ""War of the Worlds" debuted.
I had anticipated the release of that film for some time and I saw it opening night. I was not disappointed. Afterwards, my companions and I sojourned to a local bar/restaurant to discuss the movie.
Joining us at our table was another acquaintance, a young lady who had not accompanied us to the film. During the ensuing conversation, she made very clear her distaste for the idea of seeing a film starring Tom Cruise, an attitude which she stated was inspired by the Oprah incident and the later psychology comments.
My response to her was as follows (this is verbatim): "I don't give a crap. I really, honestly don't. Tom Cruise can wear a pink tutu and dance a jig while singing opera on Letterman for all I care. I enjoy his work as an actor. I have always enjoyed his work as an actor. At ten bucks per ticket, I plan on continuing to enjoy his work as an actor. Why? Because he's one of the most consistently reliable performers on screen today and I know going in that there's a better than average chance I will be entertained and get my money's worth."
Individuals like the guy from PopWatch are confusing being clever with being pompous. It's all about what's on the screen, not religious beliefs, marriages and divorces or whether or not some guy from the Fifth Avenue and Main Street condo association newsletter thought M:I III underperformed. With the exception of extreme situations such as the mess involving director Victor Salva a few years back* , the personal life of the involved talent doesn't enter into it.
* After that news broke, I did have a reaction. I couldn't bring myself to purchase a ticket to one of Salva's films and potentially put my hard-earned money in his pocket.
Roger,
It's strange that your least interesting (to me anyway) blog is about movies.
I personally like Nicole Kidman up until a few years ago (and I have no idea why though I suspect face altering technology may have something to do with it). That said, I think the focus on her is simply ridiculous.
I really like Tom Cruise as he invariably turns out interesting movies. MI3 excluded.
My reason for writing is not the problems faced by Nicole & Tom. It's a bigger issue and refers to your centerist blog.
We get what we deserve.
Our pathetic fascination with trivia and gossip supports a new media that feeds on human lives because we want it to. It is as simple as that.
WE ARE THE PROBLEM. Not the media. THEY SERVE US.
Rob
Mike: Are you so certain? If AMAZING could be objectively defined and Lindsay Lohan were spotted anywhere in ITS vicinity, I dare say that's ALL we'd be hearing about. If she smeared some green grease in her hair and emoted all boggle-eyed and drooling in front of Christopher Nolan's over-rated camera as The Joker's Daughter, all her "Girls Gone Wild" excesses would be excused. I've read more about Heath Ledger's AMAZINGNESS and niceness in THIS THREAD than I ever wanted or needed to read in order to make up my own mind.
I see what you mean (though I loved The Dark Knight, and Ledger's was one of my favourite performances of the films I saw at the cinema last year). The thing is, Lohan's a capable actress (well, she was), and I reckon one day she'll deliver a great performance - but it's very dubious that the media would be singing its praises when she's such an easy target. Sure, they did it with Robert Downey Jr., but I doubt they're going to do it any time soon for the likes of Cruise or Kidman, and Kidman hasn't even done anything 'wrong'. Lohan can go one of two routes (to extend a exemplar to breaking point) - the RDJ route or the Cruise route. The more I think about it, the more your point makes more sense - but it would all depend on the box office of the film with her acclaimed performance, wouldn't it? If it did less than expected, it'd be a "Lindsay Lohan failure", despite a great performance. Hence two malevolent threads of modern-day entertainment 'journalism' come together in one monstrous snake. If it was a TDK-size smash, then it'd be "Lindsay Lohan, give her an Oscar now!" It depends on any number of factors, most of all the box office.
That reads like a mess. Oh well.
Oh, and Mike - I saw The Visitor today - I loved Richard Jenkins too. A brilliant, subtle performance.
Ebert: Not a chance. They were all grown-ups. But Hitchcock? Good gravy, maybe you're right. Too slow. Subtle. Not enough action. Requires some thought and a useful attention span. No teenagers.
I'm 19, and shamefully have only seen one Hitchcock film in my life. Although I did love almost every minute of Rear Window (beyond the terrible special effects). I hope this at least gives you an iota of hope for the future of mankind, Mr. Ebert.
Ebert: Now see "Notorious" or "Vertigo."
By Ron Barth, Jr. on January 5, 2009 3:35 PM
"So tell me, Mickey, did you vote for Reagan, or would you have voted for Schwarzenegger (assuming you're not a California resident), despite their breaking the celebs-can't-speak-their-minds-about-politics rule?"
Hey there Ron: First, I didn't stage a protest or "boycott" the Dixie Chicks. I simply chose not to purchase their product. It was not because they spoke their mind, but in the manner in which Natalie Maines spoke hers; specifically, while on foreign soil with our most staunch ally on the eve of the war against Iraq. Some people do not realize that when you diminish the President (arguably the most powerful person in the world), you diminish our country. Is she entitled to her opinion? Absolutely. I believe how and where she declared her opinion was horribly naive and idiotic and I am not going to support a person who is so blissfully and defiantly ignorant of that fact. She did it to kowtow to an audience she supposed was anti-American. It was a cheap parlor trick and she deserved the backlash (not the death threats) she received.
And so you know, I stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and put my hand over my heart. I take my hat off during the national anthem. I don't fly a flag at night and I never let it touch the ground. These are all part of the unwritten rules of being an American. I may disagree with the President (I have and do). I may disagree with the direction of the Country (I do). But I would never go overseas as a celebrity and choose to speak negatively of my Country especially during such a tenuous time in history.
And Ron, please don't compare Natalie Maines to Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Both of those gentlemen were well steeped in politics long before they attempted to run for office. They ran for office and were elected by a majority of the voters. Reagan was in the military, and then entered politics long before being elected governor of California (two terms) and the President of the United States. Schwarzenegger did not have the background of Reagan, but was a committed party supporter and invested into politics through his marriage. Natalie Maines sings (rather well) in a band.
I was 7 when Ronald Reagan was elected President. I am fairly sure I voted for him in my second-grade election though. And you are right, I am not a Californian. And I would have voted for Schwarzenegger if I thought he was the best person to run my state. And to do this, I would have researched his background as much as could be practically done, become versed in the issues of the state, and made a value judgment of whether or not I would want that person representing me. That's was a Representative Republic is about: electing persons that best reflect your set of core principles and values and who you think will perform the most satisfactory.
I am not an Archie Bunker, love-it-or-leave-it person. I prize the first amendment and thank all of those individuals, military and civilian, who sacrificed everything to defend that principle. But, I also have a that same right to express my discord with those that choose to diminish the United States. I hope that answers you, Ron.
For the same reason that Ozymandias is remembered:
If the mighty can fall, then the failure of the ephemera is lessened.
I was thinking about a point that you brought up in a previous article or response about how the mind approaches television and film differently. I think that the preoccupation with the personal details of actors, and artists in general, when they achieve a measure of fame and the schadenfreude in underperformance at the box office is a result mostly of the instant intellectual and emotional processes of television. It is easy to absorb the fragments of "reportage" surrounding a scandal and also easy and satisfying to reduce a person into a single event or sound bite.
With film, you must approach a character and performance with much more intellectual rigor and openness. Why spend two hours getting to know someone when you can draw a conclusion in 20 seconds?
I am not a huge Cruise fan, but in the last three movies that I have seen of his--War of the Worlds, Minority Report, and Eyes Wide Shut--I have enjoyed his performances and did not find that any of his personal details distracted me from these movies. Since I've confined my TV viewing in the last 10 years almost solely to sports (which of course has its own issues of media saturation), it helped immensely in viewing and appreciating the artistry and craft of many actors without extraneous prejudice. Which brings me to a question, is there responsibility on the audience's part to do research on the artist prior to viewing the art? Am I being irresponsible for not knowing more about Mel Gibson? How about Roman Polanski? Elia Kazan?
Good insights, Roger. It's terribly sad how it seems that everyone's out to crucify someone, especially when it's undeserved.
Also, I just want to say that, for the record, as a long-time gas permeable man, I find nothing disgusting about the removal of a contact lens, although my sister's best friend used to get grossed out when I'd pop my retainer out with my tongue.
What you rightly point out is that there is a cycle imposed on stars, actresses in particular, that preordains a certain coverage of their careers. The cycle is based on building up and tearing down, for both garner consistent attention.
For the actress in particular, the declaration of "decline" is guaranteed, preordained from the start, for it is built into the fact that she only has so much time to be young and beautiful before she is cannibalized and disappears from the screen.
But age is only the last line of defense. Far better if personal problems derail the star while she is still young and beautiful. American culture thrives on this manner of virgin sacrifice.
The great meta-movie for all of this is of course "A Star Is Born." One wonders, did the system precede the film, or is the film the blueprint for the system that is still in place?
I remember reading that Joan Crawford was seen as one of the few actresses to ever escape this system of cannibalization. She continued to adapt, taking roles that "suited her age" (i.e. wholesome mother, devious crone). Is there a contemporary actress who could be seen as a parallel? Julie Christie has utterly floored me with her characterizations of increasingly older women, but she has operated more or less from outside Hollywood.
Ebert: Judi Dench...Meryl Streep...Liv Ullmann...Jeanne Moreau...Lauren Bacall...
I was once a great fan of the show, Mystery Science Theater 3000 or MST3k. A show that made fun of movies with little silhouettes in front of the screen 'riffing' at old and sometimes abhorrent movies. It would often attack old fifty's shorts and exploitation films. It had wit and random silliness with sometimes gut-busting puns and was often considered The smartest show on television. So when it was canceled, I was rather put off. recently though, the Head Writer Mike Nelson released Rifftrax on the internet. Which sells MP3s' of their comments that you sync up to any particular movie that they target, even big Hollywood releases!! I was pleased as punch at first, but gradually I've come to be seriously put off by it for exactly the behavior your talking about. Where once you had obscure references (like Diane Arbus) and real biting satire. Now you have pithy jokes about Amy Winehouse's drug addiction and groaning references to internet memes. That and the attitude that I once thought they reserved for cheesy exploitation and cynical educational shorts are sometimes put up against honest to god, good movies. Most recently the original Star Wars. In a time as forboding as this, do we really need to be cynical about Star Wars?. The worse thing is, on occasion, it's still really funny stuff. 'Joker' "Do you know why I use knives?" 'Riff' "Because soup tastes better when it's difficult"
I'm honestly torn by this, because I love these guys but they Their cursed knowledge of pop culture and mean delivering is off-putting. They are weaving dangerously close to 'Family Guy' country. However, should you visit the site. Be sure to preview the Educational shorts. They are still rather funny, probably more so without being burned out by the main features.
Story is making it out this morning that during a run on Broadway or something, maybe 20 weeks long, Katie Holmes dropped $14 mil shopping. This while the vast majority of the rest of Americans wondered how they were to pay next month's bills.
I think it's a simple merit issue. And I think it's a sign of the loss of something crucial in this society that the most anyone does about it is enjoy nasty gossip about these people, and pro athletes, and CEOs and politicians. In a country with a pulse, a sense of justice, and a vocal, educated group willing and able to incite the rest to violence, you'd have something else altogether.
What it comes down to is, we have two separate countries. Stars are not in ours. They're in the nice one, and, however hard they work or talented they are, they do not deserve anywhere near the amount of money they make compared to most other people. Money is not just symbolic it controls labor, and there is only so much of it, and however much more these few people have, it's that much less MANY people have out in the real world. So to ask people to not hate these people is like asking a black person in 50's Alabama not to resent the white people who, for no good reason, got to live a much easier life than he did.
So it's about justice. Mother Theresa was not worth $14 mil, Katie Holmes is dropping it in four months shopping. And if it weren't for TV (and I'm completely serious) I doubt athlete and actor salaries would ever have been allowed to get where they are today ; but you dumb a populace down so much, they become completely depoliticized, and then any injustice at all is allowed to go on, and there's no threat of the people rising up to stop it.
And I know the CEOs and bankers are worse, or at least as bad. But their being worse doesn't make athletes and 'entertainers' (some are, some, not so much) any less guilty. If this country were ever to wake up (and I don't foresee a way this would happen with television and mass advertising so firmly established), it'd be like The Day of the Locust out there. Hollywood would be under siege. Wall Street too, but Hollywood for sure. And there's nothing in the least wrong with that. The sad thing about this sort of anti-star gossip isn't that it's attacking these people, but that it's not coming right out and saying why it is - perhaps because the people involved are themselves unconscious of the source of the resentment. It's just an outlet for impotent people to vent their impotent rage, when they should really turn off the TV and start reading and participating politically to stop the free ride these criminals have gotten the past several decades.
Oh and when little Suri is controlling the labor of my children or my friends' children, that'll be great, too. I don't think these people have any idea how lucky they are that everyone else is asleep while they're on this crime spree. They ought to be very thankful this (ie, the gossip and hatefulness from fans and media) is all they're being made to pay. Some day that may change, and then these times will seem to them like halcyon days.
ps
I'm just kidding, actually. I think it's great that a labor nurse can work 45 years and earn less in that time than some starlet will get for photographs of her newborn. That's just fantastic. Who would be mad about that?
Ebert: I read that Cruise is concerned about his wife's shopping addiction.
I must confess, the first time I heard the name Diane Arbus was upon reading your original review of "Fur."
Ebert: They didn't appreciate it half as much as I did because you remember my review of a movie I didn't review. Damn, I'm good.
I have not seen the movie "Fur" but I am positive I read your review of it (I also remember the Diane Arbus reference). It does not seem to be in the database now.
Ebert: "Apocolypto" was off my radar during illness.
Well, damn, I'm also sure I read your review of "Apocalypto" (part of the reason I remember deciding to see it) but its not there now either. I could be wrong on that one, but I'm certain I've read other reviews that later on I could not relocate on the site when I went back to reread them. Is it possible some reviews "slip through the cracks" for some reason?
Ebert: They were almost certainly written by Jim Emerson.
Ebert: I doubt he would have appreciated it. It might have been the 10,000th time he heard it.
Must've been a compulsive winker, then (not to be confused with wanker).
Julian Wheatley on January 5, 2009 2:06 AM
...(side note: TDK extra post made me smile).
Happy to help, Julian. (But was it the delusional extra tale, or the nice-guy-Heath part?)
I have known several guys like your delusional extra. The Heath Ledger you spoke of made me smile.
Garrett on January 5, 2009 12:17 AM
The title of the episode was "Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods." I had literally just finished reading your excellent review of Revolutionary Road, and when I saw this I almost fell out of my chair.
I have always wondered if there was an unknown feud between Roger Ebert and South Park creators. I think I have proof. In the summer of 1998, Ebert reviewed Baseketball starring none other than Matt Stone and Trey Parker, South Park creators. It was given One and a half stars or two thumbs down based on the new scale. Now even though they were the stars of the movie they actually had nothing to do with the scripts. Maybe the fact that Ebert's poor rating gave signs of things to come. Stone and Parker were about to release their own movie later that year, Orgazmo(half a star), and could be very well be why they made Baseketball to begin with. The South Park episode "Roger Ebert..." was released that year at the beginning of September and probably as a warning for fans not to take advice from movie critics when their film was released the next month they took a jab at one of the most revered critics. Having read all of your reviews of films involving them, the South Park rating was the closest to a thumbs up than any other film. But I think it is because of the work Pam Brady does as a cowriter tranposes the tv show into a film. She helped Andy Samberg's Lonely Island web talents become a hit in Hot Rod and she even wrote some great material for Steve Coogan in Hamlet 2. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are great at TV, and just average on movies.
Ebert: Can't say I was offended. I should've laid off fatty foods.
I think there's just a lot of anger and resentment towards people who have a lot of money. So now it's reflected in all the stories about actors, actresses, and big-budget movies that fail. People like to read about that, internet websites are full of this kind of stuff, so there's more and more articles to satisy that need.
Excellent blog, as always. I disagree about "Australia," but then that's incidental. I'm a (wannabe) critic at my university and, amateurish and slowly-learning as I am, it bewilders me how many supposed professionals review based on who's in it and much buzz it's getting. I've taken to likening Ben Lyons' criticism to Wall*E opening the jewelery box, tossing out the item of value and instead marveling over the worthless plastic that encases it (but that LA Times article attacking him was just terrible).
Ebert: Not a chance. They were all grown-ups. But Hitchcock? Good gravy, maybe you're right. Too slow. Subtle. Not enough action. Requires some thought and a useful attention span. No teenagers.
I dunno. I'm 19, and my friends fall into the 17-21 range. I'd say about half of my closest friends rank Rear Window in their personal "Top Tens" (maybe that's why they're my closest friends). Then again, I think I'm the only one who's watched Notorious, and maybe if I could stop rewatching it myself I could teach them something.
Now, getting them to like Herzog? Herculean task #13.
Roger, you've posted a valid comment, and I often am infuriated at the constant barrage of "news" about celebrity doings. I've reached the point where I only watch about 1-2 hours of television a week, and I'm really beginning to appreciate Groucho Marx's comment: Television is very educational. Every time someone turns one on, I go into another room and read a good book.
Many commentators have given their take on the causes of this, and I'd like to vote for d) all of the above. With an addendum.
I think it's easy, and cheap, for "news" organizations to pay tens of thousands of dollars (or even hundreds of thousands) for photos of celebrities caught in the act of doing something wrong. It's easier because there are literally thousands of bozos with cameras out there snapping pictures, hoping for the next windfall. With this kind of set up, the news organization has to only pay for the picture, and not any of the "infrastructure" - they don't have to pay salary, benefits, equipment, transportation. The free-lancer pays for that him/herself. The news organization doesn't have to pay for a journalist to interview someone, etc., etc.
So, having convinced their readers that they want "news" about celebrities, the whole thing becomes a positive feedback loop - more news about celebrities means that's what more people see and think they want, which means editors want more news about celebrities, and so on.
And of course, the great unwashed masses, given nothing but the pablum of "celebrity news", never discover the pleasures of meatier fare.
Also, I think I've noticed a pattern. When you look at the stars who are targeted, I think there is a sort of calculation made between perceived level of talent and effort vs. the infractions. I've read many comments that Tom Cruise is not particularly talented as an actor, or at least his range has diminished. He continues to earn big bucks and marquee status; but what has he done? Treat Oprah's sofa like a trampoline and be open about his Scientology.
So I think that there's a point where people perceive Tom Cruise to be not talented or just not trying - and yet he continues to get this star treatment, and it's easy for people to judge that he doesn't deserve it. And so, out come the knives.
Ebert: The movie "Delirious" (2002) has Steve Buscemi as a hard-working paparazzi, and captures the life perfectly.
Isn't it interesting how, when a star is NOT in some scandal, he ends up nowhere in a magazine article, or on TV, or anything? He simply disappears to have his good life. Such an actor would be someone like Ben Affleck. After he and Jennifer Garnar had their baby, they smiply disappeared from the headlines, and really haven't been back. I say "Good for them," simply because of how the papers, or and kind of media, for that matter, is run these days: something is wrong with you, or you are not worthy of a story.
It is very upsetting news to learn that people dismissed Tom Cruise before the film came out, based on his "couch-jumping" moment. I tell you, I watched that episode of Opera (I'm sure many people did), and all I could see was a happy man, excited with life! How could people have reigned down so hard on the man? Sure, he did a botched interview with Matt Lauer (which was more scary than anything else), but, really, after three and a half years they are still bringing it up? That's pretty heinous if you ask me.
Savvy
Jason on January 5th: "This makes sense at a micro, film by film, level, but at a macro level it results in fewer film studios, making bigger and bigger movies and demanding larger audiences to support them. Scale down. Make movies on lower budgets, so audiences can be smaller. The smaller audiences will be happier, and more likely to buy the DVD."
Ah, I am back and forth on that point. I stand by something that Whoopi Goldberg said: "Movies are suppose to be big - If they're not big, they're television".
Thank you, Mickey, for giving me the very definition of boycott ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boycott )while stating that you did not boycott them, despite previously being a fan of their music. It needn't be "staged" or public to be a boycott.
That would be our most staunch ally in a misguided endeavor, illegal under international law, about which the British public was much better informed -- and to which they were largely opposed -- because they are not subjected to the same degree of corporate captive, war profiteering media as we are?
Reagan's military service, somewhat confused by his befuddled recollection in later life that he'd actually seen combat, was cosmetic; in that, as in his politics, he was not a man of principle so much as an opportunistic performer. Remember, he was a union president and a Democrat -- and ardent supporter of FDR's New Deal, in fact, until he made some money and those uppity blacks started looking for equal treatment under the law.
Defending that principle includes those who have the audacity to actually exercise their First Amendment right to speak, even at great personal cost to themselves, as Natalie Maines did. And who has diminished the United States more, Natalie Maines or George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? The United States is its Constitution, not its territory, not its wealth, not its people or politicians. Remember, the oath they swear is "to support and defend the Constitution...against all enemies, foreign and domestic," not the people, the landmass, the wealth, or the corporations. In that, there can be little reasonable argument that the current administration, in its abject disregard for the law (and the laws) of the land, is deserving of whatever scorn is heaped upon it, no matter the forum.
Don't forget, also, that what the rest of the world sees from American media is largely cheerleading for war, despite the draft-dodging, drug-addicted megaphones with pilonidal cysts who endlessly and inanely trumpet their "liberal media" trope. You may disagree with our government, but you have no real media forum in which to express that disagreement. Celebs, on the other hand, do, and they are absolutely right to use the media that dotes on them to publicize their political viewpoints. Bottom line, if more people had listened to the "liberal" -- otherwise known as correct or prescient with regards to Iraq -- celebs, we would not have murdered/displaced hundreds of thousands/millions of Iraqis in Bush's delusional vendetta just to show up/make proud his Daddy, not to mention having tens of thousands of our own American kids dead or grievously wounded.
Spoken...or written, actually...like a true American: "I don't need first-hand evidence 'in order to make up my own mind.'" Also, you might wish to lose the CAPS; your adolescence is showing.
Stars are being paid the huge bucks not just for their work on a movie set, but also for the "STAR" status.
I'd love to ask have a kind of test for those on the verge of stardom. Tell them you can 1) Act for the rest of your life in interesting work in small independent movies and on the stage and make a nice decent living but you will only live nicely not luxuriously (nice home, nice vacations etc), no easy in at most palces or 2)You can be a STAR and get HUGE money to buy the best of the best in terms of houses, cars, clothes etc. and you can be guranteed top treatment at restuarants etc and meet with the biggest names of your time, BUT you will be followed by photogs all the time and people will critisize you and will be happy when you fail.
What percentage do you think would choose 1? Maybe 15 percent?
" The more I think about it, the more your point makes more sense - but it would all depend on the box office of the film with her acclaimed performance, wouldn't it? If it did less than expected, it'd be a 'Lindsay Lohan failure', "
Adam, none of these pronouncements are certain because none of them are ever placed in context. If the first reviewer to write "Lindsey Lohan's performance was sensational" has any clout, each subsequent reviewer will tend to repeat it. No reviewer mentioned the ending of TDK (God, I'm sick of using that movie as an example of anything - I'm tired of it being referenced in every response to every Ebert blog! ((But, here I go))) was a jumbled, confusing WTF that contradicted all of the inarguably good stuff that happened prior. They couldn't, because their credibility depends on consensus. Critical thinking is not required for movie reviewing. (Roger Ebert, of course, is an obvious example of the minority of writers who actually apply critical thinking, because the writing is the important thing to them, not the perpetuation of Hollywood hype.)
Let us contend that the following is false: "Tom Cruise's career is on a down-turn because audiences think he's a flake." There certainly is no emperical evidence to defend the statement. Yet it is implied and implied and it becomes "common knowledge."
Why would we contend that the following is true: "Will Smith is the greatest star on the planet right now."?? Again, the science is as faulty as Ben Stein's intelligence. But, we continually read of Mr. Smith's overwhelming aptitude and charm for weeks before any of his movies open. Then, if the movie is a drama, it disappears with a whisper.
Oscar season celebrates many movies that lack Box Office statistics. Indeed, we COMPLAIN that hits are discriminated against at awards time. Brad Pitt is likely to be nominated for BENJAMIN BUTTON, while Richard Jenkins is not. Does that mean anything? Not unless, if he were to win, Brad Pitt's name and description as "Oscar winner" were always denoted with an asterisk.
I'm certain, if Lindsey Lohan ever meets AMAZING at a party and shakes its hand, it will be reported in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, and we'll all get a chance to see her reclaim her supposed importance as a star. Since no one expects a Lindsey Lohan vehicle to perform well at the Box Office, accounting would be unlikely to rear its ugly head during any discussion. If TDK had bombed - say, in a world of my devising where I was Emperor of Culture - do you think anyone would say it had been Heath Ledger's fault? (Mumble-mouthed Christian Bale in a stupid costume, I'm looking at you!)
We're all expected to believe Madonna has talent, too.
My point is, if we are pre-disposed to believe one thing or the other - good or bad - about a celebrity - our entire understanding of whom is based on their press - that will be our opinion. But neither is true, really. And even LESS important.
Paul, I think you're missing one essential point in labelling people like Katie Holmes "criminals".
Though they may make more than they "deserve" on some cosmic scale of compensation (though Mother Theresa's own virtue has been called into question), are Holmes and Cruise necessarily bad people just for taking those salaries? It's what their employers are willing to pay because their employers estimate that they will make at least that much back at the box office, and that is because we are willing to go and see their output. Audiences are complicit in the system. I may not be a big enough fan of Cruise or Holmes to see everything they make, but there have been many times when an actor or actress' presence has sold me on wanting to see a film.
Movies make lots of money, and have since their invention. It's the blessing and curse of the medium, a blessing because it means people are willing to invest in spectacles and some spectacles are very good indeed, a curse because the business often overshadows the art. But the stars earn what they earn because the studios think they'll bring in that much and more, and they're often right.
I think the writer Harlan Ellison made an interesting argument- you deserve to make however as much money as you can convince your bosses to give you. If, say, you are one of the stars of THE OFFICE, and NBC is making billions off of syndication and merchandise and ad sales, it's not really going overboard to ask if they could funnel some of that in your direction.
I have a number of thoughts on this subject. I'm not so worried about the celebrities themselves, although certainly Princess Di offers one example of how extreme the consequences can be when the press avails itself of the rights granted to it for the preservation of democracy, yet employs them to the end of creating and amplifying tabloid grotesquery. I worry about the people who inundate themselves in this cesspool of inconsequential curiosities. Frankly, the entertainment press and the viewer who imagines himself as part of the life of a stranger, the celebrity, verge on stalker mentality. I mean, the mentality is quite similar. Only the extent to which one acts on the delusions differs, so really it's a question of ontology whether feeding on these rumor mills is any worse than stalking celebrities. And in some cases the results can be similar.
As to why people do this, I think we can only speculate. I gather that you can read French from some comments that you have posted, so I will link this fable written by La Fontaine, "La Besace," that touches on the nature of people that might motivate them to revel in the destruction of these celebrities. Mainly, the idea is that one prefers to look at the faults of others, and the more one can focus on those extraneous faults the less one feels the need, perhaps, for painful introspection. I personally associate the term catharsis with the action of shifting scrutiny onto an external figure. It is pleasing to see a pasteboard villain destroyed by an uncomplicated good guy because one has the luxury then to associate wholly with goodness and place evil entirely outside of oneself.
http://bac-francais.hyadex.fr/ecrivains/jean-de-la-fontaine/fables/livre-1/la-besace.htm
As to the various commentators who have mentioned schadenfreude, it is not the height of discourse to slap a label on a phenomenon and consider the question resolved. There is little difference between saying, "It's schadenfreude," and resting your laurels than in offering a folk saying such as, "The grass is always greener on the other side of the field," as though the end of discussion were to find the proper foreign word or folk saying to file the issue under. Let us get to the "little lower layer," as Ahab implored.
I wonder, though, to what extent this argument is a critique of low culture by high culture. Surely, gossip has always existed, and high culture has been at pains to isolate it, at least formally, within the bounds of low culture. I think there is always a sense, in high culture, of being under siege. Certainly, as an elite, one is outnumbered. I wouldn't argue against elitism; in my opinion, that would just be sophistry. However, unrestrained critique of low culture has the potential to become an 'ism'. I felt that was a weak point of Mike Judge's Idiocracy, that it went for easy targets solely within low culture, and as such it felt like a duck shoot. I think you have done a good job of being prudent, but let us stay on guard. What use is criticism if we don't use it on ourselves, not from time to time, but with a regularity?
I got off track, there, though. What I meant to point out is that gossip is, in a sense, the province of the folk, perhaps a part of folk lore. Interest in stifling the lore of the folk is often a masked and unrecognized attempt to preserve the prevailing hegemony. But there will be gossip, do us what we will. Because I believe this, I believe that we should not attempt to harangue this entertainment media audience into changing their predilections, but that we can only, at best, set some standards of behavior for the media that provides them with their information buffet. The media should not necessarily be providing everything that the most gluttonous rumor consumer demands because what they are furnishing is by its nature some property of life that needs be extracted from the daily doings of celebrities, the process something like vampirism. Well, if vampires don't regulate their diet, then like too-virulent plagues they will by their very hunger extinguish themselves.
Consequently, I believe that the solution to this ugliness in the entertainment media is, perhaps, more government regulation to make people accountable for their words. I understand that journalists have to be able to protect their sources, but if they are now inventing sources so that they can write anything they want and pass it off as truth, then that is as much a threat to the journalistic ideal that undergirds democracy as would be forced revelation of sources. Additionally, either more regulation or more enforcement against Paparazzi-style photography or journalism would help make life easier on celebrities and cut down on the supply of meaningless but addictive faux-news out there (now Requiem for a Dream comes to mind, in terms of its wider view of addiction). I think that much of the laziness in journalism extends from the conglomeration of news-media, so perhaps some antitrust actions are in order as well.
Anyway, I should stop myself there. My inner-liberal is getting the better of me. :D
Ebert: Thought-provoking. You are an intellectual who writes with clarity. That doesn't always come with the territory.
Yes, I've noticed this thread is rife with "schadenfreude," which has never been mentioned here before, as I recall. Apart from wondering what different posters mean by it, I have to admit I'm impressed they all spell it correctly. I always have to look it up.
"cesspool of inconsequential curiosities." That would have been a better title for the entry.
Thank you Roger. We saw Australia and enjoyed it. The criticism of Nicole Kidman has become petty and childish. She is a lovely and talented Oscar winning actress. I look forward to more of her work and wish her and her family health and happiness.
I agree that Nicole Kidman doesn't deserve to be blacklisted and that she has done great films as well as not-great films, but since you bring her up, do tell me: don't you think that she would be a better actress if she could still move her face?
"Movie stars? We don't need no movie stars?"
Roger, after 4 yrs of staying away from theaters we broke our boycott and went to see Slumdog and what a joy it was. This is what a movie should be like.
Most of the new Hollywood films disgust me not just for the bad acting. Anyone with a leaked sex tape can get a film role. Marginally talented singers and rappers want to do movies in between designing clothes and perfumes. And what is up with the sameness of roles? -- Owen Wilson, Jen Aniston,Sarah jessica Parker, Vince Vaughn just to name a few, keep doing the same character over and over. Makes me think of the Beatles song "Act naturally". And then there are the most mind numbing sequels and prequels, star phones in a performance while waiting for the paychecks to roll in. Will George Clooney co-star with a teen Shiloh Jolie Pitt in Ocean's 22?
I won't be watching them,for me all the good viewing is now on PBS or cable tv.
Ebert: Don't shut out documentaries and foreign films. For a subtitled film to even get released in this country means several people bet their money that it was a good one.
Your comment about being more discriminating than others if in a theatre with only 50 people really hit home. I decided to see "The Reader" last night even though it barely registered a blip at the box office. I was the only person in the theatre. The movie was quite thought-provoking and your review nailed it. I was kind of sad about the fact that so few people will see this movie and felt a little awkward having the theatre to myself.
"Why do we thirst for movie stars to fail?" /*/*/ What do you mean "WE", Kemo Sabe? And why are you limiting this to movie stars? Schadenfreude does not discriminate; Anyone can play this game - and anyone can be played. It's just that tabloids and cable news ("the cabloids", as I'll be calling them from here on in), which now span the globe, are inescapable, so we know about misbehavior and misfortune almost from the moment it happens. Modern-day "journalism" seems to believe "Good news is no news" and positions itself accordingly. We not only know more than we need to know; if we're diligent enough, we learn more than we want to know. It can cost us our heroes - it has for me a number of times recently. /*/*/ Here's a quick example: as a White Sox fan, boy and man, I always admired Bill Veeck; I read both of his books while I was in high school. One story he told that particularly impressed me was of how he tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies during the war years, in order to stock it with players from the Negro Leagues. Veeck was in the Marines at the time, and still owned the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers, which was a complication; nonetheless, Veeck said he wanted to force the integration issue as soon as he could. As he tells it in "Veeck As In Wreck", he ran into doubts from Judge Landis, the commissioner, and outright opposition from Ford Frick, the National League president, and so nothing came of the plan. Veeck told this story on the lecture circuit all his life, occasionally varying some of the details, and everyone who ever wrote about him took it as sooth. Lap disssolve to 1998: Larry Gerlach, a baseball historian based in Philadelphia, decided to write the story up for the Baseball Research Journal, an annual pubication of SABR. Gerlach started with local sources in Philadelphia, working his way out to other possible sources around the country. The story was by now fifty years old , and most of the people were long gone, but surviving families and companies kept records, as did newspapers and libraries. What happened was something Gerlach did not expect: he found no corroboration of Veeck's story anywhere - anywhere at all. Veeck mentioned many people by name and gave them specific functions in his story; none of their descendants, could find anything in the family records to support Veeck's account. Newspapers of the time, which then as now covered the sale of a major league ballclub as if it were the transfer of government power, did not support Veeck's version. Gerlach published his article - not the one he expected- and it was clear that the admiration he had always had for Bill Veeck had taken a major hit (as mine did). /*/*/ This may be a bad example; Larry Gerlach was not out to nail Bill Veeck, as today's cabloids would almost certainly be. (Imagine what someone like Jay Mariotti would do with this.) But I would ask you to consider, given the current nature of The Beast, what has happened and almost certainly will happen to celebrities, sports stars, and politicians (especially the President-elect - whose daughters started school yesterday accompanied by more press than probably covered the last space shuttle launch) and ask a question I may have asked here (or somewhere) already: Which came first - the supply or the demand?
Ebert: Why do people do things like that? Maybe he should have added, "I meant to." He did send a dwarf up to the plate, though. Didn't he?
@ Ali Arikan: You win a steel cube.
I am an editor who developed the Wikipedia article for Valkyrie, and I am very much in agreement with your assessment of how people have reacted to the film leading up to its actual release. The film, as the article says, has been the source of "media sniping", and in expanding the article, I've been wary of commentary like that of MSNBC's Hazlett and FOX News's Friedman. Incidentally, it appears that Friedman was barred from a critics' screening and had to pay his way in, resulting in a very negative review of the film, labeling it "Nazi apologia". Valkyrie was a decent film, and I am glad that Cruise was vindicated by his statement some time ago, to see the film before being so critical.
Regarding Bryce Wilson's comment on January 5, 2009 2:39 AM
"We don't want her to die Stanley. We need her to die... for the corn." [snip]
And really, "The Corn" is as good of an explanation as any for why people obsess over this junk.
"The Corn" reference comes from 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson (http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lotry.html) , one of the better short stories of all time.
Ebert: “Wouldn't you prefer "Birth" to be creepy, with an intelligent, articulate heroine who doesn't believe in reincarnation, than a sentimental exercise in New Age soppiness?”
“Birth” is kind of a conundrum with me. I am not a fan of the film itself but I think it contains one of Nicole Kidman’s best performances. I like that she plays Anna not as a total skeptic or as a true believer but as a woman who seems to have never given a second thought to reincarnation. When the idea becomes a possibility it is fascinating to watch her reasonable doubts slowly begin to crack. Watch her face very carefully. In the beginning her face shows a lot of pain, then there begins a look of reassurance that begins around the edges of her eyes and her lips and slowly comes to cover her entire face culminating in that beautiful scene at the opera. I think she is a far more expressive actor than she is given credit for.
You know, something just occurred to me. Producer Joel Silver's The Invasion wasn't even the film Nicole Kidman signed up to make. She signed up for Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion, and I am very, very interested to see the movie that he put together before The Wachowski Brothers made it stupid. I'd like to see a bigger push for that.
[b]I'm 19, and shamefully have only seen one Hitchcock film in my life. Although I did love almost every minute of Rear Window (beyond the terrible special effects). I hope this at least gives you an iota of hope for the future of mankind, Mr. Ebert.[/b]
[b]Ebert: Now see "Notorious" or "Vertigo."[/b]
and the 39 Steps, the Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt (I'm so glad this is going into the Great Movies...is it still circling? Can't wait to read it!), Dial M for Murder and Frenzy.
I'd also recommend Stanley Donen's "Charade."
Seriously, how can suspense be boring?
A good German name like Ebert, and you have to look up schadenfreude, Roger?!? And oh goodie: I took a peek at Wiktionary just to confirm that schadenfreude has been adopted into the English language, thus obviating the need (well, my compulsive need, anyway) to italicize it, and they have a synonym, epicaricacy!
@ Julian Wheatley:
The guitar in "All My Whenever Minutes" sounds a lot like the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" (heard at the end of Fight Club as America's financial institutions collapse...literally, as opposed to their current economic collapse). Check your friend requests, even though you're a...eeeeeeek!...Texan.
I hate the way the whole media machine is driven, too, and I think I'm better than all that. But consider:
The #1 movie this week and last is by Brad Pitt's old flame. Their faces appear at every supermarket checkout stand in the US.
Jennifer Aniston's old flame-why, that's Brad!-has the #2 movie.
Brad's current wife, or whatever(news flash--I'm not considering her relationship to Brad when she's on the screen), did a great piece of work with Clint Eastwood. Made a ton of money, too.
Change the pieces around and you have the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman story.
All of us on this blog liked or considered attending most if not all of these movies. Just by that alone, we condone the current system, if we're honest, and it galls me to admit that I play along. But I do. We all do.
"Spoken...or written, actually...like a true American: "I don't need first-hand evidence 'in order to make up my own mind.'" Also, you might wish to lose the CAPS; your adolescence is showing."
Aw, shucks, Ron, you really got me there.
Heath Ledger's being a nice guy has as much relevance to his acting and the discussion at hand as Tom Cruise's flakiness.
And the caps were a direct reference to the post to which I was responding.
Now, the implied "true American" insult? You might want to lose the chip on your shoulder. People are going to think you're no fun at parties.
Suicide is adolescent. Now, call me names.
Ebert: "Apocolypto" was off my radar during illness.
Mike: "Well, damn, I'm also sure I read your review of "Apocalypto" (part of the reason I remember deciding to see it) but its not there now either."
Yeah, I thought he panned "Tideland" at some point, but there's no listing. Now let us never mention it again.
Ebert: I think you're all remembering Jim Emerson reviews written while I was sick.
Thanks for rushing to the defense of the poor, downtrodden Actors of the world, Mr. Ebert. It's all too easy to get caught up in our trival, selfish concerns: the worst economy since the Great Depression, Americans dying in two wars, and so forth, but thankfully, you and you alone have managed to keep your priorities straight. Thank god there are still heroes like yourself out there, willing to stand up for what's REALLY important: Tom Cruise getting bad reviews on his latest 20-million dollar payday. I mean, my god, just how low have we sank, when we spend our time worrying about losing the means to feed our families, when instead we should be storming the offices of our local newspapers, demanding that they stop being so mean to Nicole Kidman? Sure, there are children starving or being killed, maimed and crippled in the streets of Gaza, but of the love of all that's holy, won't someone think of the Actors?
Ebert: Every entry can't be about everything.
Roger,
First of all, excuse this comment. It has nothing to do with your blog, but I must say something.
For the past couple of years, I've always looked forward to your top ten list, but for specific reasons. Your decision to remove numerical ordering and replace it with alphabetizing is reasonable, but I was disappointed. First of all, although I don't like numerical ordering, it indicates that the critic enjoyed a select few films more than the other great films that came out. I always look at the critic's top three or four, because when I make my list, I draw attention to these films because they were my favorite. I refuse to believe you liked twenty films equally! You wrote extra articles about "The Fall" and "Synecdoche, New York" -- among others -- so why not say, "OK, there were 20 great films made this year, but these six I liked the best." I look at your list because I want to know which films really, really moved you, and a top 20 alphabetized list fails to do this. And if you're going to argue that we don't judge films the way numerical lists suggest, then why stop at 20? Why not simply list however many 4-star and 3-and-a-half-star reviews you wrote that year? What if that list exceeds 20? "Here's my top 27 list of 2008!"
OK, so I'm being a little harsh. I guess I just liked your numerical list because it says a lot about you. It tells me that certain films that year moved you more than others. If you have forever convinced yourself that numerical lists are bad, can we compromise with an admittance of the best film of the year? You can't deprive us of that, Rog.
Ebert: I think I'll go back to the top 10 next year. I always used to have a 10-place tie for 11th place, which amounts to the same thing, but seems to satisfy people more. Lists!
"Though they may make more than they "deserve" on some cosmic scale of compensation (though Mother Theresa's own virtue has been called into question), are Holmes and Cruise necessarily bad people just for taking those salaries?"
Yes. I wouldn't. I would give almost all of it away, and probably be content to live on $60-100,000 a year. And though I know the vast majority of people wouldn't, that doesn't mean they would be right, or set up by their behavior a standard of 'acceptable virtue'. It's simply morally wrong to have that much of the means to live (which is what money ultimately is) when so many other people have so little of it. If you don't just instinctively recognize that as true, I won't be able to convince you it is.
"It's what their employers are willing to pay because their employers estimate that they will make at least that much back at the box office, and that is because we are willing to go and see their output. Audiences are complicit in the system. I may not be a big enough fan of Cruise or Holmes to see everything they make, but there have been many times when an actor or actress' presence has sold me on wanting to see a film."
I understand how capitalism works.
"Movies make lots of money, and have since their invention. It's the blessing and curse of the medium, a blessing because it means people are willing to invest in spectacles and some spectacles are very good indeed, a curse because the business often overshadows the art. But the stars earn what they earn because the studios think they'll bring in that much and more, and they're often right."
I understand how capitalism works.
"I think the writer Harlan Ellison made an interesting argument- you deserve to make however as much money as you can convince your bosses to give you. If, say, you are one of the stars of THE OFFICE, and NBC is making billions off of syndication and merchandise and ad sales, it's not really going overboard to ask if they could funnel some of that in your direction."
I understand how capitalism, and Harlan Ellison, work. I am not operating from the assumption, however, that capitalism is revealed religion, ie the only option, ie the standard. I am calling capitalism immoral. I probably should have been up front about that. It is impossible for the immoral discrepancies in pay and lifestyle to NOT exist in a capitalist, democratic culture in which there is this level of technology. You could try it twenty more times and if you begin with a democratic, capitalist country, and gradually feed it technological innovation after technological innovation, you would always end up back where we are. I think it was Einstein said capitalism was still jungle law. Now, Einstein, Einstein was worth $14 mil. But he at least would have had some compunction about amassing and sitting on such wealth while his neighbors fought to survive. Jungle law. The next step is socialist in nature. I doubt this nation will ever take it. Too much money on the line, and too strong a hold on it by those with an interest in keeping it all to themselves. Thanks for your response, though.
First the media dehumanizes them. They are celebrities not people now I can treat it how ever I want. I no longer see myself in this person so I am free to disrespect and treat is as something other than human. I can make up things about it, we all read it, laugh, and judge as if we did not have our own problems and challenges to deal with. I do not beleive for one second that people care one way or the other if Tom Cruise is a Scie