My Intellectual Heroes, Part 1

This week: Roger Ebert

What have you read that made you think, “My God, I never considered it that way!” and now you can’t imagine a world where you didn’t know that? This series is about people who are, collectively, my North Star. I can only dream of one of them up there in Author Heaven, reading something I wrote and saying, “Well, that doesn’t stink.”

There are some standard ways to write about a famous writer:

• A biography, listing the main events in their lives. Wikipedia is excellent for that.

• An explanation of how they compare to others in their class

• An argument with them, explaining all the things they got wrong

I’m going to try not to keep to any of those outlines, and instead, do something harder. I’m just going to tell you why they’re my heroes, and should be yours, too.

In alphabetical order. Only one of these (Taleb) is still with us. This week we have….

Roger Ebert

Wikipedia

Roger Ebert is the only film critic with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Unlike critics who are mainly about themselves, Roger was about the movies and telling you why he loved them. He educated you about film.

Roger appreciated some movies that I couldn’t stand, and hated others I actually liked. Usually, though, his take on the movie was spot-on. His love for movies was much broader than anyone’s. It could be high art, or it could be trash, but Roger was always there to tell you what was good or bad about it, and give you enough to decide if it was worth your time. What he hated was formulaic script writing and directing, and what he loved most was the unexpected burst of creativity from a director or actor.

When I look at a review before choosing to see the film, all I want to know is, “Should I see this?” I definitely don’t want any more details than that requires. I don’t want a thumbs-up from him (although that helps) and I certainly don’t give a flying fork about the average of 100 critics, e.g. Rotten Tomatoes or MetaCritic.

I don’t really care what audiences are saying, either. I want to know what this film is like. What’s good about it? Then I can judge for myself. For that, I look at what he said, or the review on his website (which is overseen by his widow) if the movie came out after his passing, and I look at the New York Times review. That’s it.

A Great Movie

Let’s pick Lost in Translation,

one of Roger’s “great movies.” Here are parts of his review:

Bill Murray’s acting in Sofia Coppola‘s “Lost in Translation” is surely one of the most exquisitely controlled performances in recent movies. Without it, the film could be unwatchable. With it, I can’t take my eyes away. Not for a second, not for a frame, does his focus relax, and yet it seems effortless. It’s sometimes said of an actor that we can’t see him acting. I can’t even see him not acting. He seems to be existing, merely existing, in the situation created for him by Sofia Coppola.

OK, I’m interested. A great performance by an actor I like. Read on:

She [Coppola, the director] has one objective: She wants to show two people lonely in vast foreign Tokyo and coming to the mutual realization that their lives are stuck. Perhaps what they’re looking for is the same thing I’ve heard we seek in marriage: A witness. Coppola wants to get that note right. There isn’t a viewer who doesn’t expect Bob Harris and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) to end up in love, or having sex, or whatever. We’ve met Charlotte’s husband John (Giovanni Ribisi). We expect him to return unexpectedly from his photo shoot and surprise them together. These expectations have been sculpted, one chip of Hollywood’s chisel after another, in tens of thousands of films. The last thing we expect is… what would probably actually happen. They share loneliness.

Now I’m sold. It’s not Hollywood cliche; it’s something deeper and harder to pull off.

After I’ve seen it, I’m interested in all sorts of things: who gave a good performance, who was just phoning it in, what dialog was good or bad, how the director set up the shots, and on and on. The reviewer’s scholarship and the quality of his eye, as well as his pure writing skill are what matters. I’ll read his review of a movie I’ve never seen and have no intention of seeing, just to enjoy his writing.

More on Lost in Translation:

The cinematography by Lance Acord and editing by Sarah Flack make no attempt to underline points or nudge us. It permits us to regard. It is content to allow a moment to complete itself. Acord often frames Charlotte in a big window with Tokyo remotely below. She feels young, alone and exposed. He often shows Bob inscrutably looking straight ahead (not at the camera; not at anything). He feels older, tired, patient, not exposed because he has a surer sense of who he is. That’s what I read into the shots. What do you get? When he brings them together they are still apart, and there is more truth in a little finger touching the side of a foot than a sex scene.

Now that I’ve seen it, I can appreciate how the cinematography and editing were done. Roger was in the theater with his Reporter’s Notebook, but I was just watching and enjoying it.

A Bad Movie

Anna Karenina (2 1/2 stars)

I’ve read the book three times. If you haven’t, this isn’t one of those Great Books you have to force your way through. It’s very readable. Movies and TV series galore have been made of it.

If I find out that there’s yet another remake, I have to ask myself, “Is there something special about this one? Does it bring out something in Anna, Karenin, Vronsky, Kitty, and Levin that I never thought of? Or does it Hollywood-ize 19th Century people to make them something “modern people can relate to?” I don’t want it modernized; I like my Tolstoy straight.

I read Roger’s review to find out.

In Joe Wright’s daringly stylized new version of “Anna Karenina,” he returns for the third time to use Keira Knightley as his heroine. She is almost distractingly beautiful here and elegantly gowned to an improbable degree. One practical reason for that: As much as half of Wright’s film is staged within an actual theater and uses not only the stage but the boxes and even the main floor — with seats removed — to present the action. We see the actors in the wings, the stage machinery, the trickery with backdrops, horses galloping across in a steeplechase.

All the world’s a stage, and we but players on it. Yes, and particularly in Karenina’s case, because she fails to realize how true that is. She makes choices that are unacceptable in the high society of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and behaves as if they were invisible. She doesn’t seem to realize the audience is right there and paying close attention. She believes she can flaunt the rules and get away with it.

So: it’s some director’s “stylized” ego trip, to show us that the Russian public’s opinion of Anna matters, by filming the movie in a theater. OK. I know now I can pass on this one.

A Great Movie I’d Never Heard Of

There’s a section of the Roger Ebert website devoted to great movies. I’m sure there are a few you’ve never heard of, like I’d never heard of The Ballad of Narayama.

But Roger’s here to tell you about it.

“The Ballad of Narayama” is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens up between its origins in the kabuki style and its subject of starvation in a mountain village! The village enforces a tradition of carrying those who have reached the age of 70 up the side of mountain and abandoning them there to die of exposure.

Keisuke Kinoshita‘s 1958 film tells its story with deliberate artifice, using an elaborate set with a path beside a bubbling brook, matte paintings for the backgrounds, mist on dewey evenings, and lighting that drops the backgrounds to black at dramatic moments and then brings up realistic lighting again. Some of its exteriors use black foregrounds and bloody red skies; others use grays and blues. As in kabuki theater, there is a black-clad narrator to tell us what’s happening.

It’s a pure Japanese movie. No one in the West would ever make this. I’m in.

A Garbage Movie

Maybe your kids were into the Transformers (you just know that God is punishing you for something you did, and when you die, you’ll find out what).

The kids discover that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is in the local megaplex, and they nag you relentlessly to take them to see it. How bad could it be? Roger tells you how bad:

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

Great Movies to Think About More

The Night of the Hunter

is a movie we showed at Google. Roger tells us why it’s great:

Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) is one of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many “great movies” are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Many great movies use actors who come draped in respectability and prestige, but Robert Mitchum has always been a raffish outsider. And many great movies are realistic, but “Night of the Hunter” is an expressionistic oddity, telling its chilling story through visual fantasy. People don’t know how to categorize it, so they leave it off their lists.

Yet what a compelling, frightening and beautiful film it is! And how well it has survived its period. Many films from the mid-1950s, even the good ones, seem somewhat dated now, but by setting his story in an invented movie world outside conventional realism, Laughton gave it a timelessness. Yes, the movie takes place in a small town on the banks of a river. But the town looks as artificial as a Christmas card scene, the family’s house with its strange angles inside and out looks too small to live in, and the river becomes a set so obviously artificial it could have been built for a completely stylized studio film like “Kwaidan” (1964).

Why was Mitchum so creepy, and why was the movie so genuinely frightening? Roger tells you.

Conclusion

If someone is an intellectual hero of yours, you never consider an issue fully explored until you read what they said about it. That’s what Roger Ebert is for me with movies. Next week we’ll talk about Christopher Hitchens.