10 Wonderful Roger Ebert Insights About Movies We Love
It's jarring to visit Roger Ebert's Sun Times page and discover that he's reviewednew movies I still haven't seen. It's like he's not quite gone, or like he's started a dialogue and is still waiting for our response. Man.
You could consider Roger Ebert an overly sympathetic critic, but more often than not he was succinct and truthful in his thousands of columns. It didn't matter whether you agreed with him because knowing Ebert's perspective was valuable and edifying by itself. Some critics try to wow you with wordplay and professorial authority. Ebert always directed your awe back at the film itself.
To honor his passing, I've picked out ten Ebert quotes about movies we've looked at in our Best. Movie. Ever. feature. Let's use his great insights to buttress our own. His remarks about each film is italicized, then my own remarks about that quote follow. (All Ebert quotes can be found on his Sun Times page.)
Ebert: "Brokeback Mountain" could tell its story and not necessarily be a great movie. It could be a melodrama. It could be a "gay cowboy movie." But the filmmakers have focused so intently and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman. Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.
What I love about this quote is it points out two distinct things we need from the film industry: to make more movies about gay characters because our stories contain universal (and some un-universal, underdiscussed) truths andto be as thorough as possible in making gay stories realistic.
Some of the reviews of "Paris is Burning" have called the movie depressing - because the dancers are pretending to be the kinds of people who would not accept them in real life ("After all," one person says, "how many gay black males are there in the business executive ranks?"). I was not depressed. What I saw was a successful attempt by the outsiders to dramatize how success and status in the world often depend on props you can buy, or steal, almost anywhere - assuming you have the style to know how to use them.
Perfect. Drag/voguing culture is more about nervy subversion than appropriation.
The central scene in the film - one of the most emotionally affecting scenes in any film on dying - involves Bruce Davison as the lover of a dying man. The struggle has been long and painful, but now it is almost over, and what Davison has to do is hold the hand of his friend and be with him when he dies. The fight has been so brave that it is hard to end it. "Let go," Davison whispers. "It's all right. You can let go now." The scene plays for a long, quiet time, and it is about the absolute finality of death, but it is also about why we are alive in the first place. Man is the only animal that knows it will die. This scene shows how that can be the source of courage and spiritual peace.
This points to the movie's great triumph: As the film's characters fill with dread over the unavoidable, seemingly unpredictable devastation of AIDS, slowly a profound understanding of mortality and spirituality emerges.
Madonna has kept her act fresh by adopting a long series of public star personas, yet, backstage, people don't relate to her as a star, but as the boss. Her charisma comes not through glitter but through power, and there is never any doubt about exactly who is in charge...We get the feeling that if show biz ever loses its appeal for her, she could be successful in business or even politics: She's a hard-headed organizer, a taskmaster, disciplined and clear-headed.
Madonna and Ebert have one thing in common: They both believe Madonna could be president.
5. Nine to Five
Watch [Dolly Parton] in the scenes where she's not speaking, where the action is elsewhere on the screen. She's always in character, always reacting, always generating so much energy we expect her to fly apart. There's a scene on a hospital bench, for example, where Tomlin is convinced she's poisoned the boss, and Fonda is consoling her. Watch Dolly. She's bouncing in and out, irrepressibly.
I think the acting in Nine to Five is generally under-praised. My lady Fonda is dynamite in one of her least strident roles, Tomlin is hilarious, and Dolly Parton is indeed an effervescent spectacle.
6. Cabaret
Liza demonstrates unmistakably that she's one of the great musical performers of our time. But the heartlessness and nihilism of the character is still there, all the time, even while we're being supremely entertained.
Cabaret is the best. There is no movie that is more soulful or soulless.
7. Mean Girls
[Lohan] has a quiet self-confidence that prevents her from getting shrill and hyper like so many teenage stars; we believe her when she says that because of her years in Africa, "I had never lived in a world where adults didn't trust me." She never allows the character to tilt into caricature, and for that matter even the Plastics seem real, within their definitions of themselves, and not like the witch-harridans of some teenage movies.
I remembered this praise because too often, especially in the wake of Lohan's unending tabloid dramas, she is dismissed as a non-talent, or a lucky ingenue who landed one good role in Mean Girls. While she doesn't spout as many funny lines as Rachel McAdams or Lizzy Caplan, Lohan is certainly the heart of Mean Girls. We're completely on her team, and it's because her initial reticence and provocative transformation are both expertly played.
There are no cheap shots against suburban lifestyles or affluence or mannerisms: The problems of the people in this movie aren't caused by their milieu, but grow out of themselves. And, like it or not, the participants have to deal with them. That's what sets the film apart from the sophisticated suburban soap opera it could easily have become. Each character in this movie is given the dramatic opportunity to look inside himself, to question his own motives as well as the motives of others, and to try to improve his own ways of dealing with a troubled situation.
One of the great things about Ordinary People is that all the troubled central characters have profound and varied reactions to one another. Ebert's completely right that the movie isn't condescending either to small-town life or its own desperate characters.
9. Rear Window
There is one shot, partly a point-of-view closeup, in which she leans over him to kiss him, and the camera succumbs to her sexuality even if Jeff doesn't; it's as if she's begging the audience to end its obsession with what Jeff is watching, and consider instead what he should be drinking in with his eyes--her beauty.
For me, the most thrilling parts of Rear Window are when Lisa (Grace Kelly) takes control, whether she's climbing in the suspected killer's window or demanding Jeff (James Stewart) acknowledge their relationship. The famous close-up kiss is her first triumph.
10. What's Up, Doc?
This time, she proves herself as our most accomplished screen comedienne, a title she could have had a long time ago if it weren't for the inflated films she found herself in. She plays what I guess you'd call the Katharine Hepburn role, and O'Neal certainly has it in mind to play the Cary Grant role. Poor fellow, like so many actors before him, he finds that only Grant can quite do that. O'Neal wears horn-rim glasses and tries to be slightly prissy and offended by Miss Streisand's brashness, but we can't believe it.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but there is a serious lack of knowledge about Barbra Streisand's merits as an actress nowadays. She is not merely good in What's Up, Doc?; she is exceptional and ceaselessly funny, elastic, and charming. Ryan O'Neal had no choice but to shatter in her presence.
Do you have favorite Ebert reviews?
