Things I Learned From Roger Ebert

By far my favorite, Ebert is the rare critic that actually seems to love movies. He can be analytical, yes, and he isn't afraid to disparage a critically popular film like Fight Club. However, he's also unafraid to love a movie that most dislike, such as Across the Universe. He writes with a clarity that is understandable even if you know nothing about film aesthetic or theory. And even if you don't agree with him, he explains himself so well you can at least see where he's coming from. I read his reviews, not only for his opinion on film, but for his keen insight into the human condition the film is attempting to convey. Many of his comments stray from the actual plot of the film into his own stories and anecdotes where he finds simples truths and discusses them with passion. Don't misunderstand my respect: I am not claiming he is the ultimate authority on any of these subjects, but his comments always provide a jumping off point for some insightful soul searching, and often help me better understand a film. Here are some of my favorite passages from his reviews.


From The Blair Witch Project:
"At a time when digital techniques can show us almost anything, The Blair Witch Project is a reminder that what really scares us is the stuff we can't see. The noise in the dark is almost always scarier than what makes the noise in the dark. Any kid can tell you that. Not that he believes it at the time."


From City of God:
"In its actual level of violence, City of God is less extreme than Scorcese's Gangs of New York, but the two films have certain parallels. In both films, there are really two cities: the city of the employed and secure, who are served by law and municipal services, and the city of the castaways, whose alliances are born of opportunity and desperation. Those who live beneath rarely have their stories told. City of God does not exploit or condescend, does not pump up its stories for contrived effect, does not contain silly and reassuring romantic sidebars, but simply looks, with a passionately knowing eye, at what it knows."


From The Woodsman:
"The reason we cannot accept pedophilia as we accept many other sexual practices is that it requires an innocent partner whose life could be irreparably harmed. We do not have the right to do that. If there is no other way to achieve sexual satisfaction, that is a misfortune, but not an excuse. It is not the pedophile that is evil, but the pedophilia. That is true of all sins and crimes and those tempted to perform them: It is not that we are capable of transgression that condemns us, but that we are willing."


From The Virgin Suicides:
"Mourn for the passing of everyone you knew and everyone you were in the last summer before sex. Mourn for the idealism of inexperience."


From Elephant:
"Truffaut said it was hard to make an antiwar film because war was exciting even if you were against it. Van Sant has made an antiviolence film by draining violence of energy, purpose, glamour, reward and social context. It just happens.....The movie is told mostly in long tracking shots; by avoiding cuts between close-ups and medium shots, Van Sant also avoids the film grammar that goes along with such cuts, and so his visual strategy doesn't load the dice or try to tell us anything. It simply watches.

"At one point he follows a tall, confident African-American student in a very long tracking shot as he walks into the school and down the corridors, and all of our experience as film-goers leads us to believe this action will have definitive consequences; the kid embodies all those movie heroes who walk into hostage situations and talk the bad guy out of his gun. But it doesn't happen like that, and Van Sant sidesteps all the conventional modes of movie behavior and simply shows us sad, sudden death without purpose."


From Brokeback Mountain:
"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 a cabinent-maker."


From Dangerous Beauty, a film about a courtesan (prostitute):
"I am not surprised, as I said, that the screenwriter is a woman. Few movies have been so deliberately told from a woman's point of view. We are informed in all those best-sellers about Mars and Venus, that a man looks for beauty and a woman for security. But a man also looks for autonomy, power, independence, and authority, and a woman in sixteenth-century Venice (and even today) is expected to surrender those attributes to her husband. The woman regains her power through an understanding of the male libido: A man in a state of lust is to all intents and purposes hypnotized. Most movies are made by males, and show women enthralled by men. This movie knows better."


From Capturing the Friedmans (about a father and son arrested for pedophilia):
"The film is an instructive lesson about the elusiveness of facts, especially in a legal content. Sometimes guilt and innocence are discovered in court, but sometimes, we gather, only truths about the law are demonstrated. I am reminded of the documentaries Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, which involved the trials of three teenage boys charged with the murders of three children. Because the boys were outsiders, dressed in black, listened to heavy metal, they were perfect suspects -- and were convicted amid hysterical allegations of "satanic rituals," even while the obvious prime suspect appears in both films doing his best to give himself away. Those boys are still behind bars. Their case was much easier to read than the Friedman proceedings, but viewers of the film are forced to the conclusion that the law and the courts failed them."


From The Winslow Boy:
"It is an interesting law of romance that a strong woman will choose a strong man who truly disagrees with her over a weak one who goes along. Strength demands intelligence, intelligence demands stimulation, and weakness is boring. It is better to find a partner you can contend with for a lifetime than one who accomodates you because he doesn't really care."


From A History of Violence:
"This is a movie not about plot, but about character. It is about how people turn out the way they do, and about whether the world sometimes functions like a fool's paradise. I never give a moment's thought about finding water to drink. In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, would I have been willing to steal from stores, or fight other people for drinkable water? Yes, if it meant life for myself and my family. But I would have made a pitiful thief and fighter, and probably would have failed....At the Toronto Film Festival I saw a screening of Nanook of the North, the great documentary about Eskimos surviving in the hostile Arctic wilderness. They live because they hunt and kill. Of the three levels A History of Violence refers to, I think Cronenburg is most interested in the third, in the survival of the fittest. Not the good, the moral, the nice, but the fittest."