There are too many fine Ebert tributes out there to try and track even a fraction of them, and I won’t try. Here are a couple great ones, though, from a former rockcritics contributor and a former rockcritics subject.
Along with Leonard Maltin’s Home Video Guide, [Ebert's] Movie Home Companion kept me occupied when I should’ve been studying or doing my homework. Being severely visually impaired, I shouldn’t have been reading for long stretches at a time, but I did. (I remember when I discovered the Talking Book Program for the Blind had Ebert’s A Kiss is Still a Kiss on tape. I must’ve listened to it dozens of times, especially his interviews with Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, William Hurt, Nastassja Kinski, and Robert Mitchum, and his level-headed defense of Bob Woodward’s Wired.) Ebert’s introductions to each subsequent edition were like yearly dispatches from an old friend. He would end each intro with a list of recommended readings including Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Stanley Kaufmann and other esteemed critics. He wasn’t insecure about having people leave him to discover other voices. He encouraged it. I devoured Kael and Sarris and Molly Haskell. I also read some John Simon. (I’m still debating if that was a good idea.)
- Remembering Roger Ebert (1942-2013) (Aaron Aradillas)
Like a lot of people unfortunate enough to have never lived in Chicago — where he began as the Sun-Times‘s bumptious young film reviewer way back in 1967, and what I envy him most is that he knew Bill Mauldin — I first became aware of Ebert as the co-host with Gene Siskel of “At The Movies” in the ’80s. And like a lot of my fellow Village Voice-ey snots, I then thought of the popular television show—thumbs up, thumbs down, and so on—as some sort of death knell for intelligent criticism.
That was an especially dumb and revealing mistake for someone who believes in pop outreach. It took me a long time to grasp that “At The Movies” — or “Siskel And Ebert,” as it’s more commonly known — was the last, most expressive flowering of that lovely era when movies seemed like they were worth arguing about until the cows came home. To the end of his days, Ebert believed equally and passionately in movies and the value of argument, and his website is proof that he never pulled rank with readers who tangled with him. If they cared enough about film to contest his opinion, then they were kindred spirits, not enemies.
- Roger Ebert, the People’s Movie Critic (Tom Carson)
Here, according to the website, Complex, are the 25 Best Movie Critics of All Time. Says Matt Barone in his intro, “Anyone who takes cinema seriously is advised to read their work.” All right, then.
And there was one more moment between us. She called me. She was in the hospital, although she didn’t say that. Her voice was weak, this writer whose voice was always so strong, all brass section, all parade. ‘What will become of all of you?’ she asked. ‘What will you do with no good movies?’ How do you answer that? I tried to keep it cheery. ‘Have you heard about this movie In the Bedroom?’ I had seen that, a few weeks earlier. It was the first movie that came to mind. ‘Oh, someone sent it to me,’ she said. For a moment she sounded like herself, confident, more than a little bossy, sexy in her very personal way.’It’s just a piece of shit, honey. That’s all it is. That’s all anything is, mostly.’ Then I could hear her starting to fade. ‘Except for Sissy Spacek, of course. Who has ever been like her? Or Diane Keaton! Or Streisand, in Yentl. God, I adored that strange girl in Carrie —’
Yes, that James Chance. From the latest edition of Perfect Sound Forever. Because I’m fairly noir-deficient, much of the context here eludes me, but there’s some great lines throughout. On 1947′s Nightmare Alley: “The movie that proves that the geeks that you meet on the way up are the same ones you meet on the way down. In fact, you just might be meeting yourself.” (If that’s not a tag line for this very site, I don’t know what is.)
“I must say I enjoyed even the music enormously, possibly because I have not yet been traumatized by transistors into open rebellion against the ‘top 40′ and such. (I just heard ‘Hello, Dolly’ for the first time the other day, and the lyrics had been changed to ‘Hello, Lyndon.’) Nevertheless I think there is a tendency to underrate rock ‘n’ roll because the lyrics look so silly in cold print… I like the songs the Beatles sing despite the banality of the lyrics, but the words in R&R only mask the poundingly ritualistic meaning of the beat. It is in the beat that the passion and togetherness is most movingly expressed.”
Andrew Sarris, from his review of A Hard Day’s Night, Village Voice, Aug ’64. I love Sarris’s review of this, and it puts him in an exclusive club of pre-war critics who got — or anyway, who at least attempted to get — rock and roll. (We’re talking about an extremely exclusive club here: McLuhan’s in it, for sure, Kael… and who else?). Not suggesting that Sarris became any kind of major fan of rock and roll — I strongly doubt it, in fact — but that’s beside the point, what matters is that, before such a thing as rock criticism even existed, he evaluated the music on its own terms, heard something special in the beat, took for granted its “importance” from the get-go (well, from the second get-go — not sure he has any words on Elvis, Chuck Berry, et al.).
Of course Sarris will be recalled by many for a hell of a lot more than that, and rightly so, but it’s a small moment in a giant career which, to me, seems at least worth a mention. More about Sarris here.
Kellow writes from the point of view of an admirer of Kael’s — like many of us, he came under the spell of one of her review collections when he was a movie-mad teen and then followed her week-by-week for the rest of her tenure at The New Yorker.
The book explores some of the critic’s eccentricities — she would never see a film more than once — and some problematic ethical areas (she became very close to filmmakers but did not disclose that fact in both positive and negative reviews).
Pauline is very fortunate in her biographer. Kellow, an erudite movie lover, features editor at Opera News and author of a book about another formidable woman, Ethel Merman, writes beautifully and dexterously interweaves the story of a career long-thwarted with a sensitive reading of his subject’s youthful enthusiasm and intellectual growth. To an impressive degree, he gets inside the head of a precocious, fearsomely smart young woman from small-town California and is able to describe what drove her, which authors turned her on (James, Hawthorne, Dostoyevsky, Melville, Woolf, Proust), her love of jazz and her distaste for aesthetic, religious and political dogma. So thoroughly does he portray the development of Pauline’s character and passionate engagement with matters aesthetic that it comes as no surprise she was able to burst onto the scene, at the relatively advanced age of 48, as one of the most dynamic cultural arbiters of the past century.
I saw Pauline Kael give a talk once, back in the spring of 1976, when she had just begun her latest six-month “vacation” from The New Yorker. She spoke for awhile, maybe half an hour, I can’t recall. Her topic was masculinity in movies, and she might have recalled her still-fresh essay on Cary Grant, although again, my memory isn’t much good for this. After she’d spoken, there was a question-and-answer period, and one by one, people from the audience (it was in Zellerbach, for folks who know about Berkeley), given the chance to say a sentence or two to Pauline, would inevitably call up the name of some movie they loved that Kael hadn’t reviewed, asking her what she thought of that movie.
Thirty-five years later, I feel like that night I got an early preview of what it would be like when she died. You see a new movie, and you wonder what Kael would have thought.
(BTW, if you’re on Facebook, check out the movie page referred to in Steven’s post: “If They Move, Kill ‘Em! Steven, Jeff & Phil Count Down Their Favorite Films.” ‘Jeff’ in this case meaning Jeff Pike, ‘Phil’ in this case meaning Phil Dellio, all taking turns writing about their 50 favourites. They’re closing in on the Top 10 as I write.)
He’ll only be recognized here, I suspect, by Canadian movie lovers, but his impact can’t be dismissed: for 25 years, from 1974-1999, he hosted TV Ontario’s “Saturday Night at the Movies,” a showcase for so many classic, brilliant films of all genres and eras and persuasions (during the ’80s, especially, I practically had my VCR set on automatic record every Saturday night at 8:00).
He was no critic: He seemed to relish everything, and his interviews with filmmakers and movie stars were breathless — not to say gushing — encounters. Elwy could hardly wait for the subject to finish the answer before he was saying how marvellous or interesting it was. It was that pure joy that made Elwy such a reassuring and refreshing TV presence.
True enough, “he was no critic,” but his show certainly provided a critical function of sorts; it was a repertory cinema in your living room, basically (sans commercials; TVO is publicly funded). Also, he did interview movie critics, including Kael. (There are clips from that interview in this documentary on the auteur theory.) I e-mailed a program director at TVO several years ago, not long after Kael died, asking if they might consider replaying the entire interview, but I never heard back. It’d be great if it came to light at some point.
The rest of [Adler's] essay is consumed with relentless, lawyerly citations of Kael’s alleged critical sins, argued with the fervor of a causist possessed. A 1979 graduate of Yale Law School, the 41-year-old reporter laboured on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment staff and secretly wrote speeches for Chairman Rodino. Kael, in a sense, became her Nixon.
Pauline Kael died 10 years ago this summer, only a few days before 9/11; most remembrances of her were lost in the haze and fury. I’ve been thinking about Kael a lot recently, missing her bawdy and crackling voice, wondering what she’d say if she were alive to weigh in on, say, Black Swan or The Social Network. (I suspect she’d have smacked both around, while finding things to enjoy about David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s work in the Facebook movie.)
I meant to post this about three weeks ago… Sometime rockcritics.com contributor, Aaron Aradillas, has a good Internet radio gig at at the Movie Geeks portal. Aaron’s show is called “Back By Midnight,” and focuses on “all things home entertainment.” Readers of this site will be especially interested to hear this episode with guest Robert Christgau (among others) talking about James Brown. (Christgau joins about an hour in.)
Two clips of various directors and critics discussing the auteur theory. Featuring Robert Mitchum, Frank Capra, Pauline Kael, John Frankenheimer, Peter Biskind, Peter Bogdanovich, Elwy Yost, et al. A fairly intelligently edited piece (cf. the back and forth sequence between Capra and Phillip Dunne), though no strong critical proponents of auteurism could apparently be bothered to chime in: the closest you get to Andrew Sarris is a dazzling shot of his book!
