Roger Ebert – The Last Picture Show

RIP Roger Ebert – see him featured on the #1 poet blog.

He did the right thing!


via New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) – a film was Better Luck Tomorrow..

Better Luck Tomorrow is a 2002 crime-drama film directed by Justin Lin. The movie is about Asian American overachievers who become bored with their lives and enter a world of petty crime and material excess.

  • My Dinner with Andre
    Roger picked the right films in his early career (via his wiki ).. He had “My Dinner with Andre” too…
    1967: Bonnie and Clyde
    1968: The Battle of Algiers
    1969: Z
    1970: Five Easy Pieces
    1971: The Last Picture Show
    1972: The Godfather
    1973: Cries and Whispers
    1974: Scenes from a Marriage
    1975: Nashville

  • Moreau and Ebert (happy days)

    Jeanne Moreau as star and as director – BY ROGER EBERT / November 21, 1976 –
    He captured Moreau’s free spirit well…. on her walking out on Warren Beatty when he was on a power trip at the meeting, or how Jean Eustache taught her to drink Jack Daniel.

    To Jim Emerson (His editor) on Malick’s To the Wonder starring Ben Affleck

    “Jim, old friend, I’m in bad shape. I type on my lap in a hospital bed. I’m on pain meds. Did the review of ‘To the Wonder” make sense to you? Such a strange movie.
    “I need your help.”

  • Ebert Festival

  • Herzog dedicated his 2007 documentary shot in Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, to Ebert. The director explained to EW that he typically does not dedicate his films to anyone, but he decided to give Ebert that shout-out in the film “to send a signal in his direction [of] admiration, friendship, respect, encouragement because he was the wounded soldier still holding out.”

  • In Memory of Ingmar Bergman by Roger Ebert

    There are so many memories crowding in, now, from the richness of Bergman’s work, that I know not what to choose. A turning point in his despair occurred, perhaps, in “Cries and Whispers,” a chamber drama in an isolated Swedish estate where Harriet Andersson is dying painfully of cancer and her sisters have come to be with her. After she dies,they find a journal in which she recalls a perfect day in the autumn, when the pain was not so bad, and the women took up their parasols and walked in the garden. “This is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better,” she writes. “I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.”

    “When he was 60 years old he celebrated his birthday on his island, on that beach. And my daughter was there; she was five years old. And…he said to her, ‘When you are 60 what will you do then?’ She said, ‘I’ll have a big party and my mother will be there. She’ll be really old and stupid and gawky but it’s gonna be great.’ And he looked at her and said, ‘And what about me? Will I not be there?’ And the five-year-old looked up at him and she said, ‘Well, you know, I’ll leave the party and I’ll walk down to the beach and there on the waves you will come dancing towards me’.”

    Defending Bergman by Roger Ebert

    I have long known and admired the Chicago Reader’s film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but his New York Times op-ed attack on Ingmar Bergman (“Scenes from an Overrated Career,” 8/4/07) is a bizarre departure from his usual sanity. It says more about Rosenbaum’s love of stylistic extremes than it does about Bergman and audiences. Who else but Rosenbaum could actually base an attack on the complaint that Bergman had what his favorites Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson lacked, “the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits?” In what parallel universe is the power to entertain defined in that way?