First Tuesday Book Club: Life Itself

Max in writer-director Adam Elliot's Mary and Max, joining us this month for the Last Cinema First Tuesday Book Club

Welcome to the Last Cinema First Tuesday Book Club, a monthly dive into the world of film through the pages of books. From memoirs and biographies to historical accounts and critiques, we will try to view the legacy of cinema through the words of those who shaped it and those who have explored it.

The Last Cinema First Tuesday Book Club presents:

Life Itself: A Memoir, by Roger Ebert (2011)

Four years ago today, Roger Ebert died. If you will forgive the whimsical contradiction, it feels like so much longer that we have been without him, but in ways real and imagined, it seems he has never left. Such is the impact of a great man.

I do not need to tell you Ebert was my favorite writer; that I have written copious words to that effect here and here.

I do not need to tell you Ebert’s prose stands alongside that of any of the giants held dear by the literary canon; that he could toss off in the middle of paragraphs words of such beauty and poetry other, lesser writers would base entire novels around them.

I do not need to tell you his opinions shaped the cultural conversation; that to this day, no lover of film goes to the cinema without wondering, ‘What would Roger think?’

Roger Ebert, in his office

I do not need to tell you praise from Ebert could craft the legacy of a film, of a director; that much of what we appreciate in the past half-century and more of moviemaking we owe both directly and indirectly to his influence.

I do not need to tell you any of that because you are here and, thus, must already know, but it bears repeating Ebert was the first and last word for most of the film-going public on what mattered at the movieplex.

In 2012, I was writing a feature on Little Miss Sunshine filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris in advance of their second feature, Ruby Sparks. While interviewing Dayton’s mother for the piece, I mentioned to her Ebert had given the film three stars and written kindly of it. She said, “Well, if Roger liked it, that’s good.”

Life Itself is a memoir filled with the recollections of a life well lived, deeply felt, and extensively explored, but it is as much about the idea of memory as the memories themselves. Though a fair portion of its chapters were pulled from the blog that made Ebert foremost among the internet commentariat, a majority of it was written as he approached the end of his life. He knew it was coming as his body betrayed him time and again – cancer – but his mind was as alive as or more so than ever.

The prologue of Life Itself is titled “Memory,” and it ends thusly:

The blog let loose the flood of memories. Told sometimes that I should write my memoirs, I failed to see how I possibly could. I had memories, I had lived a good life in an interesting time, but I was at a loss to see how I could organize the accumulation of a lifetime. It was the blog that taught me how. It pushed me into first-person confession, it insisted on the personal, it seemed to organize itself in manageable fragments. Some of these words, since rewritten and expanded, first appeared in blog forms. Most are here for the first time. They come pouring forth in a flood of relief.

From there, we are whisked away into the world of the most prominent film critic of his time or any other. All the highlights are there, the stories you want to hear about the glitterati and the celebrities, the film festivals and the films, but those tales – as wonderfully told as they are – are but a small fraction of the book’s intrigue.

Its heart and soul exist in Ebert’s reflections on his youth, particularly regarding his mother, his friends and their wild times in the Chicago newspaper scene of the late 1960s and ’70s, and most of all Chaz, his wife, the love of his life, and the person he credits with helping him hang onto this life as long as he did, in more ways than one.

He writes in chapter 19 “All By Myself Alone”:

Roger and Chaz Ebert

I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.

More than anything else, Ebert’s memoir is an opportunity to sit on the deck with one of the great communicators of his time and regard the waves of one of the great lives of the 20th and 21st centuries. One wishes perhaps there had been just one more high tide, one more swell on the seemingly endless ocean of words and ideas he left us.

It is like the exchange between Steve Carell’s and Keira Knightley’s characters as they face down the possibility of oblivion at the end of Lorena Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. She says: “It isn’t enough time.” He replies: “It never would have been.” And isn’t that always the case? When we lose a loved one or a hero, we cry over the life lost, yes, but more, I believe, we cry over the life not yet lived. We wish for one more smile, one more joke, one more kind word, and while we recognize it could never be enough, well, at least we would have had one more.

I do not only think of Ebert when I sit in the dark of the cinema, though I always think of him when I am there. Rather, I think of him also when I read the news, when I look out on the world and wonder what the hell has happened. As cited before in this space, Ebert was the person who said movies are “like a machine that generates empathy.” I would argue Ebert’s writing functions in much the same way because throughout his life, particularly on his blog but in all his work, he focused on the experiences of others, on their lives, on their hopes, dreams, and fears.

He understood not one among us is better than any other, and he pulled no punches in calling out the hypocrisy and absurdity of believing any differently. Sometimes I am thankful he did not live to see the ugly turn this world and this country in particular have taken. But at other times, I wish we had just one more piece from him, one more reflection, one more word about the state of things. Maybe it would not change the state of things, but at least we would have one more wave to ride gently across the sea before we came crashing down again on the reality of the shore.

Next month: Young Orson, by Patrick McGilligan

New movie review: 99 Homes

Andrew Garfield stars in writer-director Ramin Bahrani's masterpiece 99 Homes.

If the soul exists, it must have no price. If the soul exists, it must be an essential part of a person. If the soul exists, it must be the most valuable thing one can possess. That is – if the soul exists. The way we often speak of it, the soul is intangible, and being such, we do not have a lot of use for it in our daily lives. Our families cannot eat it, take shelter in it, or survive off it, so its value seems rather negligible against the raw realities of life.

Speaking in a strictly areligious sense, the devil knows this. Maybe the devil is your boss, asking you to sacrifice a part of yourself for the company. Maybe the devil is your spouse, asking you to sacrifice a part of yourself for your family. Maybe the devil is you, and you sacrifice a small part of yourself every time you go against your better judgment or your reason or your ethics. These small trades for money, love, or comfort cost us little on the surface, but if the soul exists and makes you who you are, then every piece you give up is another piece of yourself lost.

In the magnificent legal thriller 99 Homes, from writer-director Ramin Bahrani, Andrew Garfield plays a man who makes a Faustian bargain with the devil he knows, and we stare on breathlessly as he loses himself piece by piece. The suspense comes from watching and wondering how long this man will allow himself to fall apart before he realizes what he has done and tries to put everything back together. It is a shattering, heart-rending experience, and it is one of the best films of the year.

Garfield plays Dennis Nash, who struggles to provide for his mother (Laura Dern) and young son (Noah Lomax). When they can no longer afford to pay the mortgage, they are evicted from their longtime family home and forced to live in a hotel, where many other families have suffered the same fate. Real estate operator Rick Carver, played by Michael Shannon, is in charge of the eviction. Carver makes his money evicting people from their homes and exploiting government and banking loopholes in the wake of the housing market crash.

Nash earns what little money he can working odds-and-ends construction jobs until Carver offers him a deal. Carver will buy the Nash family home if Nash agrees to work for him to pay off the debt. Nash signs off on the deal, and that is how easy it is to make a pact with the devil. For the rest of the film, Nash will descend further and further into the morass and compromise more and more of what he stands for with every transaction until he resembles Carver more than himself.

Michael Shannon in 99 Homes.

Garfield and Shannon are excellent as two men with competing loyalties whose interests are briefly aligned. Shannon turns in the kind of work befitting one of the best actors of his generation. He is menacing and pragmatic but just vulnerable enough to suggest how Nash could fall into Carver’s trap. He may be playing the devil, but Shannon’s performance shows us how even the devil cannot do his job without being stained by it.

The true revelation, however, is Garfield, who was so good in 2010’s The Social Network but has been lost down the rabbit hole of superhero movies for the last five years. In fact, 99 Homes is his first non-The Amazing Spider-man movie since The Social Network, and it is a great relief to see Garfield once again with a tremendous role to play. As Nash, he is resolute and determined but beaten down by a system that has no regard for him or his family. Garfield is just 32 years old, but he slides easily into the role of weary family man. His youth works for the film thematically as well and suggests problems of poverty and debt will affect generations to come.

Speaking of youth, there is the film’s co-writer and director. Bahrani is 40 years old and has made six feature films. In 2005, Man Push Cart launched him into the critical consciousness, and after his superb 2009 feature Goodbye Solo, no less than Roger Ebert called him unequivocally “the new great American director.” Bahrani even shows up in Steve James’ Ebert documentary Life Itself, and Ebert gifts him a puzzle once owned by Marilyn Monroe. Though Ebert long championed Bahrani’s work, the puzzle felt like a passing of the torch. Here, Bahrani returns the favor by dedicating his masterpiece to Ebert.

And a masterpiece, it is. The American-born son of Iranian immigrants, Bahrani has specialized in films about the struggle to achieve the American Dream. For the first time though, he turns his focus in 99 Homes to the difficulty in maintaining that dream. This is a film about mostly good people whose lives are destroyed by greed and corruption. Nash is but one of many people who got the home they always dreamed of but could not afford to keep it. The banks preyed on these people from the beginning, and what we are watching as Carver evicts them is the final kill.

Bahrani shows us row after row of homes in the Orlando, Fla., suburbs where the film takes place. Each house represents a family, and many are abandoned. They are not empty because of people like Carver. Carver is an opportunist, but he serves a higher master – the banks, those institutions we were told are too big to fail. Implicit in that oft-trotted-out maxim is the little-discussed fact that Nash and you and I are not too big to fail. In fact, we are too small to matter.

This is the kind of film that should make us angry about the world in which we live. Hopefully, none of us will endure the pain and heartbreak of losing our homes, but statistically, some of us will. Some of us have, and our options are few. Around the midpoint of the film, Carver tells Nash, “America was built by bailing out the winners.” Nash has seen losing and does not want to see it again. He takes Carver’s deal because it is the only one on the table. No other help is on its way. For his son, his mother, and his own dignity, he trades away a part of himself, but if the soul exists, what good to his family is a man without one?

See it? Yes.

My favorite writer: Two years without Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert died April 4, 2013.

Sometimes, I feel a little silly telling people that my favorite writer was a film critic. Not Charles Dickens or Henry David Thoreau or Richard Yates – though they are all great – but Chicago movie writer Roger Ebert. Of course, those of us who read Ebert’s work every week and hung on his every word know that he was much more than a film critic. He was a life critic, someone who could see the logic and the flaw in any argument and always sought to be on the side of right, whatever that was.

He died two years ago today, and each day since, it has been difficult not to feel that I am missing something valuable from my life. His longtime colleague and friend Richard Roeper spoke for all of us last year on the first anniversary of Ebert’s death when he said: “What would Roger say? What would Roger write? What would Roger’s take be? Those thoughts cross my mind nearly every time I exit a screening.”

No one can speak for Ebert. I certainly cannot, but there are a few things I am sure of. He would have loved 12 Years a Slave. As a fan of Michael Apted’s fabulous Seven Up series, he would have been floored by Boyhood. He would be just as excited as the rest of us to see Martin Scorsese’s long-gestating passion project Silence finally make it to screens this year. I feel certain of these things, but damn, I wish he were around to write about them.

His work expanded on the Internet from film reviews to blog posts and other columns, and so did the scope of his interests. As much as I loved his reviews and his television show – At the Movies was appointment viewing when I was in high school – I lived for his columns on spirituality, gun violence, and American culture at large. Growing up, I never wanted to be anything other than a writer, and Ebert’s columns showed me all the different things being a writer could mean. It means being observant, honest, optimistic, and most of all compassionate.

Ebert is not my favorite writer because I think he is the best, although I would put his simple, elegant prose alongside any of the giants of English literature. No, he is my favorite because he is the one who makes me love what I do and makes me want to keep doing it. There is nothing in this life I am more suited to than writing, and it was Ebert whose work convinced me this pursuit could be more than words on a page. He showed me this could be important and valuable, and I don’t think we can ask too much more of our heroes.

I have told my Roger Ebert story before. You can read it in my review of director Steve James’ great documentary on Ebert, Life Itself, which is on Netflix Instantwatch now, by the way. So, rather than retell that, I thought I would share some of his work that influenced me most and most changed the way I think about movies and about life. Click on any of the below links to go and read the piece.

A Leave of Presence

The Great Movies: La Dolce Vita

O, Synecdoche, My Synecdoche!

In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye

Ending Up in a Kind of Soundlessly Spinning Ethereal Void As We All Must

How I Believe in God

Gatsby Without Greatness

Thank you, Roger, for all of it. I only wish there were more, but I guess the same could be said about this whole crazy life of ours.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary

Director Rory Kennedy's Last Days in Vietnam is among the Oscar nominees for Best Documentary.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Documentary

The nominees are:

Citizenfour

Finding Vivian Maier

Last Days in Vietnam

The Salt of the Earth

Virunga

The Oscars rarely get political. For its advertisers’ sake, the Academy generally tries to make its show as entertaining as possible to the widest possible range of viewers without offending anyone. Whether it succeeds on that front is a debate for another time – namely, immediately after the show – but as a rule, hosts and presenters try to keep the atmosphere light and breezy and avoid kicking off a firestorm by offering any politically volatile commentary.

The one place the Academy often cannot help but get political, though, is Best Documentary. Some of the great controversial political moments in Academy Awards ceremony history have been the result or a side effect of the Documentary category. Michael Moore’s tirade against then-President George Bush and the Iraq War when accepting his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine jumps immediately to mind, as does Vanessa Redgrave using her Supporting Actress acceptance speech to shout down “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums” who stood outside the ceremony protesting Redgrave’s involvement with the documentary The Palestinian.

There are others, but you get the idea, and it is possible we will have another such moment this year should the frontrunner for the award take the stage. The category is ripe for a surprise, either with who wins or what the winner will say for an acceptance speech, and at the Academy Awards, surprises spell fun.

Citizenfour (directed by Laura Poitras) – No more important film came out this year. The story of Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency domestic spying scandal is a story about all of us. There is not one person in America who is unaffected by the U.S. government surveillance program, not necessarily because we all are being watched but because any one of us could be. The freedom of the individual is what the citizens of this nation have always valued – even if we have not always done our best to see this ideal through – and any encroachment on privacy is an encroachment on freedom.

Poitras’ film has taken hits in some unexpected areas for not being cinematic enough, for being an important story told badly. I could not disagree more. Citizenfour has the look and feel of a modern Hollywood thriller. From the receipt of the first encrypted communiques, the clock is ticking, counting down to the moment when Snowden and his confidantes break this scandal wide open. It is a potboiler of the highest order, watching these people navigate their lives with the weight of an ungrateful world on their shoulders.

Perhaps the most important thing Citizenfour accomplishes is to humanize the infamous Snowden. If you have followed reliable news sources, then you know much of the story of the NSA leaks, but when the news media dug their claws in, they ripped out the substance of the scandal. Politicians spun and “journalists” played their role, turning the story around on the supposed traitor Snowden rather than focusing on the government that betrayed all of us. Poitras’ film reminds us that Snowden is just a man who saw a wrong and tried to right it. By making him the story, Citizenfour shows us how much bigger the real story is.

Last Days in Vietnam (directed by Rory Kennedy) – The history of the war in Vietnam has been written in fits and starts. Documents are declassified, witnesses come forward, and new stories come out of places we might never have imagined. American filmmakers from Oliver Stone with Platoon to Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now have covered the experience of the U.S. ground forces in Vietnam. The victory at the end of almost every Vietnam War film is when the American soldier makes it home, but we cannot forget America lost, and South Vietnam fell to the communists.

Last Days in Vietnam tells the story not of the American soldiers who made it home but of the South Vietnamese fleeing the country. Using archival footage and present-day interviews, Kennedy reconstructs the mass exodus of citizens trying to escape South Vietnam as the last Americans got out. It is a thrilling tale of denial, false bravado, and true heroism that paints the story of the end of the Vietnam conflict in a rarely considered light. Kennedy spends the first half of the film setting the stage, then uses the back half to explore in detail the retrieval and evacuation efforts of several different American military units.

This is a more traditional documentary than Citizenfour, featuring the classic talking-head interviews, old news footage, and animated reconstructions of some events. It is an incredibly accomplished film on a technical level, particularly the editing, and editor Don Kleszy’s name appears first in the opening credits. The subject of the film is fascinating, and Kennedy’s storytelling is riveting. While perhaps not as topical as Citizenfour, Last Days in Vietnam would certainly make a more handsome winner than most others.

Virunga (directed by Orlando von Einsiedel) – The accomplishments of von Einsiedel and crew to bring this story to public attention belong in the annals of war reporting. This is a different kind of battlefield – a nature preserve where the last of the world’s mountain gorillas dwell. Showing patience and diligence in the face of great danger, von Einsiedel slowly unravels the corporate and governmental conspiracy that threatens to destroy Virunga National Park, located on the eastern edges of Congo.

Congo was a nation already overrun by rebel violence and various separatist factions attempting to take control of the country. When oil is discovered under Virunga National Park, the site becomes the battleground for the preservation of the beauty and natural resources of Congo, which without protection will fall to multinational energy corporations and local militias looking to profit off the newly discovered resources.

Von Einsiedel and his crew put themselves on the front lines with the park rangers who risk death to protect the gorillas and other wild inhabitants of the park. They encounter rebels and take gunfire, and some even lose their lives, but the rangers never shrink from their duty, and the filmmakers never pull out of the conflict. Virunga tells a complex story in a simple but engaging way and represents a tremendous feat by a remarkable group of documentary makers.

Finding Vivian Maier (directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel) – Vivian Maier’s story is intriguing, as would any similar mystery be, but I found myself irritated by the baldly self-serving nature of this film. Maier was a nanny who almost to the point of obsession took photographs of people she saw on the street. None of her charges knew of her hobby, and she never publicly displayed her work. After she died, Maloof purchased some of her negatives on a whim. Upon discovering the quality of the photographs, he set out to obtain as many of Maier’s negatives as he could and to share her work with the world.

Here is where it gets murky. I have no doubt Maloof thinks Maier is a talented artist who never got her due in life for any of various reasons. Uncovering these reasons could make for a fascinating documentary, but as told by Maloof – the sole owner of Maier’s work and the person who stands to profit most from increasing its value – the film plays like a stock market scam. Maloof is trying to inflate artificially the value of his stock (the photographs) so he can sell high and get out before the market crashes. A good business decision? Sure. A quality documentary? Not even close.

The Salt of the Earth (directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders) – This is the one nominee in this category I have not seen because it has not been released yet. The trailer came out recently, though. Let’s enjoy it together:

It is interesting to me that the documentary branch of the Academy would go for two admittedly very different films about photographers in the same year, but Wenders is a fantastic filmmaker, and the movie seems absolutely gorgeous to look at, so I cannot wait to see it.

The final analysis

Citizenfour has won basically every early award leading up to the Oscars, and most industry pundits have it down as a lock for the Academy Award, but I am less certain. Since Inside Job won in 2010, Academy members have shied away from overtly political documentaries, awarding a sports film and two music documentaries. Critics are quick to call the Academy a “liberal” organization, but the history only somewhat bears this out, and if such a bias were truly so all consuming, films such as American Sniper would never be considered for the top award.

Last Days in Vietnam may be a viable alternative for members who do not want to award a movie about Snowden because the wounds of his actions are still too fresh. Everyone can agree on the tragic mistake that was the Vietnam War, so that may be the safe “liberal” pick. Virunga will benefit from the added exposure of being on Netflix, and it has a touching and important storyline, but based on everything that has happened up to now, it would be unwise to predict anything but Citizenfour.

Will win: Citizenfour

Should win: Citizenfour

Wish it had been here: Life Itself