Roger Ebert’s Final List of His Top 10 Favorite Films

in Film | July 9th, 2014

Image by Sound Opinions, via Flickr Commons

Roger Ebert seems to have resented star ratings, which he had to dish out atop each and every one of his hundreds upon hundreds of regular newspaper movie reviews. He also emphasized, every once in a while, his disdain for the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” system that became his and Gene Siskel’s television trademark. And he could hardly ever abide that run-of-the-mill critic’s standby, the top-ten list. Filmgoers who never paid attention to Ebert’s career will likely, at this point, insist that the man never really liked anything, but those of us who read him for years, even decades, know the true depth and scope of his love for movies, a passion he even expressed, regularly, in list form. He did so for, as he put it, “the one single list of interest to me. Every 10 years, the ancient and venerable British film magazine, Sight & Sound, polls the world’s directors, movie critics, and assorted producers, cinematheque operators and festival directors, etc., to determine the Greatest Films of All Time.”

“Why do I value this poll more than others?” Ebert asks. “It has sentimental value. The first time I saw it in the magazine, I was much impressed by the names of the voters, and felt a thrill to think that I might someday be invited to join their numbers. I was teaching a film course in the University of Chicago’s Fine Arts Program, and taught classes of the top ten films in 1972, 1982 and 1992.” His dream came true, and when he wrote this reflection on sending in his list every decade, he did so a year nearly to the day before his death in 2013, making his entry in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll a kind of last top-ten testament:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
The General (Buster Keaton, 1926) — free online
Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2010)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Deciding that he must vote for “one new film” he hadn’t included on his 2002 list, Ebert narrowed it down to two candidates: The Tree of Life and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. “Like the Herzog, the Kubrick and the Coppola, they are films of almost foolhardy ambition. Like many of the films on my list, they were directed by the artist who wrote them. Like several of them, they attempt no less than to tell the story of an entire life. [ … ] I could have chosen either film — I chose The Tree of Life because it’s more affirmative and hopeful. I realise that isn’t a defensible reason for choosing one film over the other, but it is my reason, and making this list is essentially impossible, anyway.” That didn’t stop his cinephilia from prevailing — not that much ever could.

The Two Roger Eberts: Emphatic Critic on TV; Incisive Reviewer in Print

Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 33 ) |

Robert De Niro’s Taxi Cab License Used to Prepare for Taxi Driver (1976)

in Film | July 7th, 2014

We all know that Robert De Niro has never cut corners when it comes to preparing for roles in films. Need him to gain 60 pounds to play the retired Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull? No problem. How about dropping down to a lean 4% body fat for Cape Fear? Consider it done. And while we’re at it, let’s pay a dentist $20k to grind the actor’s teeth down, you know, to achieve the menacing look of Max Cady. When it comes to Taxi Driver, the least a method actor can do is learn to drive a cab. Above, behold the hack license obtained by Bobby D. in 1976. As part of De Niro’s meticulous preparation for Taxi Driver, writes Andrew J. Rausch in The Films of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, the actor spent some weekends as a cabbie. On one occasion, a passenger recognized him and asked him if he was Robert De Niro. The passenger, who also happened to be an actor, then quipped: “Well, that’s acting. One year the Oscar, the next you’re driving a cab!” (I’d really like to believe that story is true.) The license permanently resides at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

via That Eric Alper

Martin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imaginative Short Works

Young Robert De Niro Appears in 1969 AMC Car Commercial

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Casting of The Godfather with Coppola, Pacino, De Niro & Caan

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Celebrity Encounters of Koko the Gorilla. For Her 43rd Birthday Today.

in Biology, Film, Life, Television | July 4th, 2014

Koko the Gorilla, who celebrates her 43rd birthday today, keeps pretty down-to-earth company for a celebrity. While others court the paparazzi with their public canoodling and high profile Twitter feuds, Koko’s most comfortable hanging with non-marquee-name kittens and pals Penny Patterson and Ron Cohn, the human doctors who’ve headed her caregiving team for the past 41 years.

Her privacy is closely guarded, but there have been a handful of times over the years when her name has been linked to other celebs…

Above, actor William Shatner recalls how, as a younger man, he called upon her in her quarters. He was nervous, approaching submissively, but determined not to retreat. “I love you, Koko,” he told her. “I love you.”

She responded by gripping a part of his anatomy that just happens to be one of the thousand or so words that comprise her American Sign Language vocabulary. One that takes two hands to sign…

Their time was fleeting, but as evidenced below, the connection was intense.

Comedian Robin Williams also claims to have shared “something extraordinary” with Koko. Their flirtation seems innocent enough, despite Williams’ NSFW description of their encounter, below. (He undercuts his credibility by referring to her as a “silverback”.)

Leonardo DiCaprio is yet another famous admirer to be caught on camera with Koko. Is it any wonder that she embodies all of the qualities he claims to look for in a potential love interest: “humility, a sense of humor and not a lot of drama”? No word as to how the Titanic hunk measures up against the qualities Koko looks for in a mate, though footage of their one and only meeting has been known to get fans fantasizing in the comments section: “I wish I was that gorilla ;) lol I looooooooooooooooove u Leo”

From the lady’s perspective, Koko’s sweetest celebrity encounter was almost certainly with her favorite, the late children’s television host, Fred Rogers. She removed his shoes and socks, he studied her lips, love was a primary topic and yet their time together does not invite prurient speculation. I can’t think of another human male as deserving of her affection.

Ayun Halliday invites you to read her thoughts on another July 4 birthday on Rewire Me. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Lodger: Alfred Hitchcock’s First Truly ‘Hitchcockian’ Movie (1927)

in Film | July 3rd, 2014

Before Alfred Hitchcock freaked out audiences everywhere by killing off the protagonist halfway through Psycho, before he was praised as a great master of cinema by a bunch of French critics who would themselves go on to become cinematic masters, before the adjective “Hitchcockian” entered the language, Hitchcock was simply a guy struggling to make a go of it as a director.

He started his career in film when he was barely out of his teens in 1919. Hitchcock soon found himself working in the largest and most influential studio in Europe, Germany’s Universum Film AG (UFA). There he not only watched Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau direct, but he also worked as a writer, art director, assistant director on a number of silent films including The White Shadow (1924) and The Blackguard (1925). Though Hitchcock got his first director’s credit with the 1926 movie The Pleasure Garden, the first movie to truly feel Hitchcockian was The Lodger: A Story of London Fog (1927). You can watch it above.

Based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, The Lodger opens with a blonde woman screaming in terror. She is the victim of a shadowy Jack the Ripper-like serial killer who leaves a calling card announcing himself as ‘The Avenger.’ Cut to Daisy, a blonde model whose parents are jubilant over finally finding a boarder for their spare room. The guy is handsome, mysterious and has a weird thing for blondes. You think he might have something to do with the murders?

For a film that came out decades before Vertigo and Rear Window, The Lodger has just about all of Hitchcock’s cinematic ticks. A fetishistic obsession with blondes? Check. An unsettling mingling of sex and death? Check. A man wrongly accused? Check. The only thing it really lacks is a national landmark as the backdrop of a showy action set piece.

On the other hand, The Lodger feels decidedly German. The claustrophobic lighting, the grotesque shadows and the generally morbid storyline all would be perfectly at home at Universum Film AG. In fact, The Lodger, in terms of story, tone and looks, feels like a cinematic cousin to Fritz Lang’s 1931 early sound masterpiece M.

Of course, Hitchcock was just a young director in 1927. And like many young filmmakers, he had a hard time with his producers. While the book leaves it ambiguous whether or not the lodger is the killer, the handlers of the movie’s star Ivor Novello couldn’t possibly have the actor play a villain and demanded a change to the ending. When Hitch turned in the final movie, Michael Balcon, the movie’s main producer, was unimpressed and almost shelved the flick, and, with it, Hitchcock’s career. But after a little bit of tinkering, the movie was finally released. And when The Lodger became a huge box office hit, Hitchcock’s career was assured.

You can find The Lodger on our list of 23 Free Hitchcock Movies Online, as well as in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

23 Free Hitchcock Movies Online

The 39 Steps: Hitchcock’s 1935 Classic Online

37 Hitchcock Cameo Appearances Over 50 Years: All in One Video

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Wim Wenders Reveals His Rules of Cinema Perfection

in Film | July 2nd, 2014

Does Wim Wenders, one of my favorite directors, make perfect films? Hardly — and therein, at least for me, lies the appeal. Perfection strikes me as a singularly uninteresting goal for art, and Wenders has made some of the most interesting pieces of motion picture art going for the past thirty years: Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas; Notebook on Cities and Clothes; Tokyo-Ga. Perhaps, it occurs to me, he has achieved his own kind of very specific, inimitable perfection. But if you seek to imitate it nevertheless, have a look at “Wim Wenders’ Rules of Cinema Perfection” above. In this video (actually a kind of spot for Stella Artois, a brand with which the auteur has worked before), we see humorously revealed several of Wenders’ best filmmaking practices: “You need a good title from the beginning,” “Continuity is clearly overrated,” “Try to welcome and incorporate” the unexpected, and “If you like football, don’t shoot during the world championship.”

If you’ve done your reading on Wenders, you can probably tell that the clip draws from a published list of the director’s “50 Golden Rules of Filmmaking.” Other helpful recommendations include “Before you say ‘cut,’ wait five more seconds,” “A ‘beautiful image’ can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene,” and “There are no rules.” Will following these if-n0t-rules-then-guidelines turn you into the next Wim Wenders? Unlikely. Will drinking Stella Artois do it? Certainly not. But it could hurt none of us, whatever our creative endeavor of choice, to emulate his willingness on display here to learn from his mistakes (based on his list, I’d say he’s taken his share of hard knocks hiring couples, adapting novels, and working with animals); to share his wisdom; and (maybe most importantly of all) to learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Sure, his detractors tend to accuse him of pretentiousness, but we true fans (who pay close attention even to his commercial acting gigs) know the truth.

via No Film School

Wim Wenders and Celebrated Directors Talk About the Future of Cinema (1982)

Wim Wenders Visits, Marvels at a Japanese Fake Food Workshop

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Coudal’s Kubrick Collection: An Online Treasure Trove of Kubrick Ephemera

in Film | July 2nd, 2014

Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art wrapped up a brilliant, exhaustive exhibition about Stanley Kubrick. It was a veritable cornucopia of Kubrick memorabilia, ranging from grainy black and white photographs he took for Look magazine as a youth, to a creepy plastic Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the blood soaked dresses of those hollow-eyed twins in The Shining. The exhibit was a massive success. It’s hard to imagine any other director, with the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, who would not only get an exhibit in a major art museum but also be able to pack the hall week after week.

Part of his allure, no doubt, is Kubrick’s carefully-honed public persona – a reclusive genius who controlled every element of his movies, from the font on the opening titles to the design of the poster. His movies, especially his later ones, are dense, deeply-layered works of such complexity that they continue to unpack themselves after multiple viewings. Heck, there’s an entire documentary, Room 237, that presents nine starkly different interpretations of The Shining.

Kubrick’s movies seem designed to appeal to a certain breed of obsessive film geek. So if you count yourself a member of this tribe (as I do) and you didn’t happen to catch LACMA’s exhibit, you’re in luck. The Chicago design firm Coudal Partners has created a whole online treasure trove of Kubrick ephemera. We’ve culled a few cool things from their site.

Above is a cheesy, behind-the-scenes movie for 2001. The 20-minute promo sets up the movie as if it were an episode of The Outer Limits. “It is the year 2001, you’re on your way to a space station for business,” intones the narrator. “This is but one example of what life would be like in 2001.” What follows is a series of interviews with the scientists, experts, and craftsmen involved in creating Kubrick’s vision of the future with only fleeting footage of the filmmaker himself at around the 18-minute marker. Though it does give you a lot more information on the nuts and bolts of the astronauts’ spacesuits, the short movie, one can’t help but think, is setting up the audience for disappointment. It does little to help viewers understand that the first half of 2001 is about the struggles of ape men on the plains of Africa and does even less to address the psychedelic freakout of the movie’s last reel.

Also found in Coudal’s collection is a site that has compiled all the fonts that Kubrick, a noted typography enthusiast, used in his movies. We’ve posted a couple. He liked Futura and Gothic a lot, apparently. The title card for The Shining was designed by Saul Bass.

And on this site, some genius has created sweaters, ski masks, and doormats from that odd, geometric carpet pattern from The Shining. Pre-orders have sadly closed, but hopefully they’ll start selling them again. I want the cardigan.

And then there’s this behind-the-scenes shot of the director and Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita accompanied by a quote from Kubrick about the actress.

“From the first, she was interesting to watch—even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.”

And speaking of photos, here’s a few pictures Kubrick took of the New York subway system back in 1946 for Look magazine. Compare these photos to his earliest movies like Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss. Both his early flicks and these pictures have the same gritty immediacy.

There is much, much more there at the Coudal Partners to keep any film nerd and Kubrick maven occupied. Check it out.

Stanley Kubrick’s Daughter Shares Photos of Herself Growing Up on Her Father’s Film Sets

Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Created)

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Internet’s Own Boy: New Documentary About Aaron Swartz Now Free Online

in Current Affairs, Film, Life, Web/Tech | June 29th, 2014

On BoingBoing today, Cory Doctorow writes: “The Creative Commons-licensed version of The Internet’s Own Boy, Brian Knappenberger’s documentary about Aaron Swartz, is now available on the Internet Archive, which is especially useful for people outside of the US, who aren’t able to pay to see it online.… The Internet Archive makes the movie available to download or stream, in MPEG 4 and Ogg. There’s also a torrentable version.”

According to the film summary, the new documentary “depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.”

The Internet’s Own Boy will be added to our collection, 285 Free Documentaries Online, part of our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 15 ) |

Steve Buscemi’s Top 10 Film Picks (from The Criterion Collection)

in Film | June 28th, 2014

Ah, summer sunshine. It’s lovely, but so is the idea of drawing the drapes while Steve Buscemi schools me in some of the darker corners of cinema and the human psyche.

The man who’s met his onscreen end so frequently (and horribly) as to merit a Youtube tribute titled The Many Deaths of Steve Buscemi is one of dozens of luminaries who’ve compiled top 10 lists from the Criterion Collection’s film catalog.

What do Buscemi’s 10 picks reveal?

A fondness for black-and-white, a documentary sensibility, and an appreciation for anything deftly straddling the divide between horror and humor…

If, like me, you’re unfamiliar with some of his picks, take a look at the trailers. I wouldn’t be surprised to find him cropping up in any one of them.

Billy Liar

This shining example of the British New Wave can be referred to as a kitchen sink drama, but Buscemi calls it a comedy, with “one of the saddest endings” he’s ever seen.

Brute Force

Picture a remake with Buscemi filling the shoes of sadistic prison guard Hume Cronyn.

The Honeymoon Killers

Buscemi’s hometown gets the nod in one of his favorite-ever film lines: ‘Valley Stream. Valley Stream. What a joke!’”

Man Bites Dog

Not hard to imagine the Coen Brothers enlisting Buscemi to hold forth on the ballast ratio for corpses. Those with the stomach for it can watch the whole disturbing thing here, though as Buscemi himself warns, it’s not for everybody.

My Own Private Idaho

Buscemi’s favorite River Phoenix flick.

Salesman

Wondering how Albert Maysles will feel when he reads that fellow director Richard Linklater fixed Buscemi up with a bootleg of his doc about door-to-door Bible peddlers.