Roger Ebert's Blog, page 5

The excerpt below is from a piece I wrote at MSN Movies about what films of the past can teach us about the politics of the present. It's called Lights, Camera, Election! Political lessons we learned from the movies:

Events are more carefully staged and scripted than ever, and the mainstream media cover the photo ops, "press conferences" and "debates" as if they were actually news. Even Baghdad can be just another studio back lot: McCain claimed to "walk freely" in a market there and complained A

If, like me, you were spellbound by each season's opening credits for "The Wire," you must see the short film analyses of them by critics Andrew Dignan, Kevin B. Lee and Matt Zoller Seitz at Moving Image Source (published by the Museum of the Moving Image). Using the actual footage, along with still frames and zooms (aka "the Ken Burns effect"), these short films examine the credits in critical detail, treating them as short movies unto themselves. Which is exactly what they are. Each season o

If you were at Comic-Con in San Diego, you could ride the unicorn from "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay." You could learn about upcoming projects, most of them sequels and remakes. (They're making "Tron 2." Really.) You could listen to the creators of some of these things talk about what they've been working on and what they worked on and promoted at Comic-Con before.

Comic-Con is the new Sundance, the marketing event for people who want to be the first to know about things that other

Hey, remember the year they released "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"? Where were you when the movie of "Sex and the City" came out? Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a 63-page spread about the former HBO show the week before the feature film came out? Oh, and what about the big "Chronicles of Narnia" sequel? It was such a hot property they made everybody go through security -- with metal detectors and everything. What if someone had made a shaky-cam bootleg of it 36 h

I regret that I haven't seen Guillermo Del Toro's "Hellboy" (2004) or "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (2008), though De. Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" was my top movie of 2006. Andrew Tracy at Reverse Shot evidently isn't impressed with the Hellboys, and I say "evidently" because I'm putting off reading the whole of his review of the new one until I've seen it.

But that hasn't stopped me from relishing the first two paragraphs! Because Tracy is articulating thoughts I've often entertained but too rare

Do you recognize this Barranca Airways plane? I hope so. Because it's from one of my top-five favorite movies (and most personally influential of all time -- and one of the great classics of American cinema.

A friend sent me this picture, from an "Antiques Roadshow" episode. The seller was asking $250 and didn't even know he had...

This is my condensed version of David Fincher's 1999 comedy masterpiece, "Fight Club," to accompany and expand on my personal/critical essay below. Notice that only one punch is thrown. The violence is psychological, inner-directed and apocalyptic. That's the idea. See for yourself. (Speaking of condensation: Did you know that you can make explosives from soap and condensed orange juice? Tyler Durden says so. But don't talk about it.)

PLAY THIS MOVIE LOUD.

Spoilers abound.