For example, on June 16th, Roger Ebert dropped out of sight again to undergo further surgery on a recurrent problem, a cancerous growth in his salivary gland. In the introduction to one of his recent yearly compilations, Ebert wrote movingly of his disease and its impact on his job and on his spirit. Ebert has been a friend to this site in the past, and I wish him well. Curiously, I’ve become something of a “defender” of Ebert of late. Here’s the background. When I was younger, and Ebert was first on national TV (on PBS), finding the Pulitzer Prize winning writer’s columns wasn’t so easy, so in evaluating the man all one had to go on was the prize itself and his TV persona, in which he was, then anyway, aggressive, smart, and with a debater’s cunning for his opponent’s weak spots. Only later, when his annual review compilations began to appear, and then with the advent of the WWW, could a curious reader not living in Chicago, or with access to cumbersome library copies of the Sun Times, dive into his prose. Thus in recent years I’ve become quite a fan of Ebert the daily journalist. At the risk of insulting the TV Ebert, the print Ebert is a much better reviewer than the TV version would lead you to think  

On the page he is expansive, generous, confessional, and politically forthright, and has that quality so rare in writers of any kind, common sense. In the past four or five years I get his annuals, issued by Andrews McMeel Publishing in November, and read them from the beginning to (I hope) end while in the bath or going to bed. I go as far as I can, anyway (the next edition usually beats me to the end; I’m only in the “D”s for 2006 and the year’s half over). This immersion in the work of a reviewer is the true test of a reviewer. Can you read the old material with the same urgency and appreciation now that it had then? Does the style in such large gulps wear on you? Though the answer to the first question is “no” when asked of, say, the terribly overrated and sentimentalized James Agee, with Ebert it is yes; and while the answer to the second question is “yes” when it comes to the dread Pauline Kael (Ebert would never use thephrase “dread” of a fellow reviewer, live or dead), for reading Ebert’s style in large doses the answer is “No,” it doesn’t wear on you. It is plain prose that lasts, which isn’t to say that Ebert doesn’t occasionally have the memorable flourish or the odd joke (good phrase: a barber shop in a movie serves as a place where “daily soap operas are played out to loud acclaim or criticism”; good joke: on Dirty Dancing: “I thought the plot was a clunker assembled from surplus parts at the Broken Plots Store”). 

One knock against Ebert I’ve heard in conversations with friends is that he is too easy on African-American films and actors. Though that may be true of the TV Ebert, the print Ebert is fair and often quite hard on films that displease him. But it is true that he is much nicer in print in general than people seem to take him to be, especially Hollywood types. In fact, the individual ratings for films really only make sense (to me, anyway) if you knock them all down a star. My only complaint against his books, which annually come in at just under 1000 pages, is that the movies are offered up alphabetically instead of chronologically. I wish in the future he would either re-print them in order of publication, or post the actual release date of each film (instead of just the year), or add an appendix that re-lists all the films in chronological order. But that’s just me. In any case, it is testimony to the nature of the times that Ebert must be “discovered” as the fine writer and thinker he really is.   

 

Dan Brown’s novel is part of a long tradition in popular American fiction, from Moby Dick to James Michener, the novel as technical manual. Tom Clancy is the highest current living perpetrator of this style of novel. Books in this mode must be big and fat and tell you how to do simple and complex things, such as how to drain a whale of blubber or navigate the icy depths of the Bering Straight. These books revel in providing the reader with the fruits of the author’s research. Every once in a while a novel like Da Vinci Code comes along, and within living memory they have included Love Story, The Godfather, Jaws, and The Exorcist, books that everybody seemed to be reading or have read and that at the same time the elites hated. There is a secret to all these books that I am loath to expose, but they all became very popular movies.

The point is, though, that they were mostly good movies, era defining movies, career announcing movies. Da Vinci (shouldn’t it be the Leonardo Code? [Da Vinci means a place of birth, and isn’t a name]) is none of these things (a career ender, maybe). Nothing in it is clear. Who are the bad guys? What did she say? What does the end mean?

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly raises the good questions in his blog commentary on the film, noting that the movie changes he book significantly, mostly in leaving out “Dan Brown’s ultimate thesis about the evolution of Christianity — i.e., its suppression of the ”sacred feminine.” In the movie, the notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had descendents is the cornerstone of the conspiracy. The Church, as presented, is guilty of covering up a fact — the human proof of Christ’s bloodline. That, of course, is true in the novel as well, yet what gets muddled, if not lost, in the movie is the spiritual significance of Christ’s having been married. Throughout the novel, Dan Brown uses the lighting-rod issue of Christ-as-husband to ask, in a far more general and embracing way, What happened, over the course of two millennia, to women in the church? Were they ever more central? Why did goddess culture — an undisputable truth of history — fade?”

Some time in the late 1970s or very early 1980s, Saturday Night Live did a parody of 60 Minutes or at least the Andy Rooney part, with a NRFPT Player (Joe Piscopo? Al Franken?) slumped at a desk, huge eyebrows quivering, and asking the camera in great anger, “Have you thought about shoes lately?!” The opening salvo capture perfectly the banality, the false whimsy, the unfocused crotchetiness, What we really didn’t know was that Andy Rooney really isn’t a humorist, because he doesn’t have a sense of humor, as shown in the way he reacted to Ali G.’s attempt at an interview with him. I assume that a humorist requires a sense of humor but perhaps I’m being optimistic. In any case, Rooney reversed the usual order of parody on Sunday, June 4th, by dedicating his segment to … shoes, reaching finally after 20-some years the depths of banality that SNL had unknowingly predicted for him. His rage at shoes. Their expense. Their ugliness. The fact that they accumulate (he hauled all his shoes over from his no doubt expensive abode in order to prove this). And so forth. The segment wasn’t funny. But then, Rooney never is. It wasn’t insightful, or whimsical, or even quotable (the collected wit of Andy Rooney is a slim, if existent, volume).

as anyone else noticed how the Dodge Caliber commercial (titled “Too Tough”) has been censored or edited? This is the commercial where the cute Tinkerbelle clone is raising havoc in a city trying to change things into child’s toy versions of themselves. She meets her match in the Dodge Caliber, which bounces her spells back at her till she collapses in defeat. When a street tough laughs at her, deriding her as a “stupid fairy,” she “taps” him into a sweater garbed Fire Island denizen with four Pekinese instead of White Supremacist with an attack dog (I know I don’t have the breed quite right here”).

However, since that commercial has first aired, the “Stupid fairy” line has been excised. Or at least is often excised (sometimes late at night the whole text is there). Sometimes its there and sometimes it’s not. Did a gay rights group protest, or did the commercial suddenly seem offensive to the car company when they finally saw it on TV?

While on hiatus from QuickStop-to-be, I wrote an exhaustive and exhausting (to read) review of John Ford’s The Searchers over at the DVDJournal.com.