2016-07-19 A machine that generates / empathy

 

2016-07-19   A machine that generates / empathy   

 

Course the d®eam of every film reviewer is to have a film made about his / her life, and Life Itself is such / a film, a hagiog®aphy about your man Roger Ebert, who videed umpteen films and then spouted off / about them, videeing umpteen films and then spouting off / about them is all / we gots. 

 

A precocious child from Urbana, Illinois, your man Roger Ebert wrote his very own Take This Thing Back to Baltimore me-moirs and Life Itself, and the basis of this film.  Ebert edited The Illini, the local Urbana-Champagne newspaper, and took over the film ©ritic column from your (wo)man ‘Mae Tinee’, a pseudonym along the lines of ‘Lew Cifer’ in Adrien Lynn’s Angel Heart, played of course by Robert de Niro playing Lu©ifer, and assigned to whatever staff member of the paper managed to get to go the local matinee to videe and review the same, ‘get it?’ Brad Pitt’s Detective Mills askes it better of his wife, played by Gwyneth Paltrow in David Fincher’s Seven ‘got it’ she replies, ‘good’ is the final nauseating but somehow endearing bit of the exchange and pillow-talk, Lew Cifer = L©ifer, and Mae Tinee = matinee, nauseating but somehow endearing is all / we gots, get it ?

 

Here’s A.O. Scott, film ®eviewer of his beloved NYTimes, going on and on about the ‘art’ of cinema, and also ‘its earthly / delights’.  “It is fueled by speech’ Ebert says about the conference that he was after attending for many decades and eons, but that he is unable to attend now because of the debilitating disease that’s taken half / his jaw, ‘and I am out / of gas’, fueled by speech and out of gas is all / we gots.

 

There is something unsettling about viddeeing a hagiog®aphy about a film ©ritic with no / ©riticism, about as close as we get is ‘you couldn’t make / Siskel and Ebert’ your man the ‘newspaperman’ says it better of that TV show of the same name of the 1980s starring your men the dueling film critics Ebert and Gene Siskel, writers from the neighboring newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times (Ebert) and the Chicago Tribune (Siskel), ‘unless you were Dr. F®ankenstein’.

 

‘You must make a friend of horror’ Brando’s Colonel Kurtz says it better in an all-too brief ©ameo from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now of an actual movie amidst the hagiog®aphy and the Pulitze® and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the prize and film screenplay, won by and written by Ebert respectively, ‘horror and moral / terror’, horror and moral terror is all / we gots.

 

 There are near-unwatchable bits – ‘he is a wounded ©omrade’, your man the film director Warner Herzog pontificates it better of Ebert, ‘who cannot even speak / any more’ – and vast swaths of the film involving Ebert and Siskel and their TV show that need to be edited / out, and aren’t, vast swaths that need to be edited / out and aren’t is all / we gots.

 

‘They hung together’ a fellow-©ritic says it better of your man Ebert and of his 19^th century predecessors’ sta®-f*&^ing tendencies, before during and after (t)his rockumentary jumps the shark, Ebert and Siskel both have ‘faces’, Cin busted his friend and local TV anchor’s chops once in front of a young viewer, innit AH and to his consternation, ‘made / for radio’. 

 

Good times, what do you expect of the hagiog®aphy of someone whose job is to go to the Cannes film festival for 40 years / straight and interview the starlets du jou®.  C®iticism?  Course Cannes and Nice aren’t quite so nice after last week’s mass murder-by-truck, Belgium will not be able to fight Islamist terrorism the Jewish politician Israel Katz said it better if a little on-the-nose after the Brussels airport attack earlier this year, ‘if Belgians continue eating chocolate and enjoying life and looking like great democrats and liberals.’

 

Good times, course it’s a little on the nose and terribly cinsensitive to aks how a film reviewer might review a film like this one about himself, a film reviewer.  It’s all very meta but surely worth aksing whether endless shots of your man Ebert in the home stretch of his life – ‘‘kill me’ the note read’ his widow says it better in the film of a different kind of writing done by Ebert during the worst times of treatment – would get one of his and Siskel’s cinfamous Thumbs Up / or Down, cinfamous Thumbs Up / or Down is all / we gots.

 

 ‘Drama holds a mirror up to life but needn’t / rebuff it’ your man Ebert wrote it better as part of his review of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and surely his bons mots can be found sprinkled through this Take This Thing Back to Baltimore me-moirs and mirror up to life. 

 

Thank you for reading (t)his Take This Thing Back to Balti-memoires and (t)his life.