Like butter spread on too much bread

If it seems like I haven't written much lately, it's not your imagination. Lately I just don't have it in me. There are a number of reasons for this. Part of it is the ridiculous hours I'm working, which has been seven days a week, 65-80 hours over those seven days. Some of it is outrage fatigue. After all, there's only so much internal resources that one has at the ripe old age of 55, and I have to keep my priorities straight in the age of American Diminishment. Since it looks like the guy we put into the White House is getting ready to fulfull the Republican dream of pulling the rug out from under the Social Security system into which I've been paying for thirty-eight years, if working seven days a week is what I have to do in order to have a roof over my head and some mac and cheese on the table in my old age, well, that's what I do. But some days I have to conserve my internal resources for work, and I don't have the luxury of expending it on the State of the World.

As Ian Holm says as Bilbo Baggins in the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, "I feel thin, sort of stretched... like butter spread over too much bread." Well, I can't remember the last time I felt thin, but you get what I mean. The way it's manifested over the last couple of weeks is a kind of hair-trigger emotionality.

It really started with the Tucson shootings. For two weeks I simply could not look at a photograph of Christina Taylor-Green, or even THINK about her, without bursting into tears. Every step that Gabrielle Giffords, a Blue Dog Democrat who had I known more about her, might have been the focus of one of my anti-DINO rants, makes towards recovery, brings me a kind of joy that only comes from a small beacon of light shining on an otherwise dark, dark world.

Here in the New York area, it's Jets Fever, as the boisterous, goofy, brash, perhaps overachieving New York Jets prepare to take on Ben "Sexual Assault" Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, and the rest of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC Championship game tomorrow. For those who hate the Jets, Rex Ryan is an ass, Mark Sanchez is a pretty boy hype machine who doesn't have the goods, and the assortment of scrap heap cast-offs who have found new life with this team are a bunch of scrubs. But for those of us who have been captivated by this team, this asshole of a coach, for whom everyone in the NFL seems to want to play because he seems to galvanize a team the way no "gentleman coach" can, there's something endearing about this bunch of cast-offs like Santonio Holmes and LaDainian Tomlinson and Jason Taylor, this Byronesque quarterback who befriends dying children and loves musical theatre. I won't cry into my beer if the Jets lose tomorrow (or maybe I will, who knows?) because it's been a good long run for them. But a win would again send me off into a transcendent joy that far outweighs any degree of football fandom I might have.

Yesterday I was reading Roger Ebert describing his new chin prosthesis, which he will wear in his segment on a new At the Movies (which premiered last night on PBS). Ebert is such an American institution, and his very public journey with a disfiguring salivary gland cancer has been such a moving one, that simply having him back in the balcony (if in a limited capacity) is a cause for celebration. Again -- something far more significant to Ebert than to those who don't know him, but a small beam of light just the same. (Note: You'll be able to stream the show soon here.)

And then last night we lost Countdown, and it's all part of the same thing. I didn't know Christina-Taylor Green. I don't know Gabrielle Giffords, or Roger Ebert, or Keith Olbermann. And unlike people like, say, Rich Lowry, I do know the difference between actual people and images on a TV screen. But whatever happened to push Keith Olbermann off the air (and despite some rumblings that he just quit, whenever I hear "mutual agreement", you know it always means "asked him to resign"); whether it was outrage fatigue, grief over losing his father last year, an inability to conceive of how to keep the show sharp while "dialing it back a notch", the fact is that many of us invited this man into our living rooms every night for eight years. If it's eight o'clock, it's Olbermann. And now it isn't.

It isn't that we LIKED him, not in the way we LIKE, say, Rachel Maddow. Keith Olbermann never came across as someone you'd actually want to know. Those of us who watched every night knew that he was a bombastic, egotistical ass. But he was OUR bombastic, egotistical ass, and we loved him warts and all. When he was suspended for making the same kind of political contributions that everyone at Fox does (and even Joe Scarborough at MSNBC does), over 250,000 viewers signed a petition for reinstatement. We recognized his faults, but he wasn't our friend. He was the guy we turned to for a voice of sanity in a world full of climate change deniers and Christofascist zombies and ignoramuses who regard facts as just other opinions. At first it was just Keith Olbermann, but he's also the guy who gave us Rachel Maddow in prime time -- a gift for which we can never hope to repay him. And if you saw Rachel refuse to capitulate to the inevitable and ubiquitous filibustering of Club for Growth shill Stephen Moore on Real Time last night you too will be grateful to Olbermann for giving her a well-deserved break:

Olbermann was important to us, but despite his good work in setting up free health care clinics and making it possible for Americans to donate to help provide transplants to Arizona residents doomed by Jan Brewer's REAL death panel, he kept us at a distance. Rachel is more like the big sister of the narrator in a Carson McCullers story -- the happy, athletic, popular big sister who is always there for you when your parents don't understand you because you're nerdy, bookish, and anxious. Her success has allowed her to be filmed doing segments and promos without full makeup, in the blue nerd glasses and the Converse All-Stars. And the fact that she exudes passion and unabashed liberalism, and then puts on Kent Jones in a funny costume, may help insulate her somewhat from the kind of controversy that has always shadowed Olbermann.

But as much as we adore Rachel, it's Keith Olbermann who has been the pioneer, the voice cursing the darkness when no one else could have. Without Keith Olbermann, there's no Rachel Maddow. There's no Ed Show. There's no Sam Seder in front of the cameras in prime time. There's no Cenk Uygur forcing Republican former Congressman Bob McEwen to admit that there's no money in the Social Security trust fund because they stole it and we have to just suck it up. Without Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell (who is still too "centrist" for my taste) is still an occasional third banana on Morning Schmoe. Without Keith Olbermann, the only voices of opinion journalism on the medium in which most people still get their news are the reality-challenged hatemeisters on Fox News.

Who knows...perhaps with the "friendlier faces of liberalism" that now constitute the MSNBC lineup (because Cenk Uygur's seat-warming at 6 PM is still only filler), the "both sides do it" claim will be mitigated. But for those of us who invited Keith Olbermann into our homes at 8 PM every weeknight for eight years, there's a big empty chair today. And just another weepy-trigger for an exhausted blogger.

More on Olbermann:

Greg Sargent
Steve Benen
Nicole Belle, focusing on the crowing of the right.
Brad Friedman
John Aravosis
Justin Rosario
Steve Kornacki
Some speculation about what's next (I'm not buying it.)
Adrastos
Richard Bey (with some inside dirt)

Not important in the larger sphere of things, but wonderful news just the same

Roger Ebert is coming back to television -- sort of:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun-Times film critic is producing "Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies" with his wife, Chaz Ebert. The weekly, half-hour review program will debut in January and be syndicated nationally on public television stations.

The show will feature co-host Christy Lemire of The Associated Press and contributing critic Elvis Mitchell of National Public Radio and former movie critic for The New York Times. Ebert will have his own segment on the show called "Roger's Office," during which he will use his computer voice to review new movies or talk about the state of film.

In a pilot of the new show, Ebert is shown sitting behind a desk, typing his review of a documentary. The computer voice says his words as he discusses the film. As Ebert finishes his review, he says: "I think it's a real discovery on DVD and I give it a big thumbs up." And he does.

[snip]

The new show features Lemire and Mitchell sitting in red movie theater seats debating back and forth about a movie before issuing a thumbs up or thumbs down review, not unlike Siskel and Ebert years before.

Lemire and Mitchell will never in a million years have the chemistry, the "dysfunctional marriage" aura the Siskel and Ebert had. And they just aren't in the same league, though Mitchell in particular knows his stuff. But nothing will ever equal the originals, as you'll see from this Siskel and Ebert review of the wonderfully campy teen vampire movie The Lost Boys:

But anything that involves Roger Ebert is guaranteed to be worth your time. If you haven't been reading Ebert's blog, you don't yet know what a damn fine writer he is -- not just about film, but about everything.

Since I can't stay up, why not hang with the best?

Ebert is livetweeting the Academy Awards. And I finally understand the awesomeness that is Mo'nique.

Quick Dispatch from the Department of Great Ideas

DougJ over at Balloon Juice has an interesting idea for an award to honor and remember "Jon Swift". Even if, as one commenter pointed out, it means Driftglass and Tbogg win every year.

And back when I and my online movie reviewer compatriots were forming and then running Cinemarati, our stated goal was to have online film criticism gain the same prestige as print criticism. I therefore find it oddly funny that a decade later, Roger Ebert is musing on how to monetize a blog. What does it say about the world when Roger Friggin' Ebert is saying this:

I'm not part of the usual "studio buy" for purposes like that. For the better films, I should be. I am the most-read movie critic on the web. I don't think the studios give a shit about critics. Their online budgets gravitate toward sites with celeb photos, downloadable wallpaper, gossip,"exclusive" trailers, that stuff. My readers actually buy tickets and go to movies at a much higher rate than the national average; just read one of the comment threads here. But for the big tentpole movies, you know what? The marketing people aren't looking for readers. They're looking for buzz.

I mean, Mary Ann Johansen sounded like this eight years ago. This is ROGER EBERT, folks; the one critic that even people who don't read critics read. Maybe online criticism does finally have the same prestige as print -- except that print went the other way instead.

So Ebert and has therefore formed an online club at a cheap price to offer film geeks and Ebertians some Special Stuff in exchange for five bucks. I think that's a pretty good deal. I paid more than that for Randi Rhodes podcasts.

There's a special place in heaven for the people who did this

Some of the people who used to fancy themselves as cinéastes and posted condescending missives on the old Cinemarati messageboards might disagree, but for me the most treasured voice in the area of movie reviewing has always been Roger Ebert. There's this idea that being a film critic means you have to turn up your nose at anything not made in Eastern Europe in the 1960's, but what Ebert has always been able to do is to evaluate a movie within its own genre. He's not expecting Iron Man to be like Belle du Jour, and aside from an unfortunate tendency to give any movie featuring Angelina Jolie in a tight sweater a pass, he's usually right on the money.

It's one of those cruel ironies of life that a series of cancer recurrences has robbed Ebert of his actual voice. A not-so-cruel irony is that what is coming out of the pen of Roger Ebert of late has more to do with life than movies, and he's arguably doing the best writing of his career in his online journal.

The latest Esquire has an article about Ebert's cancer battle, and about his life today, and while I'm sure most of us had the same response to the photograph accompanying the article, which shows the full ravages of the disease, the article is riveting, even if you, like me, will find yourself crying buckets after you finish reading it. And yet, crying seems in some ways like an inappropriate response, because the reality of Ebert not having to hide behind photographs of himself before he lost much of the lower half of his face gives him a new freedom to speak out. And yesterday he spoke out, in person, on Oprah Winfrey's show. He now speaks by typing out on a keyboard and having his thoughts spoken by a computer-generated voice not much different from that used by Stephen Hawking. But a company in Scotland called Cereproc is painstakingly dissecting hours of Ebert's DVD commentary tracks to reconstruct his actual voice. Here's a sample, and it is truly amazing:

And nobody does it better

If you've been reading this here little bloggie over the weekend, you know that I've been taking a bit of a stroll down memory lane, back to the days when I went to the movies every weekend and then often felt inspired enough to write about them for eight years. Long around 2005 it stopped being fun, and since I had already started B@B, it seemed a logical point at which to say farewell to movie reviewing. While I'm surprised that so many of my former peeps are still at it, I'm disappointed that so many have also given it up; like my longtime colleague ModFab and the great Film Snobs, particularly the Critic Formerly Known as Shimes, who when he drank enough, was in the league with some of the best writers in literary history.

But while there are the Jonathan Rosenbaum cinéastes, and the Armond White fans, for my money there is only one critic who is irreplaceable and that is Roger Ebert. No other critic seems able to evaluate a film's worth within its own genre, and I have a special place in my heart for someone who adores the brilliant Dark City. Aside from being occasionally blinded whenever Angelina Jolie's rack appears in a movie, usually if Ebert says it's worth seeing, it's worth seeing.

But even Ebert has joined the ranks of bloggers, and it's clear his gift isn't just for writing about movies. For perhaps no one really understands the zen, the craft of newspaper journalism quite the way Ebert does.

The grit of Roger Ebert

While going through old VHS tapes the other day I found a tape I'd made of a special memorial program broadcast after Gene Siskel died in 1999. In some circles, it was Siskel who was regarded as the "real film critic" of the Siskel and Ebert duo, while Ebert was just a hack.

Of course, these are the people who gave me fits during my seven years of reviewing movies; the kind of cinéastes who don't like any movie that isn't made in the Czech Republic or by Lars Von Trier and isn't 4 hours long. People used to tell me I was a good reviewer, but mostly all I did was write about movies and tell people what I thought. I never professed to have any kind of great knowledge of the Art of Cinema. I wrote because I wanted to write, and that was all.

To those in the know, "film critics" are people like Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Denby, Armond White, and of course the Doyenne of All Film Criticism, Pauline Kael. But just as Beverly Sills made opera accessible to those who don't like opera, Roger Eberg has made film reviews accessible to people who just like movies and don't know a gaffer from a key grip.

When you strip movies of all the mystique, what you end up with are "honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars." This is something that Roger Ebert has always understood. The reason that Ebert's reviews have always been mandatory reading is that Ebert always evaluates a movie within the context of its genre and what it's trying to do, rather than judging an action shoot-em-up by how it stands up against Dancer in the Dark.

Yet Ebert has never been the kind of quote whore whose blurbs are usually the earmark of a movie you should be sure to skip. For while he has never been guilty of taking movies too seriously, perhaps no one else has been a bigger booster of creative filmmaking. And no one's image has been as iconic in its association with film criticism. And so it's hard to underestimate the courage it took for Ebert to appear Wednesday night at the Overlooked Film Festival, which he created.

The recent cancer announcements of Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow caused a nationwide epidemic of discomfort, as Americans faced the prospect of having to look cancer right in the face. Well, Elizabeth Edwards was right there at the Democratic candidates debate last night, and Tony Snow plans to return to work on Monday despite a dire prognosis. Roger Ebert has been rendered unrecognizable by surgery to remove part of his jaw as part of treatment for salivary gland cancer last June. He wrote about it earlier this week:

I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the Festival. I’m told that paparazzi will take unflattering pictures, people will be unkind, etc. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. As a journalist I can take it as well as dish it out.

So let’s talk turkey. What will I look like? To paraphrase a line from “Raging Bull,” I ain’t a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of Siskel & Ebert was that we didn’t look like we belonged on TV.)

What happened was, cancer of the salivary gland spread to my right lower jaw. A segment of the mandible was removed. Two operations to replace the missing segment were unsuccessful, both leading to unanticipated bleeding.

A tracheostomy was necessary so, for the time being, I cannot speak. I make do with written notes and a lot of hand waving and eye-rolling. The doctors now plan an approach that does not involve the risk of unplanned bleeding. If all goes well, my speech will be restored.

So when I turn up in Urbana, I will be wearing a gauze bandage around my neck, and my mouth will be seen to droop. So it goes.

I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what? I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers.

Although months in bed after the bleeding episodes caused a lack of strength and co-ordination, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago restored my ability to walk on my own, climb stairs, etc. I no longer use a walker much and the wheelchair is more for occasional speed and comfort than need. Just today we went for a long stroll in Lincoln Park.

We spend too much time hiding illness. There is an assumption that I must always look the same. I hope to look better than I look now. But I’m not going to
miss my Festival.

Why do I want to go? Above all, to see the movies. Then to meet old friends and great directors and personally thank all the loyal audience members who continue to support the Festival. At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is “overlooked,” or why I wrote “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”

Being sick is no fun. But you can have fun while you’re sick. I wouldn’t miss the Festival for anything!

If we had not recently seen Katie Couric attack Elizabeth Edwards on 60 Minutes for not having the decency to go home, die quietly, and not subject us to having to watch her condition slowly deteriorate, we might think that Eberts' friends concerns about bad press coverage to be misguided. But with cancer still the disease we dread most, it's inspiring to see high-profile people battling the disease refusing to just go away and hide. Roger Ebert loves movies, and for him to not attend this festival even if he had to be carried in on a sedan chair is unthinkable. And while there may yet be unfavorable coverage, so far what most papers are recounting is the standing ovation he received and the love the attendees have for this man who has arguably done more for the movies than anyone else in his field.

For those of us who have been admirers of Roger Ebert's work, the idea of a man who has made his living and his reputation through language being unable to speak is unspeakably cruel. And yet Ebert is right -- as long as he can think and type, he can still do his work. And so Roger Ebert joins Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow to form an unlikely trifecta of courage in the face of disease -- and show us how important it is to refuse to go quietly.