Winter Lion

Roger Ebert may be on his way to the big bijou in the sky but he's living life to the fullest through his writing, which is at his smart populist Midwestern best. Not only are his movie reviews as accurate and enjoyable as ever, if not moreso as there is a freedom in his writing that seems a heightened version of what he had before, but he's also dead-on politically again, opening his Thursday "A Letter to Rush Limbaugh" with:

You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation.

He then excoriates the Satanic Limbaugh for discouraging contributions to Haiti via the Red Cross link on the White House website, drumming up paranoia that it'll put his listeners on the Barack Obama campaign mailing list.

But it's the poignant blog piece from January 6 that's being passed around the Net, where Ebert reveals his feelings about no longer being able to eat or drink. It's elegaic without self-pity, and even has a movie title, "Nil by mouth:"

I dreamed. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and there's a passage where the hero, lazing on his river boat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda attached to it and drinks. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he's served a beer in a frosted mug. I don't drink beer, but the frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and I driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying "...and a five-cent beer for the boy." The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat.

For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.

He writes about how many memories are coming back now, that it's all there, events long ago sparked by a scene in a movie that was shot in a location near the memory. He talks about not missing food and drink as much as the company, :

What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss. Because I can't speak that's's another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy pals like my friend McHugh so much, because he rarely notices if anyone else isn't speaking. But to attend a "business dinner" is a species of torture. I'm no good at business anyway, but at least if I'm being bad at it at Joe's Stone Crab there are consolations.

When we drive around town I never look at a trendy new restaurant and wish I could eat there. I peer into little storefront places, diners, ethnic places, and then I feel envy. After a movie we'll drive past a formica restaurant with only two tables occupied, and I'll wish I could be at one of them, having ordered something familiar and and reading a book. I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist.

And as a man who not only embraced the Internet but created the most thriving individual movie critic's website, he closes with a deep understanding of how it's allowed him to connect personally with his readership:

So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, "Remember that time?" I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it's sad. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.

Let's hope he hangs in there, without severe chronic pain or debilitation, for longer that anyone expects.

As long as he can type.

Memories Can't Wait

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button says it's about the passage of time, but it's really about the passage of memory. The biggest change that screenwriter Eric Roth made to F. Scott Fitzgerald's original short story, written in 1921 and based on a Mark Twain quote about what a pity that the best things in life happened at the beginning and the worst at the end, is the addition of the love story plot and, in fact, build the whole movie around it.

Well, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett sell that story. After all, they're not only excellent actors, they're also uncommonly great to look at. Their scenes once they're out of all the computer-generated make-up are a welcome heart of the story -- their ages meet, but the visual path director David Fincher surrounds them with is all Orson Welles meets Mark Twain -- elegance with a riverlike pulse, the story almost a corrective to Welles' own tale of unrequited love over many decades of societal change, The Magnificent Ambersons.

I'm not sure the ultimate significance of the film, but it's just lined with diorama time pieces, moments that play off the gentle loneliness of the age-flipped protagonist and, without too much pain, lull you into reflecting on your own journey, what moments are more poignant for being lost, but mainly what happens when all that you are slips away, and how do you slip out of history.

The answer, of course, is when everyone who ever knew you, who knew you well, passes on as well. We seek mates in large part because we seek witnesses. If we choose it constancy it may be for that reason alone, a desire for the line, a metaphor spoken by Blanchett in the dance studio, the dancer's neverending quest to be the perfect line.

Death, however, breaks a line every time, and maybe the movie is germane to our moment because it is the scope of the 20st Century, from WWI getting us out of the 19th Century, through Hurricane Katrina turning the page on that failed ideology and burying the 20th Century in her wake.

Has it been nine years? Just a memory.

Gent

Just a brief pause before le deluge tomorrow where either Obama is stopped or rolls on like a freight train, or maybe doesn't hit blow-out expectations and somehow the Clintons spin that into a win.

I was fortunate enough to enjoy Roy Scheider speaking in person after one of his films, The Fourth War (John Frankenheimer, 1990) screened at NYU. It wasn't Scheider's best film or biggest budgeted, but he was, as always, great to watch.

Scheider was a total gent. He answered any and all question with a winning combination of self-respect and very funny humility. Wonderful stories about having all this rehearsal time with Richard Dreyfuss on Jaws because Spielberg's mechanical shark didn't work, so that the two of them could rehearse alone all day, then show up at Steven's with a bottle of red wine, eat dinner, then do the scenes for him. Which is why the movie holds up so well over time -- the shocks are totally earned by the character work.

I didn't realize until deep into the q & a how much All That Jazz was the highlight of his film acting career. Here was a summer stock song and dance man who got typecast as various shades of tough in Klute and The French Connection and Sorceror, and had fought hard, auditioning without real invitation, to get cast by director Bob Fosse in what was essentially his autobiography and mortality essay. Scheider was rewarded with an Oscar nomination, losing to the overdue Dustin Hoffman for Kramer vs. Kramer. (Hoffman later went on to win again for Rain Man.)

Scheider had the room feeling very warm and communal, everyone sharing in his good guy come far stories. I had always heard that Scheider was cool politically (lay down in the road in 2003 to protest the Iraq invasion) and he reminded me of a version of my dad, just three years younger -- Depression baby made good, essentially decent guy who could be tough when needed but never a smidgen more.

Maybe the room was a little too loose, because it was close to the end and some kid asked the innocent, instantly regrettable question out of the laughter to a previous answer: "Were you disappointed when you didn't win the Oscar?"

The laughter stopped dead. We were all suddenly embarrassed for him; he'd won us over, and this was how we repaid him? To dredge up a painful loss? The moment when Hoffman's name, not his, went into the almanac?

Scheider got serious, quiet and frank. While I can no longer quote it verbatim, it went something like this: It always feels better to win, and nobody who's honest will tell you it doesn't suck when you lose. But if you're not in it for the work, you're never going to be happy.

So Roy Scheider died yesterday of a staph infection complication from melanoma. Come to think of it, he was always so goddamn tan.

Like when I saw him live once again, at the premiere of Do the Right Thing at the Ziegfield in Manhattan. He was with a woman who may have been his girlfriend or his wife, looking for their seat. I was in the back of the orchestra, with Rick Moranis and wife in front of me, John Salley with his long legs on the aisle (sporting his brand new NBC Championship ring). Scheider came by as the lights were going down, looking dapper as usual in some kind of white suit (better show the tan), but they were running out of time.

I thought about how strange it was that this guy who had been in some of the premier AA++ films of that hard rockin' era was scrambling for a seat, maybe for the next job as well.

I remembered when he first made an impression on me (I was a little too young to see French Connection in the theaters) in Marathon Man. He plays the secret agent brother to NYC nerd Dustin Hoffman, the reason Hoffman gets in all the trouble with Olivier's Szell. Scheider's signature scene has one of the most memorable squibs of all time

Scheider is attacked from behind by a hired assassin using a razor thin piano wire, but Scheider managers to get his hand up in time to block the wire from garroting his throat. His forearm and wrist take the brunt of it, a suddenly opening long skinny gash, a long skinny geyser of red. He slams the assassin backwards. They crash around the room like Viggo in the baths this past year -- to the death.

Fate, fate fate. He 's poured his heart out into his Bob Fosse performance, arguably his career performance, but he's lost the Oscar to the guy at the top of the Marathon Man bill, his narrative brother from three years ago. No matter how much you might have expected it or not, it's gotta hurt.

Ah, well. At least he's still got the best scene in their movie together.

No contest.