Swarmanoid-Prey

Roger Ebert tweets:
Swarmanoid: Humanoid Robotic Swarms. What could possibly go wrong? http://t.co/ysykIWb

And my reply:
@ebertchicago Ah, yes... Michael Crichton's "Prey" http://t.co/oSjoqM1

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"An Apology For Roger Ebert"

The title of a talk (transcript here) by Brian Moriarty, delivered 4 March 2011 at the 25th Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, an intelligent defense of Ebert's remark that "video games can never be art."
Among other things, I found this interesting:

Back in 1900, the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium.

Around the edge of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques, three on the left, three on the right and three overhead.

The plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers.

We can imagine the names that were being thrown around. Bach, Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Brahms.

But when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored, the trustees couldn't make up their minds.

And so, for the past 111 years, visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques. Only one, at the very top, contains a name, the only one the trustees could all agree on: Beethoven.

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Ebertfest 2010

The schedule for 12th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival has been posted.

The Wednesday night opener is Pink Floyd The Wall in 70mm. Also looking forward to seeing Apocalypse Now/Redux on the big screen.

Ebert writes about this year's festival on RogerEbert.com:

Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), my choice for the best film of the decade, will appear after the screening of his masterpiece at Ebertfest 2010. The 12th annual festival will be held April 21-25 at the landmark 1,600-seat Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, and for the first time ever, all festival Q&A sessions and panel discussions will be streamed live on the Internet.

Presented by the College of Media of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival features a dozen screenings, along with lectures, guest appearances and special events. I program, produce and host the event, along with my wife Chaz. Thanks to my computer-generated voice, I plan to play a larger role onstage this year.

Win Ben Stein's mind

[Apparently, I had written this back in December 2008 and neglected to publish it. Posting now (05.29.2010) with original post date and time.]

Roger Ebert has posted an essay, Win Ben Stein's mind, to his Journal in response to criticism that he hadn't written a review of Ben Stein's film Expelled!

Here are a couple of excerpts from Ebert's post:

Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now you are faced with two choices: (A) Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or (B) Intelligent Design.

Because this is a special edition of the program, you can use a Hotline to telephone every scientist on Earth who has an opinion on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them agree on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking. You could use the money. Which do you choose? You, a firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and exercise your freedom of speech. You choose (B).

Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You have lost. Outraged, you file suit against the program, charging it is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your suit argues that the "correct" answer was chosen because of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Design, despite the fact that .025 of one percent of all scientists support it. You call for (B) to be discussed in schools as an alternative theory to (A).

Your rights have been violated. You're at wit's end. You think perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope.
...
You release your film "eXpelled."As you fully expect from all your experience, it is rejected almost unanimously by the MSM. It receives an 8% rating on the TomatoMeter, earning it a place on the list of the worst-reviewed films of all time. In a review not catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnwers.net writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart right cross to the protruding jaw of evolution's elite."

Again, the useful excluded middle. Those for whom Ben Stein is not a hero are not believers in God. It also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. So ChristanAnswers has excluded two middles at one fell stroke.

It's a long post, but well worth reading in its entirety!

Ebert update (3 of 3): Creationism Q&A

Another Ebert commentary, this time, the seriously funny Creationism: Your questions answered. (I guess it's just seriously, uh, serious if you really believe men walked the earth with dinosaurs.)

Ebert update (2 of 3): Movie rating systems

Roger Ebert's Journal entry, You give out too many stars, wherein Ebert discusses stars, thumbs, and the "Little Man" of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ebert update (1 of 3): Lost parts of "Metropolis" found

In a commentary posted 4 August, Roger Ebert writes:

It is the most sensational find in recent film history. A nearly-complete print of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927) has been discovered in Buenos Aires, 80 years after it was thought a quarter of the film was lost forever. Called by many the most important of German films, one of the landmarks of silent Expressionism, its plot had several loose ends that will now be repaired.

"Nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster"

A. O. Scott writes something of an homage to Roger Ebert in today's New York Times. In an April 1 letter to readers of the Chicago Sun-Times Ebert announced his return to (written) criticism, following the 10th Annual Roger Ebert Film Festival. (Although cancer free, Ebert's latest surgery -- his third -- failed to restore his ability to speak.)

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.

It is this print corpus that will sustain Mr. Ebert’s reputation as one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment. His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.

His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off. He’s just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do.