Remembering Siskel and Ebert

The film reviews that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert aired on various television channels, formats and names from the mid-70s through the end of the 90s are indelibly stamped in my memory. These guys had a weekly presence in my household, as my mother and I watched them religiously when I was a teenager, and I continued to watch religiously into early adulthood. I can actually recall certain lines verbatim: Roger, when addressing the criticism by those who felt that the 1988 film The Accidental Tourist was kind of slow, “You know what my answer to them is? ‘You’re kind of slow!’” When both Gene and Roger gave an enthusiastic thumbs up on a film, it got my attention, and more often than not I’d seek out the film. I didn’t always agree with them, but I respected them enough to give them the benefit of the doubt.

There was a brief moment when Siskel & Ebert episodes were available at the online archive atthemoviestv.com, with over 5000 searchable reviews. Sadly, Buena Vista/Disney-ABC dropped the site when they discontinued At the Movies in 2010. Years later, an unofficial fan-initiated site, SisketEbert.org, also went down. Today, it seems that the best way to view old episodes is on YouTube. Though not ideal, it’s terrific that people have gone through the trouble to upload so many of these episodes, and I’ve spent countless hours rewatching the show.

It’s mind-boggling to me that two intelligent people (though that might be the first problem) offering short reviews of new movies can’t generate a consistent following. There are a few podcasts I’ve listened to, but none are as appealing to me as the old format of Siskel & Ebert, who typically reviewed five new movies an episode, sharing clips before offering their opinions and giving their trademarked “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” Yes, the film clips and the reviews got shorter and shorter as the pair transitioned from PBS to network TV, honoring new time constraints, but they were so articulate, fun and knowledgeable that they could communicate a lot in a short period of time. Today, I find so many film discussion to be too short or too long, too immature or too unrelatable, and often lacking succinct, intelligent observations.

It’s such a shame that Gene died in 1999 and that Roger’s health was so significantly compromised prior to his passing in 2013. An additional decade or two of Siskel and Ebert episodes would be such a gift. What would Gene have thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? What would Roger have thought of The Big Short? What I’d give to hear them spar over Tropic Thunder or Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or First Reformed or Spotlight. But we’re fortunate that these two offered their insights for a quarter century of movies.

The film industry could use another pair of film advocates with as much gravatas as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. If they’re out there, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.

(note: as if I needed reminded, I appear to be repeating myself, as I wrote a very similar blog entry back in 2013 after Roger Ebert dies. Eerily, I’d just watched a Siskel and Ebert episode two nights prior to learning about Roger’s death. This is especially eery given that last year I watched The Natural the night that Robert Redford died, and Spinal Tap II basically at the same time as Rob Reiner’s murder. I’d forgotten about the Ebert coincidence, but it does make me wonder whether I’ve got to stop watching videos of the living!)

Jeanne Dielman Review Revisted

It’s funny what kind of blog posts get a reaction. I’ve been writing essays for sixteen years now, and most don’t inspire any written comments at all despite my website getting upwards of thirty thousand hits a year. But there’s one post of mine that keeps getting responses: a blog from December of 2022, when I offered my opinion about the 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, as it had just been declared the greatest film of all-time by the British film magazine Sight and Sound. This declaration prompted me to watch it, and while I noted some of its attributes, I mostly scratched my head about the behavior of the protagonist of the film, questioning whether the fictionalized account of a single mother in Brussels was really representative of the broader experience of women everywhere, as the film is celebrated to be.

A few responses agreed with my take, liking the film even less than I did:

“Four hours of my life I will never get back. I wasn’t alone in finding it ludicrous – around 12 of the fortyish (in the) audience walked out, with over half leaving during the utterly callous crying babe scene.”

One commented that “The mother is appalling. She is like a shell, a zombie.”

But other disagreed: “This is cinema at its finest, leaving us with much to wonder and talk about.”

This is an important point, because any film that makes you think and leaves you with something to chew on is a worthy watch. That’s what good art does, so in that sense, I’m really glad I watched Jeanne Dielman.

A few responders were quite taken aback by my negative impression of the lead character and decided to go low:

“This is genuinely such a braindead review…You’re looking at a movie about a woman who has been stretched so thin she has no real time for herself, she doesn’t live for herself, she’s constantly working for no pay (yes, homemaking is labour), so of course she has no more energy for the emotional labour of taking care of a child.”

And then another wrote:

“A rather pointless review. You have clearly misunderstood Jeanne Dielman and instead of reading a lick of feminist theory or others’ interpretations of the film, you have decided to instead to declare that you were rather watch ‘Goodfellas’ and other male-directed movies. Very original.”

I found both of these comments ironic, because they made assumptions about me that could be categorized as “braindead” or “pointless.” There’s an inherent assumption behind the words, “Yes, homemaking is labour,” as it implies that I don’t view it as such. I do. I do with a degree of authority on the matter because I did it for twenty-three years, probably longer than the person making the point. Despite working hard at parenting, I found joy in the daily grind and in seeing my kids grow, something Jeanne Dielman was unable to do.

Then there was the assumption that I hadn’t read others’ interpretations of the film. Not true. Not only did I mention reading reviews in my original essay - something the reader clearly overlooked - those reviews are what prompted me to write my own review in the first place. I simply don’t agree that the film is a universal depiction of oppressed women, and I certainly don’t agree that I should have to read books on feminist theory to draw a conclusion about a film that should stand on its own merit.

My mother was a single mom for seven years, raising me and my siblings (note: not just one teenage son as in the film) and was in roughly the same position as Jeanne Dielman, but that’s where the similarities end. My mom worked hard, kept a steady job, laughed, dated, played tennis and cards with friends, cooked and arranged home repairs. It was difficult. It was exhausting. But she still lived her life to the fullest.

This is the lens through which I viewed the movie. Others undoubtedly view it through different lenses. That’s okay. People from different backgrounds and different experiences can view things differently, but it doesn’t mean that any of our opinions are “braindead” or “pointless.” It just means that they’re different.

I do wish more of my blogs inspired readers to comment – I find it illuminating, even when they get a bit personal. But kudos to a film that’s still being talked about fifty-plus years after it was released.

I just never want to see it again.

Rob Reiner

For the second time in three months, I watched a movie at home, only to discover a short time later that a main actor from the film had died. First was Robert Redford, whose film The Natural I likely watched as the actor was taking his final breaths. Then last night I rented Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and not an hour after completing the movie received word from my daughter that Rob Reiner had been murdered, along with his wife, Michele Singer Reiner.

When I told my daughter about this eerie coincidence, she texted: “Dude stop watching movies!”

It’s terribly upsetting, and the news capped off what had already been a horrific weekend of calamities with mass shootings at Brown University and Sydney, Australia, that latter a hate-based anti-Semitic crime that resonated with my wife and me as we lit Chanukah candles last night. Such madness. So senseless. That the Reiners were murdered hours before they too might have lit their own holiday candles also hit home.

Reiner had been a Hollywood thread for my entire life, beginning with his portrayal of Michael Stivic on All in the Family, which I recall watching on TV with my family when I was 3 or 4 years old. Then came Reiner’s directorial career, with a string of successful movies that few directors have matched in all of film history: This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, A Few Good Men, The American President. An amazing run. A few years ago he directed a great documentary on actor and writer Albert Brooks, and his year released the long-awaited sequel, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. This may not have been a masterpiece, but it was a joy to see Reiner return as filmmaker Marti DiBergi, playing straight guy to Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer.

But perhaps more than his contributions to TV and film was his joyful presence and model of sanity in an ever-increasingly angry and insane world. Like his father Carl Reiner before him, he oozed positivity, worked tirelessly in helping others, and just seemed like an all-around good guy. We could use more of those today.

Rest in peace, Rob, and rest in peace, Michele.

Hitchcock's Rear Window

With Oscar night right around the corner, movies have been on my mind, and last week I happened upon a particular episode of the fabulous podcast Filmspotting, in which co-hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pitted Hitchcock’s 1954 Rear Window against his 1958 film, Vertigo. The former has long been in my top three movies of all-time (along with Avalon and Cinema Paradiso), and after watching it last spring for maybe the 20th time, I determined that it was conclusively my favorite film. I was curious to see where Adam and Josh would land on these two films, especially given that Vertigo has long been touted as one of the top two or three movies of all-time on many lists. I needn’t have worried. A few minutes in, I learned that Josh’s default answer for his favorite film has been Rear Window for quite a while.

Not that I needed the validation. I first saw the film at summer camp in Madison, Wisconsin, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, where my fellow music nerds and I would gather in the cafeteria at night to watch movies. Rear Window and Psycho were on the docket that summer, and from that point on, I was all in. For the next half a decade or so it was all Hitchcock, all the time. I rented every movie I could find (oddly, the nearby Sentry grocery store had virtually all of Hitchcock’s 1950s films available for rental on VHS), borrowed several books from the local library (eventually purchasing the wonderful book of filmmaker François Truffaut’s interviews of Hitchcock), and eventually used my newfound knowledge to write a paper for Mrs. Kossoris’s senior English composition class. I was kind of a Hitchcock bully for a while, subjecting many friends to a movie rental night of a subpar film (Topaz and Torn Curtain come to mind) after likely forcing the critical decision at the video rental store.

My enthusiasm for Hitchcock films has been tempered only somewhat since my teenage years, mostly because I started with the best. Rear Window was the first one I saw, and it is indeed his masterpiece. Others have been a hell of a lot of fun: The Lady Vanishes, Lifeboat, Notorious, North by Northwest, Psycho – but nothing rises to the same level of Rear Window, not even Vertigo. That film is wonderful for its creepiness, its pacing, its dreamlike atmosphere and swirling score, not to mention the superb acting of Jimmy Stewart yet again, but there are more holes in Vertigo’s plot than there are in a Chinese checkers board. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes required when watching film, and I love Vertigo, but I never finish the movie feeling entirely satisfied, similar to how I feel after purchasing a new car and wondering if I’ve been taken by the sales guy.

With Rear Window, the only lingering feelings are those of pure delight. When I first viewed the film in 1984, I was positively captivated by Grace Kelly, enthralled with the comedic banter between her, Stewart and the amazing Thelma Ritter, and stressed out beyond belief at the film’s climax. Unfortunately, suspense can’t really be easily duplicated after multiple viewings, and though I may no longer fear for Lisa Fremont’s life when she’s caught in Lars Thorwald’s apartment, Hitchcock’s deft direction and the smart dialogue of screenwriter John Michael Hayes keeps this movie from getting stale even after several viewings. Hayes may not be a household name – I had to look it up for this blog – but he hit the ball out of the park on this one, not just for its entertainment value, but for its larger themes of voyeurism, isolation, loneliness, and what it means to be a neighbor, issues that sadly feel as on-point today as they likely did in 1954.

Other films I’ve seen have knocked me off my feet for a variety of reasons: Broadcast News, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Goodfellas, Beginners, High Fidelity, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Witness for the Prosecution, The Big Short, Charade, Parasite, Holiday, Amadeus, Schindler’s List, Elf, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Searching for Sugarman, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Get Out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roman Holiday, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I Tonya, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Wall*E, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tar, Finding Nemo, Fiddler on the Roof, Long Shot, Michael Clayton, Magnolia, The Great Escape, It’s a Wonderful Life, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense…

But if I had only one film to live with for the rest of my life (not counting trilogies and the like), Rear Window is tops for me.

Now, onto the 2024 Oscars!

Jeanne Dielman: a Film Review

You may have recently heard about the 1975 movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, as it was declared the greatest film of all-time by the esteemed British film magazine Sight and Sound, a slot formerly held by Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo and the 1941 Orson Welles film Citizen Kane. Jeanne Dielman may be unfamiliar to many movie lovers, as it was for me, and despite it running over 200 minutes, I felt compelled to give it a viewing last week (it’s currently streaming on HBO Max and Prime). It was directed by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman who died by her own hand in 2015 at age 65, but not before dedicating her life to portraying women’s lives through dozens of feature films, short films and documentaries. And indeed, Jeanne Dielman, which Akerman directed at age 25, is astounding if for no other reason that it’s almost exclusively about a woman (played by Delphine Seyrig) doing household chores, not the stuff of most cinema, especially in 1975. The movie is almost universally praised by critics and has even garnered an audience approval rating of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not too shabby for a long film with little plot.

But if I’m being honest, I found the film to be a slog. I know, it’s supposed to be a slog, as it depicts a widowed housewife whose days are spent doing menial tasks such as peeling potatoes, running errands, dusting chotchkies and preparing meals for her teenage son, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the slog is worth it.

According to some of the contemporaneous and modern reviews I’ve read, the film is meant to portray the oppressive nature of women’s existence, which boils down to serving men, whether they’re husbands, sons, bosses and – in Jeanne Dielman’s case – clients who pay to have sex with her, a different man visiting her apartment each afternoon. And look, if the film is meant to capture three days in the life of one particular woman who’s clearly suffering from depression, then okay. I can buy the premise and its conclusion, but that doesn’t mean I particularly like it, that I wasn’t bored when the main character peeled potatoes for not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, but for eight minutes, or that I’ll ever watch it again, but okay. The film is completely unique. The subject matter is completely unique. And the artistry of the framing and motionless camera cannot be denied.  

But the problem for me is that others claim that the movie has a more general insight about women’s plight everywhere, and for me that’s where the film falls short, as if Akerman supposed that because she was depressed and alone that women everywhere must also be. Akerman is said to have based the film on the post-World War II generation of women that she observed in her younger life. If that’s truly the case, then I not only stand corrected, but I’m truly sorry, because Akerman must have been surrounded by a bunch of sad sacks. But I honestly don’t buy it.  Yes, many women over the decades have been completely justified in their dissatisfaction with living life as homemakers, but that doesn’t mean they lived like robots, absent of all feelings, sleepwalking through life.

The character Jeanne Dielman is a joyless, expressionless, friendless dud. A complete and utter pill. She shows no joy toward her son. No joy toward an acquaintance she runs into while running errands. No joy in music. No joy in receiving a letter from her sister in Canada (indeed, she reads it aloud with the same intonation one would use to read a cookbook recipe). No joy toward a neighbor’s baby, whom she watches for five minutes each day (this, to me, was the most revealing. How can you look at a baby and not smile and engage?). She admits to not having loved her husband who died six years ago, marrying him mainly to leave her parent’s home. And she apparently has made no friends over the years, which is odd. She is alone, lonely and depressed. Oh, and instead of getting a job where she could earn some money and be part of society, she chooses to prostitute herself (I have a hard time imagining how she found her clients, given how socially inept she appears to be. How exactly did the word get out? And how do men find satisfaction in what is — in essence — screwing a mannequin?).  

And this is meant to portray women’s experience everywhere? I don’t think so. The only things that ring universally true are the necessity to get married in order to leave home and to be in charge of housework by default. I get that. In the 1960s, my mother had aspirations of being a doctor, but coming from a modest family at a time when women “didn’t become doctors,” that dream was denied her. She married my father after a very brief courtship. At that time that was what women did. Either that, or they were stuck living in their parents’ homes, life suspended without the aid of a man. And I know she wasn’t entirely satisfied with being a mom and with running a household. But neither was she joyless. She still had some agency in her life, some control of her aspirations and how she viewed the world. She still played. She got together with friends. She dated after my parents split. She worked at a place of legitimate employment. Despite the similarities of their plights, my mother bears almost no resemblance to Jeanne Dielman.

In the film, the main character’s son says almost nothing throughout and offers not a finger of assistance to help his mother. In an episode of the wonderful podcast Filmspotting the hosts — both of whom love the movie— admonish the son and how unhelpful and ungrateful he is. What they fail to highlight is how uninterested Jeanne is in her son. In a revealing scene at the end of the film’s second day, Dielman’s son finally opens up to her, practically begging her to sit down and have an actual conversation. Instead, she’s impatient and dismissive, offering a quip and telling her son to go to sleep. You can chastise the son all you want, but if Dielman’s current disposition is any indication, her fatherless son has never actually been loved, merely tolerated. No wonder he shows no love for his mother and no propensity to help her with tasks.

The parent-child relationship in Jeanne Dielman reminds me of the parents in the film Revolutionary Road played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who view their kids at best as a nuisance and at worst as obstacles to their true ambitions. I liked that film quite a lot, but I reject the notion that somehow it represents American suburbia in the 1960s. Yes, it beautifully portrays the isolation and dissatisfaction associated with being a suburban mother lacking in agency. But the mother also failed to see the beauty right in front of her.

So no, I didn’t particularly like Jeanne Dielman, and like many highly-praised films, I fear that many people claim to love it mostly because they’ve been told to. For me, give me Rear Window or Goodfellas or Beginners or Eternal Sunshine or loads of other films any day of the week. I will not be watching Dielman again.