Ebert's essentials. 25 movies to mend a broken heart

87 Pages·2012·0.57 MB·English

by  Ebert

Other Books by Roger Ebert
An Illini Century: One Hundred Years of Campus Life A Kiss Is Still a Kiss Two Weeks in
the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook Behind the Phantom’s Mask Roger Ebert’s Little
Movie Glossary Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (annually 1986–1993) Roger
Ebert’s Video Companion (annually 1994–1998) Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook
(annually 1999–2007, 2009–2012) Questions for the Movie Answer Man Roger Ebert’s
Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing from a Century of Film
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie The Great Movies
The Great Movies II
Your Movie Sucks
Roger Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews 1967–2007
Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert Scorsese by Ebert
Life Itself: A Memoir A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length
With Daniel Curley
The Perfect London Walk
With Gene Siskel
The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and
George Lucas
DVD Commentary Tracks
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls Citizen Kane
Dark City
Casablanca
Crumb
Floating Weeds
Other Ebert’s Essentials
33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity 25 Great French Films
27 Movies from the Dark Side

25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart copyright © 2012 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.
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Contents
Introduction
Key to Symbols
About Last Night . . .
All the Real Girls
Annie Hall
Autumn Tale
Beauty and the Beast
Before Sunrise
Before Sunset
Cousin, Cousine
500 Days of Summer
Flirting
Innocence
Lars and the Real Girl
Like Water for Chocolate
Minnie and the Moskowitz
Moonstruck
An Officer and a Gentleman
Once
Out of Africa
Possession
Pride and Prejudice
Say Anything
Scent of Green Papaya
Shakespeare in Love
Some Like It Hot
The Truth About Cats and Dogs
Introduction
To begin with full disclosure, I am not at all sure a movie can mend a
broken heart. It may be able to distract you, or cheer you up a little, or
put a positive spin on things, and if it does any of those things, you can
count yourself fortunate. But mending a broken heart? Only time can do
that—sometimes.
That said, here are twenty-five films that made me feel very good
while I was watching them. Certainly one of the most beneficial was
Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, a reminder that Cher at one time was a
superb actress, although she has chosen different directions.
It is a film about love. Not content with one romance, it involves five
or six, depending on how you count, and conceding that some characters
are involved in more than one. It exists in a Brooklyn that has never
existed—a Brooklyn where the full moon makes the night like day and
drives people crazy with amore, when the moon-a hits their eyes like a
big-a pizza pie.
And it permits its characters such joyous exuberance. I have long been
an admirer of Nicolas Cage. He is dismissed by many movie fans as an
overactor, an undisciplined show-off who bolts over the top with the
slightest excuse. But certain films require that almost manic quality, and
not many actors have the nerve to go for it. Maybe they’re worried about
looking goofy.
When Cage as Ronny Cammareri sweeps Loretta Castorini (Cher) off
her feet in Moonstruck, he almost, in his exuberance, throws her over his
shoulder.
“Where are you taking me?” she cries.
“To the bed!” he says.
Not “to bed,” but “to the bed!” There is the slightest touch of formality
in that phrasing, and it is enough to cause Loretta to let her head fall
back in surrender. Such sublime abandon, by Cage and Cher, is part of
the magic of Norman Jewison’s romantic comedy, but it also depends on
truth spoken in plain words.
The movie observes many long-embedded conventions of the romantic
comedy. In this case, they all have a reason for being used—even in the
triumphant scene around the kitchen table where everything that must
happen, does happen. One of the gifts of a film is to use clichés and
deserve them.
There is also great consolation to be found in Richard Linklater’s films
Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. The first presents an accidental
encounter that leads to a long night of conversation and revelation. In its
own way, it is self-contained. But Jesse and Celine, the characters played
by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, create such an absorbing relationship
during their long night in Vienna that when they meet again nine years
later in Paris, we are grateful that the conversation can continue.
The second film isn’t a “sequel” in any conventional sense. The first
film was complete. But something happened between them, and now in
Paris they begin to talk again, in a rush. It’s not so simple now. Before,
they were young, with their lives ahead. Now they’re over thirty, and
have made commitments, and this strange relationship stands outside of
their lives, almost as an alternate time line. Would that heal your heart?
To find that another path in life might find you happiness? Probably not.
But isn’t it nice to think so?
R E
OGER BERT