Ebert what makes a good movie

Same with silent films, documentaries, specific directors. I bought some books that were enormously helpful. The most useful was Understanding Movies, by Louis D. Giannetti, then in its first edition, now in its 11th. He introduced me to the concept that visual compositions have "intrinsic weighting.

These are not "laws. I have never heard of a director or cinematographer who ever consciously applied them. I suspect that filmmakers compose shots from images that well up emotionally, instinctively or strategically, just as a good pianist never thinks about the notes.

It may be that intrinsic weighting is sort of hard-wired. I am not the expert to say. I can observe that I have been through at least 10 Hitchcock films and not found a single shot that doesn't reflect these notions. I already knew about the painter's "Golden Mean," or the larger concept of the "golden ratio. A person to the right of that position will seem more positive; to the left, more negative.

A centered person will seem objectified, like a mug shot. I call that position somewhat to the right of center the "strong axis. Now what do I mean by "positive" or "negative?

They are not absolutes. But in general terms, in a two-shot, the person on the right will "seem" dominant over the person on the left. Does this apply even to films from cultures that read right to left or top to bottom? From my treks through many Asian films, yes, it seems to. There are many other rules of thumb. I will outline some broadly, and if you're interested you can examine them in films, or read about them in books by such as Giannetti or David Bordwell both often used as textbooks.

They will not use the same terms, and by no means do I imply they would agree with me; I am summarizing my own beliefs, based on hundreds of shot-by-shot experiences over the years.

But they are scrutinizing films with the same intense curiosity, and that's the real point. Consider Bordwell, whose great book on Ozu uses many panels of individual frames to illuminate a director who virtually never moved his camera, and yet whose compositions are alive with visual strategy.

In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom. The foreground is stronger than the background. Symmetrical compositions seem at rest. Diagonals in a composition seem to "move" in the direction of the sharpest angle they form, even though of course they may not move at all.

Therefore, a composition could lead us into a background that becomes dominant over a foreground. Tilt shots of course put everything on a diagonal, implying the world is out of balance. I have the impression that more tilts are down to the right than to the left, perhaps suggesting the characters are sliding perilously into their futures. Left tilts to me suggest helplessness, sadness, resignation. Few tilts feel positive.

Movement is dominant over things that are still. A POV above a character's eyeline reduces him; below the eyeline, enhances him. Extreme high angle shots make characters into pawns; low angles make them into gods. One of his ledes is 79 words long! But Clark also notices Ebert's wit and what Clark calls his "voice"—the ability to lure the reader into a review's thinking—"the illusion here that a smart person is speaking directly to me off the page.

The Ebert tributes have lacked good examples. Ebert was so great a reviewer and so great a writer that the world is mourning him, yet no one has shown us the sentence that represents his style or the paragraph that captures his relationship to movies. I've been bringing Ebert's rule-breaking reviews into writing classes at the University of Chicago for about a decade. It's dangerous material to give to students, when you hope students will learn discipline before they begin to stray.

Ebert strays at will. He's no more confined by reviewing convention than he is by rules of writing. In one of my favorite reviews, Ebert has to assess the Adam Sandler remake of "The Longest Yard," but he finds himself in a predicament:. I kinda liked it, in its goofy way.

There was a dogged ridiculousness to the film that amused me, especially in the way Adam Sandler was cast as a star quarterback. Once you accept Sandler as a quarterback, you've opened up the backfield to the entire membership of the Screen Actors' Guild. Now three weeks have passed and I have seen 25 films at Cannes, most of them attempts at greatness, and I sit here staring at the computer screen and realizing with dread that the time has come for me to write a review justifying that vertical thumb, which is already on video and will go out to millions of TV viewers seeking guidance in their moviegoing.

Ebert tells us less in this review about Adam Sandler's movie than he tells us about himself. But really, his first paragraph told us all we needed to know about "The Longest Yard," and in the rest of the review, he offers insights more valuable to moviegoers and especially to movie reviewers than the assessment of any single film:. I often practice a generic approach to film criticism, in which the starting point for a review is the question of what a movie sets out to achieve.

Most of its audiences will be satisfied enough when they leave the theater, although few will feel compelled to rent it on video to share with their friends. So, yes, it's a fair example of what it is. I would however be filled with remorse if I did not urge you to consider the underlying melancholy of this review and seek out a movie you could have an interesting conversation about.

I have just come from 12 days at Cannes during which several times each day I was reminded that movies can enrich our lives, instead of just helping us get through them. In a word eulogy as pithy as a good review, Friel catches many of Ebert's virtues, and he lingers on Ebert's print personality—his voice—his humility and his approachability.

We see that humility at work in "The Longest Yard" review. Ebert had been reviewing for almost 40 years when he sat down to review that movie, but he was still letting movies teach him how to watch them, and he was teaching us as he went along. A few years ago one of my students, Steven Flores , delved into Roger Ebert's work for a research project. Flores studied dozens of reviewers but he loved Ebert most:. Because his column is widely syndicated, he seems to meld his wealth of knowledge with middle-brow taste in a way that is never condescending and always even-handed.

The film chronicles a donkey's life in a village, and it conveys a hallowed atmosphere, a sense of the sacrosanct. Ebert begins his review on the same note:. And always he did it in character, playing a solemn and thoughtful man who trusts in his own ingenuity.

It is no accident that the screenplay never concerns itself with fight strategy. For Jake LaMotta, what happens during a fight is controlled not by tactics but by his fears and drives. It's the best film I've seen about the low self-esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women.

Boxing is the arena, not the subject. LaMotta was famous for refusing to be knocked down in the ring. There are scenes where he stands passively, his hands at his side, allowing himself to be hammered.

We sense why he didn't go down. He hurt too much to allow the pain to stop. Both of them use their cameras as largely impassive, honest observers. Both seem reluctant to manipulate the real time in which their scenes are acted; Ozu uses very restrained editing, and Mizoguchi often shoots scenes in unbroken takes.

With Ozu, it's as if the characters are living their lives unaware that a movie is being shot. And so we get to know them gradually, begin to look for personal characteristics and to understand the implications of little gestures and quiet remarks. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material. And there are scenes that will be hard to forget: The mother and father separately thanking the daughter-in-law for her kindness; the father's laborious drunken odyssey through a night of barroom nostalgia; and his reaction when he learns that his wife will probably die.

The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's ' A Space Odyssey,' and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling.

There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, but now there are only a few. Malick has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature in In uncanny ways, the central events of 'The Tree of Life' reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me.

If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick's gift, it would look so much like this. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention.