33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity: Ebert's Essentials

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

25 Great French Films

25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart

27 Movies from the Dark Side

33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity 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

Apollo 13

The Band's Visit

Bang the Drum Slowly

Breaking Away

Bridge on the River Kwai

Casablanca

Chariots of Fire

Cinema Paradiso

Departures

E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial

Everlasting Moments

Gandhi

Grand Canyon

Hotel Rwanda

Ikiru

The King’s Speech

Lawrence of Arabia

Moolaadé

My Uncle Antoine

October Sky

Philadelphia

The Right Stuff

Say Amen, Somebody

Schindler’s List

The Shawshank Redemption

Silkwood

The Station Agent

The Straight Story

The Tree of Life

12 Angry Men

2001

Up

Whale Rider

Introduction

Sad movies rarely make me cry. I pick up all the cues, the story hits its mark, the music underlines the emotion, but most of the time my interest is only technical. For that matter, I don’t cry a whole lot at the movies anyway. But when I do, I notice that it’s almost always because of the goodness of a character. Someone in the film has been sympathetic, generous, or moved to help others because of a good heart.

Do such films restore my faith in humanity? At the time, yes, they nudge me in that direction. Then a picture with wall-to-wall brutality comes along to nudge me back again. I suspect I would be a happier person if I only went to see movies I recommend.

The selections in this e-book will, in general, warm your heart and make you happy to have seen them. Consider the animated masterpiece Up, which is about an old grouch. (Trolls on the Internet said he looked like me, but never mind.) Up opens in an unexpected and beautiful way. Carl and Ellie grow up, have a courtship, marry, buy a ramshackle house and turn it into their dream home, are happy together and grow old. This process is silent, except for music. It’s shown in a lovely sequence that deals with the life experience in a way that is almost never found in family animation. The lovebirds save their loose change in a gallon jug intended to finance their trip to the legendary Paradise Falls, but real life gets in the way: flat tires, home repairs, medical bills.

The focus of the film is on Carl’s life after Ellie. But so many people told me this prelude was one of the most touching films, in itself, they’d seen. Carl’s later heroism in the jungles of South America are terrific entertainment, but this opening, of two ordinary people who care for one another, is the part that gets you.

A film like The Band’s Visit could hardly be more different. A military band from Egypt, on an official visit to Israel, finds itself dropped by a bus at an isolated small crossroads that has nothing to do with their mission. In a long evening and a longer night, the local cafe owner and the bandleader, who are technically enemies in a political sense, begin to talk, and share, and sense their common humanity. It all happens in such a low yet realistic way, you hardly realize it’s happening at all.

Departures, from Japan, won an Academy Award for the year’s best foreign film. It was possibly the most cheered film we’ve ever shown at my Ebertfest film festival at the University of Illinois. I imagine many or most of the readers of this collection will not have seen it. It is about so many things, simultaneously, that it’s impossible to summarize. Maybe beneath everything else it deals with learning to see people as they really are, and accepting them on those terms. This process, we learn, can continue even after death.

The happiest film on the list must be Say Amen, Somebody. It’s an example of a film that many people assume they wouldn’t be interested in. A documentary about the pioneers of African American gospel music? Sounds like a boring educational film, right? Yet what joy and priceless human nature are on display here, as we meet Mother Willie May Ford Smith and Thomas A. Dorsey. George Nierenberg, the director, is not a particularly religious person, but he respects his subjects, introduces their loved ones, and captures them at important moments in their lives. There is also a great deal of music, and we sense the goodness and charisma in his two stars.

There’s a reason for every title in this collection. They all have that one thing in common—the goodness of people. They are very different people and good in many different ways, but all of them, whatever the place in life that fate has led them to, try to do the best they can with their opportunities. Yes, that can restore your faith in humanity. We need more of these films and fewer weekend blockbusters entertaining young people with the slaughter and suffering of anonymous victims in action pictures.

ROGER EBERT

Key to Symbols

Apollo 13 threestar

PG, 135 m., 1995

Tom Hanks (Jim Lovell), Bill Paxton (Fred Haise), Kevin Bacon (Jack Swigert), Gary Sinise (Ken Mattingly), Ed Harris (Gene Kranz), Kathleen Quinlan (Marilyn Lovell), Mary Kate Schellhardt (Barbara Lovell), Emily Ann Lloyd (Susan Lovell). Directed by Ron Howard and produced by Brian Grazer. Screenplay by William Broyles, Jr., and Al Reinert.

There is a moment early in Apollo 13 when astronaut Jim Lovell is taking some press on a tour of the Kennedy Space Center, and he brags that they have a computer that fits in one room and can send out millions of instructions. And I’m thinking to myself, hell, I’m writing this review on a better computer than the one that got us to the moon.

Apollo 13 inspires many reflections, and one of them is that America’s space program was achieved with equipment that would look like tin cans today. Like Lindbergh, who crossed the Atlantic in the first plane he could string together that might make it, we went to the moon the moment we could, with the tools that were at hand. Today, with new alloys, engines, fuels, computers, and technology, it would be safer and cheaper—but we have lost the will.

Apollo 13 never really states its theme, except perhaps in one sentence of narration at the end, but the whole film is suffused with it: The space program was a really extraordinary thing, something to be proud of, and those who went into space were not just heroes, which is a cliché, but brave and resourceful.

Those qualities were never demonstrated more dramatically than in the flight of the thirteenth Apollo mission, in April 1970, when an oxygen tank exploded en route to the moon. The three astronauts on board—Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert—were faced with the possibility of becoming marooned in space. Their oxygen could run out, they could be poisoned by CO2 accumulations, or they could freeze to death. If some how they were able to return to the Earth’s atmosphere, they had to enter at precisely the right angle. Too steep an entry, and they would be incinerated; too shallow, and they would skip off the top of the atmosphere like a stone on a pond, and fly off forever into space.

Ron Howard’s film of this mission is directed with a single-mindedness and attention to detail that make it riveting. He doesn’t make the mistake of adding cornball little subplots to popularize the material; he knows he has a great story, and he tells it in a docudrama that feels like it was filmed on location in outer space.

So convincing are the details, indeed, that I went back to look at For All Mankind, the great 1989 documentary directed by Al Reinert, who cowrote Apollo 13. It was an uncanny experience, like looking at the origins of the current picture. Countless details were exactly the same: the astronauts boarding the spacecraft, the liftoff, the inside of the cabin, the view from space, the chilling sight of the oxygen venting into space, even the little tape recorder floating in free-fall, playing country music. All these images are from the documentary, all look almost exactly the same in the movie, and that is why Howard has been at pains to emphasize that every shot in Apollo 13 is new. No documentary footage was used. The special effects—models, animation, shots where the actors were made weightless by floating inside a descending airplane—have re-created the experience exactly.

The astronauts are played by Tom Hanks (Lovell), Bill