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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Rob
This sounds pretty great. Put me in the column of folks who will definitely be listening. And if you're ever short a person, I can come off the bench and participate.
As someone who's been a part of this sort of thing before, I'll second Zarban's suggestion about mics. The internal mics on laptops have gotten better in recent years, but getting everyone miked up with even a cheap-y USB mic makes a substantial difference, both in terms of the participants and the listener experience.
One of my favourite Ebert quotes was this gem on Freddy Got Fingered-
“This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”
I recall reading that. I never forgot it. I actually forgot what movie he was reviewing, but I always remembered that bit about barrels.
And that review he wrote on The Brown Bunny was withering. It actually made me want to see the movie.
I had a these thoughts after hearing the news:
1) If you stopped the average person on the street, there's probably only a handful of movie critics that person would know by name. Ebert was one of them. That's significant.
2) Even when I disagreed with Ebert, I admired his approach. There's even an example or two of him changing his mind, or having his mind changed by a sound argument, which seems rare among big-name critics. Also, he was a lifelong newspaperman who managed to write intelligently about movies while keeping his prose accessible. When I stop and think about it, these are the things I actually liked most about him, not so much that I tended to agree with his assessments.
3) As has been mentioned, cancer is a motherfucker. It also whacked Siskel.
4) He seemed to see criticism as a conversation about movies, not a war of contesting aesthetic values. On TV, his tone of voice often carried the implication that "this is my opinion." Other prominent critics, from Kael to Armond White, reliably adopted a tone that suggested their opinion was gospel, the objective truth that you'd be silly to disagree with. It's a tone designed to end the conversation rather than start it. I didn't see him adopt that tone as much as others. (Although he did do it to Siskel a lot back in the day. It was their rapport.)
5) His memoir wasn't bad, but this e-book, about Siskel & Ebert's behind-the-scenes shenanigans, is goddamned fascinating.
Re: the Surrogates April Fool's gag — I thought it was hysterically funny. My girlfriend was sitting on the couch with me at the time I accessed the site. When it came to the part where Teague popped on the screen, laughing maniacally, my girlfriend looked over and blithely said, "Yeah, some of those people on YouTube are just plain psychotic..."
Thanks for the welcome.
That book is truly one hell of an artifact. Its many gems include a photo (taken in the 1970s) of Ricky Jay and Carl Sagan. The caption says they are discussing "the possibility of throwing cards on Mars." Jay looks like the lead singer from Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Sagan is wearing a Mr. Furley-style shirt.
So, yeah, that book is about the coolest thing I own.
Hi everybody. I'm Rob. I've been lurking and listening, listening and lurking, for a long time.
What hooked me in originally was that DiF is about movies, and I like movies. But frankly, what has kept me a listener all this time is how Teague and everybody on the show regularly display a collection of interests/obsessions/passions that are eerily similar to my own—whether it's having an admiration for philosopher-king William Goldman, or just loving science and being in a perpetual state of awe at NASA and, well, the universe in general. (I've revisited the Apollo 13 commentary several times just to hear Brian's story about the NASA public relations guy who pleaded with the CAPCOM not to say "Uh, yeah, that's affirm, Dick.")
Other random facts:
For work reasons, I have dual residency in NYC and Chicago, however, I once lived in the shittiest apartment in in North Hollywood for one year.
When people invite me over, I always look in their medicine cabinet. Always.
I own an early printing of Ricky Jay's book Cards As Weapons.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Rob
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