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[Ya-ta Boy]

One of the real pleasures of coming home on Friday after work is getting to log in to http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage and read Ebert's latest movie reviews. I'm always a little disappointed when he hasn't found a great new movie to review. In my opinion, he's at his best when he praises a movie without slobbering all over himself.

Here are some recent examples:

From today's review of Sean Penn's "Into the Wild"


For those who have read Thoreau's Walden, there comes a time, maybe only lasting a few hours or a day, when the notion of living alone in a tiny cabin beside a pond and planting some beans seems strangely seductive.

This is a reflective, regretful, serious film about a young man swept away by his uncompromising choices. Two of the more truthful statements in recent culture are that we need a little help from our friends, and that sometimes we must depend on the kindness of strangers. If you don't know those two things and accept them, you will end up eventually in a bus of one kind or another. Sean Penn himself fiercely idealistic, uncompromising, a little less angry now, must have read the book and reflected that there, but for the grace of God, went he. The movie is so good partly because it means so much, I think, to its writer-director.

A couple of weeks ago he wrote this: Toronto #4: Perfection times two

It�s not often you see films that are perfect. I have just seen two of them here at the Toronto Film Festival, and two others that are extraordinary, and a documentary that is spellbinding. Do I love everything? Not at all. I just happened to have an ecstatic period of moviegoing, that�s all, and that�s enough.
There is no ranking perfection, so I will discuss the perfect films in alphabetical order. The first is �No Country for Old Men,� by the Coen brothers, and the second is �Rendition� by Gavin Hood. The Coens are among our national treasures. Gavin Hood, at 44, was the South African director of �Tsotsi,� the masterpiece which won the Oscar for best foreign film of 2005.
Now what do I mean when I say a film is perfect? I described Atman�s �McCabe and Mrs. Miller� as perfect, that�s what I mean. A perfect film is serious or funny or anything in between, but in its way it owns wisdom about life, and we learn something from it. Our attention is fully engaged by it. If we are movie critics, our notebooks rest forgotten in our hands. It is cast so well that the roles fit the actors like a second skin. It has dialogue that functions to accomplish what is needed, and nothing more; it can be poetry, prose, argument or bull----t, but we believe the characters would say it. There is not an extra or a wrong shot. The compositions make everything clear but not obvious, and they work on an emotional level even if we�re not aware of it. And when it�s over we know we�ve seen one hell of a film.