Left to my own devices

This little blog is ten-years-old today. I wanted to mark the occasion, but wasn't sure how. New posts have been a little sparse of late, as I'm not always sure what to say, or how to say it. There's mental energy involved in writing, and sometimes it just isn't there. Life, and all its idiosyncrasies, can get in the way. There's close to five started posts sitting here, in draft mode, that may or may never see the light of day. So it goes. Regardless of how frequently I write a new post, this blog has already lasted longer than my previous one. That was a very political endeavor -- almost exclusively so. I was a lot more righteous back in the early-to-mid aughts. Life, experiences, a bout with cancer, and simply aging conspired to mellow me somewhat, at least in what I choose to (figuratively) put to pen to paper about. Also, I owe a debt of gratitude to the late, great Roger Ebert.

I've sometimes wondered how I would have functioned as a gay man born, not in the latter-half of the 20th century, but during a time when seeking the partner of one's choice was simply not allowed. At least, not legally. How would I have behaved? Would the repression of my sexuality have proven to be too much? Or would I have settled down with a woman, perhaps had children, and soldiered on? The closing film of this year's Roger Ebert Film Festival , the 2004 musical biopic De-Lovely , focused on the life of lyricist and composer Cole Porter, and provided another opportunity to ponder the aforementioned thoughts. Though fraught with a narrative structure that was almost clunky enough to derail the overall experience, the movie succeeds in spite of its flaws, and was an enjoyable, moving motion picture. There was a sophistication to the performances of Kevin Kline (as Porter) and Ashley Judd (as his wife, Linda Lee). Somewhat familiar with Cole Porter, though unf...

Be wary of people who like to say they don't care what anyone thinks about them, for those are often the people who care the most about others' opinions. There's nothing wrong with that. As human beings, we do not live in a vacuum, devoid of social interaction and all that comes with it. The need to impress and gain approval is fairly ingrained in us, and to deny it is silly at best, folly at worst. Thus we land on a topic that's been foremost on my mind this past week. Another Ebertfest has come and gone and, with it, a reminder of the book that I never wrote, and likely never will. It was to be a collection of film reviews, and some of the work had already been done. For a few years during the early aughts, I wrote reviews on Amazon, many of them for movies I'd seen. Some of them needed a bit of polish, but for the most part, they were a good spring board for a nice collection. The plan was to edit those film reviews, and write perhaps twenty or thirty mo...

Meeting celebrities is an awkward business. The above conclusion is one I've reached over years of going to the Roger Ebert Film Festival , and having visited Hollywood, California back in the 1990s. Perhaps it's just me, but there really doesn't seem to be any real connection that we, the public, have with those who produce and star in some of our most beloved pop culture touchstones. Take, for example, Ebertfest of 2002. One of my favorite movies from that year's festival was Kwik Stop , starring and directed by Michael Gilio, who was in attendance. The film moved me and, after Gilio's Q&A on-stage, I decided to approach him and say what a marvelous movie it was that he'd made. Of course, once I was in his presence, it was more like gibberish that came out of my mouth, followed by a perfunctory request for an autograph, which he provided. Then there were several years where actor Scott Wilson attended the festival. Known then for his role ...

There are a lot of milestones in our lives: birthdays, wedding anniversaries, first date anniversaries, the day we began a new job, the day a loved one died, etc. Some are happy reminders, others not so much. Some have a bit of a mixed-bag impact on us. That's probably the best way to describe what happened five years ago today. April 9th, 2010 was a Friday, much like any other. It was a couple of weeks before the annual Roger Ebert Film Festival , of which I am a regular attendee. Ebert was on my mind at the time, not necessarily because of the festival, but because he'd had thyroid cancer a few years earlier and, on that particular morning, I was rolling into Provena (now Presence) Hospital for a morning surgery to remove my own cancerous thyroid. That morning was a particularly early one for Ashley & I. The surgery was scheduled for 7:30am and, like airports, hospitals want you to arrive at least an hour or two early. There was the check-in process, the inte...

Earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan announced to his readers that he would soon be ending his blog. There was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from the audience, and now Sullivan is reconsidering (or, to be more precise, is looking into the idea of having the blog continue without him at the helm, instead run by a team of people). One need look no further than RogerEbert.com  to see how something like this might play out, what with the film critic's web site continuing to publish the reviews of others after he passed away almost two years ago. In truth, I am uneasy about such things. It can be argued that Ebert's web site has been a success since his death. Admittedly, I periodically check its reviews, and sometimes happen across a reviewer who I likely never would have heard of otherwise. That's what Ebert was wanting, I think -- both to keep film criticism alive, and to nurture a new crop of reviewers, giving them the needed exposure. It's not the same,...

The first thing you need to know about Gareth Edwards' 2014 version of Godzilla is that it features a fairly small amount of the titular character. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just... unexpected. Another aspect of the film that was unforeseen (at least by me) is that not all of the big names in the cast are in the movie very much. Perhaps the most notable observation of all, however, is that, despite the surprising turns taken with the characters and lack of huge screen time for the main monster, I found the film to be fairly predictable. Godzilla opens in a flashback to 1999 (has that really been 15 years ago?), and Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is an engineer living in Japan along with his wife (Juliette Binoche) and young son. Disaster soon strikes the nuclear power plant where Brody works and, well, I'll just say that the timeline skips forward to present day, where son Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is all grown-up and coming-off 14 months of active d...

Having grown up in Champaign-Urbana, IL, I have memories of people and places that are no longer with us: Keith Page, Mr. Roberts (both local weathermen), George Valentine, Nicole Storch (educators), Burnham Hospital (where I was born) and, of course, the movie theaters. There was the Co-ed on campus, which was long ago demolished, the Thunderbird in Urbana, which has been re-purposed as The Canopy Club , a hot spot for live acts, Market Place Cinemas in Champaign (demolished), and Country Fair Cinemas (long-closed). For the most part, these places exist only in memory. One local movie theater that has stood the test of time is The Virginia . Opened some 90 years ago, it began life as a vaudeville hall, and then made the transition to showing films. By the time I came on the scene, the Virginia was in its waning years as a first-run movie house. Multiplexes were becoming the in-thing, and single screen movie palaces were on a major decline. After closing its doors in 1991, the ...

Every year, the late, great film critic Roger Ebert used to hold a contest called Outgess Ebert . In it, he would guess who would win the various categories of the year's Academy Award nominees, and would challenge his readership to submit their predictions, to see if they could "outguess" him. While I don't have the desire to hold a contest, nor am I the movie guru that Ebert was, I thought it would be fun to put my picks out there, and see how it goes. The 86th Annual Academy Awards air tonight on ABC, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres. Following are my predictions on who will win what and, in a few cases, why. Here goes!

I don't know exactly how to write this entry, except to start off with the fact that I miss Roger Ebert. It's difficult to put into words, mostly because Mr. Ebert is a man I never knew personally. Our physical paths crossed a time or two during his annual film festival in Champaign-Urbana, but we never spoke, we never e-mailed, we never directly communicated in any way. My relationship with him was as a kid watching him spar with Gene Siskel on an old TV in my bedroom, engrossed in their conversations about movies. And then, as an adult, enjoying his written film reviews, his tweets, and his blog entries.

I certainly didn't expect to see Roger Ebert up and about at his own funeral. Of course, this was only in a dream. It occurred last night, most likely triggered by having watched an Ebert retrospective on local PBS station WILL-TV . A series of local interviews with the late film critic, interspersed with pledge breaks, left me feeling bittersweet. It was nice to see and hear Ebert in his prime, holding court about film, but then it made me miss him even more. Then there was the dream. Things began rather suddenly -- as they so often do in dreams -- at the approach to Ebert's funeral. Ashley & I were walking, side-by-side, on a concrete road leading up to a rather nondescript beige building sitting at the edge of a town. Throngs of people were gathered in front of the building, however, much to my surprise, they were not solemn and silent, but whooping and hollering with glee. As we got closer, it became evident they were focused on one person in-particular...

Beloved film critic Roger Ebert died three months ago, after several years of dealing with cancer and its consequences. I never knew him, yet miss him. I enjoyed reading his thoughts, whether they were via his movie reviews, blog posts, or tweets. He was, as we all are, unique. I miss the man. I miss his opinions. There is still an emptiness where he once existed, a void. None of this is particularly irregular after someone dies. And yet... Ebert's legacy is proving to be an unusual and, dare I say it, awkward one. His Twitter account has been left active. His wife, Chaz, and others (honestly, I'm not really sure who all has access to it) continue to tweet under the banner that had once belonged to an individual. It was a personal account, a window into the heart and mind of a wonderful man. Judging from some of the responses to recent tweets, I'm not the only one made uncomfortable by the account's continuation.

Well, readers, it's been an interesting 30 days. They say that April can be the cruelest month. While this April wasn't necessarily cruel, it was definitely full of a varied amount occurrences, some good, some bad. I thought it fitting to review the month, properly say goodbye to it, and look ahead to May with some optimism.

David Allred has written a " faith column " for Oak Ridge Today , in which he takes umbrage with the late Roger Ebert's musings on death . In particular, Allred would seem to dislike the term "nothing" being ascribed to the state of what happens to us after we die. Allred appears to believe in an afterlife and, it seems, a god. Following is a passage from Ebert's essay-in-question: I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. Adding to Allred's distress over Ebert's beliefs (or lack thereof) is the mass sharing of the late film critic's essay that has occurred since his passing earlier this month. From Allred: ...

Upon entering the resplendently restored Virginia Theatre in downtown Champaign, IL this past Saturday, my first thought was, 'If only Roger Ebert had lived to see this.' The rest of the visit there that afternoon was bittersweet. My partner and I, longtime Ebertfest-goers, walked around and took-in the Virginia in all her rediscovered glory. The murals, the stencils, the new licks of paint, the repaired masonry, it was all so beautiful. The new chairs? Eh, well, nothing is perfect. And now, a few days later, we are about to begin Roger Ebert's 15th Annual Ebertfest , but without Roger Ebert. The film critic died earlier this month, and this will mark the first time the festival has taken place with its namesake dead (he did not attend one year due to health issues, but was active on his blog during the course of the festival). It is unclear how the festival will unfold this time around. Probably as normal, with a few misty-eyes and remembrances thrown in for goo...

Nothing is infinite. Well, probably nothing. We can't be certain, but we know that many things are finite: our lives, certainly. Even the Earth, the sun, other stars and planets have expiration dates, although it's difficult to fathom such a notion, as their lifespans are so very much greater than our own. What seems to define all of this is time. True, there is also space, but space is pretty much a given. Things -- though they come and go -- exist within a spacial plane. But what defines them (and us) is time. Indeed, it would seem that time is the ultimate prison, the ultimate foe and, therefore, the ultimate frustration. We could, theoretically, travel to other worlds. And perhaps someday we as a species will do so. But for us, here and now, the likelihood is slim-to-none. Anyone who is reading this bit of writing when it is published will not survive long enough to have such an opportunity. Time will have taken its toll on us.

There I was, at the President's House of the University of Illinois, enjoying a work-related function. Odd though it may sound, it was a familiar environment. I'd been there before, several times, for the opening night gala for Ebertfest , Roger Ebert's annual film festival held in his hometown of Urbana-Champaign. Then I got a text from my partner that read "Ebert has died." The surroundings remained familiar, but surreal. A few moments prior I'd been thinking how, in just a couple of weeks, I'd be back at the house again celebrating a new edition of Roger Ebert's Film Festival . It would be fun! Yes, Ebert had recently announced that his cancer had returned, but he'd sounded very future-forward in his outlook, and I sort of hoped that perhaps he'd be able to attend his wonderful, glorious event. And now he's gone.

It's easy to be subjective. Quick, name your five favorite movies. Or simply five films that you really quite enjoy. Now, try and be objective . Name what you think are the five best movies that have ever been made. It's never been an easy task for me, hence why, despite a fondness for list-making, I've never attempted to create a list of what I objectively consider to be the best films of all-time. But now, after nearly a week of great movies at the Roger Ebert Film Festival , plus a bit of perusing the Sight & Sound once-per-decade greatest films poll , I'm ready to sit down and do the list. Here, then, are what I consider to be the Top Ten Best Movies Ever Made.

Today in the mail we received our invitation to the opening gala for the 14th Annual Ebertfest , the film festival held each year in Champaign-Urbana, hometown of Pulitzer Prize winning critic Roger Ebert, programmer of the festival. It's one of the most exciting times of year in the Matt & Ashley household, and we look forward to the festival with great antici....   pation. This year, the schedule of films to be shown at the venerable Virginia Theatre in downtown Champaign looks to contain yet more interesting genres and guests.

A recent excerpt from film critic Roger Ebert's new memoir, in regards to his views on death, got me to thinking about the subject. Not for the first time. Let's be real: Death is something that we think about from time to time. It is, in many ways, the basis for nearly all religions in the world - past and present. My own view on death may sound bleak, and it does scare me sometimes, but it is what is is.