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 33 Movies to Restore Your Faith in Humanity 25 Great French Films 27 Movies from the Dark Side 25 Movies to Mend a Broken Heart 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. Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC an Andrews McMeel Universal company 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106 www.andrewsmcmeel.com ISBN: 978-1-4494-2224-0 All the reviews in this book originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. Attention: Schools and Businesses Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department: [email protected] Contents Introduction Key to Symbols About Last Night . . . All the Real Girls Annie Hall Autumn Tale Beauty and the Beast Before Sunrise Before Sunset Cousin, Cousine 500 Days of Summer Flirting Innocence Lars and the Real Girl Like Water for Chocolate Minnie and the Moskowitz Moonstruck An Officer and a Gentleman Once Out of Africa Possession Pride and Prejudice Say Anything Scent of Green Papaya Shakespeare in Love Some Like It Hot The Truth About Cats and Dogs Introduction To begin with full disclosure, I am not at all sure a movie can mend a broken heart. It may be able to distract you, or cheer you up a little, or put a positive spin on things, and if it does any of those things, you can count yourself fortunate. But mending a broken heart? Only time can do that—sometimes. That said, here are twenty-five films that made me feel very good while I was watching them. Certainly one of the most beneficial was Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, a reminder that Cher at one time was a superb actress, although she has chosen different directions. It is a film about love. Not content with one romance, it involves five or six, depending on how you count, and conceding that some characters are involved in more than one. It exists in a Brooklyn that has never existed—a Brooklyn where the full moon makes the night like day and drives people crazy with amore, when the moon-a hits their eyes like a big-a pizza pie. And it permits its characters such joyous exuberance. I have long been an admirer of Nicolas Cage. He is dismissed by many movie fans as an overactor, an undisciplined show-off who bolts over the top with the slightest excuse. But certain films require that almost manic quality, and not many actors have the nerve to go for it. Maybe they’re worried about looking goofy. When Cage as Ronny Cammareri sweeps Loretta Castorini (Cher) off her feet in Moonstruck, he almost, in his exuberance, throws her over his shoulder. “Where are you taking me?” she cries. “To the bed!” he says. Not “to bed,” but “to the bed!” There is the slightest touch of formality in that phrasing, and it is enough to cause Loretta to let her head fall back in surrender. Such sublime abandon, by Cage and Cher, is part of the magic of Norman Jewison’s romantic comedy, but it also depends on truth spoken in plain words. The movie observes many long-embedded conventions of the romantic comedy. In this case, they all have a reason for being used—even in the triumphant scene around the kitchen table where everything that must happen, does happen. One of the gifts of a film is to use clichés and deserve them. There is also great consolation to be found in Richard Linklater’s films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. The first presents an accidental encounter that leads to a long night of conversation and revelation. In its own way, it is self-contained. But Jesse and Celine, the characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, create such an absorbing relationship during their long night in Vienna that when they meet again nine years later in Paris, we are grateful that the conversation can continue. The second film isn’t a “sequel” in any conventional sense. The first film was complete. But something happened between them, and now in Paris they begin to talk again, in a rush. It’s not so simple now. Before, they were young, with their lives ahead. Now they’re over thirty, and have made commitments, and this strange relationship stands outside of their lives, almost as an alternate time line. Would that heal your heart? To find that another path in life might find you happiness? Probably not. But isn’t it nice to think so? R E OGER BERT