Happy Birthday, Jimmy Stewart

Jimmy Stewart was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, 103 years ago today, May 20. His star image of the Everyman who embodied uncomplicated honesty and integrity seems the stellar opposite of today’s tarnished stars and publicity-hungry celebrities. Stewart’s career and star image epitomized an era when movie stardom held value for American culture, when each star represented a value or ideal on the big screen that audiences admired, respected, and maybe aspired to. In that world, Stewart’s star persona as the sometimes naïve but always morally centered protagonist—cemented with his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—was admired and beloved.

The 13th Annual Ebertfest, Part 2

Guest blogger Sharon Gissy continues her in-depth coverage of Ebertfest 2011. 

Day 3 of Ebertfest opened with a quiet, beautiful marvel that ended up becoming a festival favorite for many. 45635, a loving and poetic documentary by brothers Bill and Turner Ross about their hometown of Sidney, Ohio, is a meditation on small-town America that foregoes a classical narrative in favor of washing the audience in a sea of images and scenes that evoke a feeling or mood. For example, neighborhood kids trick-or-treat with orange pumpkins, a father reads to his child and sings a lullaby, the high school football team gets pumped up for a huge game, police gently arrest an intoxicated woman who hasn’t given them trouble in 19 years. It is clear that the brothers shared a special intimacy with their subjects as very often the people don’t acknowledge there is a camera there at all, and scenes unfold in a natural and realistic way that makes us voyeurs into the lives of Sidney’s residents. The post-session Q&A was my favorite of the festival, because the brothers are such genuine people with a passion for telling stories about their lives. They said they shot over 500 hours of film, which they began going through to pull out the central characters and storylines. One of them had simply compiled some footage labeled “Things I Like,” that didn’t fit in anywhere else. After, watching these scenes together, the Ross brothers decided this extraneous footage was actually what the film needed to be.

The 13th Annual Ebertfest, Part 1

Attending a film festival is a crucial experience for movie lovers given the state of the commercial film industry. Not only have the Hollywood studios given up on innovation, invention, and solid storytelling, but mainstream distributors and exhibitors fail to offer anything but the sequels, series, and remakes churned out by the studios. The Facets Blog encourages the festival experience by covering as many fests as it can. This week, guest writer Sharon Gissy offers a wonderful account of Ebertfest. Look for Part 2 of her thoughtful and thorough overview on Friday. 

The 13th Annual Ebertfest was held in the beautiful historic Virginia Theater in Champaign, Illinois, where its namesake attended the University of Illinois and honed his writing chops. The festival used to be called Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival and was a chance for Roger Ebert, one of the most well-loved film critics in history, to showcase films he thought were underrated or unknown. Really, though, it has become a platform for Ebert to show movies he genuinely loves with a huge audience of enthusiastic fans who are there to enjoy and discover them. It is an ideal movie-going experience for the true cinephile. As Roger and Chaz Ebert said at one point, there are no prizes or judges masquerading during the festival, it’s all about the movies. And as special guest Tilda Swinton (dubbed Saint Tilda by Ebert) remarked, there are plenty of film fans who want to be critics, but there are only some critics who are true film fans, and everyone at Ebertfest is a film fan.

The Real Thor

This is a tale of two movies, two directors—and two strongmen.