person:roger ebert

  • DVD Review: ’Taxi Zum Klo’ - Film Reviews | CineVue
    http://www.cine-vue.com/2011/03/dvd-releases-taxi-zum-klo_15.html

    During one scene from Frank Ripploh’s semi-autobiographical tale of a sex-obsessed, German school teacher Taxi Zum Klo (1980) we witness a man lying on a bed being sprayed in the face with urine. For ten, maybe fifteen seconds, all we are shown is the increasingly soaked and excited gent and a stream of the aforementioned urine being directed by an unknown party. 

    Although a large percentage of the film-going public would claim to be appalled by the allusion of one man relieving himself on another, I thought it was a brave and interesting scene. Certainly my first experience of seeing a ’golden shower’ on the big screen and being a liberal fellow in an art house cinema I had no problem with the suggestion. Hell, it was only a stream of water or something; it’s not as if Ripploh had furnished us with a wide shot of him with his cock out actually pissing into the guy’s mouth!

    When the wide shot of Ripploh with his cock out actually pissing into the guys’s mouth arrived, a strange silence swept across the audience. Nobody walked out, nobody vomited on the person in the neighboring seat and it wasn’t long before the silence was replaced with laughter - though it wasn’t the act itself which we all found amusing, it was the director’s audacity.

    Taxi Zum Klo is audacity personified. Upon its release it quickly became notorious for its graphic portrayal of gay sex. Few people have actually seen the film in its entirety, altough a few gay men of a certain age might have seen the sex scenes cobbled together in a private Soho club or on a grainy videotape. Taken out of context those scenes wouldn’t look out of place in a hardcore porn movie, but to dismiss the film as being nothing more than a sexual aid does Frank Ripploh a gross disservice: it’s a funny, provocative and clever piece of film making. 

    Shot in a documentary style on a shoe string budget, Ripploh is fearless in exposing his life and desires. By day he’s a good primary school teacher who shares a fabulous relationship with this students and by night he’s a sex tourist haunting public toilets in search of cheap thrills. Along the way he meets a man in a cinema and falls in love but his lust, verging on nymphomania, eventually spirals out of control.

    Ripploh is unapologetic about his sexual exploits and being as this film was made in a Pre-AIDS Germany we shouldn’t make the mistake of judging his reckless behaviour by modern standards. Plenty of heterosexual folk liberally put it about back then without fear of reprisal and although some may question his morality, in reality it’s nobody’s business what Frank gets up to with his own body.

    The film also attempts to dispel certain myths regarding homosexuals and children. At one point a public information film about paedophiles is inter-cut with scenes of Frank tutoring a student. He deliberately provokes the audience and although he does it in a humorous way he is also making a point. Just because you’re gay that doesn’t mean you pray on children and just because you have a broad sexual appetite that doesn’t mean you can’t be good at your day job. There is no conflict unless you, or a disapproving other, creates one.

    All in all the film works best as an insight into the normality of gay life. Frank may run around like a sex-crazed Timothy Claypole at times, and the editing is a little on the clunky side, but if you want to be challenged and experience a piece of cinema quite unlike anything you have seen before then ’Taxi Zum Klo’ is essential viewing. As a straight man - who, admittedly, has always shied way from gay cinema, believing that it wasn’t for him - I was pleasantly surprised.

    Although I’m not going to rush down to Blockbuster video and order a stack of homoerotic DVDs, I’m glad to report to anyone laboring under the mis-apprehension that watching two men have sex turns you gay that it simply isn’t true...now where’s my copy of Brokeback Mountain?

    Lee Cassanell

    Taxi Zum Klo, review - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8467365/Taxi-Zum-Klo-review.html

    On its first release, Taxi Zum Klo (1980) was seized by US Customs. The film (its title translates as Taxi to the Toilet) was written and directed by Frank Ripploh who also takes the lead role of a schoolteacher who likes sex. He marks student essays while sitting on cottage toilets, picks up garage attendants, tells his homebody boyfriend that he’s going to clubs to pick up strangers.
    These adventures, intercut with scenes of vintage porn, are shot naturalistically with (literally) warts-and-all candour and a good deal of droll humour. The film, far from being degenerate filth, is a loving document of pre-Aids Berlin, and a touching comedy about the human desire for and struggle to achieve intimacy.

    Taxi Zum Klo Movie Review & Film Summary (1982) | Roger Ebert
    http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taxi-zum-klo-1982

    “Taxi zum Klo” is an unsparingly honest film, documentary matched with (I assume) docudrama, in which Ripploh reveals himself fearlessly. The revelations that must have taken the most courage are not the ones about his homosexuality, but the ones about his unhappiness, his sense of inadequacy. He appears in this film to be seeking a life of openness, love, beauty and loyalty to a lover — and at the same time he marches on a treadmill of futile promiscuity.

    As the film opens, Ripploh is a schoolteacher in West Germany. He seems to be a pretty good teacher, cheerful and frank with his students. After hours, he cruises the gay bars and public meeting places, seeking anonymous sex, often with a sadomasochistic flavor. He’s particularly drawn to gay sleaze, to the bars specializing in the theatrical flaunting of sexual identity, to the places in the big city where sex is mixed with danger.

    He meets a young man, Berndt, whom he values more than most of his partners. They become lovers. They move in together, and Ripploh tries to break his pattern of addictive sex and to be faithful to one person. The movies best scenes involve Frank and Berndt trying to work out the ground rules of a relationship.

    Meanwhile, Ripploh gets fired from his job (for staying out too late after a drag ball and imprudently turning up in his classroom in drag). He contract hepatitis, is hospitalized, and, in the movie’s saddest scene, leaves the hospital bed in his patient’s gown, and hails a taxi to take him to a rendezvous with an anonymous stranger (hence the title’s English translation, “Taxi to the Toilet”).

    How does he feel about his sex life? Judging by the movie, he finds the sex itself an exciting addiction, but fears his promiscuity is training him to see persons as objects. The end of the process is clearly a great, bleak loneliness, and it is against his loneliness that he seeks protection with Berndt.

    “Taxi Zum Klo” does not contain much explicit sex, but the sex it does portray is graphic and will probably shock some viewers. Ripploh believes he could not make an honest film of his life without showing us all of it, and his frankness redeems even his most scatological scene.
    The triumph of “Taxi zum Klo” is that, in the midst of its portrait of isolation, Frank Ripploh himself emerges as a cheerful, open man, willing to reveal his weakness, willing to hope that things will take a turn for the better. The movie is about a person, not about his sex life. It understands that all of our identities and lifestyles are just hopeful strategies in the search for a sense of belonging, usefulness and love.

    #cinéma #gay #Berlin

  • 60 Free Film Noir Movies | Open Culture
    http://www.openculture.com/free_film_noir_movies

    During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir. In this growing list, we gather together the noir films available online. They all appear in our big collection 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. You might also enjoy perusing our list of 20+ Free Hitchcock Films.

    #films #domaine_public #hard_boiled #repérage

  • Video Games Do Guilt Better Than Any Other Art - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/video-games-do-guilt-better-than-any-other-art

    The idea that motion pictures can be works of art has been around since the 1920s, and it hasn’t really been disputed since. It’s easy to see why—cinema shares characteristics with theater in terms of acting, direction, music, set design, narrative, and so on. Now we have whole academic departments dedicated to film appreciation, to understanding the emotional and intellectual responses—deep feelings of awe and reverence, among others—that movies can elicit. But video games aren’t assumed to be as artistic as cinema or theater, if it all. In 2010, for instance, the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote an essay titled, “Video Games Can Never Be Art.” But with the increasing sophistication, and variety, of video games today, it’s becoming more and more clear that they are forms of art; or, at (...)

  • Video Games Are Changing the Hero - Issue 43: Heroes
    http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/video-games-are-changing-the-hero

    Whenever the Kingdom of Hyrule has been in danger, a young boy named Link has risen to the challenge of saving the land from all manner of pixelated evil. The latest chapter of Link’s ongoing quest in the video game series The Legend of Zelda is about to be released. And while the graphics have improved since the 1980s, Link is still an empty vessel for players to inhabit, only facing danger with a push of the joystick. Videogame heroes take up a larger amount of people’s imaginations today than they ever have before. In the cultural economy they are as big a force as the heroes in books and movies. But as relatively new as videogame heroes are, some still question their ability to impact us on the level of more traditional art. In 2010, the late great movie critic Roger Ebert argued (...)

  • 60 Free Film Noir Movies | Open Culture
    http://www.openculture.com/free_film_noir_movies

    "During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir. In this growing list, we gather together the noir films available online. They all appear in our big collection 700 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. You might also enjoy perusing our list of 20+ Free Hitchcock Films.❞

  • 1000 Frames of Hitchcock: See Each of Alfred Hitchcock’s 52 Films Reduced to 1,000 Artistic Frames | Open Culture
    http://www.openculture.com/2014/10/1000-frames-of-hitchcock.html

    Some directors like John Cassavetes and Wong Kar-wai like to discover the movie as they are making it. Others filmmakers have a very clear conception of the movie right from the beginning. Alfred Hitchcock was very much in that latter category. “Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all,” he once told Roger Ebert. “I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts.” And that is very much evident in the final product. From the famous Psycho shower scene to a wild-eyed Jimmy Stewart dangling from a ledge in Vertigo to Cary Grant being menaced by a crop duster in North By Northwest, Hitchcock has produced some of the most memorable, arresting images of the 20th Century.

    British artist Dave Pattern set out to highlight Hitch’s visual genius with his 1000 Frames of Hitchcock series, which compresses each of Hitchcock’s 52 major movies down to a mere 1000 frames. That’s about six seconds of running time.

    “It all started when in 2003 I made a website that tries to gather information about Hitchcock DVD releases over the world,” Pattern told Danish movie magazine Echo. “The quality of the publications are very different from country to country. It sort of snowballed from there.”

    What’s amazing about this project is just how much of the movie comes through in this greatly abbreviated, soundless version. You completely understand that Tippi Hedren is getting terrorized by an implacable enemy in The Birds. You don’t even need to see that malevolent murder of crows. You can see it just in her face. At the beginning of the movie, she’s elegant, aloof and perfectly composed. At the end of the film, she’s unkempt, bloody and broken. Hitchcock’s creepy sexual politics and his famously unwholesome obsession with blondes shines through here.

    ...........

    #Hitchcock

  • Je me culture avec l’interwebz: List of films considered the worst
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_worst

    The films listed below have been cited by reputable critics in multiple reputable sources as among the worst films ever made. Examples of such sources include Metacritic, Roger Ebert’s list of most hated films, Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, Rotten Tomatoes, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the Golden Raspberry Awards ("Razzies").

    #merci_arno

    • C’est l’avantage des listes de films « considérés comme… », c’est qu’il faut avoir le même goût que les autres gens pour être d’accord. Ce qui est évidemment impossible si tu as déjà vu plus de 10 films dans ta vie.

      Par exemple, cette liste ne contient pas « Titanic », alors que pourtant je suis passé, du jour où j’ai vu ça, d’une moyenne de 70 séances de cinéma par an à… environ 2. Le genre qui m’a bien dégoûté d’y aller.

  • A l’échelle mondiale, je fais partie de ces « one percenters », et le jour où ça va exploser, je serai certainement parmi ceux qui devront en assumer la responsabilité si je ne suis pas déjà mort.

    Mon intérêt immédiat serait donc plutôt de perpétuer ce système en attendant la mort ...

    « Vivons heureux en attendant la mort » comme disait Desproges

    The One-Percenters - Roger Ebert’s Journal
    http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/04/the_one-percenters.html

    • "The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.

      “Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”

      "The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent.

      “Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”

    • L’article de Joseph Stiglitz, sur lequel se base ce billet:

      Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% | Vanity Fair
      http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105

      Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

      #économie #inégalités

  • Why #3D doesn’t work and never will. Case closed. - Roger Ebert’s Journal
    http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html

    The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

    #cinema