Word: rogerism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ROGER...
...Movie reviewing is the solitary evaluation of a communal medium. Critics watch films in small screening rooms, or alone on DVD players, then retire in solitude to write up their opinions and insights, to recollect passion in tranquility. Roger does all that; but more than any critic I know, he brings the informed discussion of film out from under the lamp, into daylight. He has used his fame to elevate the conversation, challenging audiences to attend not just to the dramatic and ethical aspects of films but to their visual strategies. (Roger is one of the few film critics...
...retains it all. He has a memory that's both photographic (enabling him to recall virtually every shot from every film he's seen) and phonographic. On one indelible occasion at the 2002 Floating Film Festival, he and cinematographer Haskell Wexler sang Woody Guthrie's "The Union Maid" - and Roger performed not just the chorus ("Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union, / I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die") but every verse. Roger had picked it off a Pete Seeger record he heard when he was younger and repeated it decades...
...back with Roger to the early 70s, when he wrote a long, fine piece on Russ Meyer for Film Comment, the magazine I edited. He also did an important analysis of the action-film audience's disconnect from narrative - how they would simply ride from one sensational episode to another, without caring about any continuity of narrative or character. When the magazine needed a smart story, Roger would write one. By now TV had made him a star, but he was never a prima donna...
...Mary and I really got to know Roger at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, when he got us onto the yacht of Lew Grade, the Lord (literally; he'd been knighted) of ITV, and brought us into star-studded cocktail hours at Cannes' posh Majestic Bar; in one conversation about Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the smartest comments were made by actor James Woods. ("MIT grad," Roger whispered knowingly.) In between the partying, he managed to keep sending pieces, mostly interviews, back to the Sun-Times. That Cannes, he said, he saw seven movies and wrote 11 columns...