Roger Ebert had a relatively short list of his favorite films. 2001, La Dolce Vita, Gates of Heaven, Apocalypse Now, The General, and now, The Third Man have played in the festival. It is actually surprising that so few of these "favorite" films have played in the eighteen years of the festival. Vertigo was rumored for the festival a few years ago. I am NOT counting Citizen Kane because it was not properly shown. It is still bewildering to me that they chose to show it with Ebert's commentary track without having first played the movie with its original audio. The other "favorite" Ebert movies are Casablanca, Floating Weeds, Notorious, Raging Bull, 28 Up, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Tokyo Story, and The Tree of Life. Note: This is a combination of his lists from 1991 and 2012. Considering how many differences there were in those two lists, Ebert probably had a more "general" list of around 20 or 30 films "floating" around in his head that were pretty much interchangeable depending on his mood and what he had seen most recently. Oh, and we can probably count Synecdoche, New York as another one of his favorites to play the festival, since he listed it as one of his two possibilities for new films to join that list (he chose The Tree of Life instead).
This 4K restoration of The Third Man looked incredible. I would never thought it could look so good, especially since I can remember seeing it in public domain quality home video incarnations. For some reason the dialogue often came across as muffled. Maybe it was just the accents, or maybe my hearing isn't the greatest. I'll have to watch this movie again at home, maybe with the subtitles on so that I can finally understand all of the dialogue.
Ok, so I liked Grandma. It is exactly the type of film that I would expect to play at Ebertfest, and that is not a putdown. At times the dialogue was too artificial--meaning that two people would never really talk to each other that way, and this is the type of relationship movie that needed to stay away from that. More naturalism (along with maybe going away from the word for word dialogue in the screenplay) might have helped here.
I was underwhelmed by Northfork. I didn't have high expectations going in, as Ebert was one of the few critics who liked the film. It felt like the Polish brothers were going for a Lynchian film without the creative inspiration to pull it off. What is really frustrating is that Ebert liked this movie so much (perhaps because he liked the whole angel thing), and yet he regularly bashed David Lynch movies. I was going to link to his review of the brilliant Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but I couldn't find it, nor could I find a clip from the Siskel and Ebert tv show. Maybe he never formally reviewed it? He did post negative comments about it in an article written after viewing it at Canne.
[Edited to move The General to the "shown" list.]
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