Roger Ebert Movie Review

Weekend Box Office: July 4-6, 2008

Hancock tops the box office with $62.6 million

Daily Box Office: Monday, July 7, 2008

Hancock tops Monday's box office with $8.5 million

by Roger Ebert I have been waiting for this for years: a superhero movie where the actions of the superheroes have consequences in the real world. They always leave a wake of crashed cars, bursting fire hydrants, exploding gas stations and toppling bridges behind them and never go back to clean up. But John Hancock, the hero of “Hancock,” doesn’t get away with anything. One heroic stunt ran up a cost price tag of $7 million, he’s got hundreds of lawsuits pending, and when he saves a stranded whale by throwing it back into the sea, you can bet he gets billed for the yacht it lands on.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson / ***1/2 ()

"Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson " (Unrated, 121 minutes). Documentary about the hell-raising journalist who stood stride the 70s, staggered through the 80s, crawled through the 90s, and killed himself in 2005. He was first a legend, and then a captive of the legend. The doc by Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side") is all you could wish for in a film about Thompson, except information about how he ingested so many controlled substances, and what he was like when he woke up the next day. Rating: Three and a half stars.

Diminished Capacity / ** ()

"Diminished Capacity" (Unrated, 89 minutes). (Matthew Broderick plays a Chicago newspaperman, and Alan Alda is his small-town uncle. Both are suffering from memory loss; Cooper's condition is temporry, Alda's is progressing. The plot involves the uncle's priceless 1908 Chicago Cubs baseball card, a rekindled romance between Broderick and Virginia Madsen, and Dylan Baker as a Cubs memorabilia dealer who with the name Mad Dog McClure can't be all bad. A mild pleasure from one end to the other, but not much more. Rating: Two stars.

Great Movie: Triumph of the Will (1935)

By Roger Ebert ...By general consent [one] of the best documentaries ever made. So I wrote in 1994, in a review of what in fact is a better documentary, Ray Muller's "The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl." I was referring to Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" (1935), about the 1934 Nazi Party congress and rally in Nuremberg. Others would have agreed with me. We would all have been reflecting the received opinion that the film is great but evil, and that reviewing it raises the question of whether great art can be in service of evil. I referred to "Triumph" again in the struggle I had in reviewing the racist "Birth of a Nation."

Movie Answer Man: Spike vs. Clint on Iwo Jima

Q. Recently there has been a press argument between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood. I'm wondering what you think of Lee's accusations. Spike Lee is a talented, original voice in American filmmaking, but what he has to say about "Flags of Our Fathers" seems to be a little off the mark. Your thoughts? Nathan Marone, Chicago, IL A. Lee believes that Eastwood should have shown some African-American soldiers in his depiction of the battle of Iwo Jima. Eastwood counters that there were no African Americans involved. An article in the New York Times concludes that there were African-Americans involved in the battle, but (because of racial discrimination) they were in the supply lines, not the front lines. Both directors have a point. It is certainly true that black characters for years were under-represented in Hollywood movies about World War II. The Tuskegee Airmen are an example.

People: Werner Herzog: "Tell me about the
iceberg, tell me about your dreams."

by Roger Ebert Werner Herzog's documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" is a film about the humans and other creatures who make their homes at the South Pole. It opens July 11 at the Music Box, and is in release around the world. I posed five questions to the great director. RE: From the beginning if your career, you have been drawn to people who exist at the extremes. It is impossible to conceive of a Herzog film about ordinary people living ordinary lives. Why are the exceptions so much the rule with you?

People: Kevin Costner: "I'll never make a sequel."

by Roger Ebert Kevin Costner has made a movie about a presidential election with a finish so close that one man, one single citizen, will decide the entire race. "Swing Vote," which opens Aug. 1 and was directed by Joshua Michael Stern, stars Costner as that man, who becomes the center of a national media circus. He begins as an embarrassment and ends on a heroic note, with a simple, direct, patriotic speech that we can actually believe would come from his flawed character.