Entries associated with the tag "Richard Roeper":

The Tribune -- even the new "if we all think outside the- box maybe this-sorry ship-won't sink" Tribune -- doesn't like to offend. So when stand-up comic Ken Swanborn died the other day, the paper turned up its nose at the paid death notice his family submitted.

The Tribune refused to publish the notice's final line, a nod to Swanborn's sense of humor and political convictions: "In lieu of flowers, please vote Democratic."

Says a woman on the paper's paid-death-notice desk, "If it's considered discriminatory or offensive, they take the line out."

Offensive?

"What if I'm a Republican and I'm offended?"

But instead you offended the family.

"Well, it was not intentional, but we do have protocols and we do have rules we have to follow."

But the family was paying to say this!

"We have guidelines."

The Sun-Times published the death notice as the family wrote it. And Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper quoted the last line in his tribute to Swanborn, a buddy from the days when they were growing up in Dolton.

Says Carol O'Neill, another Dolton buddy, "Only Swanny could have his obit rejected. He’s been a huge political activist for years. His parents started the movement years ago. When black families started moving into Dolton in the early 60s they were involved in meeting with the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King. So at an early age Swanny was involved in standing up for social justice. In his mind you were a Democrat or get out of here."

Tribune innovation czar Lee Abrams might want to innovate some common sense.

(H/t Eileen Favorite.)

Richard Roeper questions the decision to give a photo of Conrad Black flipping reporters the bird the top prize in the annual News Photographers Association of Canada competition. "It's not even a good picture," Roeper says, eyeing the picture's technical shortcomings. Besides, "it's not even that unusual to catch a public figure in the act of giving the finger these days."

The photo was taken by David Chidley of the Canadian Press outside the Dirksen Building last July as Black arrived for a day of the trial that led to him serving six and a half years in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. No, it's not a remarkable picture, and unless we take eyewitness testimony into account we can't even be certain that Black wasn't making some other sort of gesture. Where are the curled upper lip and mob boss scowl that normally accompany a first-rate mimed obscenity?

But on the other hand. Chidley's picture prevailed in the spots news category, where artistry plays second fiddle to immediacy. And the Canadian mind-set must be considered, not merely the preoccupation with all things Black but the normal cultural diffidence. "Canadian notable caught in demonstrative behavior" might have been the subtext that put Chidley picture's over the top.

The worst that can be said about the winning photo is that despite what it shows, it's false to Black. Susan Berger, a Chicago journalist who maintains a a blog on Black  and who alerted me to the win, observed in e-mail that for the most part "Conrad was totally a gentleman who actually enjoyed talking to the press. (I remember many times when his daughter Alana would just touch his arm and give him a look to get him to stop talking to us.) It was like his daughter and wife kept him in check. There is some irony that this photo won an award because it was truly not a depiction of his behavior during the trial but rather just one day when he lost it."

UPDATE: On the other hand ... 

Neil Steinberg asked a useful question: "Few newspaper Web sites seemed able to usher Charlton Heston into the hereafter Sunday without using the word 'legendary,' and I can't be the only one who wondered 'legendary for what?' Beside wooden acting and gun-nuttery, I mean."

His observation reminds me of a conversation I was in a long time ago with some fierce litterateurs who argued Hemingway didn't matter anymore, though, as someone eventually pointed out, it was Hemingway they'd spent the last 40 minutes rejecting.

I'm not even sure what "legendary" means in this context, but maybe it's "Glad he's finally gone, so we can go back to thinking about him as he was 30 years ago." That's what, to Steinberg's dismay, everyone's been doing. Steinberg's Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper wrote a column about Heston in the same edition. "He was a towering presence, on and off the screen," said Roeper. "There won't be another like him." And the paper's Miriam Di Nunzio did a piece on Heston's best DVDs. 

Over at the Tribune, film critic Michael Phillips wrote a eulogy that described Heston as "an emissary from an earlier era, a rock-solid throwback in his declamatory approach to acting, standing up to external circumstances of biblical proportion." Meanwhile, Manohla Dargis went a little ape in the New York Times, callling Heston "one of the last American movie stars" and someone Orson Welles directed "brilliantly" in Touch of Evil, "making particularly memorable use of the actor's physicality, his big, rangy body and the hard, clean right angles of his face." Steinberg should note that talent had nothing to do with it.

You haven't read anything yet. On his Web site, film critic Dave Kehr remembers that Heston was "the subject of the single most notorious pronouncement in the history of film criticism -- Michel Mourlet’s proclamation that 'Charlton Heston is an axiom of the cinema.'" Mourlet was just getting started. Kehr reprints the whole thing, and before he's done Mourlet makes it known that through Heston, "mise en scène can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage.”

Heston was legendary for what? For something that intelligent people were compelled to try to put into words at the considerable risk that some would sound like gibbering idiots.

When death comes, the press takes its threesomes any way it can find them. The Tuesday Tribune carried a front-page box titled “Farewells,” with directions to the obits inside the paper for Ingmar Bergman, Bill Walsh, and Tom Snyder--who were certainly closer in death than in life. The Sun-Times’s Richard Roeper began his column the same day, “It was a dark trifecta for those who believe celebrities die in threes.” (Roeper went on to say he doesn’t.)

But there was a fly in the ointment. Michelangelo Antonioni died too late for the print editions but not for the radio stations Chicago woke up to. Antonioni was a movie director whose stature can be compared to Bergman’s. Did this make four?

Or two? With all due respect to TV interviewer Tom Snyder, he was never considered a genius of his trade the way Walsh was. And with all due respect to Bill Walsh, the fame of football coaches ends pretty abruptly at the water's edge. 

The Tribune’s tributes to Bergman and Antonioni were written by Michael Wilmington, “special to the Tribune.” That’s Trib-speak for “doesn’t work here” and it raised more questions than it answered. Hasn’t Wilmington been a Tribune movie critic for the past 14 years? Geoff Brown, associate managing editor for features, told me Wilmington resigned a few weeks ago. I asked why. “You’ll never get me to discuss why anybody comes or goes,” Brown said. “Maybe comes.”

Ron Santo’s latest rejection by baseball’s Veterans Committee reminded me of how much I admired Rick Morrissey’s recent column anticipating Santo’s disappointment. “In a strange, very selfish way,” Morrissey wrote in the Tribune on February 21, “we might all be a little better off if Santo doesn’t make the Hall of Fame next week. I know that sounds horrible. But for many of us, it’s not such a bad thing to witness again how a good man responds to defeat.” Morrissey’s homage to Santo’s courage and resiliency wasn’t simply elegant, it was intelligent -- the work of a writer who'd found a subtler, more original way of thinking about a familiar topic.

I had a similar reaction a couple days later to John Kass’s last column on Mayor Daley before Daley’s reelection. Kass can write about Daley in his sleep, but this wry tribute to our LaSalle Street Putin was thought through. “The comic antics at the Cook County Board, with the media punching bag named President Todd Stroger, reinforced City Hall’s subliminal message: Without Daley, all is lost,” wrote Kass, putting into his own words an idea I'll give you in mine: in a city of warlords, many of whom, like Stroger, inherited power by permission of their clans, Daley runs as the warlord who guards the city against the clans. As Kass noted about what he called Daley's "ruthless" reign, that’s how the people, the real-estate interests, and the media like it. Certainly the warlords do.

And then there was the column by Cathleen Falsani in the Sun-Times February 23.  It began on a note I normally find obnoxious—the reporter insincerely asserting his or her own timidity in order to underscore the bravado of someone else. But in this case Falsani told us “I’m a coward” as a prelude to writing about a coward, someone whose psychology Falsani wanted to tease out: Sister Blanche, the “nervous poodle of a woman” in Dialogues of the Carmelites who, like the other Carmelites, loses her head at the end of the opera. Sister Blanche returns to the convent “just in time to be beheaded,” and Falsani wondered why. Maybe she was terrified “of breaking a vow,” maybe it was “her fear of life” if she were left behind, alone. The idea that Sister Blanche suddenly found her courage at the last minute is the trite possibility I admire Falsani for not even considering.

On other fronts . . . In Tuesday's Sun-Times Richard Roeper wrote about meeting Al Gore at the Oscars. Roeper asked Gore if he might have won in 2000 if he’d been as engaging on the campaign trail as he is in An Inconvenient Truth. “To his credit," wrote Roeper, "Gore doesn’t duck the question or deny its validity, but says he couldn’t linger on the past and had to focus on the here and now.” That's not ducking? Roeper may have more to learn about the awesome magic trick where a politician fills a notebook right before your eyes but when you look inside it’s empty.