High hopes

Please, all of you, don’t watch it at the same time – I don’t want YouTube to take it down – but Mike Leigh’s High Hopes was uploaded a couple of weeks ago. There are precious few movies anymore that I’ve been waiting for years to view. High Hopes is the foremost of them.

The movie features the great Mike Leigh regular, Ruth Sheen; and, even better, the great Mike Leigh occasional, Philip Davis. Young, woolly Philip Davis. Sheen and Davis star as Thatcher-era hippies.

(Leigh depicts hippies brilliantly in Nuts in May, also viewable on YouTube.)

Philip Davis is one of the world’s best actors, along with, oh, David Gulpilil, Noah Taylor, and Robert Mitchum. You may have seen him in “A Study in Pink,” the first episode of Sherlock (he plays the cab driver). He’s also in the TV show Whitechapel and Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake.

Here’s another still of him in High Hopes. See how sadly he regards the kettle.

I plan to watch this movie tomorrow, first thing after work.

Roger Ebert, R.I.P.

Since 2000, when I moved to the U.S., I’ve read more words by Roger Ebert than by anyone else. Much of what he wrote is online, gratis. Just yesterday I was reading some of his reviews from the 1970s and ’80s.

He wasn’t the first movie critic whom I read extensively — that was Pauline Kael, who was more ruthless and precise. Ebert was more prolific and more humane. He was glad to review stuff that was unambitious, and, more important, he appreciated what was morally interesting about a lot of that stuff. (Example: Blue Crush.) In general, he judged the unambitious stuff more insightfully than he judged the ambitious stuff.

Not that he didn’t appreciate the ambitious stuff. His “Great Movies” series was useful to me when I was beginning to learn about ambitious movies. Some of those reviews explain subtext. (Examples: The Big Heat … Walkabout.) Others recount production history. (Example: Beat the Devil (a not-so-ambitious movie).)

He wrote warmhearted profiles of some great actors: Robert Mitchum … John Wayne.

Near the end, when he could no longer speak, he wrote some lovely personal reflections. Two of my favorites happen to be about not drinking and not eating: abstinence by prudential necessity and by incapacity. Doing without the drink and the food wasn’t so difficult for Ebert. What he really missed was the companionship.