Roger Ebert Movie Review

Weekend Box Office: January 25-27, 2008

Meet the Spartans tops the box office with $18.5 million

Daily Box Office: Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Rambo tops Wednesday's box office with $1.0 million

"Over Her Dead Body" (PG-13, 95 minutes). Eva Longoria dies on her wedding day with Paul Rudd. Eventually he consults a psychic (Lake Bell), and they begin to fall in love, but the dead fiancee's ghost appears and tries to sabotage the romance. Standard ghostcom, not very funny, and it's strange how none of the characters seems in awe of the sudden appearance of a ghost, which they treat as a plot decide. Rating: Two stars

The 400 Blows / **** ()

Beginning Feb. 1, Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959) will be shown in a new 35mm print in a weeklong run at the Music Box. It will be paired with the short "Antoine and Colette." By Roger Ebert (1999) Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959) is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about an adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut's own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film's famous final shot, a zoom in to a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention, and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future. It is the first time he has seen the sea.

Untraceable / *** (R)

"Untraceable" (R, 100 minutes). "Untraceable" is a horrifying thriller, smart and merciless. A psychopath devises ways to slowly kill people online, in live streaming video. The more hits he gets, the further the process continues, until finally his captive is dead. On his trail: Diane Lane as the head of the Portland Cyber Crimes unit, Colin Hanks as her partner, and Billy Burke as a Portland detective. Well made and acted; a sadistic nightmare. Rating: Three stars.

Movie Answer Man: Virally targeting the audience

Editor's note: This edition of the Movie Answer Man was written by Roger Ebert before he went into the hospital for his most recent surgery -- and before the death Jan. 22 of actor Heath Ledger. Q. I'm curious about the viral marketing campaigns for many big-budget movies (such as "Cloverfield" as well as the "Batman Begins" sequel "The Dark Knight"). "The Dark Knight" uses Web sites that include puzzles in order to unlock stills or pictures from the movie. One allowed people to enter their e-mail addresses to get a coordinate. With the coordinate, they could enter it at the Web site and remove a pixel from a vandalized picture of Aaron Eckhart (as Harvey Dent from the film). As more people did this, more pixels were removed, and at the end, the first photo of Heath Ledger as the Joker was revealed underneath. Besides this, there have been scavenger hunts that would ultimately end in more photos being released and lead to Web sites revolving around the movies' events and mythology. Do you believe that more studios will use this tactic to market their product? Jeremy Flores, UCLA, Los Angeles A. "Viral marketing" refers to a strategy that tries to involve a movie's target audience in talking up a movie among their friends. They tell others about the Web sites, the audience grows, word-of-mouth spreads, and the campaign rolls under its own momentum. It is essentially a practical application of Richard Dawkins' theory of "memes," which are to ideas as genes are to heredity. He argues that certain ideas, beliefs, songs, images and superstitions spread from mind to mind and, like genes, the hardiest survive.

Commentary: An open letter to
Roger Ebert from Sundance

From James Rocchi at The Huffington Post: Roger Ebert is not, in fact, up in Park City for the Sundance Film Festival right now. I am, screening films and working in the cold, and while there's plenty of old friends and new about -- every press screening at Sundance is like a high school reunion, if only for the A.V. Club -- I was thinking of Ebert this week fairly obvious reasons. I've met Roger often over the years, and for some reason -- some stupid internal mechanism of self-deprecation, I would wager -- I always, always assume he will not remember me, or who I am. He does, of course, because he's a gentleman, but in my mind I tell myself that Ebert's mental file of "white dudes with glasses who are film critics and like to wear sweater vests" must be full to bursting, so I always re-introduce myself when I run into him. But I have friends who know him well enough, and one of them told me a few weeks ago "Ebert won't be at Sundance; he's having surgery on the 24th, for his voice."