Are Ebert and Roeper refusing to review ARARAT?

[wh00t]

It seems Ebert and Roeper, formerly Siskel and Ebert, arguably today's most popular film critics, are not going to review ARARAT on their nationally broadcast television show. This past weekend they chose to review two other films out in limited release (LA/NY): THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO and STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN. They also reviewed a film coming out this coming Friday, THE QUIET AMERICAN. It should be noted that THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO grossed about double what ARARAT did in its premiere weekend, but it was shown in 43 theaters as opposed to ARARAT's 6.

 

But more shockingly, STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN grossed half of what ARARAT did, despite being shown in 4 times as many theaters. What valid excuse do the critics have to not review an important Atom Egoyan (whose SWEET HEREAFTER made both Siskel and Ebert's top 10 of the year list) motion picture picture, one that has generated so much buzz, a film that opened the Toronto Film Festival? Surely it is more worthy of a review than THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN? I am convinced there is some foul play involved to keep ARARAT's subject matter from reaching a wider audience.

 

Nobody can force them to review a movie, but the circumstances demand explaining. I thought that perhaps they were waiting for it to go for a wider release before reviewing, and perhaps this is still the case, but seeing as how they reviewed 2 other limited release movies this week, I'm not so sure. I encourage you all to contact Buena Vista Entertainment as well as ANCA, AAA, and any other organizations who could look into the matter.

 

[ November 19, 2002, 04:49 PM: Message edited by: wh00t ]

[Sip]

I don't blame them if they don't want to review it. No matter which side they vote on, they will probably end up getting several serious death threats.

[wh00t]

Hmmm, Sip I'm not sure death threats are the issue. I don't think the critics are fearing for their lives.. if giving ARARAT a bad review had consequences like that, half our critics would be dead by now!

 

But seriously though, the whole ordeal annoys me greatly. Under normal circumstances, ie. if the movie did not deal with the Armenian question, a new $11-million Egoyan picture would definitely be reviewed. Am I blowing it out of proportion? You decide..

[Sip]

I don't know if you are blowing it out of proportion! My "feeling" is that in their eyes, this movie is probably not that important ... but that's just my feeling. Obviously Armenians and Turks have a much much different view on the topic.

[wh00t]

Sip, I understand what you are saying, and in normal circumstances I would agree. I would say hey, ARARAT isn't a big-time motion picture that appeals to the masses, so why would they review it on a nationally broadcast show to people who will never see it?

 

My problem lies in the fact that apparently they do review less "important" movies on a regular basis. This weekend, when ARARAT, IMO should have been reviewed, they chose 1 movie which is on all accounts less "important" than ARARAT (the Motown flick) and one perhaps equally "important" (The Crime of.. which was a hit in Mexico). When an unknown Motown documentary gets chosen in favor of an important work of a world-renowned film director...

[Guest Fadi]

Wh00t, I think they are not reviewing it because they don't know how th review it, Ararat, is a kind of film that can not be reviewed. What I mean is that a reviewer may call it a msterpiece or a failure, important reviewers that have lot of credibilities could not take the chance to review a such a movie before some times, because if they call it failure, later there is chaes it may be called a msterpieces and they should review what they have said, if they call it a masterpieve, again it may be viewed later differently.

 

And what I call a masterpiece is a movie that can not be reviewed, so I think Egoyan was able to make such a work that is as controversial as the subject he has chosen.

[Boghos]

I think that there could be several reasons why the movie was not reviewed, but I agree that Egoyan has already found its place in cinema and that any of his movies, historical or not, will always be discussed in the relevant circles.

 

On the other hand Ararat is in my view not the movie that most Armenians were hoping for. But knowing Egoyan one could not really have hoped for that. We had a screening of the film here, a special session during the São Paulo Film Festival (organized by an Armenian, by the way) as Martin has also reported, most people did not understand it or were disappointed by its message(s).

 

I think Nairi was the one that mentioned if Egoyan doesn´t make it, someone else will. That is probably true. But I do not believe that the dynamics of AG recognition and surrounding issues would be in any way altered even if Spielberg were to come out with a movie on the topic. I think that if we continue to wait or expect whomever but the ROA to deal with this issue in any coherent manner, we will be always disapppointed.

[MJ]

I think that one of the reasons of the absence of the review on the film may be that even the most sophisticated eye may need to see it at least twice to understand the entire message and structure of the film. Additionally, I think non-Armenians cannot really understand it, since one has to have lived the entire drama and grown up with it to understand its rationale.

 

A couple of other observations:

 

There are two gigantic Armenian symbols in the center of the film: Arshil Gorky and Charles Aznavour – one as a central personage and the other as a central actor. The role of Aznavour is not gigantic on its own. Perhaps a lot more modest actor could have successfully plaid it. Besides, one may ask "why would Aznavour agree to play such a derivative role?" I think the answer is simple and is in the understanding of Saroian’s/Aznovour’s message - "It doesn’t matter [what they say, what the do, what they recognize, what they don't recognize, what are the details, what word we would use to characterize it, etc." This message had to be delivered by someone of his statue to be accepted even if one disagrees with it – of coarse assuming it would be understood.

 

On the other hand, I think the other central message, for which Gorky was the axis of this film, was, "This is what matters – we live so that to be something good, to do something good, we can make something out of our lives and nation other than becoming perennial victims and whiners. Life is noble."

 

For me, personally, the value of this film is the discovery of the depth of Egoyan's and Aznavour's understanding of the Armenian Cause – it is something internal. It wouldn’t be of interest to Siskel and Ebert nor they can assess it. This is very Armenian.

[Rubo]

First Martin you are disappointed that they have not reviewed the film and then you write this below.

 

“For me, personally, the value of this film is the discovery of the depth of Egoyan's and Aznavour's understanding of the Armenian Cause – it is something internal. It wouldn’t be of interest to Siskel and Ebert nor they can assess it. This is very Armenian.”

 

Essentially justifying it their luck of interest in the film because “it is something internal”? “This is very Armenian.”

 

Why is it the holocaust or any other Jewish related issues are not strictly Jewish internal issue but they made them wide mainstream American and international issue. Would it be a stretch of a imagination to speculate that some Jewish lobby with strong Turkish ties simply put a stop to Ararat’s potentiality?Why Jewish lobbies?you figure it yourselves.

[Rubo]

It looks like the film is doing well despite of some film critics lock of attention.

 

From Groong

 

'Ararat' Opens With the Largest Per Screen Average of Any Film This Week

From: BenSul@aol.com

Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 01:46:33 -0800

 

'Ararat' Opens With the Largest Per Screen Average of Any Film This Week

 

Film Averages $32,188 Per Screen in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto

 

NEW YORK, Nov. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Miramax Films is proud to

announce that "Ararat," a Robert Lantos production written and

directed by Atom Egoyan, which was released in Los Angeles,

New York, and Toronto on Friday, November 15, had a very strong

opening weekend and averaged $35,188 per screen, the largest

of any film this weekend. In the first three days, "Ararat"

brought in $211,130 on six screens in North America.

 

"These numbers exceed my wildest expectations," said Egoyan.

"Miramax and Alliance have done an extraordinary job of combining

grass roots marketing with a more traditional campaign."

 

"These initial numbers are the first real vindication for our

efforts to bring this untold chapter of history to the screen,"

said producer Robert Lantos. "The amazing response at the box

office corroborates my conviction that there definitely is a

commercial audience for a thought provoking film with substance."

 

"Ararat," which has been warmly embraced by the North American

Armenian community, premiered in Los Angeles last week as the

American Film Institute's "Centerpiece." The film was also the

subject of a cocktail reception and screening at the Library of

Congress, hosted by the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues,

Co-chairs Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Representative Joe

Knollenberg, and Honorary Host Senator Robert Dole.

 

"Ararat" is Atom Egoyan's most provocative film to date. It

is a story about truth and denial -- on both an intimate and a

grand scale. The estranged members of a contemporary Armenian

family are faced both with Turkey's denial of their catastrophic

past and with their own complicated present. Told in Egoyan's

trademark elliptical style, "Ararat" is at once a mysterious

and powerful story about determining truth.

 

"Ararat" is an Alliance Atlantis and Serendipity Point Films

presentation of an Atom Egoyan film in association with Ego Film

Arts and ARP. "Ararat" is produced by Robert Lantos and Egoyan.

[MJ]

Just came across the following Opening presentation:

____________________________________

Never Again

 

"My original impulse was to tell a straightforward historical story," says The Sweet Hereafter’s Egoyan, whose new film Ararat tells the story of the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which well over a million people – two thirds of the Armenia’s population – where murdered by the Turks. "But I’d have to show extreme scenes of unspeakable horror, and as a filmmaker, I can’t do that without a degree of self-consciousness. In the end, I want the film to be about the story parents tell their children, how small moments of misunderstanding huge generational rifts." Ararat, set in the present day, tells the stry through an Armenian family working with the film crew to make a picture about the war, and is the Oscar-nominated director’s most personal film: Much of Egoyan’s family was lost in the massacre, and his son is names after one of the picture’s true-life protagonists, painter Arshile Gorky. "You want people to know what happened, but also what continues to happen," Egoyan says, stressing how many Turks still deny that the war took place. "When I told my son about the genocide, he asked if the Turks said they were sorry. If you tell him the truth, the trauma gets passed on. I want to create a fantasy of how that cycle might be broken – the healing that may occur when someone invests themselves in someone else’s history in an emotional, responsible way."

 

New York Magazine

November 18

[MJ]

Just came across the following Opening presentation:

____________________________________

Never Again

 

"My original impulse was to tell a straightforward historical story," says The Sweet Hereafter’s Egoyan, whose new film Ararat tells the story of the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which well over a million people – two thirds of the Armenia’s population – where murdered by the Turks. "But I’d have to show extreme scenes of unspeakable horror, and as a filmmaker, I can’t do that without a degree of self-consciousness. In the end, I want the film to be about the story parents tell their children, how small moments of misunderstanding huge generational rifts." Ararat, set in the present day, tells the stry through an Armenian family working with the film crew to make a picture about the war, and is the Oscar-nominated director’s most personal film: Much of Egoyan’s family was lost in the massacre, and his son is names after one of the picture’s true-life protagonists, painter Arshile Gorky. "You want people to know what happened, but also what continues to happen," Egoyan says, stressing how many Turks still deny that the war took place. "When I told my son about the genocide, he asked if the Turks said they were sorry. If you tell him the truth, the trauma gets passed on. I want to create a fantasy of how that cycle might be broken – the healing that may occur when someone invests themselves in someone else’s history in an emotional, responsible way."

 

New York Magazine

November 18

[MJ]

Meant to be, ""...I want the film to be about the story parents tell their children, how small moments of misunderstanding create huge generational rifts."

[nairi]

Why post a secondary source when there is a primary one?

 

Nairi

 

******************************

WHY THIS FILM? by Atom Egoyan

 

egofilmarts.com

11/17/2002

 

At the press conference for The Sweet Hereafter at Cannes in

1997, a journalist asked me if the film couldn't be seen as a

metaphor for the Armenian Genocide. It was one of the few times

in my life when I found myself quite speechless. The journalist

went on to suggest that many of my films had dealt with themes

of denial and its consequences, and was interested as to why I

hadn't dealt with the subject more directly.

 

It was a good question.

 

I should begin with some personal facts. My grandparents

from my father's side were victims of the horrors that befell

the Armenian population of Turkey in the years around 1915.

My grandfather, whose entire family save his sister was wiped

out in the massacres, married my grandmother who was the sole

survivor of her family. I never knew either of these people.

They had both died long before I was born.

 

When my parents moved to Canada, they settled in Victoria - a city

on the west coast where we were the only Armenian family. Though

Armenian was my mother tongue, I was desperate to assimilate.

Although I sometimes heard stories of what the Turks had done to

my grandparents, I certainly wasn't raised with anger or hatred.

I was too concerned with trying to be like all the other kids

to dwell on these ancient grievances.

 

I left home at eighteen to study classical guitar and

international relations in Toronto. At the university, there

was an active Armenian Students' Association, and I was exposed

to an Armenian community for the first time. It's important to

understand this was an extremely crucial moment in the evolution

of Armenian politics. Armenian terrorists (or 'freedom fighters',

depending on your point of view) were beginning their systematic

attacks against Turkish figures. Many Turkish ambassadors and

consuls were being assassinated in this period, as Armenians

extremists were enraged by the continued Turkish denial of what

their grandparents had suffered.

 

I was completely torn by these events. While one side of me could

understand the rage that informed these acts, I was also appalled

by the cold-blooded nature of these killings. I was fascinated

by what it would take for a person who was raised and educated

with North American values of tolerance to get involved with

these acts. One of the first feature scripts I ever wrote dealt

with this issue.

 

Thankfully, I never made that film. At that point, twenty years

ago, I wasn't ready to deal with the 'Armenian Issue'.

 

The problem with any film that deals with the 'Armenian Issue',

is that there are so many issues to deal with. First of all,

there's the historical event. Since no widely-released dramatic

movie had ever presented the genocide, it was important that

any film project would need to show what happened. We live in a

popular culture that demands images before we allow ourselves to

believe, and it would be unimaginable to deal with this history

without presenting what the event looked like.

 

I believe that the most dramatic aspect of this history, however,

is not the way it happened, but how it's been denied. Since

the end of World War I, Turkey has refused to acknowledge the

Genocide, going so far as to claim that it was in fact Armenians

who committed genocide against the Turks. While this may seem

preposterous, it is important to remember that there is now a

generation of Turks who have been raised with this denial. They

aren't denying anymore. It's what they've been led to believe.

 

From the moment I began to write this script, I was drawn to

the idea of what it means to tell a story of horror. In this

case, the horror isn't only about the historical events that

took place in Turkey over eighty-five years ago, but also the

enduring horror of living with something so cataclysmic that has

been systematically denied. Without getting into the mechanics

of that denial (there are a number of books and articles on that

issue), it is important to note that the role of the director

in my film-within-the-film is monumental. Edward Saroyan, and

his screenwriter Rouben, are faced with an awesome task. They

will be the first filmmakers to present these images to a wide

public. If their film seems raw and blunt in its depictions, it's

because they are the first people to cinematically present these

'unspeakable horrors'. They are desperate to get the point across.

 

We learn that Edward's mother was a survivor of the genocide -

that he is making this film to honour her spirit. Needless to say,

such noble personal intentions do not necessarily lend themselves

to critical distance, and it's clear from the glimpses we see of

Edward's movie that it might sometimes veer into an exaggerated

and extreme view of history. Like many epics, it paints its heroes

and its villains in an 'over-the-top' way in order to heighten

the sense of drama. Edward's ARARAT is a sincere attempt to show

what happened, told from the point of view of a boy who was raised

with these images by his mother - a genocide survivor. The scenes

of the film-within-the-film represent the way many survivors and

children who were told of these horrors would recall these events.

 

I decided to create this film-within-the-film in order to generate

the drama in the present day. All of the central characters in

my ARARAT are somehow connected to the making of Edward's ARARAT,

and most of the conflicts that occur in the contemporary story

are related to the unresolved nature of not only the genocide, but

also the difficulties and compromises faced by the representation

of this atrocity. How does an artist speak the unspeakable?

What does it mean to listen? What happens when it is denied?

 

These are hugely complicated issues, and I certainly have enormous

expectations of my viewer. While my work may have been different

if a more popular movie version of the Armenian Genocide had

already existed, this was not the case. Thus the screenplay had

to tell the story of what happened, why it happened, why it's

denied, why it continues to happen, and what happens when you

continue to deny. ARARAT is a story about the transmission of

trauma. It is cross-cultural and inter-generational. The grammar

of the screenplay uses every possible tense available, from the

past, present and future, to the subjective and the conditional. I

firmly believe that this was the only way the story could be told.

It is dense and complicated because the issues are so complex.

 

History is not only the responsibility of the person who speaks

the truth. It needs someone to listen. When that person listens,

how they listen, why they listen, are all essential components of

the communication of experience. While the structure of ARARAT

is densely layered with these issues, I needed to show how the

collective human linkage of action and responsibility is both

the wonder and tragedy of our condition.

 

I couldn't have made this film any other way.

 

Atom Egoyan

[nairi]

I was kidding about the above btw. It was an interesting article MJ. Thanks.

 

Yup. And I also believe that one way to counter these movies is simply by silencing their existence.

 

Nairi

 

[ November 20, 2002, 05:16 PM: Message edited by: nairi ]

[wh00t]

Well, Ebert saw it, didn't like it, and posted a needless half-truth about the "enormous controversy" surrounding the Hitler quote.

 

http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-...ararat27f1.html

 

"Note: In the film, Adolf Hitler is quoted discussing his plans for genocide and asking, "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" The film presents this as fact, although there is enormous controversy over whether Hitler actually ever said it."

[Guest Fadi]

It would be better that he rather say, he did not fin d the film this or that, or did not understood it, rather then saying it is not this or that, as usual someone talking with his $@##%^... I think he is better on criticising Hollywoodian movies, and Egoyan type of movies are more then his pseudo-intellectualism could handle.

 

As for the Hitler cote, it remembers me the critics of "Schindler list" by right-wings, concerning the said "air photos" of the concerntration camps.

 

So Hitler cote was not good enough eh ? Was questioned ? I have in my lists of references another publication of an interview by Hitler before World War II, that say nearly the same wordings.

[Guest Fadi]

"I have read all the reviews and the reactions to it’s screening at Cannes. I have but one thing to say: the critics are morons."

 

http://www.loopytoronto.com/ararat.html