yes Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Roger Ebert's January announcement that he was going in for another major surgery began a long and disquieting silence. As the reviews he had written in advance started to run out, with no updates on his health and more and more of the content on his website being contributed by its steadfast editor Jim Emerson, some people began to worry that something was very seriously wrong. March saw the announcement that Ebert would reappear for his annual Overlooked Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign, but there was still no word from the man himself.

Yesterday, much to my relief, a typically funny and self-deprecating message from Roger appeared on his site and in the Sun-Times. It confirms his planned appearance at Ebertfest in late April, and, better yet, announces that he will return to reviewing movies shortly afterward. The bad news is that the surgery didn't restore his ability to speak, which will for the moment preclude Ebert's return to his TV show where Richard Roeper has been valiantly trying to hold down the fort. (Is anyone still watching?) That aside, though, the dispatch is overwhelmingly good news.

Joan Allen is getting older. It's not that her face - which, since Pleasantville, has been  inseperable for me from the mental image of Reese Witherspoon-all-grown-up - has changed, so much that age is using the actress like a chalkboard. Joan Allen today looks like Joan Allen of ten years ago, with wrinkles scribbled on.

It's striking to see an actress in such an obviously advancing state of ... um ... maturity, take on back-to-back roles that deal with sexuality, as Allen has done with The Upside of Anger and, now, Sally Potter's Yes. Allen's presence as an erotic subject in Potter's film is a brave and powerful one; it's too bad the film neglects that presence for a linguistic gamble that, somewhat sadly, the actors don't really pull off.