This Week's Travel Reading

(This week's photo was taken while actually in transit!)

One of the main reasons why I wanted, for the longest time, to be a film critic was that, as a resident of Chicago, I had the pleasure of reading Roger Ebert multiple times a week in The Chicago Sun-Times. I have all of his "Great Movies" collections--though, oddly, I bought the third one first, the first one second and the second one last. I always found him to be one of the great writers about film--an essayist first, a critic second--and his "Great Movies" books are filled with in-depth analyses of inarguable great movies like King Kong, Ran and the Adventures of Robin Hood; movies than need to have a case made for them, like Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and The Man Who Laughs (which I reviewed here); and movies that are as repugnant as they are great; he does a splendid job exploring the dichotomy of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, at once a singularly vital link in the history of visual narrative storytelling and one of the most virulent examples of racism every committed to celluloid.