Weird dateline for sure.
UPDATE: A Roger Ebert documentary is due out soon, by the director if Hoop Dreams. Entitled Life Itself, here’s the trailer.
For the last 15 years or so I never went to see a movie without reading Ebert’s review. I didn’t always agree with his opinion, but he’d tell you why he liked or disliked the movie in enough detail I could almost always tell if I would like the movie before seeing it. I think he must have mellowed a bit as he got older, some of the things people are complaining about here are things he did when he was younger before I became a fan. I really felt for the man as his long fight with cancer left him increasingly incapacitated. I don’t think his wife Chaz gets as much credit as she deserves for her support.
Its been over a year since he died, and I haven’t seen a movie in a theater in that time.
I can agree with this. He had a unique combination of power and authority - Pulitzer prize, former top television celebrity, could make or break a movie, smacked down Rob Schneider like a bug - and humbleness… humbleness… humility, as if he had nothing left to prove and was confident of his abilities. His TV show was never broadcast in the UK but I remember reading all the reviews, even for films that weren’t coming out here. As if John Peel had been interested in films instead of rock music.
And he must have been scared out of his mind in the last few years. He must have gone to bed each night gripped with utter terror at the thought of what the next trip to the hospital would bring, but it never damaged his writing. He never went maudlin and he never gave up writing about his passion. He was a stronger man than most.
Er, favourite reviews? I remember bits. From Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, there was “my eyes yearn for new sights such as a giant radioactive bat trapped inside a baseball dome and emitting green rays. (There is even a voluptuous pleasure to be derived from simply typing the words "emitting green rays.‘’)”
Emitting green ways. Three stars. Ponder those lines. The grammar is cleverly broken (“inside a baseball dome, emitting green rays” flows more conventionally) but the intended breathless effect works very well. And when I think of US critics I have a mental image of awful, pompous, self-important tossers, yet Ebert gave this film three stars and genuinely seemed to love it. Because he loved great trash.
Oh, dammit, I’ll just quote the last half of the review, which appeals to me because it’s the kind of thing I might have written myself - the mixture of bemused but enthusiastic pedantry is quintessentially me, and to confuse the world he did it years before I did, and better:
"The plot. A 10,000-year-old bat named Gyaos has aroused itself from slumber and attacks Tokyo. Scientists use floodlights to lure it into a baseball stadium, where they stand in the dugout shouting lines like, “Take your posts!‘’ But only Gamera is a match for Gyaos, and soon the two flying creatures are engaged in a fierce battle that extends even to outer space. (How does a bat fly in space? Don’t ask me. I still don’t know how Gyaos flies in the air, since it has no moving wings.) I have referred to Gyaos as a bat, but after being severely pummeled by Gamera, it drops several eggs the size of minivans on the streets of Tokyo. Bats are mammals and do not lay eggs, I think, so perhaps (a) Gyaos is a bird, (b) bats do lay eggs, or (c) those are turtle eggs, and the movie is about Mrs. Gamera.”
Perhaps everyone has that feeling. People read his reviews and imagined how it would be to write something so smart. Imagined how it would be to be at the top, earning cash money - travelling all around the world, telling stories about all the young girls.
Compare with his replacement, whose name I have forgotten. Jim Emerson. He also came across as a decent bloke, but his writing was just bland and had none of Ebert’s spark. The depth of experience, the avuncular personality. And there’s the race issue; we’re supposed to ignore the fact that he was white and his wife was black, but as far as I can tell he was the only white major award-winning broadcaster in the US or the UK to have that arrangement and as far as I remember he was never attacked by white people or black people for it, presumably because (a) most people didn’t know (b) he was just a fat happy guy on TV, leave him alone (c) insert third reason, something about ion cannons. It must have been awkward to start with, I refuse to believe that it wasn’t.
And the weight issue as well. He was an overweight nerdy film nerd who ended his life as a millionaire former TV star married to somebody he loved. Which just goes to show - all those people on Imgur moaning about how lonely they are, it’s not because they’re overweight or nerdy. It’s because they’re obnoxious, unlikeable, self-pitying moaners that nobody wants to be around.
On the subject of writing in the “word technician” sense, there’s an interesting blog post here with some examples of his approach:
http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/writing-tools/209442/why-roger-ebert-was-a-good-writer/
Writing well is very difficult; Ebert made it seem easy. He had a distinctive voice. He wasn’t gimmicky or juvenile; and he wasn’t self-indulgent, either. It’s tempting as a writer to compensate for a lack of faith by adopting a persona, or by becoming self-indulgent, a la Will Self or the chap who only ever writes reviews that are the opposite of what everybody else says. The chap who heckled Steve McQueen. I mean, Will Self is a potentially great writer who feels compelled to put up a wall between him and the reader. It’s a mistake that leads nowhere.
The sad thing is that the kind of environment that nurtured Ebert - his 1960s, 1970s reviews read a little flat nowadays, he got better - no longer exists, and the kind of writing he produced has never been fashionable, even though he was objectively popular and successful. I can think of lots of internet writers who have produced good work but not good writing, if you see what I mean.
I’ll agree with those who have praised his style of often speaking to the why of a review, and thereby letting the reader know if they themselves would like a film. I always found his reviews a good read, whether I agreed with them or not, and sometimes came away with a better understanding of my own opinion.
Slightly off-topic, as it’s not a review, but his commentary track for Citizen Kane is a thoroughly engaging trip through not only the making of that movie, but the history of film technique Welles brought to bear in making it, and its impact on film-making on the whole. It’s what made me finally realize why Citizen Kane was perennially on the top of all those “greatest films” lists.
I never read reviews to decide whether to see a movie. Whenever I saw one I would then look up Ebert’s review to get another perspective about it. Like talking to a very smart and knowledgeable friend about it.
Hmm. The business card Roger Ebert handed out to me one day merely says, “Roger Ebert, Decent Film Critic.”
It seems to me he was hired to write movie reviews and did so. And he found that frame-by-frame analyses of classic films were enjoyed and appreicated by his audience, and he happliy obliged them. But hey, for all I know, Ebert took out daily ads in Varitey extolling his incredible gifts as a film critic, it’s just that I’ve never seen them. Exactly how did he market himself as a “film critic extraordinaire” again?
I miss Roger Ebert, and that’s no joke. So does the wife, perhaps his biggest Thai fan. 
Uh, okay, so sometimes you disagree with Ebert. I disagreed with him often. I’m not sure what that proves.
What’s a technical standard for quality of film criticism?
What does his ability or lack thereof outside of film criticism have to do with his work as a film critic?
I don’t even know what this means in the context of film criticism.
(1) So what?
(2) Sez who?
(3) Who cares?
This is a bizarre sentence. What you’re describing sounds like an educational lecture in the form of dissection of a classic film. Why do you judge it in terms of an “accomplishment” or a “performance”?
What the hell are you talking about? Maybe he kept giving the lecture because new people kept wanting to hear it for informational or educational or entertainment purposes. Since when does one repeat a lecture in order to demonstrate that he deserves a non-existent award?
The fact is that Ebert had a large following as a newspaper film critic and as a lecturer on film-related topics. He was recognized as a leader in his field and for having introduced a new style of popular essays on film critiques. He actually did win some awards that actually do exist. And this is all because of his powers of self-promotion? Really? I mostly knew his work by actually reading his column. If I didn’t like his columns, I would have stopped reading them. What place does a “technical standard” play here?
I think the complaint may be (and they can correct me if I’m wrong) that Ebert wasn’t a MOMA-style (or even *Village Voice *type) cinema snob–that while he did like a lot of art films, he also enjoyed plenty of mainstream fare.