As a high
school student in the 1990s who was starting to get interested in movies, Roger
Ebert’s reviews were the first ones I read. I don’t know how many lunch or
spare periods in high school I spent holed up in the library reading his Movie
Yearbooks (I wasn’t the most popular kid in high school). Every Friday, I would
head over to the computers in the library (I didn’t have the internet at home)
and read his new reviews – during the summer and other breaks, I’d head to the
public library, and spend some time reading what Ebert had to say. I bought
several of those yearbooks as well, and read them until they were dog eared at
best – one of them eventually lost both covers, and tore in half – but I hung
onto for years after.
And, of
course, I loved watching he and Gene Siskel battle out week after week in the
balcony. I always gravitated towards Ebert – not that I disliked Siskel in the
least, but I never really read his work. He was smart and opinionated, and more
easy to anger than Ebert, who I always though the more confident of the two –
the one better able to make his case. The show was never the same when Siskel
was replaced by Richard Roeper – who could never really challenge Ebert the way
Siskel did. Still, I watched it to see Ebert.
I guess you
could say that I consider Roger Ebert to me my first teacher about movies. I have no idea how many movies I watched
because Ebert championed them. It’s no accident that Roger Ebert’s favorite
filmmaker – Martin Scorsese – became my own favorite. And his reviews of
Hitchcock, Welles, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Chaplin and Keaton got me
started on looking further back in cinema history. His great movies series is
invaluable, offering perspective and insight on the most established classics,
as well as not so established ones. I watched my first documentary – Hoop Dreams
– because Ebert championed it so much. I excitedly walked to and from my local
video store in a snow storm to pick up my copy of Carl Franklin’s One False
Move, that I had to special order, because Ebert loved the film so much. I was mesmerized
by Kieslowski’s Three Colors because Ebert lauded it. I watched the films of
Oliver Stone and Spike Lee because of him – and far too many others to count.
Ebert was
undeniably the most famous film critic in America for most of his career. He
had his detractors of course – those who say that his show diminished film
criticism to simply a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and nothing else. That’s
bullshit of course – few film critics ever wrote as many reviews as Ebert did. Last
year, he wrote over 300 of them. Many newspapers employ multiple film critics,
but for the most part at the Chicago Sun Times it was only Ebert. There are few
major movies made between the late 1960s and 2012 that Ebert DID NOT review.
His show always offered a quick taste of his review – but the written reviews
were still there in all their glory.
What I think
I’ll remember the most about Ebert is the passion for movies that was evident
in his reviews. He loved movies – and unlike many critics, didn’t hold himself
up above them. He gave every film a fair shot – he went into everyone hoping to
love it. Ebert could rip apart a horrible movie with the best of them, but he
never lowered himself to the snark that many critics do. I try to keep this in
mind when I write my own reviews in my own small corner of the internet. If
that passion for movies – that love of movies – that Ebert had ever fades from
me, that’s when I’ll know it’s time to stop watching so many – and time to stop
writing about them. I hope that day never comes for me, as it never did for
him.
I guess what
it boils down to is that Roger Ebert is one of the main reasons I love movies.
I never met the man – I did see him once at TIFF, holding court and talking to
anyone who happened to stop by – but few people that I haven’t met have had
such a large impact on my life. For that, I can only say Thank you, Roger. You
will be missed.
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