- 25,831
- 15,061
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2011
RIP to a legend in journalism... He worked for 40 years for the Chicago Sun Times!!! Not to mention his other accomplishments...
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: this_feature_currently_requires_accessing_site_using_safari
The ONLY movie critic who's opinion I respected and searched for if I wanted one on a new movie.
R.I.P
Never heard of him until today, always sad to see someone who's loved by many go though.
RIP
Didnt know he was sick. RIP. I always enjoyed his approach to film critiquing.
Siskel has an aisle seat saved for your bruh |I
[h1][h1][h1]ROGER EBERT: MORE THAN JUST A CRITIC[h1]by Leonard Maltin
April 4, 2013 7:44 PM
...
It’s impossible to overstate the impact Roger and his longtime partner and rival Gene Siskel had on popular culture and the perception of film criticism. They were both firmly established in Chicago (a great newspaper town), writing for the Sun-Times and the Tribune, respectively, when their local public television affiliate exposed them to a national audience on PBS in the early 1980s. Imagine: a weekly half-hour program consisting of two critics reviewing and debating current movies. There had never been anything like it before and it caught on like wildfire. Gene and Roger were in the right place at the right time, and they made the most of it: they became bona fide celebrities, and soon their names were synonymous with film criticism. (I know this first-hand, because Entertainment Tonight went on the air around the same time. When people started recognizing me in hotel lobbies and airports, they would often ask, “Aren’t you Siskelandebert?”, as if it were a compound name.)
There was a reality-show element to their program, long before reality television took root: people loved to watch them argue and fire potshots at each other. The sniping was genuine, and not always benign…but so was their chemistry, which no one was ever able to re-create, including Roger. But at the heart of their show was an absolute passion for film: they really cared about the movies they championed, and their endorsement helped boost the profile of innumerable films.
If there was any downside to their television success, it was that so many people only knew them from that medium and never sought out their printed reviews. I was one of those people. It was only with the invention of the Internet that I began reading Roger’s reviews, on his comprehensive website, and marveling at his writing skill. He is the only critic I know who unashamedly drew on his life experiences to explain his feelings about a given movie. It wasn’t a gimmick, and it never made him seem self-absorbed, just disarmingly candid.
...
The role of critics has been marginalized by the growth of the Internet and the empowerment of self-made bloggers who are eager to share their opinions. But few, if any, of these wannabes will ever come close to Roger Ebert as an essayist, and I doubt that anyone will ever have the enormous impact he and Gene Siskel had on the moviegoing public.[/h1][/h1]
Ebert's dismay changed my understanding of how to read a film. For one thing, I didn't know a film could be read.
Ebert did a lot of reading, particularly on social issues. No major critic did more for black movies than he did. He championed great filmmakers like Spike Lee and Charles Burnett. He lifted up directors like John Singleton and Matty Rich, finding the upside in some of their mediocre filmmaking without ever seeming to damn with faint praise, lower his standards, or lie. Their filmmaking might not have been spectacular, but he deemed it morally necessary.
Even with his illness he continued to write. And the writing (and how much of it there is to read!) is what will keep Ebert a titan, alongside Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, who died last June. Ebert worked in a separate realm (and city) from Kael's and Sarris's rivalries and coteries and seemingly endless word counts. In print, Ebert practiced criticism with vivid clarity. A writer I know once told me he didn't read Ebert because he get could a plot summary anywhere. It's true that a typical Ebert review contains mostly plot synopsis, but it's mostly plot synopsis the way diamonds are mostly coal
Men, women, children, the young, the old, black people, white people, large Scandinavian-looking people, people who lived in Chicago, people crazy enough to vacation in Chicago at the end of July: They all had a look. A few of them stopped him for a picture, an autograph, or an opportunity to give him their two cents about a movie they'd seen. He obliged. I've never walked around downtown Chicago with Oprah Winfrey or Michael Jordan, superstars inextricably synonymous with Chicago, but the response to Ebert seemed vaguely comparable.
When he arrived at the store, he said, matter-of-factly, that he didn't mind the fans and the photos and the gawking — he said he needed to buy the new battery because he wanted to take pictures of them.