Roger Ebert, R.I.P.

[Ecurb]

Roger Ebert, the only film critic to win a Pulitzer, is dead of cancer. He fought the disease for a decade, and in a 2010 interview in Esquire he said, "When I am writing, all my problems become invisible. All is well."

I grew up in Chicago, so I've been reading Ebert's column for his entire career. He never wanted to be a film critic; he wanted to be a journalist. He quit a PhD. program in English to sign on with the Sun Times, and stumbled into movie reviewing. That reminds me of Red Smith, the great sportswriter, who said that he never wanted to be a sportswriter, only a newspaperman. Both were great journalists.

I once had breakfast with Ebert (if you count eating in the same restaurant in Telluride, Colorado as "with").

Pauline Kael and Anthony Lane are my favorite film critics. But Ebert always seemed so fair, kindly, and just that I admired the person as much as his columns.

[Adolescent09]

You beat me to it, Ecurb. R.I.P. Roger Ebert. Great reviewer and such a sad way to go. He will be sorely missed.

[Lokasenna]

Indeed, RIP Roger Ebert. A really great critic, whose reviews were always intellectual and stimulating.

[ashulman]

We are preparing an appreciation over at Noripcord.com which should appear soon, and this is what I submitted for that

Two TV shows running on public television were seminal in shaping the young Alan Shulman's mind, for whatever that's worth. One was Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which forever killed my already wavering belief in God (and this the year of my Bar Mitzvah, over before it began), and the second was Sneak Previews, later retitled Siskel & Ebert. I lived down the street from a popular cinema, and was a regular attendee of Saturday afternoon screenings since I was a small child. What a glorious feeling to realize that not only did someone share the same delirious thrill you had looking up in awe at those colossal images, but that there were very good reasons for your excitement. You could get a secondary rush by talking about the movie, figuring out why you liked it. This came in handy for the third seminal media event of my early adolescence - the re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey to theaters across the country. I later learned that Roger shared my passion for the film and its unparalleled cinematic grandeur. His passion sometimes got the best of him of course, as when he gave Full Metal Jacket a thumbs down on the same show he recommended Benji the Hunted. Kubrick had let him down and he was biting back. He also widely missed the point of Blue Velvet, which offended his sensibilities with its, at that time, shocking subject matter. But on the other hand he was not afraid to champion slight movies that were simply enjoyable to watch. He could bring great intellectual weight to bear but didn't throw that weight around. He never forgot that we go to the movies for the sheer joy it can bring and he was grateful to any film that delivered on this promise. I try to follow his model when writing reviews for all you Noripcorders, it's as simple as that. I miss him already.

[qimissung]

That's a very nice "review" of the late, great Roger Ebert, ashulman, but this is the line I like best, and which I think sums him up best:

"His passion sometimes got the best of him of course, as when he gave Full Metal Jacket a thumbs down on the same show he recommended Benji the Hunted."

:lol::lol::lol: But that's why I always liked him. He was very democratic in his taste (perhaps sentimental might be a better word) and he just quite simply liked movies, period, whether they were grand epics, or stories about small lost dogs. I guess you could say he was very relatable, and not at all a snob while still retaining the ability to be esoteric.

[VivianDarkbloom]

I didn't much care for Ebert's reviews; I think they lacked analytical depth. But then again that's mostly why I don't much care for movie reviews in general. They're often too circumstantial to be taken seriously. Ebert, though, used to write very well, and had his moments of insight every now and then. A friend of mine sent me this yesterday. I thought I'd share it here.


I do not fear death
by Roger Ebert

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”

Me too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:


I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”

Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:


I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

That does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.

Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally — not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:


Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.

That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”


Source: http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/