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Friday, April 05, 2013

The balcony is closed
Posted by Jill | 6:26 AM




What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.

At the same time, I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI. Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects under the Ebert brand in the coming year.

[snip]

So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies.


I'm quite certain it makes me a terrible person that I felt more gut-punched when I read yesterday about the death of Roger Ebert than I did when my sister called me at 2:30 in the morning last December to tell me that our mother had died. But if that makes me a terrible person, then so be it. I had known for some time that my mother's health had been deteriorating, but Ebert was just always there. Even when in recent years my local newspaper featured reviews by Stephen Whitty on Fridays instead of Ebert's review, he was always there, as I knew from reading his spectacularly-crafted journal.

We knew about the horrific cancer that robbed him of his chin, his ability to eat, and most tragically, his voice. We knew about the perpetual grin that disfiguring surgeries had put on the face of this most curmudgeonly of critics. We knew about the incredible voice synthesizer that was developed by a company in Scotland that painstakingly took many, many recordings of Ebert's televised reviews, cut them up into individual words, and created software that would assemble these bits into narrative in his former voice when he typed. We knew that no one goes through what he did and lives to a ripe old age. But he was always THERE. Every time a movie came out that I thought I might want to see; every time I watched a movie on TV that I enjoyed, or found one I'd never heard of that was great, I'd always go immediately afterward to rogerebert.com to see what Roger had to say about it. Despite everything he'd gone through, he was always there -- writing, hosting or attending Ebertfest every year. He embraced the technology that allowed him to continue to be important even as the newspapers for which he had written for over forty years had begun to fade. He embraced the young critics who started out on the Web, creating a new "balcony" show featuring some of those young critics. Ebert Digital, which unveiled just in the last few days, promises to continue that tradition.

"Siskel and Ebert" was a duo that became a single unit, like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. And indeed, in the later years of their partnership, Ebert and his equally cranky critic Gene Siskel seemed often to veer into self parody. I often expected Siskel to launch into full SNL-parody of the old "Point/Counterpoint" bit from 60 Minutes and say, "Roger, you ignorant slut!" Their interaction was so easily parodied, that it often was:





I chose the two reviews that head this post for a reason. The first one is because The Shawshank Redemption is arguably my favorite movie of all time. It's the only movie I've ever seen where I left the theatre just glad to be alive. Its theme of hope and "get busy living or get busy dying" so perfectly encapsulates how Roger Ebert lived his life right up until the end -- busy doing the things he loved to do. I posted the second review because after more than a decade after Titanic became something of a pop culture joke due to its sheer, dare I say it, SIZE as it steamed its way through the zeitgeist of the late 1990s, its worth remembering what it was like BEFORE everyone had seen the "flying" scene 157 times and before the multiple viewings made us realize just what an awful writer of dialogue James Cameron is for all that he's a master storyteller and technological craftsman. Because damn it, Siskel and Ebert liked it too!

That movie, laughed at today but called "epic" by Roger Ebert in 1997, is what started me writing movie reviews. Once I realized that what haunted me about the film was not the doomed romance or the ship sinking. I'd been reading about the Titanic since I read A Night to Remember in the sixth grade. No, it was that photo montage at the end; that story of a girl who "threw it all away" and took a literally life-threatening risk, and went on to live the kind of full, joy-filled life that Roger Ebert did. I started writing and before I knew it, I'd reviewed the movie. I posted it a Usenet movie newsgroup, and soon I received an e-mail inviting me to re-post it and continue to write for a site called Virtual Urth. Thus did my unpaid career as a movie critic begin. After a while, I was invited to join the Online Film Critics Society, started my own site, partnered up with Gabriel Shanks for yet another new site, and later on was a co-founder of Cinemarati.com, which alas is now a parked domain and no longer even available. I wrote reviews for seven years, always wanting to be the kind of critic that Roger Ebert was.

What made Ebert special is that he was never a film snob. Some critics frame every movie in the context of The Great Art of Cinema, and find everything else lacking. Ebert always looked at what a movie was trying to do and in what genre it was working. He would give Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle three stars because he got what it was trying to do and deemed it successful.

For all that I no longer review movies, except very, very rarely, I always felt that Roger Ebert would always be there. But now he's not. And so I'll just leave you with Chris Hayes and a group of critics remembering the man who inspired me and so many others.



Update: And what a guy.

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1 Comments:
Blogger talkstocoyotes said...
"What made Ebert special is that he was never a film snob."

Unfortunately, some of the people who are writing about him are.
4/14/13, 1:01 PM  
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