It's unfortunate that it took another sad event to finally get me back to writing again, but it is what it is. Anyway, last week the world lost perhaps the biggest fan of cinema the world has ever known. At this point it's relatively old news and I find myself at somewhat of a loss as to what to say about the man that has not already been said more eloquently by 100 other people over the last week? I suppose the only thing I can really do is talk about it from a personal level.
I became a Roger Ebert fan in a very roundabout way. Siskel and Ebert was probably the first "grown-up" tv show that I started watching sometime in the mid-80s. It wasn't the kind of thing where I went out of my way to tune in, but if I was flipping channels on a Saturday afternoon and saw that it was on I always watched it. With its debate and, at times, adversarial format it almost forced viewers to pick a side. Kind of the movie nerd version of the Jets and Sharks, minus the synchronized dancing. And pretty much right away I sided with Siskel. I really have no idea why. In fact, now I go back and watch clips of the show and think that Siskel often comes off as a very arrogant film snob while Ebert is much more down to earth. Maybe it just so happened that the first couple of reviews I saw I agreed with Siskel about, or maybe I secretly aspired to be a film snob myself.
In any case starting in high school, and especially after I started working at the movie theatre, I read Siskel's reviews religiously. I remember how much I looked forward to getting the Tribune every Friday so I could read all of his latest reviews. If the review was good, it pretty much guaranteed that I'd have to find a way to see the movie opening weekend (it helped that working at the movie theatre let me see almost everything for free). If it was bad, for the most part I pretty much just completely lost interest in seeing it, at least until it hit the rental shelves.
Siskel's illness and death was quite similar to Ebert's, just over a much shorter time span. He had surgery to remove a brain tumor in 1998 but then returned to work shortly thereafter. I, along with most of his followers, thought everything was fine. Then in early February 1999 he announced that he'd be taking a leave of absence but expected to be back by the fall. He died 2 weeks later. The leave of absence announcement followed by his passing so quickly was eerily similar to Ebert's "leave of presence" blog that came just a day before his own death (though I actually suspect that he wrote it before that and was holding it until then to coincide with the 46th anniversary of his first review).
To say I was bummed about Siskel's death would be an understatement. He was unquestionably the person that I trusted most when it came to film criticism and, film geek that I was, to no longer have that was a big deal. So it really was only natural that in my search for a new "guide", the person that I turned to first was Siskel's partner. A type of transference, if you will.
To my great surprise, I found that now that I was free from the "Siskel vs. Ebert" dynamic I actually enjoyed Ebert's writing and reviews quite a bit. Above everything, he was an excellent writer and thus his reviews were always enjoyable to read even if I didn't agree with them. I also always knew that, unlike other reviewers whose taglines appeared constantly on TV previews
The thing I quickly learned about Ebert was to just ignore the bottom line star and "thumb" rating. Because in the review, what he says about the film is almost always dead on - it's just that how strong he reacts to it may not mirror how others will feel. As a couple of great examples, he gave Spawn (a real piece of shit film, in my opinion) a 3 and a half star review because, although he admitted the plot sucked, "as a visual experience [it] is unforgettable." Conversely, he gave the original Die Hard only 2 stars (the lowest of the 4 Die Hard films he reviewed) because he absolutely hated Paul Gleason's Deputy Police Chief character (he spends almost half the review railing on this character, who has about 5-7 minutes of total screen time). But that was quintessential Ebert - a man reacting passionately to what he saw on screen and providing a logical and coherent rationale for why he felt that way. To me, that is what a movie review is supposed to be - a subjective account of what experiencing the film felt like to him. He would save his more objective commentary for his Great Movies column that he started in 1999, where he would revisit either films he had previously given 4 stars to or films that were released before he became a film critic. Here he would expound on the virtues of the films he loved and try to highlight their contributions and importance to the pantheon of cinema. I learned about a lot of pre-1967 films through that, and have seen a number of incredible films as a result.
The other thing that I loved, and in fact came to respect more and more over the years as journalism has become increasingly partisan, was how respectful he was to the filmmakers. No matter how much he may have loathed a particular film, those ill feelings never extended to the people who made it. That's something that a lot of film critics - journalists and pundits too for that matter - could learn from. Consider how he opens his half-star review of Death to Smoochy: "Only enormously talented people could have made 'Death to Smoochy.' Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams." Now, he's clearly panning the film but wow! I don't even know if I've ever evene gotten a compliment that's as gracious as that. He was also known to go out of his way to make amends if he thought he'd actually truly hurt someone - consider the famous Brown Bunny episode. The whole story is too long to recount here, but it's an amusing tale and if you're interested you can read about the initial fight here and the two of them making up a year later here.
But the quote that I will be forever grateful for Ebert for is this: "it's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it." Wrapped up in that seemingly simple statement is one of the ultimate truths of cinema, and that is that each and every subject has an infinite capacity to be either absolutely captivating or maddeningly dull. You can make a completely enthralling movie about a father and son looking for a stolen bicycle in Rome, and you can also make a soul-crushingly dull movie about one of the most important events in US history. It was Ebert's goal to eliminate the sentence which begins "I don't like movies about ____" from ever being uttered.
And so I'll say goodbye to a voice that I had tremendous respect for. I will leave all the "thumb" puns aside and just say thank you, Mr. Ebert - you will be missed.
Many have said that Ebert was more entertaining when he hated a movie than when he loved it - and I'd have to agree with that. Here are my two favorite Ebert quotes, both about movies he hated:
On Battlefield Earth: Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in "The Fugitive." I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies. There is a moment here when the Psychlos' entire planet (home office and all) is blown to smithereens, without the slightest impact on any member of the audience (or, for that matter, the cast). If the film had been destroyed in a similar cataclysm, there might have been a standing ovation.
And my all-time favorite . . .
On Freddy Got Fingered: This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.
