Thursday, April 04, 2013
TWO THUMBS DOWN
We have lost Roger Ebert
Ebert had been through a terrible siege of mouth cancers, one after the other. Only yesterday or the day before, he said the cancer was back.
Well, it did him in.
Roger Ebert should get some kind of hero status for his life work, movies. And his staying power in the progress of the cancer. He lost all functions of the throat and mouth, ate with a straw and a catheter and wrote in considerable pain.
A little more heroic than I think that I would be but let's put that aside.
There are a lot of film critics. Perhaps you have noticed.
Historically, I followed Pauline Kael and a few of the New Yorkers' reviewers, then the NYTimes. Very few others are worth a pinch of shit.
The reason is that they merely recount plot, which I am not interested in as it spoils, and, often, are easily seduced by the constant lobbying that goes on in the business. The firewall between the business side and the editorial sides of the press are thinnest in the entertainment sections.
The don't have the stars and directors out on junkets for nothing.
Ebert did recount plot but in a way you could jump over. It had a "section" in the reviews. And he was totally immune to the hype.
Something else. Very few critics wander beyond Hollywood. Even the New Yorker seems immune to subtitled films.
Not the NYTimes and not Ebert. Both review everything.
Ebert also was ready to go back and review many films a second time, say, on a tenth anniversary or some other occasion. His second reviews are often mea culpas about missing the goodness the first time around.
In this blog you will notice that only the NYTimes and Ebert appear at the links of the movies I see. The exceptions are those times where there is no review for a particular film or, perhaps, I disagree with their assessment so much at the time, I leave them out.
I don't go back a long way with Ebert. I was not much interested in his work with Siskel. Too pop goes the weasel for me.
But his works were thoughtful and helpful and often in synch with my own reaction.
One defect, I am not sure that Ebert ever saw a gay oriented film that he got right or particularly liked. So, I never or rarely used his review on that genré.
Finally. He wrote clearly and in a way that helped the reader appreciate the process by which a film was made and also, more importantly, how a film was experienced. The rules of the game for writing and directing. Why some stuff worked and other stuff did not.
I have learned a lot by reading Roger.
Goodbye old friend. Off to the show in the sky.
