On April 4, 2013, a man who changed film and film reviews forever, died from cancer after a long fight. For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivation plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while clearly pointing out the mediocre, or plain awful. “No good film is too long,” he once wrote, and “no bad movie is short enough.” Ebert, who died at the age of 70 in Chicago, had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland. He reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic.
He was also technically savvy, being an early investor in Google, and having an extremely popular website, rogerebert.com. He also not only won a Pulitzer Prize and was the first film critic to do so, but his name was also added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005. He also launched a new kind of television program to existence, “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” (soon changed to “At the Movies”) with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel, in 1975. The program was extremely successful, and ran for decades after. After Siskel died in 1999, Ebert auditioned a number of temporary co-hosts and settled Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper in 2000, and at its height, “Ebert & Roeper” was seen on 200 stations. Additionally, Ebert wrote films, along with trademarking the term “two thumbs up/down” and inevitably ran at the top of movie advertisements. He believed his job was his identity, and had a huge amount of supporters, including Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Steven Spielberg, who said that Ebert’s “reviews went far deeper than simply thumbs up or thumbs down.”
I personally grew up reading movie reviews constantly, fascinated at how each critic analyzed and critiqued specific movies. I always remembered Ebert’s reviews, as his positive reviews were always highlighted for the respective movies, and noticing how in-depth and profound they were. He was not only a critic, he was an example for the entire film community.
Two days before his death, he ended his final blog post by saying, “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.”
Sources:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2013/04/04/r-i-p-roger-ebert.html
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/04/11/ebert-memorial-chicago/2076259/
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