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Film critic Roger Ebert was not only the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, but one of the only critics known to the general public, thanks to his long-running movie review shows such as “Sneak Previews” and his thumbs-up or down movie reviews. He died Thursday of complications from cancer, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He was 70.

The avuncular champion of movies big and small had been fighting thyroid cancer since 2002, and in the past few years spoke with a voice machine. The latest show to bear his name is the PBS series “Roger Ebert Presents at the Movies,” in which he briefly appears on camera with a prosthetic chin though other critics shoulder reviewing duties.

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Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 04-04-2013, 02:54 PM:
 
R.I.P. Mr. Ebert.
 

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Posted by Ken Lackner (Member # 1002) on 04-04-2013, 03:13 PM:
 
He hated In N Out and thought Steak and Shake was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I also rarely agreed with his opinions on films. Am I the only one unfazed by this?
 

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Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 04-04-2013, 03:13 PM:
 
Roger Ebert was a childhood inspiration to me.
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-04-2013, 03:15 PM:
 
He was full of piss and vinegar when he reviewed movies he didn't like. He went apeshit about Kick Ass. Saw him a few times at Telluride. Didn't bother to talk with him.
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 04-04-2013, 03:23 PM:
 
The Chicago Sun Times Ebert page seems to have crashed. I was going to link to his post from yesterday saying he was going to take a leave from reviewing and just review the movies he wanted to, and was about to launch a variety of of movie related web stuff.

Agree with him or not (and I thought he was generally too kind to dreck) he WAS influential, really loved movies, and seemed like a nice guy.
 

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Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 04-04-2013, 03:26 PM:
 
Roger Ebert was one of the few people whose lives I wouldn't have minded having. Not only a great film writer, but a fine essayist, bon vivant, raconteur, and fellow Steak 'N Shake fan. Through his writing he turned me on to not only movies I would have otherwise missed, but many other wonderful things as well. By all accounts, a fan of great projection too. Too bad Steve Kraus doesn't come around here anymore, I'm sure he has some fond memories of him to relate.
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-04-2013, 03:40 PM:
 
I didn't always agree with him but loved reading his reviews. I got a very brief email from him once when I responded to one of his articles about the rating system.

He appeared with Gene Siskel at the first "ShoWest" I ever attended, in 1995, but that's as close as I ever got to him in person.

He truly will be missed, but I hope that some of the plans he outlined in his blog post yesterday will still go forward. He had talked about having other critics review movies on his site -- critics whose opinions he respected.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-04-2013, 03:55 PM:
 
Sad. I didn't think Roger Ebert would be with us for very much longer. The news from the last couple or so days made the situation seem more grim. Still, I didn't expect him to pass away so soon after announcing his latest work hiatus.

I didn't always agree with Ebert's reviews, but I read his reviews more often than those of any other film critic. His "great movies" collection of reviews was interesting to read. I re-read his review of Schindler's List just the other day. My girlfriend had never seen the movie before. We watched it. I had to look up a few things about it from 1993 to see if memory served correct about some of the awards and praise it won.

Ebert's Little Movie Glossary was always fun to read. It listed many of the tired clichés and other odd things movies could do without. "Fallacy of the Predictable Tree" was one of my favorites.

quote: Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary

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The logical error committed every time the good guy is able to predict exactly what the bad guy is going to do. For example, in FIRST BLOOD, law enforcement officials are searching the woods for John Rambo. A cop pauses under a tree. Rambo drops on him. Question: Out of all the trees in the forest, how did Rambo know which one the guy would pause under?

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quote: Mark Ogden

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Steve Kraus don't come around here anymore

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quote: Ken Lackner

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Am I the only one unfazed by this?

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quote: Joe Redifer

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Dying turns anyone into a saint.

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quote: The Daily Telegraph, March 6, 2013

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Roger Ebert, who has died aged 70, became the first American film critic to win a Pulitzer prize, having turned his inky art into a branch of showbusiness when he and Gene Siskel launched their influential film review show on local television in Chicago in 1975; by the early 1980s it was attracting a weekly audience of three and a half millions viewers across America.

The “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” from Ebert and Gene Siskel, with whom Ebert launched a bantering review show on local television in Chicago in 1975, was delivered to the camera in the manner of ancient Roman emperors deciding the fate of gladiators at the Circus Maximus. “They can definitely kill a movie,” the actor Eddie Murphy confirmed. A double “thumbs up” was considered a much sought-after seal of approval by the Hollywood studios, and the pair’s enthusiastic reviews began appearing in advertisements and video packaging.

Although in Britain the BBC had broken similar ground three years earlier with Film ’72, presented by Barry Norman, in America Ebert and Siskel were considered pioneers of television-based film reviewing. Their double act was quick to catch on (Ebert was the stocky one, Siskel bald), but both continued to review for their respective newspapers, in Ebert’s case the Chicago Sun-Times, for which he also profiled stars and film-makers.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Ebert mastered the technical aspects of film-making, and lectured to university students using a stop-motion 16mm projector to deliver a shot-by-shot analysis. When he ran an Alfred Hitchcock film in which there was the flash of a gunshot, he was able to demonstrate how the director had left a single frame clear so that the projector light would bounce off the screen at the critical moment.

Although he would view as many as three films a day in a screening room above a Chicago sandwich bar, Ebert considered that he had become less jaded in his judgements over the years. “When you go to the movies every day,” he reflected “it sometimes seems that the movies are more mediocre than ever … Then you see something absolutely miraculous.”

High on Ebert’s list of all-time favourites was the British film noir The Third Man (1949). He also particularly liked Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and GoodFellas (1990) — the latter directed by his hero Martin Scorsese, a critique of whose work he published in 2008.

Occasionally he would turn his gaze to the small screen, and enthusiastically reviewed the series of British television documentaries, directed by Michael Apted, that began in 1964 with the film Seven Up, in which a group of seven-year-olds were asked what they wanted to do in life and what kind of future they foresaw. Apted revisited his subjects every seven years to see how their lives were turning out.

“This series should be sealed in a time capsule,” wrote Ebert on seeing the sixth instalment, 42 Up, in 1998. He ranked it in his greatest 10 films of all time, declaring it “a noble use of the medium”.

Roger Joseph Ebert (he pronounced it Ee-bert) was born on June 18 1942 in Urbana, Illinois. He remembered the first film he saw as a child: a revival of the Marx Brothers comedy A Day At The Races (1937). At the University of Illinois he studied Journalism and edited the student newspaper. Determined to visit Europe, in 1962 he bought an airline ticket to London, where he saw Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) at a cinema in Piccadilly Circus.

On his return to America he freelanced for the Chicago Sun-Times, joining the paper as a feature writer in 1966. He was appointed film critic a year later, making his debut with a review of an obscure French film. “Georges Lautner’s Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all,” wrote Ebert, “but in between it’s pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave.”

He recognised the virtues of commercial films too, hailing both Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as masterpieces, even though the critical current of the times ran against them. His review of Bonnie and Clyde, which he watched at its London premiere in September 1967, was typically prescient: “Years from now it is quite possible that [it] will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s,” he wrote.

Ebert tentatively dabbled in film-making himself, and earned $15,000 for his screenplay of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), adapted from the novel by Jacqueline Susann. But with its scenes of sex, drugs, sleaze and violence, the film was widely slated, the Hollywood trade paper Variety calling it “the most derisible, most hootable film made by a studio in recent years”.

Nevertheless, when the British punk rock group the Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, saw it in London, they were so impressed that they hired Ebert to write a screenplay for them. The project was provisionally called Who Killed Bambi? but the money ran out and the film was never made.

Ebert’s newspaper career, on the other hand, continued to flourish, and by the mid-1970s his reviews were being syndicated to some 100 newspapers across the United States. In 1975, when he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer prize for his work, he teamed up with his arch-rival Gene Siskel, of the Chicago Tribune, in a weekly film review programme for WTTW, the city’s public television station.

The show was an instant hit, and after being syndicated nationwide and becoming the highest-rated weekly entertainment series ever on America’s public broadcasting system, Ebert and Siskel moved over to commercial television in 1982. The format remained unchanged: a film would be introduced, a clip shown, and one of the hosts would give his opinion. This would often give rise to heated exchanges with the other host, and their bickerings became one of the most popular features of the show.

Having given their verdicts, the pair would give their famous “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” signal. Two “thumbs up” would often be picked up by the studio concerned and prominently displayed in subsequent publicity for the film.

Much was made of the apparent enmity between the two — when Ebert was first told that Siskel would be his co-host, he reportedly refused and had to be talked round — but in fact they agreed more than they disagreed. Their annual lists of films of the year often almost matched, and both hated mindless car chases, violent horror films, product placement, and the colourisation of black-and-white classics such as Casablanca (1942), which Ebert considered to have been vandalised in 1988 by cable television’s “computerised graffiti gangs”.

Ebert never took notes and afterwards wrote up his reviews in a stream-of-consciousness style. “I just write what I think,” he explained.

For more than 20 years he attended the Cannes Film Festival and adjudicated at other festivals in North America and Europe.

A lifelong Anglophile, Ebert, with his former English professor from the University of Illinois, Daniel Curley, published The Perfect London Walk (1986), describing a route from Keats’s House across Hampstead Heath to Highgate cemetery.

“I have walked it in snow and sleet, in rain and cold, in burning hot drought, and, most often, on perfect spring and autumn days,” he wrote. “I have walked it 50 times with 100 friends, and I am not half through with it yet.”

Ebert’s other books include A Kiss Is Still A Kiss (1984), a collection of celebrity interviews; the bestselling Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook, published annually from 1999; and Awake In The Dark (2006), an anthology of his criticism.

For the past decade he had been dogged by ill health, losing part of his jaw and the ability to speak, eat, and drink after cancer surgery in 2006. But he resumed writing full-time and eventually even returned to television. Ebert also became a prolific user of social media, connecting with fans on Facebook and Twitter, and sharing his output online through blogs. In his last post on Tuesday he announced a “Leave of Presence”, but also set out plans for a redesigned, interactive and searchable Rogerebert.com.

Roger Ebert married, in 1992, Chaz Hammelsmith, a lawyer, who survives him.

Roger Ebert, born June 18 1942, died April 4 2013.

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quote: Joe Redifer

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He was full of piss and vinegar when he reviewed movies he didn't like. He went apeshit about Kick Ass. Saw him a few times at Telluride. Didn't bother to talk with him.

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Personally, I could agree to most of his reviews, but if your taste differs from his, then things could look a whole lot different. Kick-Ass was also a notable exception for me, I guess it conflicted too much with his own moral standards. I guess, if he didn't like something, he wrote exactly what he thought. You're also pissing in negative pH values if you don't particularly like something, don't you?

Still, I don't need to agree with everything somebody else does or says 100% of the time to respect or even like somebody. Sometimes, things are the most interesting if you do not agree, especially if both sides have strong arguments. There is nothing wrong with a good discussion now and then, as long as we keep it down to words. No reason to not drink a beer or two together afterwards.
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 04-08-2013, 08:16 AM:
 
Well, in Roger's case there was a reason not to drink a beer or two:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/08/my_name_is_roger_and_im_an_alc.html


 

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Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 04-08-2013, 01:50 PM:
 
I was never really fond of people who made money reviewing films.

However, with Mr. Ebert, he was a professional. I consider people who do their jobs well without letting their personal or political point of view get in the way of their job - professionals. If he did go on about his personal beliefs - I never heard about it.

R.I.P. Roger - no one other than you and Gene could boil a movie down to a simple "Thumbs up or thumbs down".
 

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Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 04-08-2013, 06:25 PM:
 

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Well, in Roger's case there was a reason not to drink a beer or two:

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You're right, in Roger's case it would've been a root beer or two

I guess the openness about his alcoholic troubles in the past earns him some extra respect.
 

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