Roger Ebert gave Tomb Raider a good review. “Here is a movie so monumentally silly,” he
writes, “yet so wondrous to look at, that only a churl could find fault.” I suppose that makes me a churl. Reviews like that one, especially over the
last decade or so, helped earn Ebert a reputation as something of a “soft”
critic, one who refused to hate popcorn movies just because they were popcorn
movies.
Sadly I was in college when the Tomb Raider review came out,
suffering from the same pretension imbalance that affects all too many twenty
year olds, and I might have jumped on board the anti-Ebert bandwagon for a
little while. But only a little
while. The thing about Ebert’s reviews,
about his writing in general, was that it was honest. When he hated a movie, he let you know why,
and when he loved it, you couldn’t help but feel the excitement. Make no mistake, Ebert was a master of snark,
and his negative reviews make for fantastic reading. But in an age when effusive praise is
considered less intellectually sound than brutal criticism, Ebert had the
courage to love the movies he loved.
No matter what he thought of a movie, he was always fun to
read. Like most I was introduced to
Ebert through At the Movies. I remember being thrilled at the idea of a
show where people just talked about
movies, then so disappointed when it turned out they hated all the best
movies: Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, The Addams
Family. Then to cap it off, they liked a bunch of
boring adult movies that nobody I
know had seen.
But I kept watching, when I could. Since the show was syndicated, it tended to
jump around in the schedule a lot (as it sadly continued to do until the final
version ended two years ago), so it was always something of a treat when I
could find it. As I got older and
started to see more of the movies they were talking about, I valued their
opinions more and more.
The show helped me learn that film criticism wasn’t about being
negative; it was the practice of thinking critically about movies as art. Re-watching Ebert’s commentary on Dark City today, I was struck by just
how much the guy thought about
movies. The man could probably have
written an essay about each and every frame.
At the dawn of the internet age I discovered Ebert’s reviews
online, and made it a habit to check them out almost every time I saw a
movie. He was the one and only critic I
almost always read. In high school I would often manipulate assignments so I got to use his movie reviews as a source. Even when we
disagreed, like on Tomb Raider, it
was always fun to read his writing, and great to know that someone out there
was giving Tomb Raider the same
chance, the same opportunity to provoke thought, that he gave to Oscar
winners. He helped me conquer my
snobbery towards popcorn movies at a time when I was way too full of myself,
helped me get back in touch with the kid who’d hated him for giving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze a bad review.
More recently, after he lost his voice to cancer, he began
blogging about a whole host of topics and encouraging lively feedback in the
comments section. He wasn’t just a
movie reviewer, I realized, he was a writer,
in the best sense of the word. Freed
from the newspaper word counts he had lived with since the 60s, he wrote a lot,
to be sure, but it was almost always snappy, funny, and worth reading. Even when he made arguments I find
ridiculous, like the whole “video games can never be art” kerfuffle, he made
the argument interesting. I especially
enjoyed his essays on God and his cultural Catholicism. Given my own background the latter hit me on
a personal level, but Ebert wrote so much about
so much that he probably hit just about everyone on a personal level at
least once.
In his memoir Life
Itself he goes into even more detail about his love of a particular hotel
in London, a love of Illinois’s popular Steak n’ Shake fast food chain, the love
he had for Siskel, for his wife, for the movies. Even when cancer made it impossible for him
to speak, he found ways to keep talking about the movies. The Onion article on his death just hit the
nail on the head. What a great time he
must have had.
Sadly we won’t get to read his reaction to any more movies,
but he reviewed so many there will always be a new one to read. Whenever someone watches a movie made between
the late 60s and the end of 2012, they’ll still be able to check what Ebert
thought, hear his voice as clearly as ever.
That’s the power of the printed word, and few have had as much fun with
the medium as Roger Ebert. Also, he sang
on an episode of The Critic, which I
think we can all agree will prove his most powerful legacy.
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