As a movie geek and filmmaker it is
hard imagining a world without Roger Ebert, but that world has come.
For my entire life he has been part of the movie landscape, at first
alongside Gene Siskel, then Richard Roeper, and then, online and on
Twitter. His copyrighted phrases ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’
are part of the lexicon and have been since before I was born. Most
people don’t give a shit what film critics have to say; someone who
goes to ten movies a year wants something completely different from a
film than one who sees a hundred or more in that same span. But a lot
of people listened to Roger Ebert, even when they disagreed with him,
even when he was wrong (which he was plenty of the time). If you ask
a hundred people anywhere to name the first film critic that crosses
their minds, ninety-nine of them will say Roger Ebert.
I met him once.
On the second or third day of my
adventure, I was in line for a movie (which one I don’t remember;
when you’re seeing three or four a day they kind of blur together)
and felt a large displacement of air and space behind me. A presence.
I turned around, already exhausted and fighting a cold, and there
stood a film icon. He was in no way a skinny man, but I remember him
not being as large as I thought he would be. We had one of those
celebrity moments where it registered instantly on my face that I
knew who he was. But, then again, who didn’t? We were at fucking
Sundance. Everyone knew who he was.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello,” he replied, in that
instantly recognizable voice that would, over a decade later, be
ravaged by cancer and replaced with a computer simulation.
“Enjoying the festival so far?” I
didn’t know what else to say.
The man shrugged. “So far, so good.”
“See anything you’ve liked?”
What else do you ask a film critic?
“I can’t say. I have to save it
for the show. I can’t give away reviews.”
“Oh. I understand.” And I did. It
was his bread and butter and what he thought could, especially in
those days, make or break a film, especially the small films that
used to play at Sundance. But still, I had hoped for a little back
and forth. Oh well.
“Cool,” I said. “Enjoy the rest
of the fest.”
I turned away, a little underwhelmed
by my encounter. A beat later someone tapped on my shoulder. I looked
behind me, and Roger Ebert said:
“Check out ‘Ravenous’. I really
liked ‘Ravenous’.”
I smiled and thanked him and left him
alone and filed into whatever movie we were waiting to see. I didn’t
see Antonia Bird’s ‘Ravenous’ by the end of the festival. I had
my week planned down to the hour and there was no room for it. I had
really just been making small talk, but it felt pretty cool to get a
recommendation from Roger Ebert.
Until I saw ‘Ravenous’ when it
came out on video. That movie is a piece of shit. Truly.
“Holy cow,” I thought. “I got
punked by Roger Ebert.”
But then I checked out his review. He
gave it 3 out of 4 stars, calling it ‘the kind of movie where you
savor the texture of the filmmaking’.
He hadn’t been playing me. He had
just been wrong.
My very good friend Chuck Canzoneri
wrote on Twitter today:
“Roger Ebert is a
major reason why I love movies so much. He taught me the twin joys of
watching and talking passionately about film.”
He was most
certainly a man passionate about film. No one agreed with him all the
time, especially his partners Siskel and Roeper, which of course
created the best moments of ‘At the Movies’. The next days will
be flooded with obits and eulogies, telling the man’s life story,
tracing his path from the Sun Times to TV to the internet to the
battle with cancer that took his voice and then his life. I am not
qualified to do such a thing nor am I attempting to. Yes, he wrote
‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’ and, yes, he gave ‘Speed 2:
Cruise Control’ a positive review and ‘The Usual Suspects’ a
negative one. You will read about his feud with Vincent Gallo (who
has to be feeling pretty awful tonight), the heroic love and support
he received at the end from his amazing wife, Chaz, and how Twitter
gave him a voice when disease took his real one.
I’m sure someone
will mention ‘Hoop Dreams’, a great documentary that Ebert almost
single-handedly brought into the spotlight with his ferocious love
for it. He was often a great champion of smaller films that needed
it. If you only know Ebert from watching him on television, do
yourself a favor and read his actual print reviews. As entertaining
as ‘At the Movies’ was, his real gift was as a writer. When he
loved a film, the enthusiasm he felt for it often jumped off the page
at you and made you excited to run to the theater to see what all the
fuss was about.
Conversely, if he hated a film, he
scorched it to the fucking ground. Tore it limb from limb. Pulled out
its heart, showed it to it, then ate it in front of its children. He
wrote a book called ‘I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie’, a
collection of his harshest reviews, and it’s a great read. With a
few hundred words he could destroy your dreams and dance on your
grave.
People call him a ‘critic’, but I
disagree. There’s a difference between a critic and a reviewer.
Ebert, to me, was a missing link, a bridge between these two
easily-confused occupations. He was not Andrew Sarris or Pauline
Kael, but he was also not Harry Knowles. His knowledge of film far
surpassed anyone who writes for the million movie websites out there,
but his concern was mostly with telling you whether a movie was good
or bad, not with studying art and theory of cinema. He was not
scholarly nor was he an internet troll. He existed in the gray
in-between. He was the last of the critics and the first of the
reviewers, but not wholly one or the other.
He was not a man without faults. His
views on things such as video games, 3D, and digital filmmaking often
felt antiquated, no matter how well-argued. He would sometimes sit
defiantly atop his high horse and decry immorality in films he found
offensive, even though he liked (and wrote) a good exploitation film
now and again.
The biggest problem I have with the
legacy of Mr. Ebert is with his most enduring contribution to the
cultural zeitgeist, the thing he will be most remembered for:
The thumbs.
I hate the fucking thumbs.
‘At the Movies’ reduced films into
two categories: good and bad. Worth seeing or not worth seeing. Gold
or shit. This binary approach to critiquing art left no room for
nuance or discussion. And it has influenced many, many, ratings
systems over the years like ‘SEE IT or SKIP IT’ or ‘BUY IT,
RENT IT, OR PASS’. These reductive phrases do a disservice to both
the films and the audience. I have a hard time understanding how the
man who pioneered ‘Thumbs Up’ to the point where he had it
copyrighted and wouldn’t allow ABC to use it on their revamped ‘At
the Movies’ was the same man who seemed to love and understand
movies, in all shapes and sizes, so much. In his print pieces, Ebert
would often discuss many facets of the film he was reviewing. But, on
television, he and Siskel or Roeper would issue their opinions like
Roman emperors deciding the fate of a defeated gladiator.
Thumbs up, the movie lives.
Thumbs down, it dies.
I, unfortunately, think the thumbs,
cultural phenomena they may have become, did damage to film
discourse, eliminating the educated critic and paving the way for the
modern reviewer, whose only job seems to be telling their readers if
they liked a movie or not.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t have
loved a big ‘TWO THUMBS UP’ on a poster for a film of mine, but I
am sure Mr. Ebert didn’t see my first film and, now, he will not be
around to see my next. For several generations of filmmakers, Mr.
Ebert was the father everyone was desperate to please. No matter how
arty and pretentious and independent and anti-establishment some of
us can get (and I can get plenty all of those things), there are two
things all filmmakers want, even if they claim otherwise: an Oscar
and a ‘Thumbs Up’ from Roger Ebert.
And now I have to settle for just the
Oscar.
I don’t know how to wrap this up
other than to say that the death of Mr. Ebert, a man I spoke to for
two minutes over fourteen years ago, hit me hard today, hard enough
to make me sit down and write this. A lot of my friends are feeling
the same way, if for no other reason than the fact that he loved
movies the same way we love movies. Watching them, thinking about
them, writing about them, talking about them.
God, I love talking
about movies. I would have loved to talk about movies with Roger
Ebert. That would have been a dream.
First thing I would have said, though,
would have been, “Man, you were so fucking wrong about ‘Ravenous’.”
April 4, 2013
San Francisco, CA
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