Roger Ebert RIP

            Today the sad news broke that Roger Ebert has died after a long battle with cancer.

            Ebert was my first influence in film criticism. On my days home sick from school I wasn’t allowed to watch TV, so I often passed the time by reading and rereading one of the collections of his reviews we had around the house. He provided me with many invaluable lessons in both thinking and writing about film…and, honestly, in writing in general.

            I have my problems with Ebert as a critic. He had an unfortunate tendency to allow politics (he was, naturally, an arch-liberal) and preconceived notions to dictate his opinion of films. He also raised justifiable incredulity with his lone film script – for the awful Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. But at his best, he was one of the wittiest and most insightful voices in film criticism. For all his flaws, he deserved the fame and influence he acquired – the likes of which no other critic had ever or will ever achieve. Certainly as the undisputedly most influential film critic in the world, we could have done a lot worse.

            Looking back, I think my favorite review of his was his almost lazy dissection of the 1998 Godzilla. I still can quote the opening line from memory: “Watching Godzilla at Cannes was like attending a Satanic ritual at St. Peter’s Basillica.” He then described the film as coming last in the festival “like horses in a parade, and perhaps for the same reason.” He even displayed typical good humor over the fact that one of the characters in the movie – the moronic mayor of New York – was a thinly-veiled caricature of himself. Far from expressing outrage or offense, he complained that they should have killed ‘him’ off.  

            One of the reasons I generally enjoyed his writing is that he typically wasn’t a snob; he was as willing to award a glowing tribute to a silly adventure film or special-effects extravaganza as to a pretentious art film.

            I gave up on regularly reading his reviews a long time ago – about the time of his appalling review of the original Godzilla, as a matter of fact (which was so inaccurate and negative that it raises questions about whether he actually watched the thing) – but I still occasionally drop in to check his assessment of a particular movie, whether a classic or a new release. Certainly he was a unique figure in the world of the movies; a star critic. With amateurs such as myself flooding the internet, it seems clear that we will never look upon his like again. For good or for ill, he was the giant of his field and he will be missed.

            Requiescat in Pacem.