RIP Roger Ebert

[JerryK]

I'll miss this guy.   When new movies come out, I've always checked it on metacritic with the yin/yang reviews of:

 

    Michael Phillips:  Character development & plot quality

    Roger Ebert:  Visceral 'feel' and energy of a good movie.

 

If both of them liked it, the film was usually a really good one.

 

RIP sir, you will be missed.

[PFSIKH]

R.I.P.

[JetsFanInDenver]

RIP.

 

But is it a headline making loss ? I am not sure.

[Borgoguy]

Brilliant writer, critic, and TV personality.  His show with Gene Siskel was always a must watch before venturing out to the movies.  RIP.

[Pac]

Brilliant writer, critic, and TV personality.  His show with Gene Siskel was always a must watch before venturing out to the movies.  RIP.

 

 

Look at this friggin guy!  What rock did you crawl out from under?  Good to see you.

 

 

oh and RIP Roger.  He handled his health issues with courage and dignity.

[Borgoguy]

Look at this friggin guy!  What rock did you crawl out from under?  Good to see you.

 

 

oh and RIP Roger.  He handled his health issues with courage and dignity.

 

Obviously. 

[faba]

RIP Roger

[#27TheDominator]

RIP.  I always appreciated the fact that he reviewed movies for their target audience and didn't act surprised that some stupid Will Ferrell comedy wasn't Gone With the Wind.

[SenorGato]

RIP indeed

[kelticwizard]

Apparently Ebert didn't expect to die this soon.

 

He announced on his blog just yesterday that he was taking a "leave of presence" because the cancer had returned but also,

 

My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest
to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me," he
said. "What's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always
fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review."

http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/03/roger-ebert-taking-leave-of-presence-as-cancer-returns/?hpt=hp_t5

 

 

He seemed to think he'd be around for awhile.  The end came much quicker than he anticipated.  At least it wasn't a long painful death.

 

At any rate, it will be a long, long time before moviegoers forget Roger Ebert and also Gene Siskel.  They made watching reviews of movies more entertaining than it ever was before.

[#27TheDominator]

My favortie Siskel & Ebert moment came on a talk show.  I think it was Letterman.  Siskel was did some long drawn out story that basically culminated in a punchline about Ebert's weight.  When he was done, Ebert just pointed at Siskel's head and said "Bald! Bald!"

[kelticwizard]

Despite their popularity together, they not only didn't become friends but seemed to actively dislike each other.  There was one on-air confrontation that I read about, (don't know if they ever showed it on TV), where apparently Ebert threatened to clobber Siskel.  Afterward, Siskel said he wasn't worried because in Ebert's case, "there simply is no motor coordination".

[NJ]

Big loss ... used to see him at the Billy Goat on occasion ... He pioneered the way we currently get a heads up on movies before we spend the time and money.

RIP Roger

[NJ]

Dom's right

[#27TheDominator]

NJ's posting from his phone!

[NJ]

NJ's posting from his phone!

C'mon Dom - I ain't that old

[#27TheDominator]

Big loss ... used to see him at the Billy Goat on occasion ... He pioneered the way we currently get a heads up on movies before we spend the time and money.

RIP Roger

 

 

Big loss ... used to see him at the Billy Goat on occasion ... He pioneered the way we currently get a heads up on movies before we spend the time and money.

RIP Roger

 

 

C'mon Dom - I ain't that old

 

^Exhibit A!

[Jetsfan80]

Beautiful read.

 

 

http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/roger_ebert/

 

Thursday, Sep 15, 2011 11:01 AM EDT

 

I do not fear death

I will pass away sooner than most people who read this, but that doesn't shake my sense of wonder and joy

 

By Roger Ebert

 

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
 

I don’t expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. “Ask someone how they feel about death,” he said, “and they’ll tell you everyone’s gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that’s not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you’re really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don’t really exist. I might be gone at any given second.”

Me too, but I hope not. I have plans. Still, illness led me resolutely toward the contemplation of death. That led me to the subject of evolution, that most consoling of all the sciences, and I became engulfed on my blog in unforeseen discussions about God, the afterlife, religion, theory of evolution, intelligent design, reincarnation, the nature of reality, what came before the big bang, what waits after the end, the nature of intelligence, the reality of the self, death, death, death.

 

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

 

And with Will, the brother in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” I say, “Look for me in the weather reports.”

Raised as a Roman Catholic, I internalized the social values of that faith and still hold most of them, even though its theology no longer persuades me. I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart. All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it. I know a priest whose eyes twinkle when he says, “You go about God’s work in your way, and I’ll go about it in His.”
 

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

 

O’Rourke’s had a photograph of Brendan Behan on the wall, and under it this quotation, which I memorized:

 

"I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer."

 

 

That does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

 

One of these days I will encounter what Henry James called on his deathbed “the distinguished thing.” I will not be conscious of the moment of passing. In this life I have already been declared dead. It wasn’t so bad. After the first ruptured artery, the doctors thought I was finished. My wife, Chaz, said she sensed that I was still alive and was communicating to her that I wasn’t finished yet. She said our hearts were beating in unison, although my heartbeat couldn’t be discovered. She told the doctors I was alive, they did what doctors do, and here I am, alive.

 

Do I believe her? Absolutely. I believe her literally — not symbolically, figuratively or spiritually. I believe she was actually aware of my call and that she sensed my heartbeat. I believe she did it in the real, physical world I have described, the one that I share with my wristwatch. I see no reason why such communication could not take place. I’m not talking about telepathy, psychic phenomenon or a miracle. The only miracle is that she was there when it happened, as she was for many long days and nights. I’m talking about her standing there and knowing something. Haven’t many of us experienced that? Come on, haven’t you? What goes on happens at a level not accessible to scientists, theologians, mystics, physicists, philosophers or psychiatrists. It’s a human kind of a thing.
 

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, “You’d better cry at my memorial service.” I correspond with a dear friend, the wise and gentle Australian director Paul Cox. Our subject sometimes turns to death. In 2010 he came very close to dying before receiving a liver transplant. In 1988 he made a documentary named “Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh.” Paul wrote me that in his Arles days, van Gogh called himself “a simple worshiper of the external Buddha.” Paul told me that in those days, Vincent wrote:

 

 

"Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.
 

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

 

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot."

 

That is a lovely thing to read, and a relief to find I will probably take the celestial locomotive. Or, as his little dog, Milou, says whenever Tintin proposes a journey, “Not by foot, I hope!”

[faba]

Actually I read him and Siskel in personal life were good friends- regardless of their battles on the movies.

[JetsFanInDenver]

I dunno at some point while we focus on the quantity of life the quality of how we live it  right to the every end takes a backseat. Just a Friday evening thought.

[kelticwizard]

Actually I read him and Siskel in personal life were good friends- regardless of their battles on the movies.

 

Possibly.  Would have happened after this, though.  From 1993.

 

Siskel, Ebert Have Two Thumbs Down On Each Other

 

 

Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, never all that chummy anyhow, are involved in an

off-screen tiff that began on-screen when the latter revealed the

''secret" to the movie, The Crying Game, as the two taped their Oscar TV

special, If We Picked the Winners.

 

"The program is Siskel AND Ebert," the porcine Ebert told TV Guide. "A decision like that should

have been discussed beforehand. It was arrogant of him."

 

The trimmer Siskel, noting that Ebert "was as angry as a 50-year-old child,"

said they "never discuss our opinions in advance. I was simply making a

case for one of my picks."

 

Could this come to (gulp?) blows? "There's not enough motor coordination," said Siskel.

 

http://articles.philly.com/1993-03-23/living/25948770_1_roger-ebert-siskel-and-ebert-child-custody-laws

[HessStation]

I watched a cool doc on John Carperter's Halloween today. Roger Ebert's review was a big reason why the movie didn't end up tanking.