Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.
His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002. It would not be a stretch to say that Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.
President Obama reacted to Ebert's death with a statement that said, in part: "For a generation of Americans - especially Chicagoans - Roger was the movies. When he didn't like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive - capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical."
Ebert's struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image - as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.
"When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was," he told Esquire magazine in 2010. "All is well. I am as I should be."
Ebert liked to say his approach - dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions - reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering.
"I will one day be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny," he wrote. His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialised film criticism.
In 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his Sun-Times reviews. His columns were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad, and he wrote more than 15 books, many by skillfully recycling his columns. As a critic, Ebert quickly gained traction. In 1970, Time magazine called him "a cultural resource of the community." In 1973, the Chicago Newspaper Guild cited him as "ushering in a new era of criticism in Chicago."
Ebert spoke out against the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system, saying it lurched between being too restrictive and too lenient. He criticised Hollywood for not supporting documentaries and relying too much on digital effects and what he called gimmicks, like 3-D. In 2005 he became the first film critic to be honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
"In the century or so that there has been such a thing as film criticism, no other critic has ever occupied the space held by Roger Ebert," Mick LaSalle, movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 2010.
Ebert believed a great film should seem new at every watching; he said he had seen Citizen Kane, his favourite, scores of times. His credo in judging a film's value was a simple one: "Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you."
Just two days before his death, Ebert announced he intended to write reviews only of films he wanted to review. He said he would recruit others to do the rest, saying he was taking "a leave of presence." Ebert - who said he saw 500 films a year and reviewed half of them - was once asked what movie he thought was shown over and over again in heaven, and what snack would be free of charge and calories there.
"Citizen Kane and vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream," he answered.
©2013 The New York Times
