I was born and raised in Chicago. For years, I delivered the Tribune in the morning and the Sun-Times after school. Roger Ebert reviewed films for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death earlier this week. He and James Agee probably did more than anyone else ever has to nourish my understanding and appreciation of great films. Here is an excerpt from a tribune to him by Linda Holmes at NPR. To read the complete article, please click here.
To watch “RIP Roger Ebert: 5 Classic Siskel & Ebert Reviews,” please click here.
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There’s always been Roger Ebert. And when I read that he had died Thursday, that’s what caught in my throat. Not just sadness, but bafflement. I don’t understand. There’s always been Roger Ebert.
This will be the first night in my life I go to bed and he’s not out there thinking about movies. And perhaps it’s an odd description of sadness, but: It’s weird.
By the time I was born, he was already a writer, and by the time I could process the idea of criticism, he already was a columnist and had a TV show with Gene Siskel — then called Sneak Previews — on public television, which I watched with my parents. There was always, always, always Roger Ebert.
As a young teenager — then choosing plans from a rotating carousel of futures having nothing to do with cultural criticism — I owned a bunch of his big, fat, bricklike movie yearbooks, and I broke the spines until they were soft looking up the movies I liked or hated or didn’t understand. Not to see if he got it right, but to see if I got it right. That’s the way critics seem when you first become aware of them, I think: They deliver information about whether a thing is good, and the frailty they necessarily bring to that task escapes you at first, the same way you don’t necessarily think to ask whether your history book is right when you’re 12.
The idea of arguing with him, even in my head, would probably not have occurred to me in the early going. I was so relieved when he loved something I loved, like Rob Reiner’s The Sure Thing, which was my first favorite nonkids movie when I was 14. I can tell you without looking it up — his site is completelycrashed right now anyway, and good for you, Internet! — that he said the leads in it showed normal college-age shyness about sex, and that the kiss in it is more meaningful than most.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
To watch “RIP Roger Ebert: 5 Classic Siskel & Ebert Reviews,” please click here.