From the joyless snobbery of Ratatouilles Anton Ego to the unhappy, beleaguered Jay Sherman, star of The Critic, the truism that nobody likes a critic seems alive and well. It is strange, then, that there is so much surprise and heartbreak all over the Internet following the death of Roger Ebert. He was the ur-critic, the very man the modern critic archetype is modeled from. The snob whos just too cowardly to go out and make movies of his own if he knows so much. And yet here we are, deeply saddened at the passing of a man who had made his lifes work as a movie critic.
I dont think it can be stated strongly enough that Roger Ebert is the forefather of all modern critic-as-entertainer shows. I feel safe in stating that if it werent for Roger Ebert, the modern phenomenon of the Internet critic, the good the bad and the ugly alike, would not exist. Roger Eberts show with Gene Siskel At the Movies gave us the model for how to make a show in which people just sit around talking about movies entertaining for viewers. Ebert found the intersection between criticism, academia and being entertaining. He was the man that showed us that sometimes the dissection and analysis of media could be just as entertaining as the film itself.
But despite this image of the snob-critic that Ebert himself helped form, Anton Ego he was not. He was just as fair to Hollywood schlock as he was firm on abstract indie fare. A joke that Todd and I often had when checking out what he had to say about a film we were discussing was that Roger Ebert likes everything. Even his final review, which was unfortunately the adaptation of Stephenie Meyers The Host, was much less venomous than other reviews of the same film (my own included). Perhaps the thing that strikes us the most about the ur-critic Ebert is that, despite him being the embodiment of the too-cool-for-you film snob, despite one of his best-selling books being an anthology featuring Eberts cranky mug on the cover called Your Movie Sucks, the man had a consistent, deep love for the medium of film. Hollywood, foreign, indie and studio alike, he was game for all of it. I would sometimes read his later reviews, myself utterly weary at some of the modern trends I saw, and would be amazed at the patience he displayed. Even in his review of Godzilla, a film which contains a bitter parody of Ebert himself (one must assume in retaliation for Eberts reviews of Emmerichs earlier films, which, in my opinion, were not very harsh), Ebert keeps his eye on the ball with the problems of the film, mentioning his own cameo with good-natured amusement. I fully expected to be squished like a bug by Godzilla, he wrote. Now that Ive inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones.
Even if he called out a transparent Hollywood cash grab when he saw one, he could still see through to the heart and emotion of a film. In the case of Godzilla, he compares it to other big budget spectacle films, and why they worked. He didnt dismiss a film for what it was, but for what it accomplished emotionally for the audience. That, I think, is what has kept Ebert relevant for so long.
Most of us grew up with Roger Ebert, and both directly and indirectly he greatly influenced the media sphere we now live in. He was like a cool uncle; maybe we didnt always agree with him, but he was always worthy of our respect. Perhaps society does still have a disdain for the concept of critics, why they do what they do and what their place is in the world, but the genuine sadness Ive seen on social media today about the passing of Roger Ebert shows me that it doesnt mean we cant be touched by them as well.
So this ones for you, Roger. Without you, this very site likely would not exist. May you be arguing with Gene in those fluffy red seats in the sky.
