Roger Ebert - The Great Movies IV

Roger Ebert casts a long shadow. I was hired by his widow, Chaz Ebert, to edit the website they founded in 2002, RogerEbert.com, shortly after his death in 2013. Every day I get an e-mail message, Tweet, Facebook query, or blog comment wondering what Roger would have thought about a current film. Would he have loved it, liked it, been indifferent to it, or hated, hated, hated, hated, hated it? The comments sections on RogerEbert.com are filled with people insisting Roger would have loathed a film that the assigned reviewer adored, or adored a film she loathed. This spectacle becomes poignantly amusing when you see contradictory comments beneath a single review: I am so glad you liked this! Roger would have given it four stars, though. Its a disgrace that you gave this film a positive review, Roger would have seen right through it.

What everyone longs for is not just a body of opinion focused through Rogers keen eye, but something more basic: Roger the man. Roger the life force. Good old Roger.

It is Rogers personal touch that separates him from nearly all current film reviewers, even the good to great ones: the sense that there is a person behind the words, one who has interests beyond film, and opinions about the world at large, and wisdom gained through the experience of living 70 years, producing several dozen novels worth of prose and thousands of hours of TV with his onscreen partner Gene Siskel, visiting dozens of countries, and touching the lives of untold numbers of moviegoers.

Rogers best writing evokes the most useful advice an editor gave me. I was having trouble writing a breaking news story on deadline and my editor said, Why dont you just come over here and sit in this chair and tell me what the story is about. So I sat in the chair beside him and started talking. Suddenly the gist of the story became clear. I found myself regaling him with colorful details that werent in the current draft. The pressure was off. I was no longer writing a Big Important Piece for posterity, I was just talking to a friend who happened to be my editor. See what youre doing? he said. Its like were having a cup of coffee and youre telling me about a piece you already turned in. Just take all the stuff you just told me and put that in the story.

Most of Rogers best pieces feel like thatlike hes just talking to you about things he finds interesting or funny or exciting, or riffing on a film he finds slipshod or dumb, or evangelizing on behalf of a work that moves him or that he believes is important or special. When you read Rogers work, you feel as if hes on the phone with you, or sitting across from you at a restaurant, or writing you a personal e-mail. Sometimes hes holding court, sometimes hes ruminating, sometimes hes on the warpath. But you always feel that theres a person therea man with a consistent set of concerns and values, expressed in plain language whose lyricism reveals itself when you read it aloud or quote it to others.

That personal touch is what makes Roger a great critic. A great teacher, too: the Midwestern directness becomes a linguistic Trojan horse that lulls the casual moviegoer into a comfort zone where Roger can ruminate on a movies place in film history, or explore why a particular scene works on the emotions, or dig into the sense of life expressed by the story, the characters, and the filmmaking.

All of this explains why I consider The Great Movies series to be Rogers masterpiece. The books are expansive but judicious in laying out which films Roger considers great and essential. In their terse, lyrical sentences you will find every quality Ive praised here. And if you read between the lines youll learn as much about Roger as you might watching the documentary Life Itself or poring over his archive of personal essays at RogerEbert.com.

In their concision and complexity, the essays contained in the Great Movies books are remarkable. Many of them are original; others take portions of earlier reviews and expand on them, intensify them, revise them, question them. (You often find old Roger refuting young Roger.) They all speak to the reader as one might to a friend. They seem to be written by a critic secure in the knowledge that his audience knows who he is. The sense of familiarity emboldens Roger to cut to the chase, avoid anything resembling pretense, and speak from the heart when the spirit moves him, without fear that he will be ridiculed for freely admitting sadness, anger, or joy. The