Roger Ebert - Roger Eberts Movie Yearbook 2010

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As you know, my life has undergone a fundamental change since I had surgery in the summer of 2006. The surgery was a success, and I am at present cancer free, but the result was a loss of my ability to speak. My first-grade report card had this notation: Talks too much. Well, I dont any longer.

This disability has ended my days on television, but it came with a silver lining. The focus of my work life has always been seeing movies and reviewing them, and that hasnt changed. In the early days of my recovery, my wife, Chaz, brought me a DVD of a movie she thought I might enjoy, The Queen, with Helen Mirren. She was correct. I took out a yellow legal pad and wrote my first review in a few months.

My illness involved more surgeries in an attempt to restore my speech, which were unsuccessful. What was constant were the movies. I attended as many as possible, watched more on DVD, and was soon up to form again. Indeed, I seem to be more productive than ever; as I write this in autumn 2009, Ive already reviewed 211 reviews this year, as well as Great Movie essays, Questions for the Movie Answer Man, interviews, and entries in the blog I started writing in the spring of 2008.

People ask if my writing has changed since my illness. Not that I am aware of. But it has become more necessary. From the age of sixteen, Ive been a newspaperman, and that has always been my first love. Television was unexpected. Now I am writing more than ever for the Chicago Sun-Times and my Web site. Because Ive always been very verbal, this writing has become a form of speech. I take particular pleasure in writing a review because I am expressing myself as fully as possible, and the rest of the time Im afraid I come across as the village idiot, holding up conversations while trying to scribble down notes.

What else has changed? I remember a day in 2008 when I was at a screening of the new Indiana Jones movie and realized how happy I washow much I loved movies. I was still in a wheelchair during a rehabilitation process, and all hell was breaking loose on the screen, and I loved every moment of it, even the obvious special effects.

Something has improved. I have more time now to review films out of the mainstream: more foreign films, documentaries, smaller indie productions, revivals. Ive always tried to cover those areas, but now I have more time. And opportunity. Some of the best films Ive seen this year, like Silent Light; You, the Living; Munyurangabo; Tulpan; and Departures (filmed in Mexico, Sweden, Africa, Kazakhstan, and Japan) were films that might have flown under my radar.

I also find myself valuing the human qualities of a film. Serious illness focuses the mind on human mortality and draws idiotic entertainments like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen into focus. What can anybody learn from such a film? Paul Cox, a director who has never made a film without human values, once said the experience of film should not make you less of a person than you were before it began.

Movie critics have an immediate consolation after undergoing such films. We can write our reviews. There are few things tastier than revenge, freshly brewed.

We missed a year of the Yearbook while I was sick, filling the gap with a collection of all my four-star reviews. The 2009 Yearbook doubled back and picked up everything published since the 2007 edition. Now here is 2010, which, depending on how you count, is the twenty-second or twenty-third annual volume. This one means a lot to me.

My thoughts go back to the original Movie Home Companion and to Donna Martin, the Andrews McMeel editor who conceived it and later persuaded me to switch to the Yearbook format. My sincere thanks to her, and to Dorothy OBrien, who has been the books valued editor at Andrews McMeel in recent years. Also to Sue Roush, my editor at Universal Press Syndicate, and to Laura Emerick, Miriam Dinunzio, Darel Jevens, Teresa Budasi, Thomas Conner, and all the other heroes at the Chicago Sun-Times, and Jim Emerson, John Barry, and the webstaff at rogerebert.com. Many others are thanked in the acknowledgments.

In autumn 2006, the University of Chicago Press published Awake in the Dark, a survey of my forty years of writing about the movies. My Andrews McMeel book I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie inspired a sequel in spring 2007, Your Movie Sucks. As for the Great Movies books, there may be a volume three by the time you read this, and Im already a dozen essays into volume four.

R OGER E BERT

My editor is Dorothy OBrien, tireless, cheerful, all-noticing. My friend and longtime editor Donna Martin suggested the yearbook approach to the annual volume. The design is by Cameron Poulter, the typographical genius of Hyde Park.

My thanks to production editor Christi Clemons Hoffman, who renders Camerons design into reality. John Yuelkenbeck at Coleridge Design is the compositor who has worked diligently on the series for years. I have been blessed with the expert and discriminating editing of Laura Emerick, Miriam DiNunzio, Darel Jevins, Jeff Johnson, and Teresa Budasi at the