Roger Ebert's Last Spoken Words - Esquire interview

I seek out Ebert's written reviews on his website, and have for years. I can generally gauge whether I will like a movie based on his take, even when his tastes and my own diverge. His reviews are therefore the most valuable I have read. I prefer to avoid his political musings, which have become more frequent.

I had no idea he had lost his entire lower jaw. Glad he has been getting along reasonably well, as evidenced by his work.

Thanks for posting that link the Esquire article was wonderful...

... and Disney is a one evil media corporation.

While I don't always agree with Ebert his love of movies is quite apparent and his perspective is always valuable and worth checking out.

It is sad to look at his photo.

I had known for some time he'd been pretty sick, but first Siskel and now Ebert too?

I have found since he left the TV show due to his illness that some his writings are borderline loony, but then again I consider many of his peers in that category yet they are "healthy". I miss the "old Ebert".

I dunno...maybe it's the medication the poor guy must be taking...

Wow... Life hands out some difficult challenges. Some worse than others as we can see. Good luck to him. What a great attitude. He is to be so admired.

His current condition isn't quite as serious as Siskel's.

I agree, Ebert's been willing in recent years to give overly laudatory reviews to too many unworthy films (Juno comes immediately to mind) at a time when he and other critics should be lambasting the current putrid state of the cinema. But he's been in such terrible health the last few years, it's understandable if he's softened up a little, and he's such a fine writer that his musings, about films he happens to have a perceptive take on or other topics, are still relevant and entertaining.

Stay strong, Roger.

Amazing.

When life give you lemons...

Ebert has excellent writing skills and often is quite amusing.

I read the whole article yesterday. Very well done.

Probably wouldn't be a bad idea for a mod to at least insert the word "spoken" in parentheses between "Last" and "Words".

Even though I was well aware of his health issues, I still thought he may have died when I read the thread title.

I can remember watching Sneak Previews on PBS with my dad in the late 70s / early 80s. I'm sorry to hear about his health issues. It sounds like he is making the best of them, however.

I meant he seems to be only a step away, though..

Ebert does have good writing skills, but I determined long ago that his reviews are worthless as far as determining whether or not a movie is good. There's simply no logical consistency there.

As always such statements are meaningless because they are just opinions. I think that Juno is the one of the best movies of its decade.

Roger has never claimed to somehow presciently know everyone's tastes - he's always said that enjoyment of film is subjective and that his reviews express only his own reactions to the movies he writes about.

What I've found is that he's the best at explaining why he likes or dislikes a movie, which gives me a much better handle on judging how I'll react to it. And IMHO no other reviewer can touch his writing style.

Completely off the topic of written reviews, but I'll never forget his Siskel & Ebert review of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". Both of them were bubbling over with excitement and blurting out comments when Roger exclaimed "The rock! We didn't even tell them about the rock!".

The problem is, his explanations contradict themselves. He'll "explain" that he liked one movie, but he'll use that same "explanation" to say why he disliked another movie, or vice versa. There is no rational consistency, no coherency, only an instantaneous, purely subjective "it's what I felt at the time" approach. That makes his "explanations" meaningless and worthless as any sort of guide to what's a good or bad movie.

The problem is, his explanations contradict themselves. He'll "explain" that he liked one movie, but he'll use that same "explanation" to say why he disliked another movie, or vice versa. There is no rational consistency, no coherency, only an instantaneous, purely subjective "it's what I felt at the time" approach. That makes his "explanations" meaningless and worthless as any sort of guide to what's a good or bad movie.

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He has a great love of movies, and he is a fount of information about the making of the films he is reviewing. But I'm with RobertR. He likes too much crap. I had one of his movie review compendium books and after a while I just couldn't read it any more.

I prefer people like Pauline Kael and James Agee and someone I was unfamiliar with previously, Manny Farber, who has had his complete writings on film published recently (Farber on Film). These people had great problems with just about every film they saw (all are deceased), and had varying degrees of being able to suffer the fools gladly (Agee was the most tactful, Kael by far the least, with Farber in between). They were all superb writers and probably the best film critics America has ever produced.

Strangely enough, as I go though life, I find myself doing the same thing from time to time...

Every film critic has his or her own biases. Kael, for example, had favorite directors for whom she would forgive any sin, no matter how egregious (e.g. Brian DePalma). At the same time, once she decided that she didn't like a director, she would never suffer anything he ever did again, no matter how great an artistic achievement (e.g. Stanley Kubrick).

Ebert has a weakness for a lot of crap movies, so long as they provide him with a certain minimal level of entertainment.

The mark of a good critic is how well he or she explains his or her biases and makes a case for them.

Although I don't really recall anyone around here ever getting so worked up about anything he's ever said about any movie, "bias-explained" or not. Must be nice to give an opinion somewhere and not have fanatics and industry people get their bubbles burst and livelyhood-threatened ego's all in-a-fluff and jump all over others for it .

Anyway, back before he and Siskel went national and were on (or at least still based) here in Chicago (WTTW and WGN/Tribune), they were pretty consistent and more demanding and discriminating about films (they were by far at their best when they were on local PBS here for their first couple of years together). In fact, they got to a point where they were being pretty negative about almost every major film that came out (this was after the downslide from the earlier 70's films). They were b****ing about the declining quality just like everyone else was at the time (local Chicago informational programming was going through a very cynical phase at the time - anyone who remembers WBBM's news programming knows what I'm talking about - smart-@$$ed Walter Jacobsen and his nightly "Perspective" exposing local corruption, Susan Anderson literally sticking her foot in the door and aggressively jamming her microphone in subject's faces with her consumer fraud segments, John "Bulldog" Drummond and his mob stories, etc. In fact, the WBBM 10:00 news was more entertaining than half of the other national stuff on TV at the time).

Then, which seemed pretty suddenly (after they had been national for not long), they started rating many of these mediocre films a lot better than they often were, and this was so noticable to the viewers that there was much speculation that they had been "bought off". The Disney connection was mentioned a lot. That seemed to be when a lot of people stopped taking them seriously.

I think it's a natural tendency of many film critics, in the early parts of their careers, to want to be perceived as experts in the subject, and thus to act extra "critical" and uncompromising in their opinions. When I was in film school, every single person in my class (myself included) would only ever praise the artiest and most pretentious of art films. We were all completely dismissive of any sort of populist entertainment.

But, as we get older, we realize that movies don't need to be perfect, or profound, to be entertaining. Sometimes, simple pleasures are pleasures all the same.

This isn't always the case, of course. Some people just get more intracaible and hard-headed as they get older. As I recall, the late Vincent Canby was like that, until the New York Times finally shuffled him off to do theater reviews for the last few years of his life.

I don't think that Ebert mellowing in his tastes and opinions is all that unusual.

That may very well be, but the reports of what I'm talking about are pretty well documented. You can find plenty of mentions of it on the internet where they're talking about the pair or the show's history.

It was sudden, it was drastic, and it involved both he and Siskel. If you had never seen them earlier on, you probably wouldn't even have noticed anything (they weren't completely critical about everything beforehand - they just didn't sugar-coat anything). Also, I don't recall them being particulary young or near the beginnings of their careers. They were both very well-established newspaper critics seperately here in town for a good while before they ever paired up for their first show (Ebert at the Sun-Times, and Siskel at the Tribune).

I know what you're talking about with "pretentious young critics" with nothing good to say about anything, though. We used to have a college girl here in town that used to be like that in our main, countywide newspaper. She was pretty unbearable. Literally everything about every major film release completely sucked according to her.

Every film critic has his or her own biases. Kael, for example, had favorite directors for whom she would forgive any sin, no matter how egregious (e.g. Brian DePalma). At the same time, once she decided that she didn't like a director, she would never suffer anything he ever did again, no matter how great an artistic achievement (e.g. Stanley Kubrick).

But, as we get older, we realize that movies don't need to be perfect, or profound, to be entertaining. Sometimes, simple pleasures are pleasures all the same.

As she aged, Kael became a good deal more forgiving. Her 5000 Nights at the Movies-probably her only book still in print- shows affection for some of the strangest films, films you would not think she could possibly like and probably didn't in her original reviews. She was particularly fond of dumb comedies if they made her laugh (Dumb and Dumber, for one).

These days old Dogfood himself tends to go for solid entertainment over the arty stuff that was around in the seventies, even though a lot of those art films are clearly better films than those I am currently drawn to.