In Memoriam: Roger Ebert (1942-2013)

Cartoon by Scott Stantis of the Chicago Tribune.

I’ve been a devoted moviegoer for as long as I can remember but I feel I never truly experienced movies as deeply as I could have until I discovered your work.

As one of the most sincere, funny, pithy but penetrating film critics, philosophers and writers of our time, you carried across decades your universal knowledge and appreciation of cinema.

You began writing film reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1967. I began reading your reviews in 2004 when I was in eighth grade and the second half of a dreadful, better-off-forgotten two year stint at Ormond Stone Middle School. I had social anxiety problems and when I felt lost or overwhelmed, I turned to music and movies, i.e., The Beatles and Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Tim Burton, Christopher Guest and Alexander Payne, to name a few filmmakers who I became enamored with at that time.

Then came my discovery of your website, rogerebert.com, which, since your death on April 4^th, one week ago today, has been re-launched with a stellar new design and a new-and-improved, well-oiled search engine so we can comb through seemingly endless archives of your writing.

With the update and restoration of your site comes a bittersweet twinge of blended peace and sadness. From my first readings of your work (4-star reviews of “Kill Bill” and “The Aviator,” and 1-star reviews of “Team America” and “Catwoman”) to your final filed review of Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder,” my respect and appreciation of you has grown exponentially. You have guided me through my many trips to the movies and inspired me to write, write, write.

Early on in my writing career, you even took the time to personally respond to my comment on your blog entry, selfishly asking you for your expert opinion of my glowing review of Judd Apatow’s “Funny People.”

You wrote back the following:

“Apatow may be a tad short of genius, but you have a nice conversational writing style and allow the reader to feel you are confiding.”

However brief and long ago, you’ll never know how much that meant to me, Mr. Ebert.

I began writing my own film reviews during my first year in college. Between the staggering genius of writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” and your typically insightful 4-star review, I felt compelled at last to copy down the intense flood of ideas and emotions that followed my first viewing of it. Looking back on that first review, I can see my language, grammar and communication skills have all improved since then. I attribute a lot of the credit to you, whose work I kept up with each week until the very end, when your posts began to slow down and I began to suspect something was up.

When you announced on your blog that your cancer had returned and you would be taking a “leave of presence,” reviewing the movies that you want to see and cutting down from your usual 200 (!) reviews a year, I had to take a deep breath and accept the inevitable, that my hero’s health could be declining once again, and maybe for the last time. You made that announcement on April 3, forty-six years to the day when you became the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.

The next day, your death was announced and I cried for my loss, for your wonderful wife Chaz’s loss and for the world’s loss.

You have left behind an important, masterful archive of work to be read and studied for as long as humans continue to roam the Earth. Even in death, you will continue to inspire and influence people like me. You courageously battled cancer and other health problems to the very end and for that and everything else, you are a hero and an inspiration to us all.

Thank you Mr. Ebert.

Be at peace and, as always, see you at the movies.