Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebertwas an American film critic and historian, journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. As of 2010, his reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. Ebert also published more than 20 books and dozens of collected reviews...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth18 June 1942
CityUrbana, IL
CountryUnited States of America
We are poor mortals, but it dreams to us that we can fly.
To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.
You slide down in your seat and make yourself comfortable. On the screen in front of you, the movie image appears—enormous and overwhelming. If the movie is a good one, you allow yourself to be absorbed in its fantasy, and its dreams become part of your memories
A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.
We all are born with a certain package. We are who we are: where we were born, who we were born as, how we were raised. We're kind of stuck inside that person, and the purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. And for me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.
The moment a man stops dreaming is the moment he petrifies inside.
Not only can I not describe the plot of this movie, but I have a feeling the last scene reverses half of what I thought I knew (or didn't know).
At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them.
What am I to think when six weekends of this year already have been won by slasher movies that were not screened for critics and got bad ratings on the tomato meter when they were screened?
There was a bedrock of respect that developed over the years,
Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it.
The secret of the movie is that it doesn't strain to draw parallels with current world events - because it doesn't have to.
The target audience didn't care that we hated those movies because they just expected us to hate them.
As someone who admired the freshness and energy of the earlier films, I was amazed, at the end of 'Episode II,' to realize that I had not heard one line of quotable, memorable dialogue.