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
Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.
Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
I think that probably the - I don't give quotes to studios. They have to get those out of the paper or from television. So they wouldn't have had my quote opening day.
One of the gifts one movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered
Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.
Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.
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.
The secret of the movie is that it doesn't strain to draw parallels with current world events - because it doesn't have to.
There was a bedrock of respect that developed over the years,
The target audience didn't care that we hated those movies because they just expected us to hate them.
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.
We had lots of big fights, ... We were people who came together one day a week to work together and the other six days of the week we were competitors on two daily newspapers and two different television stations. So there was a lot of competition and a lot of disagreement.
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.
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?