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
It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought. His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God.
In these days of high-tech video games, it's remarkable that kids once got incredibly thrilled while pushing little metal racing cars around a cardboard track: The toy car was yours, and you invested it with importance and enhanced it with fantasy and pitied it because it was small, like you were. Such games were weapons against the ennui of endless Saturdays.
If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
In Blue Crush , we meet three Hawaiian surfers who work as hotel maids, live in a grotty rental, and are raising the kid sister of one of them. Despite this near-poverty, they look great; there is nothing like a tan and a bikini to overcome class distinctions.
Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.
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.
His career can be summed up as the case of a man who needed a financial manager.