shadowgrin wrote:I'm not to judge his life and I'm sure he did good things as a person but I'm not sure if he even contributed greatly or offered something of significant importance to the 'art' of cinema.
It's like the veneration of him is focusing on the art critic instead of the artist.
I think people loving him is mostly tied to his struggles in recent years, the Oprah appearance for example, he was kinda the butt of jokes along with Siskel otherwise, as the Critic clip shows. (Both were very good natured in playing themselves there and elsewhere though.) Siskel got a similar elevation with his cancer. And there's a familiarity. The concept of a popular movie reviewer is basically dead. A lot of those 90s cartoons get mileage out of showing or using parodies of Ebert/Siskel or Gene Shalit. When Siskel died and Ebert couldn't do his show it collapsed even if the talent might have been better. (I doubt the show would have survived the two just retiring.)
I don't have any evidence about Ebert as a person, he was kinda a dick every time I saw him go outside his field. I don't know if this was because of the shit he was going through or if that was always his deal.
But he and Siskel are in many ways a standard to look towards as a reviewer. I wouldn't call Ebert a critic though I haven't read his books, I hear one of his late ones about bad movies is quite good. But as a reviewer he had two of the keys, his opinion was sound and he also writes well. Look at that North review, it's fantastic, it's short but expressive. At a time when random dopes on the internet get paid a near million to make documentaries about themselves becoming "critics" on crappy websites you wish they could convey half as much even when they write four times as much. ("You literally don't know what you're talking about!")
Of course, in our day and age, we love to flit between the deaths of this or that royalty and use it as a chance to express ourselves against one another with a flimsy justification.
Just look at my posts in this thread for an example.
Speaking of Gene Shalit can you believe that dude is 87.
Wish I could find this old Ebert/Siskel clip where they just savage some now really popular movie and then go right into another segment and praise some dreck nobody remembers. But I can't remember either movie so I can't find the fucking youtube clip which probably has tens of thousands of views!
