The Man in the Balcony

Growing up, the most exciting day of the week was Friday. Not just because it was the end of the week (though also that, yes), but because that was the day that Roger Ebert's reviews appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. (Well, that was the regularly scheduled day. His reviews sometimes popped up on other days, and his essays and interviews could show up any day.)

It wasn't just that I wanted to read about the movies that were coming out that weekend, though I certainly did, even if I didn't have the money or theater access to see most of them. And it wasn't because I valued Ebert's opinion over that of any other film critic--say, Gene Siskel over at the Tribune or Dave Kehr at the Chicago Reader.

It was because I thought Ebert (whom I've referred to for many years as "Uncle Rog") wrote about movies better than anyone else. He was the best essayist of the bunch, the best at relating what he saw on the screen to his life experiences, the best with words. His reviews often came with stars to indicate whether or not he liked a particular film (a system he expressed contempt for more than once), but you didn't need to know how many stars he'd given a film to know what he thought about it--the reviews, as well they should, spoke for themselves.

The book shelves of La Casa del Terror are dotted with collections of Ebert's reviews, essays and interviews. The interviews always showed a side of the individual movie star that the public rarely saw, from riding in a car with Robert Mitchum to beating John Wayne at chess, from discussing how scary "fans" could be with Jerry Lewis to watching Lee Marvin's dog bring his master a pair of panties that most definitely didn't belong to Marvin's live-in girlfriend. The essays always illuminated aspects of classic films I'd never considered, noticing gestures, trends and contexts that made the movies more accessible and understandable. Not that he ever simplified things for the reader/viewer, but more that he made it possible for us to look at the movies in more than one way.

And the reviews themselves? Ebert was a prolific writer--the annual collection of reviews, when published, often resembled a phone book--and his negative reviews were often as educational and illuminating as his positive ones. There were also specialized collections--essays on films regarded as classics (The Great Movies), and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, groups of reviews of films that were often painful to sit through. (Ebert famously said that "No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough.")



I didn't always agree with Ebert. He hated some movies I enjoyed thoroughly. He adored some movies I despised. But he wrote about some movies, old and new, that I'd never even have known about, much less sought out, if he hadn't brought them to my attention in the first place.

Ebert not only made me want to see more movie. He made me want to write about what I saw. I'd never written a single review if I hadn't read Ebert.

Of course, there was the TV show with fellow critic Siskel (shown under various names over the years, including the awkward "Coming to a theater Near You," "Sneak Previews," "At the Movies," and the even more awkward "Siskel & Ebert & the Movies"), which brought film criticism to people who never had read a movie review before. I watched the show, sure, but the infamously bitchy love/hate relationship the two shared made it less important to catch the show on a weekly basis than to catch those reviews in the paper (and later on the Internet) every Friday.

In recent years, Ebert's health tried to fail him over and over again--thyroid cancer, salivary gland cancer (I didn't even know that was a thing), multiple surgeries, the loss of part of his lower jaw and, with that, the ability to eat (he was fed through a tube thereafter) or even to speak.

But even though Ebert could no longer talk, he never lost his voice. He continued to type out hundreds of reviews while also maintaining a beautifully written blog, a lively Twitter feed and books not only about movies, but about his own personal history (Life Itself) and even a recipe book for cuisine prepared in a rice cooker.

Earlier this week, Ebert announced that he would have to cut back his workload significantly because his cancer had returned. He announced this on April 2--the 46th anniversary of his becoming the film critic for the Sun-Times. He viewed this change with unguarded optimism, stating that now he could do something he'd always wanted to do: Review only the movies he wanted to review, with a team of talented writers (including Richard Roeper, who had taken up residence in the balcony with Ebert after Siskel's untimely death at the age of 54 in 1999) covering the other movies released in any given week.

It was not to be. Ebert died yesterday, aged 70.

The Friday Sun-Times--and film criticism in general--just won't be the same without you, Uncle Rog.