Roger Ebert is dead

A day after announcing his retirement for health reasons his cancer took the best of him. May he rest in peace.

www.suntimes.com/news/metro/17320958-418...tle-with-cancer.html

Ebert is my single biggest inspiration as a writer, and the standard to which I feebly aspire. If I could ever express a tenth of what he was capable of, I would be doing much better than I am now.

Re: Robert Roger Ebert is dead

Just saw this too at Time.

RIP.

entertainment.time.com/2013/04/04/chicag...ic-roger-ebert-dies/

Sorry, I fixed the title.

Sad, but God he had to be in a lot of pain. I'm happy he isn't in pain anymore.

He is the movie reviewer I paid more attention to than any other. His tastes were eerily similar to mine. I rarely read his reviews, but always enjoyed his television show. I'd like to thank him for introducing me to countless movies that have become favorites of mine over the years.

Ebert was the only writer on films who I paid any attention to. I've read dozens of his movie reviews (and other articles) whereas I can't think of another reviewer whose work I've read more than once. That speaks to his quality as a writer and as a critic. He will be missed, and I don't mean that as a platitude. I'll actually miss him.

And with him passes the era of the critic, now all we are left with are Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. It's a sad world.

Casey is sadly absolutely right. This really is the end of an era.

Roger Ebert is why I ever got into criticizing or being critical of ANYTHING. He was so fearless in his opinions, he never talked down to the reader/viewer and instead brought them up. He educated people on how to view a film and take more out of it than just entertainment, but he was never pretentiously academic or without appreciation for "lower" examples of the medium. When I was a kid watching "At the Movies", hearing him talk about movies that I would otherwise never have heard of made me go ask my parents to go take me to see them.

Further, he really illustrated how important it is for the critic to be completely, hopelessly in love with the medium they critique. If he completely savaged a film, you always got a sense that it was because he loved movies, not because he necessarily hated the film or its makers.

I was just blown away by how he kept going in the face of such terribly declining health. Even yesterday when he announced his "leave of presence", it felt like he was just going to keep on going to the movies and writing about them.

Just a sad day, one of my biggest inspirations.

One of the great things about Ebert is he co-wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. A) He knew more than most critics about the screenwriting procees because he actually lived it. And he lived through his movie being panned.

People on here always bust on shills. I ALWAYS had a feeling Gene Shalit and Leonard Maltin were exactly that because I felt they "critiqued" movies produced by companies they worked for. (Please, let me know if I'm wrong...)

Roger loved movies to his core, and I always respected the integrity and intelligence of his critiques, even those I did not necessarily agree with (which was not often.)

He also wrote the screenplay for "Who Killed Bambi", which was to be something like a Beatles film...but starring the Sex Pistols. Russ Meyer was to direct, but it never got made.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is brilliant...I've never been on drugs, but it seems like it'd be like that film.

Where you had Gene Shalit making stupid puns and rhymes:

even Satan himself would love this angel hair pasta. It's a good buy. So this is...goodbye, from mr. good guy, Gene Shalit

I was happy you had Ebert with his direct, unafraid and honest feedback on movies. He would not mince words at all and it was what made watching At the Movies fun as a kid. ''I'm going to give that kind of feedback next time my mom makes her chicken tandori! More like Chicken Bland-ori!''

In truth I used to share opinions more with Roeper and was actually more sad at his passing. Ebert really lost it for me in the last 5 years with his anti-video game crusade which was just full of inaccuracies. But I have so many fond memories of watching At the Movies growing up and thinking movie critic must be a great job.

So even though his anti-video game stuff sucked, cancer sucks more so 10/10

Most folks claiming to be "game journos" don't have a fucking clue how to write a review...so what if Ebert bagged on a medium where its own critics are worthless? He wasn't entirely wrong, he just wasn't aware of how games had changed. Increasingly, it seems, for the worse.

RIP Ebert, the only movie critic who I seriously hear. May not always agree with him, but I respect his reviews.

Going a bit against the grain, I did not enjoy his reviews and generally disagreed with him, and he especially lost his edge profesionally in the last 10-15 years as he got old. That said, he seemed like a nice, ethical guy and it's very sad when anyone with real character dies. He had a big film fest in Champaign-Urbana and my friends always went to it---they said he was a very nice guy in person, extremely generous with his time.