Film Reviewer Meets Film Critic- Roger Ebert’s Life Itself  

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Life Itself, starring the late Roger Ebert, 2014 

 

No question that the Internet has if not “democratized” the public printing space (or the world body politic) it certainly has permitted those of us who like to write, in this instance to write movie reviews, and have our work published without having to resort to silly stuff like vanity presses has expanded our reach. Now anybody who has an opinion about any movie, old or new, black and white or color, high tech or low, with socially redeeming qualities or not, can wail away at what he or she has on his mind and get it published someplace on the Internet (most likely Amazon but there are plenty of other sites, and if you are shy then go to your Facebook page). So everybody can be a movie reviewer but as the life and times described in this biopic/documentary/tribute not all of us are film critics and if you do not understand that distinction then you best grab a copy of Life Itself, the story of the well-known late film critic Roger Ebert and see the difference.

Okay, by the numbers, when you were say six you did not need a film critic to direct you to watch this or that movie since you were being dragged along by your parents and you had to squirm through whatever mushy thing interested them. When you were ten or so you did not need a film critic either since all you cared about was that you were not held hostage by you parents and their whims so as long as the thing was scary/ bizarre/had lots of blood and guts for Saturday afternoon feasting you were fine. When you were say sixteen or so you emphatically did not need a film critic because, well, because three is company, too much company when all you cared about was getting to that dark balcony with your honey, and well, let’s leave it at who cared about what the movie was, as long as it was long. But let’s say you were twenty-two and you had a hot date and you both decided that a movie would be a nice ice-breaker, then brother you needed, desperately needed, the services of a film critic to let you at least keep away from the “dogs,” a selection which would insure that that hot date was the last date. And if you needed a film critic and you lived in Chicago in the 1960s (or read the Sun-Times) or later heard this cranky guy talking “high film” to this other cranky guy on “high- brow” public television or later in syndication than you needed the services of the great film critic of the era Roger Ebert.     

See you, at that age, under those conditions, and if you lived in certain mainly campus towns you needed somebody who knew something about the inner working of the film, especially those European films filled with angst and existential disquiet before American film-makers got hip to the idea that you could actually make films based on some high-powered idea rather than the standard Hollywood fare. So you needed Roger to help you have interesting post-film conversations to show you were “sensitive”. You needed a guy who saw film as an art form to be dissected by film critics who believed that like in other disciplines critiques were a legitimate part of the process. That, in the end, is where the Ebert (and Siskel) popularization of film criticisms has earned it places in film history.    

Was all the material covered in the Sneak Previews series high- brow/ low brow/ off the mark well sure sometimes a little of all three since there is an element of subjectivity to films and what you like just as in painting and music gets hauls into the mix but mostly they made things interesting for those of us who then needed help figuring out what to see on Saturday night. And here is the good part, the part that came shining through in this physically hard-to-make film Roger Ebert loved to do film critiques right to the end despite his severe medical problems (that relentless jaw cancer taking away his strength as we watch him decline right before our eyes). So when he could no longer speak he just took out his trusty computer and like millions of the rest of us and became a film reviewer with his very own blog. No, weren’t you paying attention, he became a film critic with his very own blog. If you think you have had tough times in life see this one, and step back a little.