Damnit, this is the worst. It's not like he slowly aged and was losing it, he was still on top of his game and juggling like 6 different projects, and a week later, dead. just fuck this

oh, correction: Roeper reviewed GI Joe on Ebert's site.  Ebert's last review really was The Host.

/goddammitsomuch

Wow, its one of the weirdest things to read. It sounds cold, but I know it was inevitable, but I really didn't expect it.
RIP Roger

My favorite memory, back from the PBS Sneak Previews days, was his review of Halloween 3. Siskel hated it, and Ebert taunted him with the song.
"Come on, you mean you didn't like the jingle? [singing] 'Five more days till Halloween...'"

I was so very disappointed on seeing that his written review trashed the film

I had a these thoughts after hearing the news:

1) If you stopped the average person on the street, there's probably only a handful of movie critics that person would know by name. Ebert was one of them. That's significant.

2) Even when I disagreed with Ebert, I admired his approach. There's even an example or two of him changing his mind, or having his mind changed by a sound argument, which seems rare among big-name critics. Also, he was a lifelong newspaperman who managed to write intelligently about movies while keeping his prose accessible. When I stop and think about it, these are the things I actually liked most about him, not so much that I tended to agree with his assessments.

3) As has been mentioned, cancer is a motherfucker. It also whacked Siskel.

4) He seemed to see criticism as a conversation about movies, not a war of contesting aesthetic values. On TV, his tone of voice often carried the implication that "this is my opinion." Other prominent critics, from Kael to Armond White, reliably adopted a tone that suggested their opinion was gospel, the objective truth that you'd be silly to disagree with. It's a tone designed to end the conversation rather than start it. I didn't see him adopt that tone as much as others. (Although he did do it to Siskel a lot back in the day. It was their rapport.)

5) His memoir wasn't bad, but this e-book, about Siskel & Ebert's behind-the-scenes shenanigans, is goddamned fascinating.

One of my favourite Ebert quotes was this gem on Freddy Got Fingered-

“This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”

And this one on B.A.P.S.-

"My guess is that African Americans will be offended by the movie, and whites will be embarrassed. The movie will bring us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom."

And then these-

"I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."

"The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented."

"Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way."

Its funny that you have the Battlefield Earth review and I just watched another one from SFDebris.
Ah, to be united with anger towards a movie

Attention all people responsible for my love of film in some way: Please stop dying.

http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/1 … onder.html

GOOD NEWS! His last review wasn't The Host. He wrote a review of Terrence Malick's latest, To The Wonder, before he passed. The review itself can't be read without an account, but I'm content with the knowledge that this is the film he went out on.

Was about to post that: http://rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/art … 09984/1023

Really fitting somehow to go out on a Malick film, I feel happier now