Life Itself

Life Itself celebrates the life of influential film critic Roger Ebert, who died of cancer in 2013.  The intellectual half of the famous Siskel & Ebert TV team of the 1980s and 1990s (with rival Chicago film reviewer Gene Siskel), Ebert had an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and the moviemaking industry, and an ability to write reviews that explained complex ideas in simple, elegant, and very entertaining language.   He was a born writer with a natural, effortless style which he infused with his genuine passion for films and prescient grasp of their central place in our culture.  An English major at the University of Illinois, he was editor of the student newspaper and began his long association with the Chicago Sun-Times soon after graduation.  His editor asked him to write movie reviews when the current reviewer quit and he never looked back.  For the next fifty years, he wrote thousands of reviews and articles, now archived on his website, www.rogerebert.com, a major resource for anyone studying movies in the last half century. 

 

For many, he was the voice of film criticism in this country, and this became a source of controversy.  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the first film critic to be so honored, but this didn’t keep his own critics from sniping at his growing profile, which overshadowed nearly everyone else after his hugely successful series of television shows with Siskel began in 1975.  Many academics also regarded him with scorn.  There’s an important difference between academic film scholarship and popular reviewing for the news media, but the fascinating thing about Ebert is that his knowledge was so vast and his writing so good he often straddled that divide.  Scholars can’t easily dismiss him.  This wonderful documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) shows us why, as well as giving us a candid behind-the-scenes look at his horrific battle with throat and jaw cancer and his relationship with his marvelous wife Chaz, which sustained both of them  until the end.  Ebert acted the prima donna in his prime, but when he finally became the star of his own movie, his gratitude for the ways in which his life had been graced by others is genuine and moving.  Two thumbs way, way up.