R.I.P., Roger Ebert

[Steve-o]

Long, sad fight.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/17320958-418/roger-ebert-dies-at-70-after-battle-with-cancer.html

For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative, or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers.

“No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.”

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.

Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize — the first film critic to do so -- but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.

The same year Ebert won the Pulitzer -- 1975 -- he also launched a new kind of television program: “Coming Soon to a Theater Near You” with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel on WTTW-Channel 11. At first it ran monthly.

 

[anderson]

R.i.p.

 

[BostonTim]

I always watched Siskel and Ebert.

Both too soon gone.

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Requiescat In Pace

BostonTim

 

[Pyxis]

RIP.
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[HarpoonIPA]

RIP you fought a good fight

 

[Pyxis]

He fought valiantly.
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[tehrick67]

Two thumbs down.

RIP Sir.

 

[Beaglebay]

For this alone, he should be remembered fondly:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat...alley_of_the_dolls_is_a_camp_masterpiece.html


Roger Ebert’s Camp Classic

By J. Bryan Lowder
|
Posted Thursday, April 4, 2013, at 6:39 PM

In the wake of Roger Ebert’s death, most will remember him for his work as a critic, but a small niche of fans will fete him for a more obscure but nonetheless worthy reason: his writing of the screenplay for the 1970 cult classic, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

The madcap, sexy, borderline-surrealist film is impossible to summarize, but calling it a fast-and-loose Hollywood fantasia on A Midsummer Night’s Dream would not be totally inaccurate. A group of somewhat innocent youths—three girls in a rock band, plus one boyfriend—head into the enchanted forest of Los Angeles and there meet all manner of fairy-like creatures (rock producer Z-Man, porn star Ashley St. Ives, and other fans of “happenings”) who lead them astray. The whole thing ends, after a Hamlet-like massacre, in a very Shakespearean triple-wedding. But the plot details don’t really matter: In the final analysis, BVD is a film of unbridled sensual pleasure, a cinematic shag carpet woven with delightful details and an intoxicating frenetic energy. It is, in a word, camp.

In my ongoing Slateseries on camp, I distinguish between “campy”—a style consisting of exaggeration or artificiality—and “camp,” which I define as the inexplicable pleasure of the nuance. BVD is one of those rare films blessed with a fair portion of both. It is awash in the now automatically campy colors and textures of the 1970s and delightfully mod dialog (wonderfully grating against Z-Man’s Elizabethan diction). Harpsichord-heavy scoring only adds to the aura. Mix into that such scenes as when the spurned boyfriend of one of the rocker girls falls like a sack of potatoes from the rafters to the concrete floor of the television studio in which the group is having their first televised concert—don’t worry, he’s only paralyzed, and temporarily at that—and you’ve got a campy brew going at a rolling boil.

But camp—the pleasure taken in the stray nuance—also abounds. Certain lines, like Ashley St. Ives’ orgasm-induced screaming of “nothing like a Rolls!”, captivate my personal camp attention, as do weird details like the absurdly thick glasses of the abortion doctor and the weird knot in a wood post that is used to (barely) obscure a ridiculous pastoral sex scene. I suspect Ebert would approve of such detail-oriented viewing of BVD. He admitted to writing the screenplay in only six weeks, noting that he and co-writer Russ Meyer made up the plot as they went along. But that wasn’t because they were lazy or pressed for time; it was by design. According to Ebert, BVD was “an anthology of stock situations, characters, dialogue, clichés and stereotypes, set to music and manipulated to work as exposition and satire at the same time; it’s cause and effect, a wind-up machine to generate emotions, pure movie without message.”

In other words, BVD was a purely aesthetic work, a patchwork quilt of details and nuances sewn with thread of campy outrageousness. For that, it truly is a camp classic, and worthy of celebration along with Ebert’s masterful reviews.




Watch it if you get a chance.

RIP, Mr Ebert