Thursday, April 4th, we lost Roger Ebert to the cumulative effects of a horrible disease. He put up an incredible fight against cancer for a decade, writing more reviews in his last year of life than any year before it.
I owe part of my wonderment and awe of cinema to Roger Ebert as I think many of us do. And there is no one whose opinion I trusted more. The man was as knowledgeable as anyone about the history and complexities of film as an art form, yet his reviews were completely accessible. Somehow, he always found a way to describe the indescribable and to do it so eloquently, it captured the magic we'd all felt and put it onto paper.
I can't imagine anyone loved movies more. Robert Redford called Mr. Ebert "...one of the great champions of freedom of artistic expression." I don't know how you could say it better than that. The man was fair and, above all, completely open minded. I felt like every time he took his seat in a theater, he managed to do so with no preconceived notions about the film he was about to see. That's how a man who loved the conventional classics like Citizen Kane, Seven Samurai and The Bicycle Thief, could fall in love with Pulp Fiction the first time he saw it, before others even knew what they were looking at. And, how he could see the beauty and meandering intent in The Big Lebowski while other critics completely missed the mark. To Ebert, a great movie was a great movie was a great movie.
Ebert continued writing until the very end. In his last blog entry on April 2nd, he wrote:
"So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness."That is the power of film and precisely why I will never stop loving movies or dreaming of making one of my own that moves people in similar ways.
And his last line of the blog was as follows...
"So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies."
80s Villain Final Four
Behold! We are down to the Final Four. (Click to embiggen.)
Johnny Lawrence. Hans Gruber. Darth Vader. Biff Tannen.
The one thing all these have in common? A dominant performance in their Regional Final. All four come in with major momentum. Personally I can't to see what happens in the Vader / Biff match-up. Darth Vader is the all-time champ in villain discussions, but Biff has been absolutely untouchable so far and I think he is truly a fan favorite.
Check back in later today to vote on the Final Four!