Roger Ebert: truth and beauty

It's always a little disconcerting when someone you grew up with, dies.

I am not referring to a childhood best friend or a next door neighbor or that family friend that took you fishing at 5:00 a.m. on a cool October morning because your own dad didn't even care about your own existence.

No, I am not even referring to the gentle eyed Home Room teacher from 6th grade that laughed at your jokes, tolerated your need to act out in class and somehow reached deep into her pockets to pay for your trip to Washington D.C. because she knew that this little church excursion would mold you into the man you are today.

It's a whole different feeling when someone you grew up with from the belly of your television set, dies.



They're dropping like flies, them TV and music stars, said a friend to me after Whitney Houston left.

I think we just tend to notice more when it's someone we grew up with regardless if we admired that person.  Death is a part of life.  We blindly accept that fact UNTIL it's someone we know or think we know.

Today, Roger Ebert died. 

A man who infamously revolutionalized this genre of TV shows called "Film Critiquing".   His brilliance lied in his writing but in this microwaving minute rice, always in a rush, information age of sound bites and photo ops, Mr. Ebert's legacy will be his thumbs up/thumbs down movie reviews on his 30 minute TV show.

A piece of Americana died today.  Thoughts of nostalgic moments flood my mind as I recall those instances his reviews caused a reaction from me; like that time, I found him to be an uptight snob because he failed to see the humor I saw in Joe Dirt. 

The brilliance of this man is evidenced by my reactions and others like me as he stated his own opinions of movies.  If someone can elicit anger from us just by the mere elegance of their well written prose, we are in the presence of a great communicator and an unappreciated talent.

I believe Roger Ebert is and was an unappreciated talent. 

You don't have to be writing about historical events with some regional dialect to be considered a modern day Mark Twain.  The beauty of excellence is it can be found in the most mundane pages of one's own diary or as in the case of Mr. Ebert, on the pages of the Chicago Sun Times where he for 46 years, courageously wrote about what he knew best, movies.

Today, an icon left us.  He will never be duplicated because his style, his talent and his thoughts were completely his own and expressed with such Twain-ian ease that regardless if you loved him or hated him, leaves an illustrious legacy behind him. 

I grew to appreciate this man as I began to regularly read his movie reviews regardless if it was a cinematic masterpiece or some buried in crap movie (as he called it), Joe Dirt.

The moment for me when I fully recognized Mr. Ebert's sagacity was after I read his review of my favorite movie, (500) Days of Summer:

One thing men love is to instruct women. If a woman wants to enchant a man, she is wise to play his pupil. Men fall for this. Tom set out in life to be an architect, not a poet of greeting cards. He and Summer share the same favorite view of Los Angeles (one you may not have seen before), and he conducts for her an architectural tour. This is fun not because we get to see wonderful buildings, but because so rarely in the movies do we find characters arguing for their aesthetic values. What does your average character played by an A-list star believe about truth and beauty?

Truth and beauty.

Those two words, in my mind, will be Roger Ebert's gift to those of us left behind.


It feels like I lost a friend today.