April 6 Tip: Listen to a powerful interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert

Listen to this powerful discussion with movie critic Roger Ebert about the meaning and impact of films
(the April 6 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/04/04/movies/100000002155907/timestalks-roger-ebert.html

Roger Ebert, the popular film critic and television co-host who along with his fellow reviewer and sometime sparring partner Gene Siskel could lift or sink the fortunes of a movie with their trademark thumbs up or thumbs down, died on Thursday in Chicago. He was 70.

His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002.

It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.

President Obama reacted to Mr. Ebert’s death with a statement that said, in part: “For a generation of Americans — especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical.”

Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.”

In recent years, Mr. Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well.

He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. He commented on pro football, his captions for The New Yorker cartoon contest, an old pub he once frequented,James Joyce short stories and untold numbers of movies and television shows, to which he linked. “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star,” went one tweet.

He swore he would not become addicted to Twitter, but emphatically did. But Mr. Ebert — whose handle was @ebertchicago — never tweeted during a movie.

Mr. Ebert liked to say his approach — dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions — reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering.

“I will one day be thin, butVincent Gallowill always be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny,’ ” he wrote.

His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialized film criticism. Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1991, Mr. Ebert agreed that his television program at the time was “not a high-level, in-depth film-criticism show.” But he argued that it demonstrated to younger viewers that one can bring standards of judgment to movies, that “it’s O.K. to have an opinion.”