roger ebert is dying in increments

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/roger-ebert-0310

i've enjoyed ebert's reviews since forever, so it's going to be real sad when he finally dies. it seems like when a movie comes out and people talk about it ebert's review usually pops up. he has been really easy going on a lot of movies since the operation though, it's softened him up a bit, he'll probably live for another 2 years or so

*shakes fist at life*

he's still hilarious on his twitter. roger ebert is a great man.

that's a very sad article

here's his blog if anyone wants to read it http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/

His review of The Lovely Bones wasn't particularly positive.

r.i.p. my nigga roger

even though he's not technically dead

Synecdoche was his favourite film of the decade, something to which I'd definitely agree. And his review on his blog puts it into words I simply couldn't comprehend after having watched it. Good man.

  Quote

"Synecdoche, New York" is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

 

The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in "Synecdoche" (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He's like a

 

novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another. Those who felt the film was disorganized or incoherent might benefit from seeing it again. It isn't about a narrative, although it pretends to be. It's about a method, the method by which we organize our lives and define our realities.

Very few people live their lives on one stage, in one persona, wearing one costume. We play different characters. We know this and accept it. In childhood we begin as always the same person but quickly we develop strategies for our families, our friends, our schools. In adolescence these strategies are not well controlled. Sexually, teenagers behave one way with some dates and a different way with others. We find those whose have a persona that matches one of our own, and that defines how we interact with that person. If you aren't an aggressor and are sober, there are girls (or boys) you do it with and others you don't, and you don't want those people to discover what goes on away from them.

 

But already "Synecdoche" has me thinking in terms of the film's insight. That is its power. Let me stand back and consider it as a movie. It's about a theater director named Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who begins with a successful regional production, is given a MacArthur genius grant, and moves with a troupe of actors into a New York warehouse. Here they develop a play that grows and grows, and he devises a set representing their various rooms and lives. The film begins as apparently realistic, but as the set expands it shades off into -- complexity? fantasy? chaos?

 

In the earlier scenes, he was married to Adele (Catherine Keener). She leaves, and he marries Claire (Michelle Williams), who to some degree is intended to literally replace the first wife, as many second spouses are. Why do some people marry those who resemble their exes? They're casting for the same role. Caden has hired an actor named Daniel London (Tom Noonan) to star in the play, as a character somewhat like himself. Many writers and directors create fiction from themselves, and are often advised to.

 

What happens in the film isn't supposed to happen in life. The membrane between fact and fiction becomes permeable, and the separate lives intermingle. Caden hardly seems to know whose life he's living; his characters develop minds of their own. How many authors have you heard say their dialogue involves "just writing down what the characters would say?"

 

Living within different personas is something many people do. How can a governor think to have a mistress in Argentina? An investment counselor think to steal all the money entrusted to him? A famous athlete be revealed as a sybarite? A family man be discovered to have two families? I suspect such people, and to some degree many of us, find no more difficulty in occupying those different scenarios that we might find eating meat some days and on others calling ourselves vegetarian.

 

"Synecdoche" is accomplished in all the technical areas, including its astonishing set. The acting requires great talent to create characters who are always in their own reality, however much it shifts. Philip Seymour Hoffman's character experiences a deterioration of body, as we all do, finds it more difficult to see outside himself, as we all do, and becomes less sure of who "himself' is, as sooner or later we all do. He shows us this process with a precise evolution.

 

Kaufman has made the most perceptive film I can recall about how we live in the world. This is his debut as a director, but his most important contribution is the screenplay. Make no mistake: He sweated blood over this screenplay. Somebody had to know what was happening on all those levels, and that had to be the writer. Of course he directed it. Who else could have comprehended it?

I want Roger (and all the fucking critics) to make a movie themselves ..

They seem to know soooo much about movies .. the final product should be PERFECT

jesus fuck, isn't there some kind of jaw implant or something they could throw in to that fleshy sack? frightening.

Clearly, movie reviewing causes cancer.

rip siskel

rip ebert

watch your back, roeper

  On 2/17/2010 at 1:42 AM, Boxing Day said:

I want Roger (and all the fucking critics) to make a movie themselves ..

 

They seem to know soooo much about movies .. the final product should be PERFECT

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

he's out lived the skinny one by a long shot though

  On 2/17/2010 at 2:17 AM, Adjective said:

  On 2/17/2010 at 1:42 AM, Boxing Day said:

I want Roger (and all the fucking critics) to make a movie themselves ..

 

They seem to know soooo much about movies .. the final product should be PERFECT

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Proof that these Idiots know nothing about Film making ..

Roger "Jaws" Ebert is a failed Filmmaker ..

P.s - Ebert is a nice guy , and i like some of his political views ..

Ebert knows a ton about film making. That has nothing to do with being a good film maker. And it has nothing to do with being a great critic, and reviewer, both of which he is.

very sad. i like how hes gotten a lot less conservative over the years.

  On 2/17/2010 at 3:47 AM, Z_B_Z said:

very sad. i like how hes gotten a lot less conservative over the years.

I love it when Idiot conservatives turn into Amazing Left Wing Liberals ..

yeah cause thats exactly what i was saying

wish i had watched siskel and ebert more

agreed on synecdoche

Was Ebert ever really that conservative? It seemed more to me like he's just become more openly political recently.

his review of blue velvet, for example, struck me as a bit up tight

i thought i remember reading that he was outraged by night of the living dead upon its original release, but after skimming the original review, it looks like thats not true. i dont know, maybe its just my perception

The only qualified reviewer I know of who, like me, hated Armageddon but liked Independence Day.

Most reviewers today are too fickle or personal in their reviewing process, I always liked his approach, even the few times I thought he was wrong. I'm going to miss his reviews, I had no idea the cancer was that bad (I've only been reading his reviews).

"Regarding his death one day, he has written in a journal entry titled, "Go Gently into That Good Night":

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris."

Well, political rants aside, he's still a grateful man.