Goodbye Roger Ebert

Yesterday I randomly opened my RSS feed reader and, doing what I normally do, read the posts from my favorite bloggers, organized by category. At the very top of the Movies category sits one giant name: Roger Ebert. He died today. But yesterday he was alive, and he posted another of his many updates about his health, his work, and his appreciation of life. He told us that his cancer had returned, and that his life would be changing again (this guy has been through so much in the past five years, how did he find the strength and resolve to keep soldiering on?). This guy changed my life, plain and simple, from the first day I knew he existed. Siskel and Ebert were household names when I was growing up, and every Sunday I dashed for the TV listings to find out when his syndicated program would play (syndication causing his show to have no consistent schedule). I loved watching these two guys argue about movies, previewing what films were coming up and having strong, definitive opinions about them. When Gene Siskel died, I remember the sadness and weird absence: what does a critic do for a person's life, in the end? The answer is: a lot. For a lot of people, Roger Ebert's name doesn't inspire confidence. Disagreeing with a movie critic is proof that they're always wrong, or something - but I disagreed with Ebert all the time, and loved every minute of it. His argumentative show proved that this was not only allowed, but required: movies were about things, and they needed to be considered on their own merits, as well as challenged. If two people saw things differently, all the better. This is why Ebert's latest love, blogging, has been a way to submerge himself (and all of us) in the art of "talking about the movies." You can't do that alone. Roger Ebert was never shy about his opinions. He was a reviewer who made sure audiences were kept up to date but also pushed to their limits: why don't we go see more foreign language films? Why do we let the MPAA censor our movies? What's wrong with silent film, or black and white? Movies were Ebert's life force - he could absorb so many of them and then turn right around and tell us his thoughts. These thoughts were never inconsequential. Not being a shy guy, he would also speak his mind on politics and religion, and I always appreciated that the movies, of all things, pushed his mind to consider high ideals and tough subject matter. In particular I loved Ebert's Great Movies series. Here he recommended for me all the movies that would fill in the gaps in my film history timeline, and expose me to transcendent and totally unknown aesthetic experience. I read a beautiful article by Ebert (I believe it was called "Awake in the Dark," also the name of one of his books) about what movies have meant to him, and he mentioned the personal movie theater in his house. He said he would watch something every Sunday, and to him this was a form of church. Movies have been a temple for me as well, a place where thoughts and feelings go to wrestle with each other. Ebert would be one of the first to say that movies have enriched his life; his love for movies has enriched mine. I am sad to say goodbye to one of the most potent voices on art that I've ever heard.