Before the Internet, or at least any Internet I knew of, Siskel & Ebert was my best resource for what was coming out. By the time I hit the age where I wasn’t supposed to be seeing certain things but wanted to, those two were a gateway drug. Very few things sounded more interesting to my just-under-teenage brain than Clerks and Pulp Fiction.
I treated their year end lists like gospel. By my freshmen year of high school I walked around with and read and re-read and basically treated Book of Film the same.
For years, when I watched something, I would end up looking up his reviews to see what he thought. While I often disagreed with him, I was always interested and loved discovering films via his writing. I wonder now what he would have thought about movies that have come out since he left us. I might wonder that forever.
As Steven Hyden wrote when he passed:
“If the sum total of all the people affected by the life and career of Roger Ebert could somehow be quantified– his fellow writers were just a tiny sliver of a large and loyal readership, mind you– we might begin the process of wrapping our arms around the legacy of perhaps the most celebrated film critic who ever lived. In lieu of that, let’s just say: It’s a whole hell of a lot of people.“
I recommend looking through his work, particularly his “Great Movies” archive. Love this quote of his: “”Every great film should seem new every time you see it.”
There is also his final “top ten” list and this list of underrated films he loved, including the Up documentary series, about which he wrote:
“No other art form can capture so well the look in an eye, the feeling in an expression, the thoughts that go unspoken between the words. To look at these films, as I have every seven years, is to meditate on the astonishing fact that man is the only animal that knows it lives in time.”
