Roger Ebert, who died Thursday, was the author of perhaps the most worn volume in our house: Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion, 1990 edition. It must have been right around 1990, therefore, that I first acquired a VCR and a membership card from the neighborhood video store, which is now an ethnic grocery ("Best goat meat in town!"). I also own Halliwell's Film Guide but I learned that you could not rent from Panorama Video any of Mr Halliwell's most highly recommended films. I say "films" because that's what Halliwell calls them. Ebert called them "movies." A column announcing his "leave of presence," published two days before his death as he prepared to enter hospice, concludes: "I'll see you at the movies." Verve under pressure.
So he was my guide, a damned good one. Considering that the hundreds of reviews, most about 500 words long, that fill his Companion were turned out at the rate of about 200 per year for the Chicago Sun Times, it's remarkable how well written they are. The product of 500 and 200 is 100,000, which is about how many words are in Wuthering Heights. Granted, there is an inestimable advantage in being able to have a couple hundred fresh starts, as opposed to creating a single unified work of art. Still. Ebert had to see all the movies he reviewed, and he kept turning out the product year after year after year in a plain, rough-and-ready style that must usually have supplied more than half the total wit and intelligence in every issue of the paper that included one of his reviews. Opening his Companion now at random, my eye falls upon, in a review of Heartburn:
The story: Rachel meets Mark and it's love at first sight, but it's not the kind of loin-churning passion we felt when Nicholson met Kathleen Turner in Prizzi's Honor. It's more of a low-grade fever, something to be treated with aspirin--or marriage.
Rooting around in the book for awhile, one's overall impression is of concision, generosity, and casual intelligence tossed off lightly (because there's more where that came from). The tributes one reads around the Internet suggest that, in life, Ebert was if anything even more likable than the companionable movie buff one knows from his writing. Here's an example, the most arresting sentence of which is possibly: "Despite his celebrity, he stayed on the side of the outsiders, the dreamers, those who didn't play the obvious game."
Nobody could see recent pictures of him without cringing. His assorted cancers necessitated the surgical removal of his jaw, which left him disfigured and unable to speak but, as he was quick to point out, still able to see, think, and write. He was a weekly entrant in The New Yorker's cartoon caption contest, and his illness had not routed his sometimes bawdy sense of humor. That last column I linked to above mentioned the recurrence of his cancer in the seventh of thirteen paragraphs.
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