The Balcony Is Closed

Roger Ebert, the long-time film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, had a unique way of looking at the movies. For one thing, his favorite Disney character was Monstro. But the most unique quality that Ebert, who died today at 70 after a long battle with cancer, had as a critic was that he was able to convey his deep understanding of cinema to a mass audience of movie fans in direct, clear, and deferential language. His love for movies was contagious, and on television with his partner Gene Siskel, who died in 1999, he got a generation of Americans to view movies, and comprehend what made a movie good or bad, in a more thoughtful way.

It wasn't just the spirited discussions and disagreements Ebert had with the Chicago Tribune's Siskel, which were as entertaining as the movies they endorsed, that made Ebert a legend. He was just as erudite and passionate about the movies in print as he was in front of a TV camera. His subtle digs at movies he disliked and his insightful comments about his favorite films were required reading. He could explain a complex Truffaut movie with ease, and he could make a strong case for an actor's ambition, as he did with Burt Reynolds' forays into directing. Ebert had a very Midwestern, sensible tone in his movie writing that helped put Chicago on the map as a serious cultural locus, thanks to his intelligent prose and impeccable taste. He parlayed that same prose into passionate discussions about his own life and thoughts when illness robbed him of his ability to speak - a tragic loss in and of itself, given his laconic wit. But he soldiered on to the end, refusing to let even his latest cancer case stop him. He died still indulging in his two biggest interests - movies and writing.

Ebert probably wished he and Siskel hadn't popularized the "thumbs up or thumbs down" matrix for encapsulating a movie's quality, which threatened to dumb down the whole approach to talking about movies, but when a studio could brag in its ads for a new movie about getting a thumb up from Roger Ebert, it was worth more than five stars from anyone else. But some of us still appreciate him fondly for the substance of his full-length reviews. R.I.P.