Roger Ebert
Apr. 4th, 2013 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jetpack_monkeyKind of a mess right now. Roger Ebert was a huge, huge influence on my writing as a film critic and he was just a generally decent person to boot. And now he's gone. Two days ago he posted that he was doing something new in his life and only reviewing the films that he wanted to review. I cracked to my mother on the phone this morning, "I guess he only wanted to review Ingmar Bergman's new works."
Ebert intersected my life twice. The first time he, unknowingly, put me back on the right course after I detoured. The second time, he helped me clarify my convictions.
In my freshman year of college, I put Classic-Horror.com on hiatus so I could focus on "legitimate film criticism" (I was 18 and stupid). I started a general movie review website called "The Reel Critics" (har har) and, soon after that, I was working as a critic for The Daily Iowan.
At the time, I considered Classic-Horror.com dead. I scavenged my best reviews from it and I was just going to let it disappear after the domain name expired. I didn't think it mattered. It was a dumb horror site that nobody read. I thought that focusing on a niche was limiting and would pigeonhole me. Again, stupid teenager who thinks he's an adult.
Then, in April 2002, Roger Ebert reviewed Jason X and made a minor reference to the review of the same film on Classic-Horror (written by a long-time Rue Morgue contributor who occasionally sent whatever that magazine wouldn't take to me). Seeing the website's name in print by someone who I respected the hell out of (even when I didn't agree with him -- especially when I didn't agree with him) was huge. I brought Classic-Horror back from the dead, began working on a redesign, put together a new team of writers, and had one of the most prolific and satisfying periods of website productivity in my life. That tiny bit of text launched the next 10 years of the site.
.
Five years on, in 2007, I was reading Ebert's site as I did on weekly basis. Specifically, I was checking out his thoughts on the AFI's updated 100 Years... 100 Movies list. In his reaction, he took a cheap shot at what he called "Dead Teenager Movies", saying, "if you were to see all 100 films on the AFI list, by the end of that experience, you would no longer desire to see a Dead Teenager Movie. (Yes, there could be a great Dead Teenager Movie. Please send me a list of the 100 greatest.)."
I took umbrage and shot off an email to Ebert. Which he then published. I did not agree with his response and I didn't think he really responded to my issues directly, but it was kind of a surreal experience. It lead to being contacted by another horror critic and we eventually went through the process of putting together the list of 100 Greatest Dead Teenager Movies requested (that list is sadly no longer online).
Now, keep in mind throughout all of this that one of the reasons that I started Classic-Horror.com in 1999 was that I didn't like so-called Dead Teenager Movies (or slasher films as they are more popularly known). In the intervening years, I'd found that I'd enjoyed some of them, but more than that, I found the whole subgenre fascinating in how it had a template that was built from component parts in bits and pieces in the 1960s and 1970s before it sort of became itself with Halloween in 1978 and then reached self-awareness in 1980 with Friday the 13th. I liked watching the various permutations within the structure of the subgenre and how different directors picked which "rules" they would follow and which components they would use (no single slasher film/series follows the template the exact same way, to the point where my saying there is a template is a bit misleading). What's especially fascinating is that the majority of this work occurred in a very short span of time. The golden age of the slasher film, where it was a major box office force, was only about six years -- 1978 to 1984. There were still some successful slashers after that, mostly franchise sequels, but the zeitgeist had gone.
I really should make a vid of the above paragraph at some point. Anyway.
I still found most of the individual films repellent or boring, however, but to say that so-called great cinema could somehow replace the "low cinema" of Dead Teenager Movies/slashers was really grating to me. I expected better of Ebert. People love what they love and film doesn't exist in a vacuum. We are built by our experiences with films, whether they focus on Charle Foster Kane's last words or the death gurgle of a bubble-headed co-ed whose name is probably unimportant overall.
I'll tell you something. I love Friday the 13th Part VI (I otherwise loathe that whole series). It's the point in the franchise where they realize they've created an icon, realize that the iconography has robbed their monster of some of his potential scariness (not that they ever really used that potential, but I digress), and decide to just fucking run with it. It's an absolute blast of self-aware murderous hijinks. And you know what? That doesn't take away from the fact that I love The Godfather or Casablanca or Singin' in the Rain or Lawrence of Arabia or Vertigo. And the fact that I love those films doesn't mean I stop loving Friday the 13th Part VI or Sleepaway Camp or A Nightmare on Elm Street. These things can co-exist.
Bringing this back to Ebert: the correspondence and the related conversations I had with other critics really brought my sense of purpose into focus. Horror was important. It had something to say and any study of cinema that ignored its voice was missing an entire dimension in its analysis. Ebert's dismissal of a small, often disdained part of something I overall loved made that love stronger and more complete and put the fire in my heart to defend it and fight for its relevance. Again, the website went through a strong creative period where I wrote some of the best reviews of my career.
That got really long. I apparently have a lot of feelings pent up on various things. Ahem.
Anyway. I'll miss you, Roger. The way you communicated your feelings on movies was unparalleled. When you loved a movie, it was sublime. When you hated a movie, the flames of enmity burned through your words. But where you really were different was when a film bored you. There you were able to riff on movies in general and the expectations we hold for them and any number of other subjects, all loosely tied to the film under the glass -- and somehow all of that divergence from the movie communicated exactly your feelings on it.
Ebert intersected my life twice. The first time he, unknowingly, put me back on the right course after I detoured. The second time, he helped me clarify my convictions.
In my freshman year of college, I put Classic-Horror.com on hiatus so I could focus on "legitimate film criticism" (I was 18 and stupid). I started a general movie review website called "The Reel Critics" (har har) and, soon after that, I was working as a critic for The Daily Iowan.
At the time, I considered Classic-Horror.com dead. I scavenged my best reviews from it and I was just going to let it disappear after the domain name expired. I didn't think it mattered. It was a dumb horror site that nobody read. I thought that focusing on a niche was limiting and would pigeonhole me. Again, stupid teenager who thinks he's an adult.
Then, in April 2002, Roger Ebert reviewed Jason X and made a minor reference to the review of the same film on Classic-Horror (written by a long-time Rue Morgue contributor who occasionally sent whatever that magazine wouldn't take to me). Seeing the website's name in print by someone who I respected the hell out of (even when I didn't agree with him -- especially when I didn't agree with him) was huge. I brought Classic-Horror back from the dead, began working on a redesign, put together a new team of writers, and had one of the most prolific and satisfying periods of website productivity in my life. That tiny bit of text launched the next 10 years of the site.
.
Five years on, in 2007, I was reading Ebert's site as I did on weekly basis. Specifically, I was checking out his thoughts on the AFI's updated 100 Years... 100 Movies list. In his reaction, he took a cheap shot at what he called "Dead Teenager Movies", saying, "if you were to see all 100 films on the AFI list, by the end of that experience, you would no longer desire to see a Dead Teenager Movie. (Yes, there could be a great Dead Teenager Movie. Please send me a list of the 100 greatest.)."
I took umbrage and shot off an email to Ebert. Which he then published. I did not agree with his response and I didn't think he really responded to my issues directly, but it was kind of a surreal experience. It lead to being contacted by another horror critic and we eventually went through the process of putting together the list of 100 Greatest Dead Teenager Movies requested (that list is sadly no longer online).
Now, keep in mind throughout all of this that one of the reasons that I started Classic-Horror.com in 1999 was that I didn't like so-called Dead Teenager Movies (or slasher films as they are more popularly known). In the intervening years, I'd found that I'd enjoyed some of them, but more than that, I found the whole subgenre fascinating in how it had a template that was built from component parts in bits and pieces in the 1960s and 1970s before it sort of became itself with Halloween in 1978 and then reached self-awareness in 1980 with Friday the 13th. I liked watching the various permutations within the structure of the subgenre and how different directors picked which "rules" they would follow and which components they would use (no single slasher film/series follows the template the exact same way, to the point where my saying there is a template is a bit misleading). What's especially fascinating is that the majority of this work occurred in a very short span of time. The golden age of the slasher film, where it was a major box office force, was only about six years -- 1978 to 1984. There were still some successful slashers after that, mostly franchise sequels, but the zeitgeist had gone.
I really should make a vid of the above paragraph at some point. Anyway.
I still found most of the individual films repellent or boring, however, but to say that so-called great cinema could somehow replace the "low cinema" of Dead Teenager Movies/slashers was really grating to me. I expected better of Ebert. People love what they love and film doesn't exist in a vacuum. We are built by our experiences with films, whether they focus on Charle Foster Kane's last words or the death gurgle of a bubble-headed co-ed whose name is probably unimportant overall.
I'll tell you something. I love Friday the 13th Part VI (I otherwise loathe that whole series). It's the point in the franchise where they realize they've created an icon, realize that the iconography has robbed their monster of some of his potential scariness (not that they ever really used that potential, but I digress), and decide to just fucking run with it. It's an absolute blast of self-aware murderous hijinks. And you know what? That doesn't take away from the fact that I love The Godfather or Casablanca or Singin' in the Rain or Lawrence of Arabia or Vertigo. And the fact that I love those films doesn't mean I stop loving Friday the 13th Part VI or Sleepaway Camp or A Nightmare on Elm Street. These things can co-exist.
Bringing this back to Ebert: the correspondence and the related conversations I had with other critics really brought my sense of purpose into focus. Horror was important. It had something to say and any study of cinema that ignored its voice was missing an entire dimension in its analysis. Ebert's dismissal of a small, often disdained part of something I overall loved made that love stronger and more complete and put the fire in my heart to defend it and fight for its relevance. Again, the website went through a strong creative period where I wrote some of the best reviews of my career.
That got really long. I apparently have a lot of feelings pent up on various things. Ahem.
Anyway. I'll miss you, Roger. The way you communicated your feelings on movies was unparalleled. When you loved a movie, it was sublime. When you hated a movie, the flames of enmity burned through your words. But where you really were different was when a film bored you. There you were able to riff on movies in general and the expectations we hold for them and any number of other subjects, all loosely tied to the film under the glass -- and somehow all of that divergence from the movie communicated exactly your feelings on it.
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no subject
Date: 2013-04-05 01:06 am (UTC)He wrote a really beautiful article about death and dying that I read today: http://slnm.us/q6fb2mF
no subject
Date: 2013-04-05 01:20 am (UTC)I will miss him, too. I feel like he was my touchstone for movies all my life. I can't believe he's gone.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-05 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-05 10:31 pm (UTC)