My brother woke me up this morning and told me Roger Ebert died, I was barely awake. The hours passed and my brain couldn't quite process it. As a Taoist I believe the afterlife has a lot of options, not so much that one not believing in one faith bars you from an afterlife but rather that an afterlife believes in you. This sense of metaphysics is probably how I took the death of my surrogate grandfather who was the granddad in place of the two granddads I never knew so well.
But Roger Ebert believed in more than just what any old person believed in, he believed in something that is very difficult to have faith in even beyond the struggles of man and religion. He believed in cinema, even as he saw the worst of what Hollywood had become in later years he never gave into the hateful critic mould and retained his humanity to the very end.
A lot of people are weighing in on this. I'm not as familiar with Siskel and Ebert as say, American Gen X-ers are or 80s kids in the USA are. I grew up with something called David And Margaret At The Movies, which was on SBS weekly and ran by the same formula but had some kind of Australian flavour to it that's hard to explain to somebody who didn't grow up here. But Roger Ebert I think retains a level of dignity as a critic beyond nostalgia goggles.
Roger Ebert was to me, in my early University days, the last bastion of giving a damn about the artform you devoted your life to. Ebert never phoned it in, never faked out an opinion to please others. A sellout he was not. He was the emblem of caring about what wonders human creativity could bring rather than giving into the depression and misery life can sometimes throw at you.
Last night I was even peeking at Kindle previews of some of Roger Ebert's books, thinking he'd be around to write many more of them. When I woke up the next morning I found out something that made me realise how wrong I was about that.
As a mildly disabled, high functioning autistic man, Roger Ebert is up there with Christopher Reeve with disabled icons who inspire even the most handicapped of humanity to achieve, despite these great challenges. The man was a movie critic who lost his ability to speak, yet was enabled by technology to continue reviewing films. We live in a world where a Youtube channel called The Blind Film Critic exists, and finally all of a sudden nobody laughs at this idea. People will always look at what they think is silly with disdain at first, but if it offers something of great value, they will take note.
Roger Ebert was a vanguard against haterade in an encroaching digital future. We may not be able to replace Roger Ebert, but be aware: there are films that Roger Ebert will never be able to review. Some good, some bad, some ugly or beautiful. And there will come a time when people have to appraise these works of cinema that the coming generations have made. Because these films have not yet been committed to cinema. Otherwise Roger Ebert would have tried his hardest to give his opinion.
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