Critique

Honestly? The first time I saw Roger Ebert was on Public Television. He was sitting "across the aisle" from another Chicago-based film critic, Gene Siskel. Together they provided a Waldorf and Statler commentary on the films of the 1980's. I watched patiently, but with a certain degree of impatience since I was also reading Pauline Kael's reviews in "The New Yorker" at that time. How did this pair of Second City-types hope to match Ms. Kael's level of insight and consideration in their three-minute flurries of opinion? To top it off, these two gentlemen distilled their views on particular films still further by giving them a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down."
As a student of film, specifically in college where I took actual courses with "film" in the title, I was put off by this Consumer Reports approach to film criticism. I was reading Andrew Sarris, Sergei Eisenstein,  and studied with Stan Brakhage and Bruce Kawin. What could I possibly have to gain from watching this Laurel and Hardy duo on PBS as they carried on in their, at times, regrettably personal complaints about each other and their visions of the world of film?
As it turns out, quite a lot. Simply by watching their show and playing along, agreeing and disagreeing with their brief but pointed assays on popular culture, I found myself developing my own point of view about movies and the way I saw them. More often than not, I found myself on Ebert's side of the aisle. That's why, when it was announced that he would be on our campus as part of the World Events Conference, I decided to go and see him. He gave a lecture that was a shot-by-shot dissection of "Casablanca." Far from a clinicial dissection of a work of art, it was obvious from the way Mister Ebert spoke of the film and the story of its creation, that he truly loved film. Everything from "Citizen Kane" to "Beyond The Valley of the Dolls." The latter of which was Roger Ebert's lone attempt at creating a film rather than commenting on them. Unfortunate, but true. It made his fondness for all things cinematic even more profound.
And so I started reading Roger Ebert's reviews. I found them every bit as clever and pointed as those by Ms. Kael. They also tended to skew more to my own sensibilities. That's why I felt a twinge when, fourteen years ago, Gene Siskel passed away. And that's why last week when Roger Ebert succumbed to the cancer that had ravaged his body over the past ten years, I felt a loss. So at last, the balcony is closed.