Roger EbertRessenyes

Honest, heartbreaking, and so well written. For anyone who loves film.

A very moreish book - cause it's a collection of shortish reviews and they all make pretty easy reading, you just keep reading the next one. Only enjoyable if you like reading short reviews/summaries of bad films - it's exactly what it says on the tin - but great if you like that. The summaries are usually far more enjoyable than the film itself and although Ebert isn't a proper comedian, he's witty enough that I've laughed out loud quite a bit and smiled even more. Sometimes his moral and political judgements are very, very off (for example, his portrayal of a few films where women are constantly violent to men as men-hating... alas! he has no idea) and there are some reviews which aren't up to much - whether cause the film is so average or cause of Ebert's poor writing or hang-ups. It's definitely enjoyable if you like reading about bad movies but the quality is pretty variable. The great reviews are a lot of fun though.

Starting out this read like it was going to be a dry recitation of biographical facts – where Ebert was born, what schools he went to, so on and so on – and then somewhere along the way it turned into an intimate portrayal of a truly remarkable life. Of course the main subject was Ebert himself but the way he wrote about his own life became a perceptive look at the world he lived in and those around him. I ended up with 14 pages of annotations in my ereader, too many to include here, but one that I especially liked was this quote, “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough”. It reminded me of this line from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, “If a book is well written, I always find it too short”, and that brings up my one and only criticism of this memoir – it’s too short.½

Short. Essay and lists. Extremely short.

New hobby for us - we watch one of the films Ebert writes on in the evening, then read his essay aloud over coffee the next morning and discuss. It's a bit like attending a film seminar. First we form our own opinion, then we let Ebert tell us what he thinks made the movie under discussion great. Most of the time we would feel it was a great film without his input, a few times he was able to convince us. Once in a while, he doesn't convince us, but we can understand why he thinks so. In one case, Body Heat, we still felt this was not a good movie. But that's part of the fun of reading a book like this. Another bit of fun: in nearly every essay, there was a factual error as Ebert recounted the plot. Was this some form of hidden trivia contest? One last thing: Ebert knows how to construct an essay. He saves some valuable insight, or twist, or detail for the very end. Recommended.

One of the reasons Roger Ebert is such a beloved critic is that he so thoroughly loves movies -- and that love runs through this book. It is a genuine pleasure to revisit, or be introduced to, some of the greatest movies ever made in the company of someone who doesn't just comment on their technical or creative achievements, but evokes their emotional content and significance as well.

Very enjoyable - avoids the trap of a lot of nonfiction/essay collections I've read recently where you get 3 samey variations on the same theme (probably because Ebert was writing for so long). The section on film criticism at the end feels very off and inside-baseball compared to the rest of the collection, but doesn't sour the experience totally.

I waffled between 3 and 4 stars for this one for a while. Call it three and a half.

I basically never read memoirs or autobiographies, but I was surprised to spot a used copy of this in the film section at the Book Barn and snapped it up because, well, it's Roger Ebert.

I've always thought Ebert was a solid writer, but Life Itself desperately needed another pass through the editors. Some of the chapters show a little too plainly as having been written for his blog and adapted later to act as chapters in his memoirs. Some of the chapters almost repeat verbatim information we already got in other chapters. Still others are weirdly out of place chronologically (maybe this is my ignorance of the form showing, but it seems to me that if your first chapter is about childhood and your last chapter is ruminating on death, the stuff in the middle should come in some kind of order). The overall effect ends up being less "a unique man looks back on his life" and more "Grandpa tells the same stories for two hours".

I feel like I've been a little harsh, though. There are definitely some good parts here - Ebert could have been a spectacular travel writer in some alternate universe, looking at some of the portions talking about his wanderings in Europe and Africa. The picture he paints of working at the Sun-Times as a young man is fascinating as well. For much of the book it seems like Ebert is very guarded about certain matters, but towards the end of the book he opens up a bit more. In a way, I'm frustrated by it, because if the rest of the book had been as good as the last few portions this would have been a very different review.

Overall, I'd say that I'm glad that I read this, but at the same time, I'm not in a hurry to read it again.

This collection of movie reviews by film critic Roger Ebert concentrates on the turkeys, the stinkers, and the flops -- as one might expect from the title.

Best taken in small doses, the reviews take unerring aim at miscasting, plot failures, editing disasters, and atrocious performances. It might better have been organized along those lines, rather than simply set up in alphabetical order by title.

Ebert also has a tendency to wander off-topic, at least when reviewing movies he doesn't like. Occasionally he devotes more words to the director's last hit or a better film with a similar plot than he spends on the flick he's supposedly writing about.

Quibbles aside, movie fans will undoubtedly find opinions they agree with as well as those they disagree with. Less avid fans of the cinema will at least have a list of movies to avoid. And pretty well everyone will come away with a favorite quote about badness -- "This movie is eye candy for the blind", or "watching it is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time". My personal favorite was "the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance."

Ebert’s path from only child growing up in Urbana, Illinois, to American’s best known film critic (along with his partner Gene Siskel is a true joy to read. I don’t know how this book escaped my notice for eight years. It’s a memoir that anyone can enjoy, but being a journalism major in college and having taught journalism, it held more interest for me than the average memoir. Stories about Chicago will fit the bill for anyone in love with that city. Ebert knew every square inch of the Windy City including all of the famous, not so famous, and infamous bars in the city. He hung out with many of the icons of Chicago including Studs Terkel. His interviews with all of the major Hollywood stars during the better part of four decades are fascinating. Ebert’s battle with cancer, which left him disfigured, is a major part of the end of the story. Never once, however, did he resort to sympathy soliciting as he talks about his condition with intellect and logic. His discussion of religion, including his own humanistic beliefs is candid and refreshing.
I really enjoyed this book even though, of course, I knew its sad ending. Ebert was a sensitive journalist whose writing skills were surpassed only by his faith in the industry he spent his adult lifetime covering. I highly recommend “Life Itself.”

you just can't beat Ebert

Roger Ebert tells a damn fine story. His memoir is full of fond and unflinching recollections, an essential kindness and wonderfully entertaining encounters with friends and celebrities alike. His attitude toward life, looking back after painful lessons and his life-changing battle with cancer strikes a deep chord with me, a kindred spirit and admirable man who was much more than just a "movie critic." Really loved this book.

I must admit, I've only read the reviews of films that I haven't seen in here, which probably amounts to a third of the book in total.

Ebert has really, really seen these films. Most of them, according to himself, several times, and an additional time in order to write this book. A lot of them are classics, and a few of them - e.g. "The Wizard of Oz" - aren't included in a lot of critics' tomes.

He opens the book with an introduction where three paragraphs stood out to me:

The ability of an audience to enter into the narrative arc of a movie is being lost; do today’s audiences have the patience to wait for Harry Lime in The Third Man?

At Boulder and on other campuses, talking with the students, I found that certain names were no longer recognized. Even students majoring in film had never seen one by Buñuel, Bresson, or Ozu. They’d seen one or two titles by Ford and Wilder, knew a half-dozen Hitchcock classics, genuflected at Citizen Kane, knew the Star Wars pictures by heart, and sometimes uttered those words which marked them as irredeemably philistine: “I don’t like black and white.” Sixty of these films are in black and white, and three use b&w and color; you cannot know the history of the movies, or love them, unless you understand why b&w can give more, not less, than color.

Today even the most popular subtitled films are ignored by the national distribution oligarchy, mainstream movies are pitched at the teenage male demographic group, and the lines outside theaters are for Hollywood’s new specialty, B movies with A budgets.

While he may seem grumpy, there are obvious points to be made. Yes, most modern Hollywood flicks are crap, yes, the attention span of anybody today is Twitter and Reddit long (by which I mean that "too long, didn't read" is more of an axiom to some than a joke), but then again - his claims would be nothing if he didn't fess up and review with gusto, intelligence and terrific insight.

And that, my friend, he delivers.

From "The Big Sleep":

Working from Chandler’s original words and adding spins of their own, the writers (William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett) wrote one of the most quotable of screenplays: It’s unusual to find yourself laughing in a movie not because something is funny, but because it’s so wickedly clever. (Marlowe on the “nymphy” kid sister: “She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.”) Unlike modern crime movies which are loaded with action, The Big Sleep is heavy with dialogue. The characters talk and talk, just like in the Chandler novels; it’s as if there’s a competition to see who has the most verbal style.

On "Ikiru":

It is not so bad that he must die. What is worse is that he has never lived. “I just can’t die—I don’t know what I’ve been living for all these years,” he says to the stranger in the bar. He never drinks, but now he is drinking: “This expensive saki is a protest against my life up to now.”

[...]

I saw Ikiru first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and cost only a quarter. I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for two and a half hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Plato’s statement “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

On "JFK", which indeed questions how films should be "truthful":

Shortly after the film was released, I ran into Walter Cronkite and received a tongue-lashing, aimed at myself and my colleagues who had praised JFK. There was not, he said, a shred of truth in it. It was a mishmash of fabrications and paranoid fantasies. It did not reflect the most elementary principles of good journalism. We should all be ashamed of ourselves. I have no doubt Cronkite was correct, from his point of view. But I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions. My notion is that JFK is no more or less factual than Stone’s Nixon—or Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, Gladiator, Amistad, Out of Africa, My Dog Skip, or any other movie based on “real life.” All we can reasonably ask is that it be skillfully made, and seem to approach some kind of emotional truth.

Reviewing a film that is old could pose several problems, but if it's been remade a million times since, is harder; Ebert pulls this off with "Nosferatu":

To watch F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself. Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons, and more than thirty other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires. Max Schreck, who plays the vampire, avoids most of the theatrical touches that would distract from all the later performances, from Bela Lugosi to Christopher Lee to Frank Langella to Gary Oldman. The vampire should come across not like a flamboyant actor, but like a man suffering from a dread curse. Schreck plays the count more like an animal than like a human being; the art direction by Murnau’s collaborator, Albin Grau, gives him bat ears, clawlike nails, and fangs that are in the middle of his mouth like a rodent’s, instead of on the sides like a Halloween mask.

Check out the insight on "Raging Bull", one of the best films ever made according to myself:

Raging Bull is not a film about boxing, but about a man with paralyzing jealousy and sexual insecurity, for whom being punished in the ring serves as confession, penance, and absolution. It is no accident that the screenplay never concerns itself with fight strategy. For Jake LaMotta, what happens during a fight is controlled not by tactics, but by his fears and drives.

Martin Scorsese’s 1980 film was voted in three polls as the greatest film of the decade, but when he was making it, he seriously wondered if it would ever be released: “We felt like we were making it for ourselves.” Scorsese and Robert De Niro had been reading the autobiography of Jake LaMotta, the middleweight champion whose duels with Sugar Ray Robinson were a legend in the 1940s. They asked Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver (1976), to do a screenplay. The project languished while Scorsese and De Niro made the ambitious but unfocused musical New York, New York (1977) and then languished some more as Scorsese’s drug use led to a crisis. De Niro visited his friend in the hospital, threw the book on his bed, and said, “I think we should make this.” And the making of Raging Bull, with a screenplay further sculpted by Mardik Martin (Mean Streets [1973]), became therapy and rebirth for the filmmaker.

Raging Bull is the most painful and heart-rending portrait of jealousy in the cinema—an Othello for our times. It’s the best film I’ve seen about the low self-esteem, sexual inadequacy, and fear that lead some men to abuse women. Boxing is the arena, not the subject. LaMotta was famous for never being knocked down in the ring. There are scenes where he stands passively, his hands at his side, allowing himself to be hammered. We sense why he didn’t go down. He hurt too much to allow the pain to stop.

All in all: very insightful, almost a little too much for me, who's not a film critic or someone who's that deep into film. Still, Ebert a perfect juxtaposition to Anthony Lane's brilliant collection of his own reviews, titled "Nobody's Perfect".

I admit: I only read the reviews of films that I've seen, which amounted to something like a fourth of these. Those that I read, however, I mostly liked.

In the preface, Ebert confesses to having been mean and harsh in some instances. Anyway, it's sheer fun:

Armageddon (Directed by Michael Bay; starring Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck; 1998) Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any thirty seconds at random, and you’d have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.

On Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond":

The plot involves . . . excuse me for a moment, while I laugh uncontrollably at having written the words “the plot involves.” I’m back.

On "Jaws: The Revenge":

There is one other thing I can’t believe about Jaws the Revenge, and that is that on March 30, 1987, Michael Caine passed up his chance to accept his Academy Award in person because of his commitment to this movie. Why? Well, as the marine biologist in the movie explains, if you don’t go right back in the water after something terrible happens to you, you might be too afraid to ever go back in again. Maybe Caine was thinking that if he ever left the set, he could never bring himself to return.

On "Look Who’s Talking Now":

Look Who’s Talking Now (Directed by Tom Ropelewski; starring John Travolta, Kirstie Alley; 1993) Look Who’s Talking Now is a fairly misleading title for those who paid attention during English class, since the talkers are dogs, and so the title of course should be Look What’s Talking Now. Anyone who paid attention during English will also find innumerable other distressing elements in the film, including what teachers used to call “lack of originality and aptness of thought.”

All in all: quite funny, but often a little too angry for my taste (and I'm a fan of anger being used justly).

I enjoyed the parts about his life, but the profiles of various directors and actors tended to drag on.

I read only the movies that I was familiar with, Atlas Shrugged, Thor, Fanboys, Basic Instinct 2, yadda yadda. Entertaining but not particularly enlightening, which is... to be expected I suppose. But I did expect funny, passionate "I hate this movie, so so much" reviews instead of like, grumpy get-off-my-lawn rants. Instead of "A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length" the title should be like, "Meh. I don't get why you kids like these things."

Silly fun, and much too true.

Rating the writing, which is wonderful, though this started out on his blog and I'd read some of it before. Haven't tried any of the recipes but in a certain sense, they're only to be taken into consideration.

I enjoyed "Your Movie Sucks", and thought this one would be even better, because it might include more movies I'm familiar with. But that's not the case. It cuts off in 1999 and includes a ton of stinkers that I don't remember at all. (There's even a review of a MST3K movie, I thought that was a neat anachronism.)

This one seems to lack the vitriol that the sequel had. Probably because Ebert hadn't reached peak cynicism yet. I thought I'd enjoy hearing his witty evisceration of my nostalgic classics, but those were few and far between. It's too bad you can't buy just the reviews of the movies you want to read about.

Why or why did I find the second book first? The story of my life. Now I have to backtrack and read Book one too. The book is a collection of essays by Ebert discussing some of the greatest movies of all time.

This is not a second tier ranking after the films discussed in book one. It is simply a compilation of essays from Ebert based on his watching and re-watching of many of these films as well as reviews by he alone and those he worked on with Gene Siskel.

One thing I love about Ebert is the emotion he writes with when discussing these films. His true love for the medium as well as his deep knowledge of all things film, comes across in his writing.
The movies cross eras, genre’s and nationalities. From France to China, from Japan to Italy, from the United States and Kingdom’s to Russia, Ebert covers so many films that you are inspired yourself to seek out some of the more difficult to find titles.

Streaming has opened film buffs to a bevy of opportunities to see films that would have been restricted to their home countries or only available to true film buffs in obscure, hard to find places. Netflix, Hulu and others have opened doors not just to great movies but also great directors and character and leading actors who have not worked in the United States.

Roger Ebert’s untimely death was a huge loss for all of us. His love and warmth regarding films just pours out onto the page and you as a reader fall in love with film as you read. It is like having Ebert beside you bringing detail and ideas to your attention as you both eat popcorn with a tall coke and get lost in celluloid.

Enjoyed this audio book read by Edward Herrmann. Roger Ebert appears to be very honest about the highs and lows of his life. Interesting glances behind the scenes with interviews. Loved the story of a rejected contract with Disney because of incorrect rounding of 2/3 of one cent.

First chapters are great. They trace his rise to being America's foremost movie expert. The last chapters are way too much name dropping.

Thank you Roger Ebert, from the bottom of my heart, for seeing these films so that I am spared from doing so. Though there are a few that I disagree with you on, you at least reviewed these stinkers honestly and fairly.

Thank you Roger Ebert, from the bottom of my heart, for seeing these films so that I am spared from doing so. Though there are a few that I disagree with you on, you at least reviewed these stinkers honestly and fairly.

Thank you Roger Ebert, from the bottom of my heart, for seeing these films so that I am spared from doing so. Though there are a few that I disagree with you on, you at least reviewed these stinkers honestly and fairly.