I can’t really tell you when I first started reading Roger Ebert’s reviews, only that I’ve been reading them longer than I can remember, longer than I even knew who he was in fact. I didn’t know him as a TV personality and have no memory of watching his show until the Roeper days to be honest. To me, Ebert was simply the guy who wrote about movies every week in the paper. I loved movies, so I read his reviews even though I didn’t actually see the vast majority of the movies he was writing about. The first review I can recall having an impact on me was his review of the Jim Carrey movie The Mask. He liked it, surprising in retrospect because my adult self can’t really stand that movie, but was surprised that he liked it because he didn’t like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. This blew my young, adolescent mind. How can somebody not like Jim Carrey? Pet Detective shaped a great deal of my preteen sense of humor. I used to say “Alrighty then” so often that I’d like to travel back in time and kick my 12 year old ass for being such an obnoxious little shit.

Still, I wasn’t mad at the disagreement. Instead, it did something else to me. I finally noticed his name at the top of the review and started paying more attention each week to his write-ups. Week after week he’d talk about movies, sometimes trashing them and sometimes praising them, but always confident in his opinion. I still mostly enjoyed reading about movies, but I also started noticing things in my own film watching that he would talk about. Over the years I’d learn to spot flat characters, plot contrivances, over-reliance on special effects. To say that Ebert taught me more about movies than anybody else is an understatement. He taught me virtually everything I know. Sure, some of that knowledge has been reinforced by friends, professors, books and other critics, but the root of everything was with Roger Ebert. I didn’t always agree with him, in fact would argue vehemently against many of his reviews, but one of the greatest things he taught me is that it doesn’t matter whether I agree with him. It’s not his job as a critic to cater to me. He said it best: “The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own.” I have trouble articulating just what this statement means to me. This isn’t just the attitude I have towards movies and critics, it’s the backbone of my philosophy on life, really. And if movies can teach us something important about our lives and the greater world around us, a good critic is about as useful a tool as we can have.

The above quote is in his terrific response to the hate mail he got when he dared suggest Transformers 2 isn’t a good movie. I encourage you to read it and it will give you an idea on just what a critic is actually for and the amazing wit of Roger Ebert. Occasionally I’ve been referred to as an elitist by friends or family, and this rebuttal is just perfect.

That somebody would refer to him as an elitist has always been funny to me, because he’s never come off that way to me. He’s sort of stuck in the middle in some ways, too artsy for the mainstream crowd and too mainstream for the art crowd. He never dismissed a movie simply because it’s a summer blockbuster nor did he reward a movie for being artistic. He was honest, and often brutal, and frequently hilarious.

I’m not really a critic, I just have a blog where I write about stuff. I’ve also moved on a bit in regards to my choice of critics I read, or at least expanded. Ebert still is, or was now, a weekly read, but I’ve found others whose opinions and writings I enjoy as much as him. Though I still have yet to find one I cherish as much. All I can really say is that Roger Ebert has given me years of enjoyment and insight and I’m eternally thankful for his role in this world. I’ll miss reading him every week, but I guess it is somewhat comforting that even a nerd like me hasn’t read every review he’s ever written. Which means I’ve got years of his archives to go through. I’ll probably start tonight and I encourage you to do the same.