Disgusting - that’s your instinctive response, pure repulsion.īut then, he’s asked a question, and Ebert’s eyes light up with the smile that his ruined face can no longer fully create.

You can see right through this fleshy noose to his neck behind it. Missing his lower jaw, due to a 2002 bout with cancer, the man at first glance is alarming, with that rubbery loop of lips and chin-skin, dangling unsupported by muscles, lower teeth or bone. The second is the sight of Ebert himself, in a hospital bed during those last months of his life. First is the sight of the Chicago Theatre’s marquee, declaring a celebration of life for Ebert, 1942–2013. Sharing the title he gave his 2011 autobiography, Life Itself throws us a couple of necessary shocks at the start. Ebert became even more prolific following his cancer surgery.Īnyway, back to Ebert. It became a cause célèbre, especially when it was not nominated for a best documentary Oscar that year, leading to an ongoing debate about how the Academy selects the films it honors. It’s directed by Steve James, whose Hoop Dreams (made with Frederick Marx in 1994) was an underdog movie that Ebert tirelessly talked and wrote about. This movie is itself a testament to Ebert’s generosity and his career-long drive to champion and sometimes befriend emerging filmmakers. The disease only seemed to make him, as a writer, more prolific and generous. Yet these guys made me love movies, even when I rarely got to see any.Īll this came back to me while watching Life Itself, the lovely, incomplete-seeming documentary about Roger Ebert’s life - particularly the last five months of it, before he died in 2013 after a leonine battle against cancer. I lived then in the deep north Georgia woods and wheedled my way to the cinema only a handful of times each year.

But I loved listening to the two of them together, Ebert and Siskel, arguing about movies I would probably never see. When I was a kid, he was just the fat guy on the sneak-preview show that turned up sometimes on the PBS station.

Siskel and Ebert redefined and magnified the role of film critics.

Life Itself by Roger Ebert