Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

suntimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 171 posts

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#71

Post by tomjen3 »

bitwize wrote: post #35
suyash wrote: post #15

Someone needs to find 100% cure against this deadly disease. So much money is spent on cancer research every year and what are the results..almost zero.

As it turns out, fighting cancer is hard. Really, really fucking hard. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Or rather our own cells, mutated through a million different gene changes with a million different causes. Progress is being made every day; it only seems like nothing compared to the massive multidimensional scope of the problem.

I am not quite sure that makes sense - polio is was pretty complex too and yet there weren't that many years between the early attemps by Maurice Brodie (36) and Jonas Salks success (52).

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#72

Post by zwieback »

Roger Ebert on the mystery of how the rice cooker knows your rice is done:

"How does it know? There are no dials and settings on the Pot. As far as you can tell, there is only a heating element beneath. There doesn't look like room for anything else to hide. How does the Pot know how long to cook the rice? It is a mystery of the Orient. Don't ask questions you don't need the answers to. The point here is to save you some time and money. If you want gourmet cooking, you aren't going to learn about it here."

source: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_u...

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#73

Post by wahnfrieden »

barce wrote: post #63
nsxwolf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no replacement. I honestly can't see myself reading movie reviews ever again.

Yes, Ebert was the only critic who could tell you how to improve as a film maker. His integrity was incorruptible. He knew things about film that none of the critics around today seem to know: a complete knowledge of films of the past, what it takes to make a film since he did one himself in the 60s, and how to make a film better. He will be terribly missed.

He comes from an old school of critics. There are plenty other good ones today, they're just not as fortunate with the media exposure Ebert got.

Some of my favorites are Glenn Kenny, David Bordwell, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, and others I'm missing.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#74

Post by gnosis »

JPKab wrote: post #43
tptacek wrote: post #13

Fitzgerald said "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Ebert seemed to have a knack for thinking all the thoughts simultaneously, and then getting their product onto a page: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/win_ben_steins_mind.... http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/how_i_am_a_roman_cat... One of t…

Wow. The Fitzgerald quote is amazing. Thanks for sharing. As a kid growing up in a poor, rural community, I wasn't exposed to much intellectual writing. The exception was the reprint in the local paper of Ebert's movie reviews, and of course seeing him on one of the two channels that came in on the antenna. When so many around me thought that being dissatisfied with the intellectual equivalent of McDonald's was eliti…

It's a sad comment on society that Ebert is considered an intellectual.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#75

Post by wahnfrieden »

webwanderings wrote: post #56

I was bowled over by Ebert's fascination with Dark City and I really liked it the first time I watched. However, many years later, I watched it again and it left me bewildered as to why I liked this movie in the first. As much as I like and respect Roger Ebert, I think he was dead wrong on his fascination with this movie. Great movies do not fall off of the imaginative pedestal, only the bad one does. As a profession…

Many of the great directors since the late 50's/60's have come from a background in film criticism. Analysis can help a lot. Criticism isn't exclusively about making value judgments.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#76

Post by rodgerd »

sho_hn wrote: post #24

While it might be cheap to remember a critic by something as sensationalist as a scorcher - and Ebert was of a higher caliber than to build a career on the entertainment value of them - his review of "Highlander 2" has been a favorite of mine for its good-natured bickering about the gaping holes in the film's logic: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19... (Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/201…

Your final paragraph was Ebert's great value for me: there are no shortage of critics who can tell me interesting things about the canon of great films; there are almost none amongst them who can also meet less elevated fare on its own ground.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#78

Post by enneff »

chjj wrote: post #53
wcfields wrote: post #12

. I'll just leave one of my favorite quotes from Ebert about a movie that is actually one of my all time favorite comedy. "This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels." [1] - Roger Ebert review of "Freddy Got Fingered"; April 20, 2001 [1] http…

I'm just going to link to one of my favorite reviews of his. You can __taste__ the contempt he has for this movie and all its characters in his words: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19... I'll also never forget when Ebert lambasted that ridiculous "Benjamin Button" movie. At the time, I felt like he was the only one on earth that agreed with me. The film recieved nothing but praise, and I w…

While it was satisfying to watch him hate the films I hate, it was incredibly validating to see him love the films I love.

Synecdoche, New York http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20... Paris, Texas http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19...

(I just notice the similar form of those film titles. Curious!)

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#79

Post by harveyj »

suyash wrote: post #15

Someone needs to find 100% cure against this deadly disease. So much money is spent on cancer research every year and what are the results..almost zero.

A "cure for cancer" is roughly the equivalent to saying "a cure for disease". Ph.D Comics did a great piece on this a few years back.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1162

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#80

Post by Cowen »

sho_hn wrote: post #24

While it might be cheap to remember a critic by something as sensationalist as a scorcher - and Ebert was of a higher caliber than to build a career on the entertainment value of them - his review of "Highlander 2" has been a favorite of mine for its good-natured bickering about the gaping holes in the film's logic: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19... (Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/201…

> I think what set Ebert apart is that he consistently judged films in the context of their ambitions.

A great example of this was his review of The Human Centipede. He said that the film perfectly accomplished its ambitions, but those ambitions were so dark, so far outside the norm that his rating system was simply incapable of properly rating the film. In his own words[1]:

> I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.

[1]http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...

Post reply on HN