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Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

suntimes.com

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Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#111

Post by vacri »

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…

the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function

This is the same guy who said "video games cannot be art, and I will not consider debate about it". The second part in particular was what I found disturbing.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#112

Post by xentronium »

KevinMS wrote: post #103

What can you say about a film reviewer that gives Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3.5 out of 4 stars? Useless. I don't get all this praise I'm reading here. Despite being witty, a national treasure, and whatever, he had one core job to do, and he was terrible at it.

I don't understand all the hate on the episode one. Except for Jar Jar Binks, the movie was quite entertaining, actually.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#113

Post by georgeorwell »

michaelochurch wrote: post #108
gnosis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This idea that new forms of media (film, TV) are innately anti-intellectual just because the classics were in writing is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong. Reading is important, the classics are important. But the idea that you have to focus in "old stuff" to be intellectual is absurd.

gnosis didn't say anything about film or new media. I'd be really pretty surprised if gnosis believed there weren't "intellectual" (read: thoughtful) things to say about film. That said, he didn't explain why it's sad that Ebert was considered an intellectual either, so who knows.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#114

Post by michaelochurch »

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.

Cancer is about two hundred diseases, at least. It's a case of undesirable evolution: cells evolve toward radical individual fitness at the expense of the organism. The body has ways of protecting against that, but the most "fit" cancer cells can sometimes overcome those. It's an ongoing arms race. This selection phenomenon (clonal evolution) similar to anti-biotic resistance is what makes it so hard to treat.

This is one reason why I have little patience for creationists. One of the most important problems (curing cancer) is an issue directly involving evolution (at the cellular level).

The cancer research is returning a lot of yield, but this is just a very hard problem. The body has about 10 trillion cells. Some are good, some are bad. The bad ones become increasingly able to survive treatments due to clonal evolution. The good ones die as well, because these are systemic treatments (highly powerful drugs) that interfere with cell reproduction. You have to kill all the bad ones, or the cancer will probably return. If you kill too many good ones, the patient dies a horrible death that's much worse than a regular cancer death. It's not easy to do.

It's just a fucking hard problem. We should be putting 10-20 times as much money into it. How many things are more important than fighting cancer? Not these fucking social media startups.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#115

Post by tptacek »

vacri wrote: post #111
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…

the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function This is the same guy who said "video games cannot be art, and I will not consider debate about it ". The second part in particular was what I found disturbing.

I admired him for that. He's not a technophobe. It was a quirky, provocative position to take, and not the easy one.

I don't think games had any reason to feel threatened by him.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#118

Post by stephencanon »

podperson wrote: post #60
nsxwolf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not a replacement, but my favorite movie reviewer is Anthony Lane (New Yorker).

Yes, both Anthony Lane and David Denby are quite good (though very different in style from Ebert).

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#119

Post by sage_joch »

KevinMS wrote: post #103

What can you say about a film reviewer that gives Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace 3.5 out of 4 stars? Useless. I don't get all this praise I'm reading here. Despite being witty, a national treasure, and whatever, he had one core job to do, and he was terrible at it.

He was an incredible writer. Any critic who reviews as many movies as he did will get the occasional one wrong (see his rating for Fight Club for another example). As an aside, I recommend his review of The Wizard of Oz. I never really understood why the movie was considered great until I read that.

Re: Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

#120

Post by tptacek »

georgeorwell wrote: post #105
pbreit wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because he chose to primarily comment about movies in public? And you don't consider movies worthy of intellectual commentary?

There's nothing wrong with film criticism. Ebert's 4-star ratings are even a good heuristic for picking something to watch. All of his "great movies" are generally recognized as such. And he certainly knew a lot more details about film than probably anyone else. The problem with Ebert's reviews is that they offer very little in the way of insight, analysis, or depth. Instead, they are generally straightforward exposi…

It's an unfortunate oversimplification to reduce Ebert to his Sun-Times reviews. They were well-written and erudite, but they weren't meant to be extended meditations on the art of cinema. His review-writing had customers, and he gave the customers what they needed and wanted. Ebert had other venues for deeper kinds of writing, and was prolific in them. Ebertfest, for instance, was well-known for frame-by-frame analyses of important movies. Or read how he arrived at and massaged his top 10 films of all time, or what he wrote about Ozu or Herzog.

But I'd pause before stipulating even that his review writing was broad. Even within the medium of mass-market reviews, Ebert was impactful. Think about how his star system worked, so that Donner's Superman shared a rating with Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, and that somehow still made sense. Or the way he managed his brand, or syndicated his show with Siskel.

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