Why is roger ebert famous

He reached more movie fans via television and print than any other critic. He became the first movie critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in He was also the first film critic to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Ebert was the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in from cancer.

His reviews were syndicated to more than newspapers in the US and abroad. He teamed up with Gene Siskel, film critic for the Chicago Tribune a fierce rival of the Sun-Times , to create the show "Sneak Previews" on public television. It was famous for the phrase "two thumbs up" which they trademarked. However they often disagreed on their opinion of a movie. He wrote more than 20 books, mostly collections of reviews, but also others, such as " Perfect London Walk ".

He was the winner of several awards and was nominated for many more, including 10 Emmy Awards. Although Roger Ebert's fame has been more enduring, they were "Siskel and Ebert" at the time. They were talented, smart critics, but the key was accessible. Siskel and Ebert were in the middle, also literally, being from Chicago.

It's impossible for critic s to have the same impact, now. Both were genuine newspapermen, but if Siskel was still vaguely elitist in fact, a Yale graduate , it was easier to imagine Ebert bending elbows with Jimmy Breslin, et al.

Edit: I may have overstated here. They were both popular, but Ebert was closer to an everyman. Two other factors: self-promotion and longevity. Ebert had the necessary knack of occasionally stirring controversy, as with his oft-mentioned review of Night of the Living Dead , which decried parents taking kids to see the film.

He also panned Blue Velvet. Right or wrong, he got attention. Longevity: They met a need for televised film criticism, a half-hour per week, but Ebert outlived Siskel by 14 years. Even so, he remained prolific, continuing to work despite major health issues.

This adds to his legend; in this sense, he bears comparison to Christopher Reeve. The bottom line: Roger Ebert was a great Pulitzer-winning film critic. If he wasn't better than the other greats, he was in the right place at the right time, and made the most of it. Roger Ebert is, indeed, just one man - but a man who reviewed thousands of movies in his career, and a man whose reviews reached millions of people. To donate to The Ebert Center, click here.

It felt right to commemorate the second anniversary of Roger Ebert's passing with a celebration of his work. The entire front page of the site—which makes space for 13 reviews—is hereby given over to Roger today and tomorrow. We've tried to select pieces that give a sense of the length of his career and the breadth of his talent. You'll see a reviews here that you've encountered or heard quoted many times, and some others that you've never seen before.

Taken together, we hope they'll give a sense of the totality of what he represented. While Roger's work was quotable, it was much more than that. His reviews say a lot in few words. He had a knack for finding the essence of a film in a fairly tight space, and for making singular observations that lodged in your mind long after you'd read the piece, sometimes to the point where it became impossible to watch or think about a particular movie without remembering what Roger said about it.

This is the first review Roger ever published in a professional newspaper. He was The opening paragraph is vintage Roger, situating the film within the context of then-current trends in filmmaking while also giving you a sense of how those same trends were becoming tired through shallow misuse: " Georges Lautner's Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave.

One of Roger's most famous early reviews was of " Bonnie and Clyde ," a sardonic and tonally daring take on a Depression-era crime spree that spoke directly to the spirit of the late-'60s counterculture. Written by Robert Benton and directed by Arthur Penn , the movie mixed jaunty populist anti-establishment comedy and shocking brutality in a way that felt new.

Although it was later treated as a milestone and a masterpiece—a consensus classic—it was off-putting to many mainstream critics at the time; few reviewers of any profile supported it with great enthusiasm. The New Yorker 's Pauline Kael was one. Roger was another. His review gives a powerful sense of the movie's unique energy—nobody who saw the film after reading this could plausibly claim that he didn't warn them what they were getting into. But it also bridges the gap between straightforward, consumer-oriented reviewing and the kind practiced in The New Yorker , The Village Voice and Film Comment.

In plain language, it explores the film's aesthetics, and connects them to what was going on at that moment in the United States during an especially tumultuous decade, when violent antiwar protests and bloody images from Vietnam were appearing in mainstream newspapers and magazines and on TV screens. But perhaps at this time, it is useful to be reminded that bullets really do tear skin and bone, and that they don't make nice round little holes like the Swiss cheese effect in Fearless Fosdick.

We are living in a period when newscasts refer casually to 'waves' of mass murders, Richard Speck's photograph is sold on posters in Old Town and snipers in Newark pose for Life magazine perhaps they are busy now getting their ballads to rhyme. Violence takes on an unreal quality. The Barrow Gang reads its press clippings aloud for fun. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. By conservative estimate, Ebert reviewed at least 10, movies during a career that spanned from to Most of these films were graded on a scale of four stars to one-half star, but I Spit On Your Grave was awarded zero.

His exhaustive website, RogerEbert. For Ebert, the zero-star grade was locked in a glass case, to be broken only in case of emergency. Barnum said about bad publicity. His newspaper columns and TV appearances slamming the film helped turn I Spit On Your Grave into a minor box office success with a long legacy including a series of remakes and an upcoming sequel.

This is not to say that Ebert was wrong to condemn the film so harshly, but rather to point out what a zero-star review from him represented.

Roger Ebert was the most famous and influential American film critic who ever lived. Before answering this question, maybe we should ask: what makes someone the most famous and influential American film critic who ever lived? Ebert was not necessarily fated for the job. He joined the Chicago Sun-Times as a reporter and feature writer in at age twenty-four.

Ebert was acquainted with the classics through his campus film society, but by his own admission, he learned on the job. He was one of the youngest major critics in the country, and on these revolutionary films he found himself on the right side of the generation gap. In , Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. Natural rivals, the two critics parlayed their anti-chemistry into lucrative media careers, doing regular Sunshine Boys shtick for Johnny Carson and David Letterman.

There was Pauline Kael, known for her intoxicating prose no one better described sensual experience of watching a movie and merciless certainty she claimed never to see a movie twice. Andrew Sarris brought the auteur theory to America, helping popularize the idea of the director as artist. Manny Farber found art in the highbrow and lowbrow, and scorned the middlebrow.

Hoberman explores how films reflect the eras and dominant ideologies from which they emerge. Armond White specializes in contrarian, often racially charged takes that seek to unmask the hidden prejudices of the critical community. John Simon was a proud snob and aesthetic conservative with a Platonic approach to film as art. Why Ebert and not any of these writers? All of them are niche tastes; Ebert was the exact midpoint between a scholar and a hack.

As a prose stylist, Pauline Kael wanted to dazzle the reader. Ebert was also a good writer, but his first-person reviews are plainspoken, digressive, proudly subjective, and unintimidating. Consider this passage from his review of the Jackie Chan vehicle The Tuxedo :.

I have been waiting for a dehydrating villain for some time. My wife is of the opinion that I do not drink enough water. She believes the proper amount is a minimum of eight glasses a day. In Hawaii last summer she had the grandchildren so worked up they ran into the bedroom every morning to see if Grandpa Roger had turned to dust. He wrote for the Friday-night moviegoer, and tried to find the good in anything sometimes a little too hard, as his three-star appraisals of the Garfield films can attest.

His reviews sometimes strike an awkward note between personal essay and consumer report: he wanted to articulate his feelings about a movie while also predicting how the target audience might respond.