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Posts Tagged ‘Roger Ebert’
Roger Ebert’s Best Films of 2008
2008/12/13In 2002 Roger Ebert called Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny the worst movie in the history of Cannes.
So Gallo called Ebert a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader” and put a hex on him, wishing him colon cancer. Ebert responded: “although I am fat, one day I will be thin, but Mr. Gallo will still have been the director of The Brown Bunny.”
Gallo’s hex was a couple feet off target.
Ironically, Roger Ebert’s battle with thyroid cancer has made him a very skinny man. It has also robbed him of his ability to speak, and driven him off television where he and the late Gene Siskel, and later Richard Roeper, starred in syndication. Part of the show’s appeal, were undoubtedly the arguments between the two rival Chicago newspaper writers (judging by the video below they may have been alcohol-induced). But it was obvious that underneath, these men cared for each other a great deal and shared a passion for cinema. Watching At the Movies over the years made me a more critical thinker and a smarter observer of not just film, but television, books, sports, art, life.
This fall, At the Movies was completely reworked into a saccharine shell of its former self starring two young guys named Ben from E! and Turner Movies who tell you to “see it or skip it.” Skip it. According to Wikipedia -“The new “At the Movies,” which premiered in September 2008, has already earned raspberries from some critics. Audiences don’t seem impressed, either. Ratings for the first two months have slumped 23%, to 1.7 million total viewers, compared with the same period last year, according to figures from Nielsen “ (I’ve always said that Nielsen is a great company). Gene Siskel is no doubt giving it a thumbs down somewhere too.
And Roger Ebert is still writing.
The best films of 2008… and there were a lot of them
by Roger Ebert
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081205/COMMENTARY/812059997/1023
