Roger Ebert (1942-2013)

Film critic Roger Ebert has died aged 70 after a long battle with cancer. Perhaps the most high-profile and revered critic in the film industry, Ebert was a regular columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and a TV critic for 31 years. Even though I never met him personally, I had nothing but the utmost respect for his opinion - an opinion that was, irritatingly, infuriatingly, almost always absolutely correct.

I had only the briefest of connections with Roger Ebert as just one of his 838,000+ Twitter followers. Last year, he tweeted a link to this very site - to my eternal shame, the feature he shared sported a banner image featuring the words 'Hotdog Jamboree'. Despite my crude attempts at humour, something about the feature tickled Roger Ebert, enough that he'd want to share it with his flock. That simple gesture, 140 characters of validation from a titan of the film industry, is the proudest moment of my 'professional' career to date. Why did it have to be 'Hotdog Jamboree'?

Roger Ebert was always up front about his battle with cancer. He lost a part of his jaw in 2006, and with it, his voice and a huge part of his identity, but never shied away from his disfigurement, sharing post-op photos with his fans online. For a guy in his 60s, Ebert was remarkably tech-savvy; an initial investor in Google and an early adopter of Twitter, he came to own online film criticism the same way he owned the media of print and TV for the best part of half a century. When you go to read external reviews on sites like IMDB, there's a reason Ebert's review is always top. In most cases, it'd be the only one you'd need to read.

I'll miss his razor-sharp accuracy. Ebert once said "No good film is too long, and no bad movie is short enough" and I can't think of a more eloquent way to sum up my relationship with movies. Of Star Wars, he wrote in 1977: "It's as goofy as a children's tale, as shallow as an old Saturday afternoon serial, as corny as Kansas in August — and a masterpiece. Those who analyze its philosophy do so, I imagine, with a smile in their minds." Pauline Kael didn't get it. Ebert did.

I'll miss his enthusiasm for films of every genre, even when it appeared to be misguided; he gave Taken 2 a positive write-up, and The Master a negative one. But unlike contrarians like Armond White, who hide behind their intellectualism when purposely praising bad movies and deriding good ones, Ebert never left you frustrated. If he didn't like a movie, he'd tell you why. More often than not, time would prove him right. Probably not in the case of Taken 2, but I digress.

I'll miss his digression, too. In 2010, he wrote a lengthy piece titled 'Why videogames can never be art', which inspired over 4000 comments from angry gamers. Though I don't necessarily agree with the statement, it's a bold one to make, and Ebert did his research, taking in ancient cave paintings, Georges Méliès' A Voyage To The Moon and the finer works of Nicholas Sparks in his citation. It's a measure of the man that his voice was heard even in an arena that was not his own; try asking Peter Molyneux what he thinks about movies and see how much coverage that gets.

More than anything though, I'll miss his sense of fun. Ebert was not a stuffy man and never held his tongue, even when it led to confrontation. In 2005, he said of Deuce Bigalow: European Bigalow: "It is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience." Rob Schneider lashed out randomly at LA Times critic Patrick Goldstein, claiming his opinion was void as he'd never won any journalism awards (he had). Ebert, defending his friend, delivered the mother of all burns: "Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."

Roger Ebert is gone, but he won't be forgotten. I never once laid my hands on one of his newspapers or my eyes on one of his TV shows, but Ebert's hugely entertaining movie reviews - millions of words on films spanning five decades - will live on forever online. And no matter how many other film critics flourish in his wake, Ebert's reviews will always be top.