Why Roger Ebert Was My Hero (and other facts)

I've been filling out the Proust Questionnaire pretty much yearly since early in my college career. I never consult previous years' responses while I fill it out, although I do compare answers afterward. Each year, for the years that I've done it, I've listed Roger Ebert as one of my heroes. 
 

"The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all."

Because he was kind.

I never met the guy, despite having lived in one of his towns for all but 4 ½ years of my life. I never made it to Ebertfest. (Where was I last year and why didn’t I go?) However, I believe that an unkind man would be unable to capture the tone Ebert did from time to time in his reviews and blog entries. He was a secular humanist. He had wide-ranging sympathies. He had made his mistakes and learned from them. He appeared not to have any regrets.

“Both Curtis and Lemmon are practicing cruel deceptions--Curtis has Monroe thinking she's met a millionaire, and Brown thinks Lemmon is a woman--but the film dances free before anyone gets hurt. Both Monroe and Brown learn the truth and don't care, and after Lemmon reveals he's a man, Brown delivers the best curtain line in the movies. If you've seen the movie, you know what it is, and if you haven't, you deserve to hear it for the first time from him.”

Because he was from Urbana and he wasn’t afraid to love it.

Everyone in Chicago, from the Tribune (ha!) to the Sun-Times and all the rest, ran to present Ebert as the ultimate post-Studs Terkel Chicagoan. That may be true, but he did Champaign-Urbana proud too. He was intelligent, unpretentious, down to earth, self-deprecating, and funny. Again and again in his writing (even in his reviewing), he held up moments from his childhood in Urbana as significant. He didn’t write it off as “downstate,” reduce it to a college town, or fixate on the corn and soybeans. He lived in Chicago and, yes, he was a Chicagoan, but Champaign-Urbana got the film festival, because where else would it be? Home is home.

"On the news last week, there was the story of a child killed by stray gunfire. He was in the middle of a basketball game in a city park. One of his teammates told the camera: "It's a shame he never had the experience of life." There are fuzzy shots of a surveillance camera showing a white car with a sunroof speeding from the site. Inside were probably young men empowered by firearms and an automobile to shoot stupidly into a park and make a pathetic gang gesture. The Interrupters were once such young men — and women. They once were blind, but now they see. […] When I was a child, I rode my bike home from school down a daily network of neighborhood streets. On one street, some kids were sitting on a porch. They pulled me off my bike, punched me and told me it was "their" street. They were white like me. They had no idea what school I went to. By protecting "their" street, they were gaining esteem. I have no doubt they felt good afterward."

Because he was serene in the face of illness.

What could have been the end of his career marked a new period of intense prolificacy and, I think, beautiful writing. He grappled with big questions with humor and perspective. He got frustrated. He was human. He made accommodations. He kept doing his job.

“The reason that O'Brian's readers are so faithful (I am one) is because this friendship provides him with a way to voice and consider the unnatural life of a man at sea: By talking with each other, the two men talk to us about the contest between man's need to dominate, and his desire to reflect.”

Because he could write.

This is the kind of writer I want to be: insightful, approachable, populist. He was a smart man, and it showed. He was funny.

“As a director he has never been willing to settle for plot; he is much more interested in character and situation, and likes to assemble unusual people in peculiar situations and stir the pot.”

Because he had great taste in movies.

And I don’t just mean fine taste. I mean he liked what he liked unapologetically, and 90% of the time I agreed with him. He was just as likely to give an art-house film four stars as a blockbuster. He cared about things like acting, direction, script, and cinematography, and whether it came with millions of dollars of visual effects or whether it was subtitled or whether it was for children didn’t matter. He disliked a lot of movies, but he only hated the ones that really deserved it.

“By the end of the movie, you find yourself reacting to the weddings, and the funeral, almost as you do at real events involving people you didn't know very well, but liked, and wanted to know better.”