R.I.P. Roger Ebert

As I’m sure you all know, Roger Ebert passed away earlier today at the age of 70. He had been battling cancer since 2002. I’m not going to write a long, detailed post about the man at this moment, because I have class coming up and you will likely be able to find more thoughtful, better ones elsewhere on the Internet. I have a feeling you won’t need to look far. Ebert was probably the most famous film critic of all time, thanks to his brilliant writing and work on At the Movies. With that show, he and Gene Siskel (and later Richard Roeper) were able to bring intelligent film criticism to the masses. If you scan through the Twitter feeds of various film critics right now, you will see one shared sentiment: Roger Ebert is probably one of the biggest reasons they got into the field. I’m almost certain that movie blogging culture would not be what it is today if Ebert did not exist. His death leaves a gigantic hole in the middle of the film universe.

Also, those who have been following this blog since its inception—when it had that original, horrible title—know that Ebert is one of the biggest reasons that anybody ever read this darn thing. Around the time the first iteration of At the Movies came to an end (when Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott were hosting) I wrote a dumb thing about the show’s legacy and whatnot. Using his movie critic wizard powers, Ebert somehow found that blog post and decided to tweet it out. I will not link to it here because I don’t want you reading it, but when I discovered the reason for the sudden bump in traffic I stood up in shock and just about jumped out the nearest window. The man who was my number one source of reviews for so long thought enough of some random post to send it out to the masses of people that followed him. It blew my mind and acted as a shot of adrenaline.

We all knew he was sick, and just yesterday he announced in a blog post that he would have to step back on his workload going forward. No one expected it to happen this quickly and randomly. This is a crushing, heartbreaking loss for anyone who shared his enthusiasm for film, and his influence on the current landscape cannot be overstated.