Everyone's a Critic, But There Was Only One Ebert

Roger Ebert was famous for a thumb's up or a thumb's down, but it was in reading what he wrote that movie-goers could learn about the films they love or hate. (Reuters photo)

If I really wanted to push a Brush With Greatness, I can truthfully say that I was once replaced by Roger Ebert.

Not that he noticed. Or even knew where he was ending up. Or that his life was made any the richer for now being on the pages of the Des Moines Register.

Such are the weird twists and turns my life has taken over the years: When I left Iowa, I had been a film critic for the Register, and have written about movies off and on for the past 15 years. When I left that job, I was replaced with wire-service copy until the paper brought on another reviewer, then stopped having staff-produced reviews altogether.

As many papers opted for the same route, Ebert’s reviews became all the more important to people, certainly those in the Midwest. We’re not Hollywood flash or East Coast superiority; we’re regular folks who are smarter than people think and do not suffer fools.

That’s why Roger was our guy. He was a Midwestern guy who wrote about movies but also looked like a guy you might see down the block with a garden hose in hand. If you couldn’t have someone local writing about this stuff, this guy still seemed to know who you were and what you wanted out of your movies. It was only after papers began cutting back on their local reviewers and the Internet took over the world that some people finally got a chance to read Ebert instead of just watching him on TV. And for all his TV fame, in print is where he truly shined.

In some ways, he made it look easy, which had to have been a blessing and a curse. It was great that he wrote for the average movie-goer as much as the academic, but his facility at that no doubt led to a sense that everyone could do it.

And trust me, it isn’t easy. In any kind of opinion writing you risk offending people. In reviewing movies, something so basic to everyone, you risk offending things that people hold near and dear. If you don’t like something they love, it’s sometimes as if you have wounded them as a human being.

I once had a voicemail message left for me from a guy who was ticked off at me for my review of “Detroit Rock City,” a road/buddy movie about guys going to a KISS concert. I didn’t give it a very good review and this guy, a huge KISS fan, was livid. I won’t go into details about what he thought someone should do to me.

And the thing is, the reason I didn’t like it was because KISS is awesome and deserved a better film than that. I wasn’t reviewing KISS, I was reviewing a film about KISS, yet this guy couldn’t see the difference.

I also gave either a one- or no-star review to an alleged film called “Three Strikes.” It was written and directed by rapper DJ Pooh and co-starred the guy who played Huggy Bear on “Starsky and Hutch,” among others. My contempt for the film sparked an email from a guy called “Snoop” wondering why I hated black people so much and wanted them to fail.

“Sorry, Snoop,” I responded. “I hate a lot of movies that don’t have any black people in them at all.”

It wasn’t all bad. An older gentleman once called me wanting to pick a fight over my positive review about “Magnolia,” a film he and his wife hated so much they left the theater. (Ebert later put it on his list of  "Great Movies.")

“Yeah, I can understand that,” I replied. There was silence on the end of the phone because he did not expect me to agree with him. I told him why I liked the movie (because it is so honest and raw with its family relationships instead of content to give us a fake happily ever after). We ended up having a wonderful conversation about that film and movies in general.

That’s why it’s sort of unfortunate that Roger Ebert (and Gene Siskel) became so known for the thumbs up or thumbs down. Liking or hating something is more nuanced than that, and no doubt those guys knew that. That’s why reading Ebert was such a joy. You knew just why he did or didn’t like a film. It wasn’t necessarily because it reminded him of some Swedish film he’d seen at Cannes in the 1970s, it might have been because it reminded him of something joyful from his childhood.

For me, this all happened in the Internet’s infancy and before the advent of social media. Both no doubt made it easy for people to get in touch with Ebert and agree and disagree, not to mention post their opinions on Amazon.com, their own blog or various other sites and platforms. And he ran with it, using all those platforms for himself as well.

These days, everyone’s a critic. And in some ways -- the good ways -- we have Roger Ebert to thank for that.