I was looking for something in my documents folder and came across this. I don’t remember writing it, but it is from my last semester at Columbia College. I believe we had to read an article on Roger Ebert and write about it. I wish I had a better prompt, but I don’t except that it relates to this blog and I wanted to post it:
10/11/05
Magazine Editing – Roger Ebert Feature
The Man; The Movies; The Politics
His name alone brings one word to the minds of many – “movies” – but is that all he knows?
“I write op-ed columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, and people send me e-mails saying, “You’re a movie critic. You don’t know anything about politics.” Well, you know what, I’m sixty years old, and I’ve been interested in politics since I was on my daddy’s knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.”
As a matter of fact, Roger Ebert has undeniably liberal politics and is not afraid to use the First Amendment to let them out. An author of 13 books, his most recent being The Great Movies, Ebert falls under the category of opinionated journalists, a likely assumption after seeing the word “critic” flooding his resume.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, the film critic and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times went on to co-host Siskel & Ebert for 23 years. The hosts’ trademark “thumbs-up” and “thumbs-down” approach to rating movies lives on in Ebert’s current TV show, Ebert & Roeper, which runs on more than 200 stations across the country. And do not leave out the 20 years of experience he had prior to that, beginning at 15, where he worked as a sportswriter and editor for a couple of newspapers in Champaign-Urbana before being whisked away to work for the Chicago Sun-Times when he was 24.
A staunch believer in Americans taking full advantage of their rights, Ebert feels that lately criticisms have been few and far between.
“I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class,” Ebert says. “I begin to feel like most Americans don’t understand the First Amendment, don’t understand the idea of freedom of speech, and don’t understand that it’s the responsibility of the citizen to speak out.”
Praising Hollywood stars for voicing their opinions on today’s political climate, Ebert also knows when some stars go too far in their effort to change the country.
Citing Michael Moore’s acceptance speech at the 2003 Academy Awards, Ebert agreed with what he said, but felt Moore did not communicate effectively enough to the audience in order to help the political cause.
“But I would propose to you that if Michael Moore had taken a deep breath, and looked straight at the audience, and said, “I am a nonfiction filmmaker during a fictitious Presidency,” and stopped, I think he basically would have gotten a positive response to that. But his whole delivery was wrong. They [the audience] were not ready to assimilate that much that quickly,” Ebert says.
In a recent column, Ebert himself created some controversy after stating that Bush acts as though God is his football coach, sending him messages via a personal dialogue the two share. Ebert says the problem with Bush believing that God’s on his side is that Bush then can’t change his mind because God isn’t going to change his.
“And so what we have here really is a rather alarming situation where religion in the White House has crossed the line between church and state,” Ebert says. “It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts, it’s in the Bush Administration.”
Yet, then the question at-hand becomes why, after Ebert received mail 10 to 1 in favor of this column by readers, by the same people who vote every four years for president, why is Bush seated at the head of the country for a second time?
“Essentially, the country is in the grip of some very bad information. I think a lot of working class people don’t understand that their money is being stolen,” Ebert says.
Ebert says Americans favor the repeal of the estate tax and love Bush’s theories because they all think they are going to be rich in the future.
“But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday. And we’ve had a concerted policy of taking money away from the poor and giving it to the rich wholesale, and at the same time, we have the runaway corporations and the greed. I feel ordinary people really should be angry.”
Politically-minded, it is almost hard to see how Ebert was thrown into the movie critic position versus that of a political commentator. However, for him, a movie is not just a movie. In his book, The Great Movies, Ebert poses that, “Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.”
Movies make viewers more broad-minded, Ebert says, because they offer people a chance to try and understand what it would be like to live in a different time or to be a member of a different group. Going to good movies, such as foreign and independent films or documentaries, will make one a better person because he or she will then understand human nature better, he goes on to say.
And as for Ebert – a man who has seen thousands of movies in his lifetime, movies of all genres, with all sorts of characters and time periods – have movies helped him to formulate his opinions and to appreciate those around him whom he might not otherwise understand? Have movies changed his life?
“By going to the movies – and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, traveling around – I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.”
No Matter Where Life Takes Me 