Life Itself (15.)
Directed by Steve James.
Featuring Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Marlene Iglitzen and Martin Scorsese. 118 mins
If you made about a film about film critic what would you consider an appropriate title? The Parasitic Pursuit? The World According to Carp? Mr Nobody? Or would you decide that maybe a film critic was not really a subject worthy of a full length film biography?
I was going to write that Roger Ebert was basically an American Barry Norman, but his career was much more extensive than that and by the time of his death from cancer in 2013 he was famous enough for his passing to be marked by President Obama. This rotund figure, whose weight fluctuations were on an Oprah scale (it must be a Chicago thing), he seemed to me to represent the best and the worst of what a film critic could be.
He got a good start; a newspaperman on the Chicago Sun-Times he was handed the film critic post in 1967, just in time to cover the most exciting, vibrant and controversial period of American movie making. He pitched in himself, helping Russ Meyer script some of his later boobie nudie epics such as Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens and in 1975 he was teamed up with Gene Siskel, the critic from the paper over the street, to present what would become Siskel and Ebert at the Movies, an American TV institution. Their success was propelled by the Thumbs gimmick, either Two Thumbs Up or Two Thumbs Down. After Siskel died of a brain tumour in 1999 the show continued with other co-hosts, most prominently Richard Roeper, (who mysteriously isn't mentioned once in the film) but Ebert spent most of this century battling with cancer.
The film consists of shots of him in the final stages of his battle with cancer, a straightforward look back over his life told in interviews, photos, archive footage and an actor reading extracts from his autobiography called Life Itself. (He does a great job of getting his voice, it is only near the end that I realised that this couldn't be the man himself reading the lines.) Cancer, which was in his salivatory glands, would eventually lead him to having his lower jaw removed, so he couldn't speak, eat or drink. His cancer effectively caricatured him, leaving him with a normal sized top half of his head and nothing below his cheeks other than the skin of his chin which just hung limply down and made him look like a Disney cartoon face.
In its spirit this is a thoroughly nice film. It wants to see the best in people. Steve James, whose films include Hoop Dreams, was a filmmaker supported by Ebert and you can feel the love he had for his subject. He must have been a man of enormous generosity and warmth. Fancy having Martin Scorsese producing the biodoc of a film critic. Prior to this I only knew of him through reputation and through clips of him with Siskel, clips that always left me underwhelmed and mystified by his reputation. The film though demonstrates that he was a writer of considerable ability but on TV I think the pair brought out the worst in each other.
Here's a film about two colleagues who both suffered horrible deaths and yet even here, in a film which surely wants to celebrate them and their collaboration as much as it possibly could, they struggle to find anything positive between them. There are some hilarious outtakes of the pair squabbling and name calling with each other. But it isn't just off screen, sitting on their little cinema chairs they would bicker away at each and wither up like shrivelled prunes at the ghastliness of what they had had to see. They were like a non-drag version of Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough's Cissie and Ada act.
Extras.
There’s a 20 minutes interview with the director and 20 deleted or extended scenes
Directed by Steve James.
Featuring Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Marlene Iglitzen and Martin Scorsese. 118 mins
If you made about a film about film critic what would you consider an appropriate title? The Parasitic Pursuit? The World According to Carp? Mr Nobody? Or would you decide that maybe a film critic was not really a subject worthy of a full length film biography?
I was going to write that Roger Ebert was basically an American Barry Norman, but his career was much more extensive than that and by the time of his death from cancer in 2013 he was famous enough for his passing to be marked by President Obama. This rotund figure, whose weight fluctuations were on an Oprah scale (it must be a Chicago thing), he seemed to me to represent the best and the worst of what a film critic could be.
He got a good start; a newspaperman on the Chicago Sun-Times he was handed the film critic post in 1967, just in time to cover the most exciting, vibrant and controversial period of American movie making. He pitched in himself, helping Russ Meyer script some of his later boobie nudie epics such as Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens and in 1975 he was teamed up with Gene Siskel, the critic from the paper over the street, to present what would become Siskel and Ebert at the Movies, an American TV institution. Their success was propelled by the Thumbs gimmick, either Two Thumbs Up or Two Thumbs Down. After Siskel died of a brain tumour in 1999 the show continued with other co-hosts, most prominently Richard Roeper, (who mysteriously isn't mentioned once in the film) but Ebert spent most of this century battling with cancer.
The film consists of shots of him in the final stages of his battle with cancer, a straightforward look back over his life told in interviews, photos, archive footage and an actor reading extracts from his autobiography called Life Itself. (He does a great job of getting his voice, it is only near the end that I realised that this couldn't be the man himself reading the lines.) Cancer, which was in his salivatory glands, would eventually lead him to having his lower jaw removed, so he couldn't speak, eat or drink. His cancer effectively caricatured him, leaving him with a normal sized top half of his head and nothing below his cheeks other than the skin of his chin which just hung limply down and made him look like a Disney cartoon face.
In its spirit this is a thoroughly nice film. It wants to see the best in people. Steve James, whose films include Hoop Dreams, was a filmmaker supported by Ebert and you can feel the love he had for his subject. He must have been a man of enormous generosity and warmth. Fancy having Martin Scorsese producing the biodoc of a film critic. Prior to this I only knew of him through reputation and through clips of him with Siskel, clips that always left me underwhelmed and mystified by his reputation. The film though demonstrates that he was a writer of considerable ability but on TV I think the pair brought out the worst in each other.
Here's a film about two colleagues who both suffered horrible deaths and yet even here, in a film which surely wants to celebrate them and their collaboration as much as it possibly could, they struggle to find anything positive between them. There are some hilarious outtakes of the pair squabbling and name calling with each other. But it isn't just off screen, sitting on their little cinema chairs they would bicker away at each and wither up like shrivelled prunes at the ghastliness of what they had had to see. They were like a non-drag version of Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough's Cissie and Ada act.
Extras.
There’s a 20 minutes interview with the director and 20 deleted or extended scenes
