Roger Ebert (1942–2013)

A very moreish book - cause it's a collection of shortish reviews and they all make pretty easy reading, you just keep reading the next one. Only enjoyable if you like reading short reviews/summaries of bad films - it's exactly what it says on the tin - but great if you like that. The summaries are usually far more enjoyable than the film itself and although Ebert isn't a proper comedian, he's witty enough that I've laughed out loud quite a bit and smiled even more. Sometimes his moral and political judgements are very, very off (for example, his portrayal of a few films where women are constantly violent to men as men-hating... alas! he has no idea) and there are some reviews which aren't up to much - whether cause the film is so average or cause of Ebert's poor writing or hang-ups. It's definitely enjoyable if you like reading about bad movies but the quality is pretty variable. The great reviews are a lot of fun though.… (more)

Starting out this read like it was going to be a dry recitation of biographical facts – where Ebert was born, what schools he went to, so on and so on – and then somewhere along the way it turned into an intimate portrayal of a truly remarkable life. Of course the main subject was Ebert himself but the way he wrote about his own life became a perceptive look at the world he lived in and those around him. I ended up with 14 pages of annotations in my ereader, too many to include here, but one that I especially liked was this quote, “No good movie is too long. No bad movie is short enough”. It reminded me of this line from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, “If a book is well written, I always find it too short”, and that brings up my one and only criticism of this memoir – it’s too short.… (more)