Thursday, June 30, 2005
What has Roger Ebert done for the culture?
The wonderfully named Elbert Ventura delivers a smackdown to Roger Ebert's work, "a career defined by middlebrow complacency."
In the path from mere critic to cultural institution, Ebert has adopted a pose at once populist and condescending.... Instead of seeking to broaden his reader's experience of movies, he presumes to approximate it, in the process lowering the culture's standards for what makes a good movie.
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Ebert is a very thoughtful, sensitive, emotionally and artistically astute guy whose brains and altruism are the very reason that he is "middle brow." In writing his reviews, the guy is a journalist for a wide circulation daily newspaper and he knows it. He also teaches film courses at a university and in interviews on DVD and elsewhere I've heard him talk about subtler things in more highbrow style than you find in his reviews. I think the man is serving society very nicely. He praises good filmmaking and he trashes films that offend his morals, but he acknowledges that "artistically mediocre" and derivative films have wide appeal and he helps their admirers find them. On top of that, he also promotes films by racial and subcultural minority directors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. If it weren't for this affirmative action I might have a perfect success rate at predicting what films I'll like from his reviews.
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