A Tribute To Roger Ebert From A Lifelong Disciple

Secondly, I owe Ebert gratitude for all the wonderful lessons he taught me through his reviews. More than just how to write about movies, I so often found new ways to watch and analyze films through his work. Most notably, the notion that “movies made for ‘everybody’ are really made for nobody in particular” is a personal mantra of mine, even though I have now forgotten which of Ebert’s reviews the quote came from. Ebert did not present a huge number of radical notions about filmmaking, but he presented the basic ideas more clearly and powerfully than any other film critic, living or dead.

Thirdly, and a bit more trivially, I should thank Ebert for the name I borrowed from him for the better part of seven years now. When I was brought on by The Denver Post’s YourHub to write movie reviews in 2007, I named my blog Jonathan Lack at the Movies, because I could think of nothing else. Siskel and Ebert’s show, though I was only slightly familiar with it, simply popped into my head, and I carried it with me through my YourHub days and on to my own website, founded in 2011, not leaving it behind until I joined the staff of We Got This Covered.

These are things I shall never get to thank Roger Ebert for, and that saddens me. I wish I could tell him how much he meant to me, and I how much I now miss him, even though he has been gone less than a day. Even these past few months, when he has been writing less and less, have felt a little melancholy without regular blog entries and reviews (those blog entries deserve several long tribute articles themselves, as they were consistently moving windows into Ebert’s mind). As a lover of film, the world simply feels less full with Roger Ebert alive to survey the cinematic landscape and report his findings. He was the best of us, and remains so, even in death.

He was also, of course, the most graceful of film critics, and of writers. He ended yesterday’s blog post with these words, the last he would ever publish as living man, and they say it all better than I ever could:

“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.”

Thank you Roger. See you there.