Sightings

This morning during a screening of Illegal Tender, Roger Ebert sat down not five seats from me.  I was assigned to review the movie for the Sun-Times, and, being it my first opportunity for a film review, I grew both exhilarated and nervous, akin to my 5th grade crush asking me to skate with her "for a song" around the rink. First Richard Roeper took a seat near the front as a few others filed in after him; 10 minutes after the scheduled start time, a young woman murmured "he's on the stairs and will be here shortly."  Sure enough, the most revered living American film critic enters the tiny theater and then the show begins.  This was the man who introduced me to Florence Rasmussen and Dan Harberts in Errol Morris's Gates of Heaven; here also was the arbiter who squashed my naive 14 year-old certainty that Dead Poet's Society was cinematic sublimity.  For 15 years I've been reading and watching Ebert, and here we were taking in a movie together.  He walks well now and was clutching close to his chest a DVD box set of one his favorite directors: Ozu. Nobody in the theater much spoke to each other, and I needed to remind myself this wasn't Friday night at the AMC; this was work. (Especially so enduring 'Tender)      

An hour after the film concluded, though, my editor called me to say that Ebert had decided late to review the movie and that my first film review would have to wait.  Not a problem, and it's certainly spiriting to see the old guy working as hard as ever while braving such a debilitating illness.      

      

Comments

[Marc Geelhoed]

Wait, Dead Poets Society isn't sublime? Robin Williams standing on a chair? Nothing?

[Bryant]

I remember it well. My 8th grade English teacher played it for our class: there were references to a midsummer night's dream, a tragic suicide, rich white kids in musty blazers, "o captain, my captain!" and mork rebelliously ripping pages out of norton anthologies. u just didn't question that kind of heaviness. ;)