Why Roger Ebert has yet to earn my respect
There are the poorly written reviews. There are the bad calls. There are the videos of him bickering with Gene Siskel.
Then there’s this: a 2001 review of “Pootie Tang,” one of the most important metacomedies in that it singularly closed the conversation on blaxploitation cinema once and for all.
Outside of parody, it stands on its own as obvious high-level humor but all Ebert sees is “mindless entertainment” and that “Pootie has funny scenes.”
There’s also the mysterious cases of delayed enlightenment. For example, a review of “The Graduate” that he wrote in 1967 was all but denounced by a followup he wrote in 1997. The guy was 27 years old in ‘67— hardly young enough to completely disagree with the senior citizen version of himself and get away with it.
There’s hope that, at this rate, in another thirty years we could be reading reviews that posit the real applicational merit of cinema to our lives and not just cute comic strip panels of Ebert surfing the crest of the IQ bell curve.
I’m onto you, Roger Ebert. Sine your pitty on the runny kine.
