Salon.com > Roger Ebert

My backup mom

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:30:00 +0000

After she had the heart attack out in Michigan on Thanksgiving 1988, I stood by her bedside in the recovery room and she tried so hard to tell me something, but it just didn't work. I loved her so much. Did she know how much? I never told her. There are always questions you wish you'd asked after it's too late to get an answer. Sometimes years can pass before you realize they're questions.

Everyone said I "took after her," and I did. My features are more rounded than anyone else on either side of my family. Martha R. Stumm was the youngest of six surviving children of a Dutch-Irish-German couple who raised their family on a farm outside Tayorville, Ill. Years after her father died and her mother opened a boardinghouse in Urbana, enough oil was found beneath the land to make it worth drilling.

I visited the farm in the 1960s with my mom and dad, Aunt Martha and Cousin Bernardine from Stonington. It was a two-story frame house on a smallish footprint. Wallpaper was still hanging from the walls. They remembered their pony that lived in the barn, and they followed the path they ran on barefoot down to the river. Their dad was not only a farmer but ran a billiard parlor in Taylorville, and took out witty wisecracks in the classified section of the local paper.

Hello, Mr. President? It’s me, Roger Ebert

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:08:00 +0000

I would ask the president for an emergency education program. Our students at every level are below American historical norms and global standards. We're importing the best and the brightest from overseas, from nations that may not spend as much money on education but seem to produce better-prepared students.

I attended a Catholic grade school for eight years in the 1950s. When my class graduated, all of us (even the "slower" students) whizzed through public high school rhetoric so easily our new teachers remarked on it. Our school was poverty-stricken and had only basic facilities. But every one of us could read, write and do math. I believe we could read and write better than many of today's high school graduates, and some of today's colleges graduates.

Reading is the key to self-education. Let me give an example that has been obsessing me. Nearly 50 percent of all Americans reject the Theory of Evolution and believe Man was "created" pretty much in his present form some thousands of years ago. Anyone who believes that hasn't been paying attention.

I do not fear death

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:01:00 +0000

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. "Ask someone how they feel about death," he said, "and they'll tell you everyone's gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that's not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you're really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don't really exist. I might be gone at any given second."

Movies the way God meant them to be seen

Tue, 11 Sep 2001 19:51:00 +0000

I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all movies deserve to be seen in their original aspect ratios. Four recent events suggest that this truth is not universally evident:

In Chicago's Grant Park, a summer film festival holds free screenings on a big screen for as many as 10,000 movie lovers. The 2001 season began with "An American in Paris." Introducing the film, I was startled to discover that it was being shown in widescreen -- in what's called a 1.65-to-1 aspect ratio. But like almost all films made before 1954, "An American in Paris" was photographed in the 4:3 ratio, or pretty close to a square screen. By trimming the top and bottom of the original picture to artificially widen it, the projector was cutting off, among other things, Gene Kelly's feet. I learned that the entire season was planned for 1.65:1, despite the booking of such other 4:3 classics as "The Maltese Falcon," "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Top Hat" -- with the cutting off of the even more sublime feet of Astaire and Rogers. Protesting, I learned this was not a mistake but a policy; the festival was being underwritten by HBO, and an HBO executive in New York had insisted on widescreen "so that people will not think we're showing television."

John Lennon, 1940-1980

Fri, 08 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

It was that troubled autumn of 1968 that John and Yoko came to Chicago, to show their new movie in the film festival. The shouts of the Democratic Convention had scarcely died down, and Woodstock had not yet been held, and "Hair" was onstage at the Shubert, and here was this goofy home movie by John and Yoko about a butterfly that took 26 minutes to fly in slow motion from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen.

What was the movie about? We didn't have questions like that then. There were still hippie children getting married in Lincoln Park, still little VW Bugs with McCarthy flower stickers on their bumpers, and you didn't ask what it was about, a butterfly in slow motion. Such images explained themselves, in 1968. John Lennon and the other Beatles did more, perhaps, than any other four people to bring about that state of our cultural mind from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

As long as the people who were young at that time still live, the songs of the Beatles will evoke that period as poignantly and heartstabbingly as the music of other eras still draws tears to other eyes. And as long as the Beatles themselves were all still alive, as long as people could kid themselves that there might be a reunion, a final concert, one more album, that time in history was itself still a little bit alive.