Here's my appreciation from 2004 of what Ebert did with his "Great Movies" section, which was the thing that turned me around on him. For years I'd considered him a lightweight, but his very good writing on difficult films made me appreciate that while his style might be glib, he wasn't -- he saw things in the pictures, and talked easily about them in a way all kinds of people could understand. That's a very great gift in a critic. And he kept his gift, and at the job, right to the end.
Also, here's a nice story Ebert told on himself as a green kid:
I had been in Chicago four months and I was sitting under the L tracks with Mike Royko in an eye-opener place. A Blackhawks game was playing on WGN radio. The team scored, and again, and again. This at last was life.
“The Blackhawks are really hot tonight,” I observed to Royko.
He studied me. “Where you from, kid? Downstate?”
“Urbana,” I said.
“Ever seen a hockey game?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought, you asshole. Those are the game highlights.”That whole column, like a lot of his columns, is well worth reading.
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