For the occasion of the 65th birthday of Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss has published a lengthy appreciation of America's best-known living film critic in TIME. It is a bit of a fawn-job--a birthday gift from an admitted "trusted friend...of three decades"--but there's a lot of good stuff here. I think there's one paragraph specifically where Corliss really gets to the heart of what makes Ebert's criticism interesting:
When he doesn't like a movie, he will often go out of his way to mention some attractive element amid the carnage, giving what amounts to a review that says, "Yes, but! Big but!" And when he decides that a movie rates a pan a "Bah, thumbug," if you will he tends to approach the task not with the hot rage of a jilted suitor, or the curled lip of contempt that is the occupational habit of other critics (this one included), but with the fretful brow of a knowing, caring family doctor. He diagnoses the symptoms, then calmly and compassionately explains the nature of your ailment...more than any critic I know, he brings the informed discussion of film out from under the lamp, into daylight. He has used his fame to elevate the conversation, challenging audiences to attend not just to the dramatic and ethical aspects of films but to their visual strategies. (Roger is one of the few film critics who actually, and knowledgeably, looks at movies.)
Roger Ebert's criticism is fundamentally a "yes" act--productive, as opposed to destructive. He looks at what 's there and considers it on its own terms. The actual meat of his reviews, then, in their refusal to adhere to the binary dialectics of "good" or "bad", fly in the face of the reductive nature of the thumb system that he's become best known for.
I'm fully aware that it's a little too early in the morning for a comprehensive discussion of affirmative dialectics, so for further appreciation of our friend Roge, go here and here and here.
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