When I was in elementary school we'd buy a sheet of movie tickets at the end of the school year. Each week I'd tear off the movie ticket for that week and my friends and I would ride our bikes downtown to the single-screen theatre in Kaysville, Utah. I'd have a couple dollars in my pocket to buy a soda and a popcorn. When I'd stay at my grandma's house in Holladay she'd give me some money to go see a movie at the theatre at the Cottonwood Mall. I'd jump the fence, cross the horse pasture, pass behind the church building, and then cut through the empty lot to Highland Drive and walk the final block to the theatre. For whatever reason I remember always buying a long piece of red licorice at that theatre, that kind that is probably a couple feet long, but felt like it was taller than my dad.
I have other specific movie memories. I remember my dad taking me to see Star Wars at the old Centre Theatre on the corner of State Street and Broadway in Salt Lake. It was a theatre of yesteryear: a single screen for a thousand movie-goers to share an experience. When we got to the theatre I remember asking my dad why they had spotlights shining into the sky. When he explained it was to attract people to come see the movie, I thought (and maybe asked) why would anyone miss seeing Star Wars? We relived this kind of experience more than two decades later when we saw Fellowship of the Rings together at the Villa Theatre, the last of the old-time theatres in Salt Lake.
We saw the Black Stallion as a family at the Olympus Hills theatre when I was nine. I remember it because my mom was with us and she normally didn't like going to movies. I remember one other time that she came to a movie with us and she leaned over to me, took my hand, and said, "One day girls will want to hold your hand when you're at the movie with them."
When it was time to take my first child to his first movie, I couldn't bring myself to take him to the ugly, tired multiplexes of State College, Pennsylvania where we lived at the time. We made the 40-minute drive to the Rowland Theatre in Philipsburg to see Finding Nemo in a proper, old-style theatre. Jacob loved it so much he invited his little best friend, Grace, and we saw it again that weekend, this time at the drive-in. A few years later one of Lauren's first movies was Ice Age at Campus Theatre during Lewisburg's ice festival. We continue to enjoy movies together.
I could go on and on about my favorite movies and movie theatres. I've probably more than made my point that I'm a nostalgic person. Sentimental. Perhaps overly so. I have so many of these memories, that seem to just come back to me in a flash.
A flash like when I got an email alert this afternoon that Roger Ebert had died.
Ebert—calling him by his last name seems as familiar as calling him by his first—has been my go-to film critic for as long as I can remember. I remember even as a teenager watching him and Siskel on TV. I read several other reviewers at times—some critics tend toward the pretentiousness and others add extreme long-windedness to their pretentiousness. Ebert had the genius audacity to judge films against others in its same genre; every film didn't have to be The Godfather or Vertigo.
Most local papers have abandoned film criticism and just pipe in reviews from other venues. One exception is Sean Means of the The Salt Lake Tribune who posted a wonderful remembrance of Ebert. I happen to have a friend here in Columbia who grew up just down the street from Roger in Urbana (look up Steve Sanderson in the index to Ebert's memoir). Over the years he has related to me a few stories of how Roger was always a good guy, no matter the fame he achieved. The anecdotes related by Sean P. Means certainly confirm that.
I'm not one generally starstruck. There are a few famous people I would certainly like to meet, not merely because they are famous, but because they seem from my distant spot to be truly interesting and engaging people. Roger Ebert is one of those people I would have loved to sit down with to talk movies. I would have asked him about movies he might have reconsidered rating higher or lower years later. Movies that he watches over and over. And even if I could have convinced him that a certain family favorite that he panned is actually comedy gold. One of my favorite anecdotes from his memoir is the time he happened to be on the Tonight Show the same night as Chevy Chase. Johnny Carson asked what was his least favorite movie of the year was. He hesitated, realizing that he was sitting next to one of the stars of the movie he was about to name, and said, The Three Amigos.
(I actually did correspond with him twice. Once I submitted a question to his "Answer Man" column for which he thanked me and gave me a reply even though he didn't use the query in his column and once to send him my take on the MPAA system given that I knew how absurd he thought the system was. He replied that he thought Taken was actually rated R. Nope.)
So, listening to NPR's Fresh Air tonight brought these memories back again. At one point Terry Gross asks him to name a favorite film scene and Roger talks about a scene in Citizen Kane and about the role of memory in that film and in our lives (forward to 13:40).
...in one little speech in a popular Hollywood film...you have the mystery of memory and of longing and of the fact that we are all, to some degree, alone and trying to reach out to somebody else.
And then you have time....And the more I think about that, if you - the more you think about that speech, the more it's about the human condition. It's about the whole thing.I think this is why I've always been drawn to Roger Ebert. His wonderful writing is accessible—he is as witty and clever with reviews of bad movies as he is glowing and effusive toward great ones. He is nostalgic and sentimental. He understands that movies, at their heart, are about storytelling. And storytelling is about each of us trying to make sense of our lives and who we are.
The last words he wrote, just days before he died, were, "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies."
Right to the end Roger Ebert showed that he didn't fear death. He celebrated life. And celebrated it well. A two thumbs up life, that's for certain.
