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Blockbusters run the mainstream industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.

Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert
Age: 70 †
Born: 1942
Born: June 18
Died: 2013
Died: April 4
Film Critic
Journalist
Presenter
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Urbana
Illinois
Roger Joseph Ebert
Freedom
Running
Blockbusters
May
Blockbuster
Able
Decade
Find
Mainstream
Never
Decades
Like
Directors
Industry

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While I am usually in despair when a movie abandons its plot for a third act given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the way Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting about it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious movie.
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Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images.
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Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
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Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.
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I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation. That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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The Lucky One is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true.
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When a girl says she likes you as a friend, what she means is: Rather than have sex with you, I would prefer to lose you as a friend.
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Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.
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Most people choose movies that provide exactly what they expect, and tell them things they already know. Others are more curious. We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.
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Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.
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Since any reasonable person would choose a Mac over a PC, Apple's market share provides us with an accurate reading of the percentage of reasonable people in our society.
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There's something depressing about a young couple helplessly in love. Their state is so perfect, it must be doomed. They project such qualities on their lover that only disappointment can follow.
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I have always had my doubts about any form of divine intervention in sports contests. The power of prayer may be remarkable in many other arenas, but why should God want my team to win instead of the other side? Isn't it insulting to request God to even take an interest in baseball?
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Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
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By going to the movies, and because of other things, too, going to college, making a wide variety of friends, moving around traveling, I became a lot more open-minded than the heritage I was born into might have suggested.
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Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.
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The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?
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What I believe is that all clear-minded people should remain two things throughout their lifetimes: Curious and teachable.
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Families and their problems go on and on, and they aren't solved, they're dealt with.
Roger Ebert
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If you plan to miss this movie, better miss it quickly I doubt if it'll be around to miss for long.
Roger Ebert