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We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.

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
Identifying
Dna
Movie
Help
Helping
Going
Coded
Protagonist
Protagonists

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
Roger Ebert
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To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.
Roger Ebert
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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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Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.
Roger Ebert
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If you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may be.
Roger Ebert
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Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.
Roger Ebert
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A film is a terrible thing to waste.
Roger Ebert
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Dogs notice, they share, they draw conclusions, they like it when they're able to be of service and are touchingly grateful when they're praised.
Roger Ebert
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We laugh, that we may not cry.
Roger Ebert
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Teenagers used to go to the movies to see adults having sex. Today adults go to the movies to see teenagers having sex.
Roger Ebert
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When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.
Roger Ebert
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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.
Roger Ebert
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All good art is about something deeper than it admits.
Roger Ebert
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We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.
Roger Ebert
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Growing up, I missed the whole 'Three Stooges' thing. Either they weren't on the station in my hometown, or we hadn't bought a TV set yet, or they came to town too late for me. I'm pretty sure that at the right age, I would have loved them.
Roger Ebert
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It's strange: We leave the movie having enjoyed its conclusion so much that we almost forgot our earlier reservations. But they were there, and they were real.
Roger Ebert
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The fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday. And we've had a concerted policy of taking money away from the poor and giving it to the rich wholesale, and at the same time, we have the runaway corporations, and the greed.
Roger Ebert
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How quickly do we grow accustomed to wonders. I am reminded of the Isaac Asimov story Nightfall, about the planet where the stars were visible only once in a thousand years. So awesome was the sight that it drove men mad. We who can see the stars every night glance up casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again, searching for a Dairy Queen.
Roger Ebert
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Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
Roger Ebert
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We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.
Roger Ebert