Quote

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

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
Eye
Citizen
Away
Hardly
Look
Fascinating
Looks
Citizens
Take
Cutting
Long
Takes
Movie
Kane
Eyes
Cuts

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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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I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.
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Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.
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Sometimes, it's all about the casting.
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Artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
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The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.
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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.
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Friends don't let Jackasses drink and drive.
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I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic - the year that Bonnie and Clyde didn't win.
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Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.
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'Marley' does what is probably the best possible job of documenting an important life.
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In the best of all possible worlds, directors would obsess about the quality of their storytelling, and not the details of their technical methods.
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From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
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We exist to have our wealth moved up the economic chain out of our reach.
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To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?
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Samurai films, like westerns, need not be familiar genre stories. They can expand to contain stories of ethical challenges and human tragedy.
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Sometimes you only need to have a few words with a person to know you would like to have many more.
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Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.
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If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.
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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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