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Film theory has nothing to do with film.

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
Arcane
Theory
Film
Nothing

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy . Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.
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One of the weapons Marvel used in its climb to comic-book dominance was a willingness to invent new characters at a dizzying speed. There are so many Marvel universes, indeed, that some superheroes do not even exist in one another's worlds, preventing gridlock.
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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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Valentines Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think its more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
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I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.
Roger Ebert
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Artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
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.
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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.
Roger Ebert
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Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.
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Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.
Roger Ebert
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Praise without merit is more harmful than unearned criticism.
Roger Ebert
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I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don't remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.
Roger Ebert
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It's easier to identify with loss than love, because we have had so much more experience of it.
Roger Ebert
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Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.
Roger Ebert
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The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.
Roger Ebert
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The Golden Thumb is not as good as the Oscar, but it is a lot of fun.
Roger Ebert
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If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.
Roger Ebert
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To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.
Roger Ebert
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There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.
Roger Ebert
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It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
Roger Ebert