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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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A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that.
Roger Ebert
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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
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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.
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A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
Roger Ebert
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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.
Roger Ebert
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Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.
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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There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
Roger Ebert
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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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The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [...] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling...and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old.
Roger Ebert
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There are two things you can't argue in film: comedy and eroticism. If something doesn't make you laugh, no one can tell you why it's funny, and it's difficult to reason someone out of an erection.
Roger Ebert
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James Cameron's films have always been distinguished by ground-breaking technical excellence.
Roger Ebert
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But the fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.
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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We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.
Roger Ebert
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What a terrible thing it would be to be the Pope! What unthinkable responsibilities to fall on your shoulders at an advanced age! No privacy. No seclusion. No sin.
Roger Ebert
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Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
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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Steven Spielberg makes Minority Report with the newest digital technology other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it.
Roger Ebert
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If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.
Roger Ebert