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I discovered writer Robert Ebert‘s blog just in time for his well-turned and generous observations on the Beijing Olympics this past summer. He has long since passed from my list of favorite critics into my list of favorite writers, an artist whose work transcends the specifics of his trade and touches the root of human nuance and communication. (Aside: such artistry is surprisingly orthogonal to quality of work, and those with deep perception regularly produce careless or incomplete work, as do we all.)
So it was a lasting pleasure to see that not only does he have a changeable personal blog to complement his regular cleanly-patterned column of film reviews, but also that he explores the medium for real conversation, with well-moderated and replied-to comments that expand his two-page posts a hundred times over. Three cheers for that.
As for those story reviews, I find a number of them (in moderation – don’t eat more than twenty at once, Molly, you’ll be sick to your stomach) a rewarding echo of the spirit-cleansing of a great story proper. And they never fail to make me mindful of the power of one’s use of time to guide the use of times to come. As Ebert says of his art,
We are all allotted an unknown but finite number of hours of consciousness. Maybe a critic can help you spend them more meaningfully… I am only trying to define what I aspire to. I have learned most of what I know about movies from other critics, and by critics I mean everyone who has ever given me an interesting insight into a film.