Roger Ebert

If you don't know of Roger Ebert, you're only partly alive. Without thirty years of access to his insight, wit, intelligence, and humor, I might never have learned of such movies as "The Third Man", which I think about on a weekly basis.

Ebert once defined a four-star movie as one which a viewer would appreciate, regardless of its genre; even a fan of action films should enjoy "A Woman under the Influence", for instance.

With this in mind, I have created my own criterion for the worth of a film: Am I still thinking about the movie a week after I see it? If so, then the movie has affected me in some way, and, in my eyes, is worthy of top-tier status. Films like "Open Water" and "Paranormal Activity" fill the bill perhaps on the strength of their genre, but so does "The Third Man."

"The Third Man" contains every element certain to appall the casual movie watcher. It is a black-and-white film. None of the main actors---Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard---is a household name today. Only three people die (one of them off-screen), and there are no noteworthy explosions and no gratuitous sex.

Yet this is a masterful film for its score, acting, and cinematography. I will refer you to Roger Ebert's review of "The Third Man", as this is the review that got me interested in film when I first read it in 1985 (this is the link to Mr. Ebert's site: http://www.rogerebert.com/. Check out the Great Movies section, where a lifetime of intellectual stimulation awaits you). Twenty-five years of wonderful insight into the movies. They are a part of my life.

Roger Ebert has shaped my taste much in the same way as did certain literature professors of mine. From them I have read and re-read Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, writers I might never have otherwise experienced. Ebert has done the same for Cassavettes, Bergman, Orson Welles, Wim Wenders, among many others.

Cheers to you, Mr. Ebert.