starring Roger Ebert
directed by Steve James
120 minutes
This documentary is about the life of Roger Ebert. He died in 2013. There is a fair amount of footage from the last few months of his life. There is also a fair amount of archival footage in the movie. There are readings from Ebert's book of the same name in the documentary. The readings were done by a voice actor who sounded very much like Roger Ebert. It wasn't until after I finished watching the movie and was doing some research that I discovered that it wasn't Ebert himself reading from his book.
The documentary returns to Ebert's situation at the time the movie was being made, which is mostly footage from Ebert's hospital room, several times. There are lots of other topics covered: his childhood, his early years as a movie reviewer, his relationship with Gene Siskel, his marriage, his approach to writing about movies, the impact of his writing and of his TV show with Gene Siskel, and finally his death.
There are a number of other people interviewed for this movie. Some of the interviews were conducted while he was still alive. Some of them are pepole who I recognized either by name or because I know what they looked like. Others are people whose names were unknown to me but who played an important part in Roger's life.
I was very moved by this movie. I'm glad I watched it. It wasn't an easy watch at times. Ebert lost part of his face due to cancer and lived that way for a number of years before he died. It wasn't the easiest thing to look at. I can only imagine what it must have been like to live with for him and his family.
Roger Ebert continued to write until just before he died. His last column was published posthumously.
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