A. O. Scott on Roger Ebert #
New York Times film critic A. O. Scott offers a nice goodbye to Roger Ebert as a television personality.
It seems to me that “Sneak Previews” and its descendants, far from advancing the vulgarization of film criticism, extended its reach and strengthened its essentially democratic character. That is not to say that chatting about a movie in front of a camera (actually three cameras), and bouncing from a scripted mini-review to improvised cross-talk, can ever achieve the depth or nuance of a polished piece of writing. (Roger has often admitted as much. When I was at his house, he scribbled a bit of wisdom on the small spiral notebook that is his main conversational vehicle these days: the gist was that when writing, you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.)
(via kottke)