Roger Ebert has written a moving tribute to his fellow film critic, Joel Siegel on his website RogerEbert.com. You can read it here. There's one part which made me tear up, I'm excerpting it below.I have a love-hate relationship with film critics ever since my Film Criticism course at Bard - I love reading their work, I hate the fact that I can't write a rebuttal. In my free time, I'd study Ebert and Siskel's (my other hero) writings and ponder how I'd have written it. I wanted to rewrite two of Ebert's movie reviews: one of Speed 2 (which he liked, I hated), and Sliding Doors (which I loved, and he hated). Sunil Malapati and I spent hours and hours discussing movies, which would have made an interesting read, kinda like the South Asian Siskel & Ebert. A boy can dream, can't he?
Ebert is an eloquent writer, and he mentioned a writing style that he follows where he starts from the middle of a conversation and talks to the audience, I've tried to copy this style for my style. I'm really happy that he's made a triumphant return from his bout with cancer, and am looking forward to his latest book, "Your Movie Sucks". The title came out of his supposed feud with the Rob Schneider, the star of "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" after he panned the movie and wrote an open letter beginning with, "Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."
So going back to Joel Siegel. He was diagnosed with cancer back in 1997, and at the time, his first son, Dylan, was two months away from being born, and he didn't know whether he'd live to see his son. Ebert writes about this passage in the book that Siegel wrote for his son called "Lessons for Dylan". This is where he talks about his feelings soon after hearing his diagnosis:
“I remember looking out the hospital window at a tree, a tree that had somehow managed to grow large and lush even though its seed had somehow taken root on a two-foot wide spit of land between the FDR Drive, one of the busiest highways in
America, and the East River, one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world. And I remember thinking about the impossible coincidences that come together to create the miracle of life.”
