Audience appreciation: How film critic Roger Ebert brought joy into our world

Although everyone seems to be texting, tweeting, poking, pinning all their experiences these days, it was actually not that many decades ago that people would spend a night at the movies, feel really strong feelings and yet get through dinner without discussing them! Film criticism was the domain of elite experts, with intimidating erudition and vocabularies.Foremost among those who helped make this kind of despotism history was the chubby Roger Ebert.
Through a newspaper column that ran to deadline for 46 years, hit TV shows and finally a dynamic social media avatar, Ebert egged everyone on to voice an opinion, to embrace heightened standards of judgment. With a puckish twinkle behind his horn-rimmed glasses, he reassured audiences that even if their intellect became confused, their emotions would never lie to them.
Consider the Walt Whitmanesque expanse of Ebert's address in a cookbook for rice cookers he wrote after cancer made it impossible for him to have solid food: "I am thinking of you, student in your dorm room. You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman. You, obsessed computer programmer or weary web-worker. You, lovers...You, in the witness protection programme. You, nutritional wingnut. You, in a wheelchair."
The few occasions on which he wrote about Bollywood were usually accompanied by an apologia about how little he knew of it. Yet, he knew not a little. Although Bombay has been renamed Mumbai, there is no movement to rename the genre Mumblywood. The genre has kept its bargain with its (often poor) audience members: You get your money's worth. He wrote this after seeing and strongly endorsing Lagaan. Teeth gnash, tears well, lips tremble, bosoms heave, fists clench, Ebert is satisfied: "I had seen a movie."
Films like Taal and Chandni Chowk to China he wrote about tongue firmly in cheek. The poor girl is not too poor to have a chorus line even when she sings to herself, he reflected. The song-and-dance numbers have great energy but also a certain detachment, as if nothing really matters but the energy. Ebert felt an innocence here that Hollywood had lost. Pulling his coat up over his head against the ferocious blasts of air conditioning at a Hyderabad theatre, he was happy to see Doris Day stories alive and well. And to see his maxim well-illustrated, "that it is less erotic to snoggle for 60 minutes than spend 60 seconds wondering if you are about to be snoggled".
He had long sung praises of the likes of Satyajit Ray, whose Apu Trilogy he compared to a prayer, "affirming that this is what the cinema can be, no matter how far in our cynicism we may stray". Lately, he had been trying to hook into India's low-budget indie scene. Meanwhile, he learned about India by reading about it. The man who taught the vocabulary of film criticism to millions championed reading as the key to self-education, for everyone.
If all the above makes Ebert sound like a saint, he was one with a razor bite. About one film, he wrote, he hated hated hated hated hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Another he called a waste of good electricity and he was not talking about the electricity between the actors. One teen comedy he declared too vulgar for anyone under 13 and too dumb for anyone over 13. He said to say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion. These views went out to more than 200 newspapers that syndicated his column across the world. Ouch.
Yet it was kindness Ebert finally avowed above all else: "We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy i lived long enough to find it out." Amen.