Roger Ebert dies at 70 after battle with cancer

Don't get me wrong. Reading is important, the classics are important. But the idea that you have to focus in "old stuff" to be intellectual is absurd.

http://www.pajiba.com/videos/watch-roger-ebert-was-a-total-d...

His personality kept at arms length throughout the 80's and 90's.

However when he could only speak through his writings, people saw some sparks of brilliance and began paying him attention. The bravery he showed by appearing at the Sundance Festival after losing his jaw was noticed. And over the last six years he has been recognized as last great critic.

Some of my favorites are Glenn Kenny, David Bordwell, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Kent Jones, and others I'm missing.

"I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable."

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2013/03/how_i_am_a_roman_cat...

The ability to hold mutually contradictory ideas at the same time and continue to function is something we all do - it's a fundamental part of the human psyche. There's nothing special about it. It's just that we generally do it by compartmentalising the ideas to different parts of our lives.

Dealing with multiple contradictory ideas at the same time and knowing and accepting how they contradict, is very different.

It's attributed to Metaphysics (http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2479557), Nichomachean Ethics -- as you said (http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/aristotleworks/a/121610-A...), and Wikiquote (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aristotle). cmd+f (or ctrl) for 'educated' to find it in the last two links for it also appears slightly different from your version.

I don't mean to restart the debate here, I'm just pointing out that his arguments are insulated and prejudiced, and hence my main point: that by denying any debate on the topic (it's the first sentence in your link - relented only by sheer volume), he refuses to learn about the topic. Again, I think this is in stark contrast to the quote I was initially responding to. I think it is profoundly anti-intellectual to behave in this manner.

I don't care whether or not he likes games, or whether he thinks they're shit art or not. Each to their own. But for an influential person in a related field to make such a contentious, declarative statement, and then refuse to entertain debate... that's anti-intellectualism, in my opinion. Just like the layperson who doesn't get cubism and calls it inferior as a result.

He did change opinion over time and concede that they could be 'non-traditional art', which suggests that yes indeed, engaging in debate (even if it has to be forced upon you) can actually change your views; help you understand why people say what they say.

PS: the snarky person in me had to laugh at Ebert's characterisation of games as 'not art' because the audience's actions can change the outcome or plot. Clearly he never played Mass Effect :D

He was right, by the way: he did indeed get thin (he stopped being able to eat after losing his jaw to a surgical mishap), and Vincent Gallo is indeed still the director of The Brown Bunny.

"I was reminded of Mad Dog Time (1996), another movie in which well-known actors engaged in laughable dialogue while shooting one another. Of that one, I wrote: " `Mad Dog Time' is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time." Now comes Frogs for Snakes, the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of Mad Dog Time."

In an interesting twist of fate, my office is in the coordinated science lab (CSL), where HAL was built.

Your continued thwapping on his score of the film that you oh-so-despise betrays your obvious fault in that you only cared about his reviews when they weren't to your liking, because anybody who's read Ebert for any length of time knows that he hated the scoring and added it against his will. All of his scores must be taken in the context of the review, and he always said (nay, demanded) as much. In the context of the review, you know, the words he wrote describing his experience, we find this:

[...] the characters in "The Phantom Menace" inhabit a plot that is little more complex than the stories I grew up on in science-fiction magazines. The whole series sometimes feel like a cover from Thrilling Wonder Stories, come to life. The dialogue is pretty flat and straightforward, although seasoned with a little quasi-classical formality, as if the characters had read but not retained "Julius Caesar." I wish the "Star Wars" characters spoke with more elegance and wit (as Gore Vidal's Greeks and Romans do), but dialogue isn't the point, anyway: These movies are about new things to look at.

It's almost as if he understands the film's flaws or something! It's a completely different perspective when you consume his opinion as it's meant to be consumed. He spoke out very strongly, all his life, against people like you who walked away with the score as a conclusion (for good reason, obviously).

I originally said all that and replaced it with "Your comment sucks.", because I knew you'd fight with me on this, even though it's entirely pointless. I am aware this is Hacker News, but thank you for the patronizing reminder. Your comment still sucks. Your followup sucks, too, particularly the "go back to Reddit" tone (the irony of a person describing Roger Ebert as "useless" on Hacker News, then pulling the Hacker News card to criticize my comment is not lost on me).

It's funny some of the vitriol around here, on a discussion of an obituary. Can't some guy die in peace?

(Aside, or back to the original topic, depending on perspective: In the last decade or so I'd been really impressed by some of Ebert's writing, post-cancer. It showed a lot of depth that you didn't get from the TV movie critic persona that he had in the 90s.)

When you say "for what?" I can only point to the aggressive variant of BC my wife was diagnosed with 3 years ago. A death sentence literally a few years ago, she is now recovered and has good prospects for a long and productive life.

This is only possible because of the "fortune" of research thrown at her particular form of cancer in recent years; but it goes deeper than that. Because of the expense of the (relatively new) treatment and limited history of efficacy/results, her specialist had to personally argue the case for her to receive the treatment with our local health authority (I am in the UK btw so perhaps this is different to the US).

As more women (hopefully) successfully recover with the use of this treatment, resistance to spend on research will hopefully fade in the face of such positive results.

From the brightest cancer researchers in the world down to the people working in your local chemotherapy unit, progress is being made at a better rate than ever before. It's just very hard work, and I don't think money and fame really come into it - there are easier ways to achieve that:)

Cancer is way, way weirder than anybody thought. It's not a single-bullet thing. Cancer actually evolves right inside you, for one thing. They can actually chart the genome of different parts of the tumor and trace the cell lineages. So any one drug has different effectiveness against different parts of the cancer.

So there's been slow, steady progress over the last couple of decades, and survival rates are way better than they used to be - and just getting better. But "treating cancer" is kind of like "treating viruses" - you need a whole array of techniques. And we're building that array. Nothing's stopping anybody.

Cancer as a whole has none of those characteristics.