#LIFE ITSELF 2014 MOVIE#

‘A sitcom about two guys who lived in a movie theatre’: Siskell and Ebert recording At the Movies. In fact, James succeeds in going beyond the usual hagiography by devoting greater attention to thornier subjects such as Ebert’s complicated dynamic with Siskel, as well as the massive and not necessarily positive impact their show had on the ways movies were received, perceived and marketed. Plenty of other people get the chance to speak here too, a fact that makes James’s film less of an adaptation of Ebert’s memoir than an equally rich and engaging companion piece. And while you may expect his voice synthesiser to be the least mellifluous, it’s actually more jarring to hear the eerily Ebert-like sound of Stephen Stanton, an impressionist enlisted by James to read passages from the memoir on the film’s soundtrack. Along with the familiar sound of its subject in the many archival clips – which chart the critic’s transformation from the skittish nerd introducing Ingmar Bergman films in his first on-camera gig in the early 1970s into the tuxedoed jetsetter hobnobbing with Robert De Niro in a Cannes report for his TV show in the 1980s or holding court at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs in the 1990s – there’s the Mac-generated version of his last years, in which he refused to allow his disfigurement to prevent him from continuing his life as one of cinema’s most impassioned and most public advocates. Material from those blogs would form the basis for the moving 2011 memoir with which James’s film shares its name.īut one of the most fascinating aspects of Life Itself is how it becomes a catalogue of Ebert’s various speaking voices as well. Indeed, a more personal and intimate voice would emerge in the voluminous array of blog entries, reviews and other writings with which he filled his final years. Of course, Ebert himself wasn’t silenced by the surgery – far from it. That’s why it felt like such a shock to lose that voice when it was silenced with the removal of Ebert’s lower jaw in 2006, a brutal skirmish in the 11-year battle with cancer that ended in 2013.

Life itself 2014