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Roger Ebert touched my life in a number of ways, not only as a film critic or a fan of movies, but as a Chicagoan. Somehow, Ebert became the de facto voice in film criticism during his long tenure at the Chicago Sun-Times. I’ll never become half the critic he was, but I acknowledge his influence every time I sit down to watch a film and every time I sit down to gather my thoughts together for a review. Everybody knew who Ebert was, highlighting just how iconic he became in his lifetime while writing for a local newspaper (that was distributed nationally, to be fair). Ebert never lost his voice, even after he very literally lost his voice to cancer towards the end of his life. Finally, a fitting testimony to his legacy will be appearing in theaters across the country later this summer.
Entitled Life Itself, the documentary follows Ebert’s life as an amateur writer to becoming the icon he eventually became, complete with the trials and tribulations he had to face. I wrote a bit about the documentary while its crowd funding campaign was going on last year. While I unfortunately missed the doc back at Sundance, I look forward to seeing what director Steve James (Hoop Dreams) was able to put together.
Life Itself will be released on July 4th.