I think this question was asked just after I created my formspring account, and I sort of regret not answering it then, as Hegel has since died and the 24 hour news cycle has moved on to other things.

I did, however, attempt to answer it a few weeks ago, by relating an insulting story about Roger Ebert. While I was typing that timely and grand take-down of a guy that's been made fun of in the media for at least 25 years, I happened to click over to my twitter window and saw a link to a blog post Ebert made.

'What synchronicity!', I exclaimed, and began singing 'King of Pain' and doing my best 'serious Sting face'. I attempt to accomplish this by imagining myself standing on a stage with two other guys. Nice guys, talented, but nowhere near as talented as I am. I have a song to sing, a castle to buy, money to make, first edition romantic poetry manuscripts to put in a vault, and these two guys are creeping up behind me. Closer and closer as the spotlight begins to shrink down. Just outside that thin gold circle is a darkness. A darkness containing no hand-written Wordsworth notes, or drawbridges, or Grammies. And it's two men attempting to squeeze into the light with me. Out of the darkness, into the light, two guys, friends, sort of, that I can't necessarily meet in open conflict. Luckily, while my lyrics are mostly, at this point, based on working class characters, and typical pop music plots, I secretly have not only an educated background, but am extremely well-studied in both the history of music and literature. I named Roxanne after the character from CYRANO DE BERGERAC, motherfuckers. I study Tantra. I study society. I am attractive. I am well liked by both high and low culture. And while I need those two guys right now, for conflict, to push me, for support, I am sure of myself. I am going to sing 'King of Pain' and just keep this all inside, until it turns to guilt and I have to spend the next 30 years attempting to save the rain forest.

Though, admittedly, it's not a very good Sting impersonation.

I clicked on the Ebert link and found an incredibly depressing essay about how he hasn't been able to eat or drink anything for years, and he used to love life, and he's trying to again, and it was uplifting in a sad way like watching those commercials where kids actually like their grandparents.

So I'm not going to talk shit about Roger Ebert. He's actually a good blogger. Most of the time, I feel the best blogs are written by either people that know a lot about one niche thing, or people that had a very specific life experience that they can relate. Ebert is a guy that has watched a billion movies, and became famous for talking about them. That's pretty specific. What Ebert is not good at though, is being a film critic.

I know a lot of people realize this. It's pretty well demonstrated in an interview he did with Bill Clinton while he was president. It's on youtube. It's uncomfortable to watch. Ebert is embarrassed, and nervous and attempting to sort of kiss Clinton's ass. He brings up the fact that AMERICAN BEAUTY and FIGHT CLUB are terrible, nihilistic films, in order to sort of play to what he (for some reason) assumes would be the American president's conservative views on pop culture. He assumes Clinton hasn't seen these movies. He has. He also understands them in a way a film professor might. He likes them. He disagrees with Ebert. He explains what type of society, historically would make films that deconstruct middle-class, suburban living. It is soon revealed that he's actually seen every movie ever made, and remembers them better, and understands them more critically than the movie critic he's talking to.

One could argue that Ebert is a 'man of the people' and part of his popularity is due to the fact that he understands film as much as some random guy that wants to watch Mel Gibson punch people. He may come at his reviews 'Larry King-style' and not do any research because he wants to just get down what a 'normal person' would experience while watching a film. He may be the Jay-Z of critics. That's cool. That's not the character that Ebert has attempted to build through his career though. He seemed to want to be the movie scholar, the original pop culture nerd, if he had heard of the French new-wave critics, I'm sure he wanted to be like them.

But as he's gotten older, and weirder (as people do), and only has his reviews posted on his blog rather than in a newspaper or on tv, he's actually gotten more interesting. It's become obvious that everything he's written has been incredibly subjective, and from a personal place. He likes the GARFIELD movie because he wants the other guy that hated it to go fuck himself, he hates GRINDHOUSE because Tarantino is just trying to be the cool version of Ebert, he likes THE DARK KNIGHT because of an origin story for The Joker he completely made up while writing the review and put into his memories of the film retroactively.

He's become a blogger.

A couple of summers ago, I went to the movies with my girlfriend, my brother and my sister. I forget what we originally went to see, but we followed it by sneaking into see THE HAPPENING. None of us had any idea what it was about besides the fact that it was the new M Night Shyamalan movie. If you've seen it, you understand that it is shockingly bad. I watched it for an hour, sort of confused, wondering if I was missing something. Marky Mark was running away from wind. I looked over at the three people I was with and just saw equally confused looks on their faces. It was the first time while watching a movie that I actually started to seriously consider the idea that I was dreaming and none of this was happening. After the part where the characters watch a tiger eat a guy's arms off on their iPhone, I started to wonder if it was a black comedy. After the part where the guy runs himself over with a lawnmower, I honestly waited for the Shyamalan twist ending to be that the entire movie was a joke.

By the time it ended, I was sort of fascinated by it. Why was it so bad? Did anyone see it before they distributed it? Where did the money to make it come from? Are other people as shocked as I am? So I went home and looked it up online. Most people were equally shocked. Roger Ebert loved it.

He reasoned that since the movie is about the apocalypse, it should be taken seriously, because for the past few years he's had a very strong feeling that the world is ending. Ebert declared the apocalypse on his movie blog and no one really cared. Of course, Ebert has been really sick for the past few years and can no longer eat, or talk, or walk, and he'd have to be having feelings of mortality. But he didn't say he was having strong feelings that he may die soon, he said he was sure that the world was ending.

Shit's subjective, Hegel.