If you like the Fitzgerald quote, you'd probably also be interested in the idea that it essentially summarizes "Negative Capability"[0] which was originally developed by the poet John Keats.

Particularly relevant I feel in a world of comment thread polemics

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability

If you're interested, the quote comes from The Crack-Up, which "tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at age thirty-nine from a life of success and glamor to one of emptiness and despair, and his determined recovery."[1]

[1]: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16893.The_Crack_Up

It's a sad comment on society that Ebert is considered an intellectual.

If Ebert had died before Siskel, your comment would probably not be questioned. Ebert has a reputation now that did not exist throughout nearly the entirety of his career. His reputation was resurrected with his public battle with cancer in 2006. Before then he was this guy:

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.

Why? Because he chose to primarily comment about movies in public? And you don't consider movies worthy of intellectual commentary?

There's nothing wrong with film criticism. Ebert's 4-star ratings are even a good heuristic for picking something to watch. All of his "great movies" are generally recognized as such. And he certainly knew a lot more details about film than probably anyone else.

The problem with Ebert's reviews is that they offer very little in the way of insight, analysis, or depth. Instead, they are generally straightforward expositions of the film crew, setting, characters, and plot. This means that you cannot read them before watching a film, unless you want to be spoiled, and afterwards, if you were paying any kind of attention, you've already grasped everything that he points out. He doesn't usually explain what he thought the central message of a film is, so it can be unclear if he got it or not. He isn't big on interpretation.

He wasn't an idiot, but he didn't do the hard intellectual work of coming up with something new to say about films. Even the most hyper-intelligent person would have a hard time coming up with "intellectual" things to say at the rate he churned through movies. I think he was writing something like one review per day by the end.

Ebert's reviews are to film criticism what Ebert's one-pot cooking is to a full kitchen. He could make something reasonable, and it would appeal to lots of people, but the structural and time constraints meant it would never have the sophistication of an in-depth treatment. Ask someone in film studies, ask someone in culinary school.

The positive side of a lack of depth is breadth, which means we have a massive number of star ratings from a single source, and as such his work is a reasonable encyclopedia of film. Much of what he details in his reviews isn't available in Wikipedia, or appropriate for it.

It's an unfortunate oversimplification to reduce Ebert to his Sun-Times reviews. They were well-written and erudite, but they weren't meant to be extended meditations on the art of cinema. His review-writing had customers, and he gave the customers what they needed and wanted. Ebert had other venues for deeper kinds of writing, and was prolific in them. Ebertfest, for instance, was well-known for frame-by-frame analyses of important movies. Or read how he arrived at and massaged his top 10 films of all time, or what he wrote about Ozu or Herzog.

But I'd pause before stipulating even that his review writing was broad. Even within the medium of mass-market reviews, Ebert was impactful. Think about how his star system worked, so that Donner's Superman shared a rating with Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, and that somehow still made sense. Or the way he managed his brand, or syndicated his show with Siskel.

Yeah, I basically agree. His mainstream work is what he's known for, and it's probably why self-avowed intellectuals (academics in film studies or film theory) don't consider him an intellectual. For me it's that even with his online work, he's much more of an everyman than an ivory tower guy, which is why the label of "intellectual" doesn't quite fit. This isn't bad or good, this is just how I see it, and it says nothing about his own intelligence. Finally, I think it's quite possible for depth within a review format. I like the ones in Variety: they're deeper, yet they don't give it away. Then again, they don't have as much mass-market appeal.

If you think Ebert only wrote starred reviews and had TV shows, then you are very wrong, and you have missed out. That's what he is most known for, but his extensive writings and lectures on film go as deep as anyone else in the field.

"As deep as anyone else in the field" implies formal writing, which I've never seen by Ebert. If it exists, does it compare with what gets published in a film studies journal, or has it been published in one? Do you have a link or article name?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Film_studies_journals

The man won a Pulitzer... how high is the bar you're setting, exactly?

So did Thomas Friedman.

So? Winning some arbitrary prize does not mean anything, other than the fact that he won the prize. It implies no level of intellectualism.

This idea that new forms of media (film, TV) are innately anti-intellectual just because the classics were in writing is ridiculous.

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.

gnosis didn't say anything about film or new media. I'd be really pretty surprised if gnosis believed there weren't "intellectual" (read: thoughtful) things to say about film. That said, he didn't explain why it's sad that Ebert was considered an intellectual either, so who knows.

I'm sure there must have been a similar reaction when the works of Homer were first written down - I'm sure bards who relied on memory must have regarded writing as "anti-intellectual".

A little ironic given how Ebert was so long a stick-in-the-mud about video games being considered art. ISTR he eventually caved on that, though.