Roger Ebert, the famous movie critic that was the first to win a Pulitzer for move criticism, died on Thursday at age 70 after a battle with cancer.
According to AOL.com, Ebert died from complications from throat cancer that reoccurred and he had previously been with the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. The critic wrote reviews of hundreds of movies and popularized the "two thumbs up" approach with fellow critic Gene Siskel.
Ebert reviewed many sports films during his career, good ones and bad, including Hoosiers, Field of Dreams, Raging Bull, Jerry Maguire, Chariots of Fire, The Sandlot, Caddyshack, The Natural and many more. Ebert was one of the most popular critics if his time and was known for his love of film and writing about the movies.
Some of his best writing from sports film reviews:
"Hoosiers"
The climax of the movie will come as no great surprise to anyone who has seen other sports movies. "Hoosiers" works a magic, however, in getting us to really care about the fate of the team and the people depending on it. In the way it combines sports with human nature, it reminded me of another wonderful Indiana sports movie, "Breaking Away." It's a movie that is all heart.
"The Natural"
"Either he hits the homer and then dies, or his bleeding was just a false alarm. If the bleeding was a false alarm, then everything else in the movie was false, too. But I guess that doesn't matter, because THE NATURAL gives every sign of a story that's been seriously meddled with. ... THE NATURAL could have been a decent movie. One reason that it is not: Of all its characters, the only one we don't want to know more about is Roy Hobbs."
"Field of Dreams"
"The film will not appeal to grinches and grouches and realists. It is a delicate movie, a fragile construction of one goofy fantasy after another. But it has the courage to be about exactly what it promises. "If you build it, he will come."
"Raging Bull"
(Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta) does not have additional "qualities" to share with us. He is an engine driven by his own rage. The equation between his prizefighting and his sexuality is inescapable, and we see the trap he's in: LaMotta is the victim of base needs and instincts that, in his case, are not accompanied by the insights and maturity necessary for him to cope with them. The raging bull. The poor sap.
