Life Itself (2014)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2014
	Director: Steve James
	Actors: Roger Ebert, Chaz Ebert, Gene Siskel
	Country: USA
	Genre: Documentary
	Conditions of visioning: 03.04.2015, SD VOD, 11" computer screen
Synopsis: A documentary about the famous cinema critic Roger Ebert who received the Pulitzer price in 1975 and died in 2013, based on his autobiography with the same title.
Review: The man was not so well known in Europe, and the most I knew about him was from his interview on the Blu-ray of Casablanca. I have learned many more things thanks to this documentary, for example that he was a born newspaper writer, already strongly gifted when he was chief editor of his high school journal. In his first years of professional journalism in Chicago he became a party animal and an alcoholic ; he gave up alcohol altogether one day in the  80's. After getting the Pulitzer for his written critics, he started to host a TV-show in which he was simply talking about movies with his kind of adversary from another newspaper: Gene Siskel. This show was extremely popular and lasted for years, in spite of the conflicting characters of the two men. Finally he lost the capacity to speak some years before his death, and at that point became very prolix on his blog. The documentary was started soon before his sickness was diagnosed, so the images of Ebert we see are already after the operation that removed his lower jaw (watching him like this can be hard for some viewers), and the director was cut short in his long series of questions by the last hospital trip. It is by the way very moving to see the transcript of their last email exchanges. Besides that, the way the documentary is done is not specially original.
Rating: 5 /10