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Rule of Thumb: Ebert at the Movies. Todd Rendleman. New York: Continuum, 2012. 209 pages. $17.09. Paperback.
When Roger Ebert passed away in April 2013, I was coincidently in the middle of three of his books: his memoir Life Itself, The Great Movies III, and A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck. Yet despite Ebert's unrivaled influence on the way Americans watch movies, monographs analyzing Ebert's work have been lacking. Into the void arrives Todd Rendleman's Rule of Thumb: Ebert at the Movies, with a foreword by Ebert himself in which he expresses his surprise that a "newspaperman" could be taken so seriously.
Presented with an opening chapter entitled "Godchild," those familiar with Ebert's religious upbringing may expect an account of his childhood; instead, the author traces Ebert's influences as a film critic, most critically Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. In regards to auteurist approaches, Ebert forged a via media between the extremes of Sarris and Kael. While Ebert certainly had directors he loved to champion (Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani), Rendleman points out that it was usually "a careful scouring of the...