Today Roger Ebert died after a hard fought battle with cancer.  He was 70 years old, and – at least for me – humanized movie reviewing, making it feel like it was something that anyone, including myself, could do.

I remember watching both him and Gene Siskel – who died in February, 1999 – on the “At The Movies” TV show, and in retrospect, what amazed me most about it in general and Roger Ebert in particular was that he was never snobby or demeaning toward the films he reviewed, despite not being afraid to call out films that were particularly bad.

As they do below with Joel Schumacher’s 1997 film, “Batman and Robin.”

Ebert was also one of the fairest critics that I had ever seen.  By which I mean that he liked all sorts of films, and didn’t disregard something because it was a scifi or horror film, which many critics seemed to have a knee-jerk negative reaction toward.

He seemed to genuinely love the medium of moviemaking, and the its possibilities, which, somehow elevated him beyond the constraints of advocating only for a particular type of film.

By way of example, I believe that he would have probably disliked the movie adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s “The Host,” though he would have given it a fair shot, and not pan it because it was from the person who sexlessly birthed the ‘Twilight’ novels that the films were based upon.

That’s why he was so awesome, and why I’ll miss him.