The key moment in my life as a cinephile was seeing Pulp Fiction when I was 15. Quentin Tarantino’s film was different than anything I’d ever seen before, and it made me realize that there was more to cinema than John McClane, John Matrix and John Rambo (not that I don’t still love those guys!). After seeing it, I started reading up on film history, paying more attention to reviews in newspapers and, before long, I caught up to the Siskel & Ebert TV show, even though it only aired at midnight on Sundays up here.

I sometimes strongly disagreed with hosts Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, but I nevertheless always found their conversations engaging, and I can’t count all the great films I saw specifically because one or both of them recommended them. Heck, I first saw Say Anything, the Cameron Crowe masterpiece which gave this column its name, because Ebert gave it first-class honours in the high school movie genre while panning the 1998 teen flick Can’t Hardly Wait!

So basically Roger Ebert played an important part in making me become a bona fide movie geek. In addition to watching him on TV, I read his reviews on the Chicago Sun-Times website for years (I still do from time to time) and bought quite a few of the books he’s written, the latest being his recently published memoir, Life Itself.

"I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me," go the opening lines, tellingly enough. Clearly, Ebert thinks in terms of cinema, whatever he’s writing about. A bit further along, while listing some of the most acutely intense moments he ever experienced, in between learning his father had cancer and proposing to his future wife, he includes the time "in the old Palais des Festivals at Cannes, when the Ride of the Valkyries played during the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now."

With or without overt movie references, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic then reminisces about his parents, his childhood, how he got started in the newspaper business and how, in 1967, he was named film critic of the Sun-Times even though that had never been a career goal of his. He learned his beat along the way, which happened to be in the New Hollywood era that spawned future classics like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Almost right off the bat, he was deemed a "populist at the movies," as a 1970 profile in Time magazine put it, taking to heart the mottos of two fellow film scribes: that of Pauline Kael, who said, "I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me," and of Robert Warshow, who wrote, "A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man." In other words, Ebert has always believed – as do I – that criticism is an inherently subjective thing. You can hide behind film theory all you want, but in the end, if you don’t write from the gut, what good is it?

Life Itself, which I’m still working my way though, also includes remembrances of various other aspects of Roger Ebert’s life, notably his struggle with alcoholism, his marriage to Chaz Hammel-Smith and, naturally, his love/hate relationship with Gene Siskel, who died on February 20, 1999, but who remains in his mind "almost every day." Ebert also opens up about how cancers of the thyroid and jaw, difficult surgeries and other complications led to him losing the ability to speak, eat and drink. A deeply unfortunate turn of events for sure, but if anything, it’s made the act of writing more important than ever for him.

Unlike your average autobiography, Ebert’s includes chapters devoted to specific actors, namely Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum and "Big" John Wayne, and to such filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Werner Herzog and odd-man-out Russ Meyer, who may not be as respected as the others, but with whom America’s most famous film critic struck up a friendship in the late 1960s. Ebert, who shared a love of large breasts with the "King of Nudies," even got to co-write Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with Meyer. Now that’s what I call a populist at the movies!

Life Itself
by Roger Ebert
Grand Central, 436 pp.