March 28, 2024

ROGER EBERT | 1942-2013: Roger Ebert, Movie Critic of the Mainstream, Dies at 70

His death was announced by The Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for more than 40 years. No cause was specified, but he had suffered from cancer and related health problems since 2002.

It would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Ebert was the best-known film reviewer of his generation, and one of the most trusted. The force and grace of his opinions propelled film criticism into the mainstream of American culture. Not only did he advise moviegoers about what to see, but also how to think about what they saw.

President Obama reacted to Mr. Ebert’s death with a statement that said, in part: “For a generation of Americans — especially Chicagoans — Roger was the movies. When he didn’t like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive — capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical.”

Mr. Ebert’s struggle with cancer gave him an altogether different public image — as someone who refused to surrender to illness. Though he had operations for cancer of the thyroid, salivary glands and chin, lost his ability to eat, drink and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he was fed through a tube for years) and became a gaunter version of his once-portly self, he continued to write reviews and commentary and published a cookbook on meals that could be made with a rice cooker.

“When I am writing, my problems become invisible, and I am the same person I always was,” he told Esquire magazine in 2010. “All is well. I am as I should be.”

In recent years, Mr. Ebert became a prolific presence on Facebook and Twitter, on which he had more than 800,000 followers, and was a blogger as well.

He fired tweets with machine-gun rapidity, on topics both profound and prosaic. He commented on pro football, his captions for The New Yorker cartoon contest, an old pub he once frequented,James Joyce short stories and untold numbers of movies and television shows, to which he linked. “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star,” went one tweet.

He swore he would not become addicted to Twitter, but emphatically did. But Mr. Ebert — whose handle was @ebertchicago — never tweeted during a movie.

Mr. Ebert liked to say his approach — dryly witty, occasionally sarcastic, sometimes quirky in his opinions — reflected the working newspaper reporter he had been, not a formal student of film. His tastes ran from the classics to boldly independent cinema to cartoons, and his put-downs could be withering.

“I will one day be thin, butVincent Gallowill always be the director of ‘The Brown Bunny,’ ” he wrote.

His thumbs-up-or-down approach drew scorn from some critics, who said it trivialized film criticism. Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1991, Mr. Ebert agreed that his television program at the time was “not a high-level, in-depth film-criticism show.” But he argued that it demonstrated to younger viewers that one can bring standards of judgment to movies, that “it’s O.K. to have an opinion.”

In 1975 he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his Sun-Times reviews. His columns were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad, and he wrote more than 15 books, many by skillfully recycling his columns. In 2005 he became the first film critic to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“In the century or so that there has been such a thing as film criticism, no other critic has ever occupied the space held by Roger Ebert,” Mick LaSalle, movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, wrote in 2010. “Others as influential as Ebert have not been as esteemed. Others as esteemed as Ebert have not had the same direct and widespread influence. And no one, but no one, has enjoyed the same fame.”

With Mr. Siskel, Mr. Ebert popularized television film criticism. Their collaboration began in 1975. Mr. Ebert was asked to appear on WTTW, the public broadcasting station in Chicago, as co-host of a new movie-review program. He was intrigued, but then taken aback when told that Mr. Siskel, the film critic of The Chicago Tribune, would be his partner.

“The answer was at the tip of my tongue: no,” Mr. Ebert told Time magazine in 1987.

As for Mr. Siskel, he said he initially had no desire to team up with “the most hated guy in my life.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 4, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified a movie critic for The San Francisco Chronicle. He is Mick LaSalle, not Mike LaSalle.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/movies/roger-ebert-film-critic-dies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Health Consumer: For Diabetes, Older Drugs Are Often the Best

One in 10 Americans has Type 2 diabetes. If the trend continues, one in three will suffer from the disease by the year 2050, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most Type 2 diabetes patients take one or more drugs to control blood sugar. They spent an estimated $12.5 billion on medication in 2007, twice the amount spent in 2001, according to a study by the University of Chicago. (That figure does not including drugs that diabetics are often prescribed for related health conditions, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol.)

Why the increase? More diagnosed patients, more drugs per patient and an onslaught of expensive new drugs, according to Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study. Since 1995, several new classes of diabetes medications have come on the market. Diabetes drugs are important to the pharmaceutical industry, more lucrative than drugs for many other chronic diseases, Dr. Alexander noted in an interview.

Simply put, many of these drugs help the body produce less glucose or more insulin, the hormone that shuttles glucose into cells for use as energy, or they increase the body’s sensitivity to its own insulin.

Patients and health care professionals have long hoped that as pharmaceutical companies found ways to help the body lower blood sugar, they would produce safer and more efficient alternatives to older medications. But a true breakthrough doesn’t seem to have happened yet..

A report released in March by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University reviewed data from 166 studies to evaluate the effectiveness and risks of various diabetes medicines. The researchers concluded that drugs that have been around for years are more effective at lowering blood sugar and often work with fewer side effects than the newest drugs. And because so many older drugs now are available as generics, they often cost just a fraction of the price of newer brand-name drugs.

Low-cost treatment is imperative to turning back the diabetes epidemic, said Dr. Wendy L. Bennett, assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the lead author of the A.H.R.Q. study. Experts estimate that only 25 percent of diabetic patients are getting the treatment they need, and expense is a big reason. Even well-insured patients may reel when confronted with the $6,000 a year it takes on average to manage the disease (not counting the costs of such complications as heart disease, stroke, and liver and kidney damage).

Becoming educated is the most important thing a person with diabetes can do to help stem the cost of medications as well as avoid complications, said Dr. Bennett. Here, three crucial things you should know. Step 1: Fight diabetes with lifestyle changes.

Cost: Free or low cost.

If you are pre-diabetic or recently diagnosed, you may be able to dodge the expense of drug treatment with exercise and a better diet and by quitting smoking. None of this has to cost a fortune, and in any event healthier foods and, if necessary, a gym membership or other exercise program are well worth the investment. Even if you are taking medication, these lifestyle changes can help the medicine work better and longer.

For more information go to www.cdc.gov/diabetes and the Web site for the American Diabetes Association, www.diabetes.org.

Step 2: If you need to begin taking a drug to control blood sugar, start with metformin, the most common and one of the least expensive diabetes drugs.

Cost: $36 for 100 pills (500 milligrams); usually taken twice a day. Prices may be even lower at Wal-Mart, Target and other discount pharmacies.

Metformin almost always works as a first-line drug, except for patients suffering from severe kidney disease, said Dr. Bennett. What’s more, metformin generally does not cause hypoglycemia, a common and dangerous side affect of many diabetes drugs.

It also does not seem to cause weight gain, as some other diabetes drugs do, said Dr. Bennett. “The last thing you want if you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes is additional weight,” she added.

A study published in Consumer Reports Health in February 2009 also found that older, less expensive diabetes drugs were just as effective as the new ones. Better yet, they have established safety records, while some newer diabetes drugs have been found to increase cardiovascular and other health risks.

“The expensive drugs are third- and fourth-line drugs,” said Dr. Marvin Lipman, chief medical adviser for Consumer Reports Health and a practicing endocrinologist in Westchester County, N.Y. “If you don’t get results with the less expensive drugs, you go to those. But you shouldn’t start there.”

Avoid: Certain newer diabetes drugs have been associated with heart failure and other risks.

Avandia, for example, has been linked to an increased risk of heart attacks. In September 2010, after years of debate, the Food and Drug Administration severely restricted Avandia’s availability, allowing it to be prescribed only to patients in a special program who had not responded to other drugs and were taking the medicine under a doctor’s strict supervision. This month the agency expanded those restrictions to include related drugs Avandamet and Avandaryl, which also contain rosiglitazone, the active agent in Avandia.

Step 3: Choose combination drugs from among inexpensive generics.

Cost: Glimepiride, $13 for 100 pills (1 milligram). Glipizide, $64 for 100 pills (5 milligrams).

Most diabetics will have to eventually take more than one drug to keep blood sugar under control. The good news here from the Johns Hopkins study is that inexpensive metformin is also quite effective in combination with other generics, such as glimepiride and glipizide.

“Most combinations worked equally well, so when you’re adding a drug, you could choose a generic to save costs,” said Dr. Bennett. She added, however, that some drugs used with metformin might increase the risk of side effects such as hypoglycemia or weight gain. Patients should discuss each drug’s pros and cons, as well as cost, with their doctors.

Avoid: Do not start with one of the more expensive drugs in combination with metformin. In some cases, patients ultimately may need a combination of both generics and the newer drugs, but this usually becomes appropriate only after a less expensive combination has been used for some time or if the patient isn’t responding to the less expensive combination, said Dr. Bennett.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1c055a54cd9e44402b35c8891b09d5da