The Reese Witherspoon-Robert Pattinson film will please fans of Sara Gruen’s best seller, but it lacks the vital spark that would have made the drama truly compelling on the screen. 
 
 A decorous, respectable adaptation of Sara Gruen's engaging best-seller, Water for Elephants would have come more excitingly alive with stronger doses of Depression-era grit and sexual spunk. The 1931 circus setting and a love triangle involving three exceedingly attractive people provides a constant wash of scenic pleasure and the film's fidelity to its source will receive nodding approval from the book's many fans, which should result in solid, if unspectacular commercial results for this Fox release. But the vital spark that would have made the drama truly compelling on the screen is missing. 
 
 Films about traveling circuses, and the often daring and dodgy people who worked in them, used to be relatively commonplace in American movies and it could be that the novelty of seeing such a troupe, traveling from one town to another on a train with dozens of performers, workers and lots of animals in tow, might be enough to captivate a fair share of people today, just as Gruen's 2006 novel did. 
 
 Furthermore, the central dilemma—that of a beautiful woman caught between her debt to the circus impresario who plucked her from a dismal existence to make her a circus star as well as his wife and her mounting passion for a handsome young man who escapes a personal tragedy by joining the company—may be well-worn but can always work in the right hands, and Reese Witherspoon, Robert Pattinson and Christoph Waltz are all more than up to the task. 
 
 So it's mostly a question of approach. Had the same story been made at the time it's set, in the early 1930s, one can easily imagine at least two distinct and equally effective potential takes on the tale: One, directed by Frank Borzage at Fox, could have been a exalted love story between two young people fated to be together despite the obstacles, while another, directed by Michael Curtiz at Warner Bros., would have been a punchy, down-and-dirty affair about lowlifes scraping by during the depths of the Depression. 
 
 In fact, had screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, who's done a mostly fine job whittling down the novel to fit comfortably within two hours' running time, settled in to watch a dozen early-1930s Warner Bros. films before writing, some hints of period slang, brassy attitude and regional accents might have profitably made their way into the chatter to provide an idea of the different vernacular in in use then. Even a tiny change—the man informing Pattinson's character of his parents' death at the outset states they were in a “car” accident rather than an “automobile” mishap, as in the book—reveals a trace of fear about the receptivity of a modern audience to antiquated speech. And in those days, indelible character actors would have brought to life a score of insolent, wise-cracking, phrase-making secondary parts with just a few lines apiece. 
 
 Under Francis Lawrence's sleekly studied direction, everything has been smoothed out to the extent that even dire poverty does not seem entirely unappealing. Certainly the three leads never do. Looking 300 per cent better than he did in his last non-”Twilight” outing, “Remember Me,” Pattinson is entirely convincing as Jacob, a Cornell veterinary school student who escapes from the ruin provoked by his parents' untimely death by almost inadvertently joining the circus. 
 
 Due to his imagined expertise with animals, Jacob is taken under wing by the owner and ringmaster of the Benzini Bros. Circus, August (Waltz), a mercurial fellow who's brought the company a long way since he took over and rightly keeps a watchful eye on his beautiful blond wife Marlena (Witherspoon), who rides the circus' top animal attraction, a stunning white horse. 
 
 Embraced and roughly treated by turn, Jacob earns a place with the outfit due to his knowledge of animals (his father had been a vet) and his help in recruiting and training a new star, a jumbo elephant named Rosie. Something of a highbrow himself, August delights in the college boy's company but can't help but notice the growing affection between his wife and the bereaved lad. 
 
 Although there are skirmishes from time to time, it takes nearly the entire film for matters to fully come to a head and the lack of complexity, danger and underlying tension becomes all too noticeable from the mid-point onwards. Once the climax does arrive, the spectacular scene is over and done with far too quickly, giving it a borderline perfunctory feel. 
 
 Waltz, in his first big film since soaring to prominence in Inglourious Basterds, again scores strongly as a powerful middle-aged man who doesn't eliminate the snake in his grass before it's too late. As for Witherspoon, she's as fetching as ever as the platinum blonde any guy would want to catch But when August insults Marlena as being of a “common type,” it's clear Witherspoon needed to inject a bit of Jean Harlow into her characterization to emphasize the lower depths from whence she came that can never be entirely erased. Despite the hard glances and suggestion of a working class accent, Marlena is still a shade too much the lady and not enough of a dame. 
 
 Hal Holbrook does a nice job framing the tale as an elderly Jacob telling the story to a modern circus worker, although by rights he should be narrating the whole thing, not Pattinson; again, modern audience sensibilities likely came into play. 
 
 Craft contributions are excellent, notably Rodrigo Prieto's lustrous cinematography, Jack Fisk's highly realized production design and Jacqueline West's resourceful costumes. ||||| Water for Elephants 
 
 April 21, 2011 
 
 There's something endearingly old-fashioned about a love story involving a beautiful bareback rider and a kid who runs off to join the circus. What makes "Water for Elephants" more intriguing is a third character, reminding us why Christoph Waltz deserved his supporting actor Oscar for "Inglourious Basterds" (2009). He plays the circus owner, who is married to the bareback rider and keeps her and everyone else in his iron grip. 
 
 The story, based on the best-seller by Sara Gruen, is told as a flashback by an old man named Jacob (Hal Holbrook), who lost his parents in 1931, dropped out of Cornell University's veterinary school, hit the road and hopped a train that happened, wouldn't you know, to be a circus train. Played by Robert Pattinson as a youth, he is naive and excited, and his eyes fill with wonder as he sees the beautiful Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) on her white show horse. The owner August (Waltz) is prepared to throw him off the train until he learns young Jacob knows something about veterinary medicine. 
 
 
 
 In an age of prefabricated special effects and obviously phony spectacle, it's sort of old-fashioned (and a pleasure) to see a movie made of real people and plausible sets. The production designer, Jack Fisk, has created a believable one-ring circus here, and even the train itself has a personality. (August and Jacob spend an implausible amount of time walking or running on top of it, but never mind.) 
 
 
 
 The dynamic in the story depends on August's jealousy of Marlena, and her stubborn loyalty to their marriage contract. This is where Waltz makes his contribution. Shorter than Pattinson, indeed hardly taller than Witherspoon, he rules over everyone as a hard-bitten taskmaster whose easy charm conceals a cold inner core; it's the same dynamic he used as the merciless Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds." He's much given to offering champagne toasts with a knife hidden inside. 
 
 
 
 In the early Depression, times are hard and jobs few. The circus is deep in debt, and August produces a new star attraction he believes can save it. This is Rosie, a middle-aged elephant, who he thinks Marlena can ride, and Jacob can train and care for, although neither has worked with an elephant before. Scenes involving the personality and language comprehension of elephants create an intrinsic charm, and the movie surrounds them with a convincing portrait of circus life on the road. 
 
 
 
 The film's climax involves a series of dire events I will not describe, except to say it's a little unclear how they are started into motion. It's also unclear why Marlena continues to be such a dutiful wife long after August no longer deserves that privilege — but the fact that she does saves the film from dissolving entirely into melodrama. 
 
 
 
 "Water for Elephants" was directed by Francis Lawrence, whose "I Am Legend" and "Constantine" were not predictions of this relatively classic film. The screenplay is by Richard LaGravenese, whose "The Horse Whisperer" also showed a sympathy for the personalities of animals. Rosie is not as charismatic as a horse, and as Jacob observes she suffers from dry skin, but you have to concede that her timing is impeccable. This is good sound family entertainment, a safe PG-13 but not a dumb one, and it's a refreshing interlude before we hurtle into the summer blockbuster season. ||||| “ Water for Elephants ,” Sara Gruen’s lightweight page turner about a Depression-era traveling circus, would appear to be a vehicle ready-made for a prestigious family movie on the order of “ Seabiscuit .” With its star attraction, a gentle elephant named Rosie who understands Polish, the novel belongs to the John Irving school of semi-serious whimsy with allegorical overtones. 
 
 But the timid screen adaptation, directed by Francis Lawrence (“I Am Legend”) from a screenplay by Richard LaGravenese, short-circuits the novel’s quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard’s insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup. 
 
 In Ms. Gruen’s novel, the beaten and mistreated Rosie is a heroine for all seasons. As you pore through “Water for Elephants,” a book with a special appeal to readers who get teary about animal stories, you develop a deepening sense that she is a noble creature, the elephant in the room who never forgets, who knows all and harbors a primal sense of justice. 
 
 With her caring trainer, Jacob Jankowski (Robert Pattinson), a veterinary student who drops out of Cornell after his parents’ sudden deaths, Rosie shares a quasi-mystical understanding of good and evil. That intuitive rapport — the soul of the novel — is barely felt in this cool, placid film, which so studiously tries to cram all of the book’s incidents and characters into two hours that it forgets it is telling a story. I’m no big fan of animal movies, but “Water for Elephants” could have used some spritzes of “National Velvet” or “Lassie Come Home” sentimentality. 
 
 The monotonous tone is established early on with Jacob’s plodding narration, which takes over after an introduction by a rheumy-eyed Hal Holbrook (wonderful, as always), playing the aged Jacob. Mr. Pattinson’s simplistic narration, unfortunately, affects the gee-whiz language of a grade-school reading book. Each time his voice breaks in to advance the plot, the movie grinds to a halt. Mr. Pattinson is only partly to blame for the fatuity of a character who even in the novel is really a generic male ingénue with no personality. In the film there is nothing about him to suggest a Depression-era youth whose parents’ deaths have thrown him into the world without a safety net. He is more like a “Gossip Girl”-ready 21st-century heartthrob who has exhausted his trust fund. 
 
 Instead of evoking a pungent vision of rough-and-tumble circus life in hard times, “Water for Elephants” concentrates on the explosive romantic triangle of the circus’s volatile owner, August (Christoph Waltz); his sultry, platinum-blond wife, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon); and Jacob. Ms. Witherspoon certainly has the wherewithal to play Marlena, a hard-boiled Jean Harlow type and product of foster homes whom August plucked out of poverty, married and turned into a circus goddess. But despite hints of a lower-class twang in her speech, Ms. Witherspoon (probably at the director’s request) resists creating an authentic period character. 
 
 The romantic chemistry between Ms. Witherspoon and Mr. Pattinson is nil. When they finally make love in a scene that is so dimly lighted you can hardly see them, it has all the heat of a kissy-poo game of spin the bottle played by 11-year-olds. 
 
 It is left for Mr. Waltz to inject “Water for Elephants” with the little sense of danger it is able to muster. As the imperious, sadistic, furiously possessive August, he brings the same intensity that infused his Oscar-winning portrayal of Col. Hans Landa in “Inglourious Basterds.” Treacherous, ruthless, greedy and cursed with an uncontrollable temper, he vents his pent-up rage by viciously beating Rosie with a bull hook. These are the only moments when the essential savagery of circus life surfaces. 
 
 Mr. Lawrence is so busy awkwardly jamming the novel’s minor events together and introducing (before dropping) colorful minor characters who have so little screen time that they barely register, that the movie fails to develop a sense of wonder. After all, what is a circus but a surreal pageant celebrating the animal side of human nature? 
 
 Brief scenes of the circus arriving in a town and pitching its tent provide momentary jolts of realism, and you almost smell the manure that Jacob has to shovel during his apprenticeship and taste the rotten, fly-covered meat he is instructed to feed “the cats.” But overwhelmingly the movie seems perversely intent on being “nice.” Its musical wallpaper accompanies panoramic cinematography that soothes rather than catches the eye. 
 
 As a piece of storytelling, the film displays its most disastrous choice when it makes the book’s climatic rampage seem perfunctory. This sloppily directed scene, which ends almost as soon as it begins, leaves you feeling cheated out of a necessary cathartic release. 
 
 Where is Cecil B. DeMille when we need him, I wondered, as “Water for Elephants” drew to its dull, tidy conclusion. 
 
 The film is so bland that it made me long for “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the 1952 DeMille extravaganza that used the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. That movie left you feeling as if you’d enjoyed at least one roll in the sawdust. 
 
 “Water for Elephants” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has mild sexual situations, some violence and strong language. 
 
 WATER FOR ELEPHANTS 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Directed by Francis Lawrence; written by Richard LaGravenese, based on the novel by Sara Gruen; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Alan Edward Bell; music by James Newton Howard; production design by Jack Fisk; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Gil Netter, Erwin Stoff and Andrew R. Tennenbaum; released by 20th Century Fox. Running time: 2 hours. 
 
 WITH: Reese Witherspoon (Marlena), Robert Pattinson (Jacob), Christoph Waltz (August), Paul Schneider (Charlie), Jim Norton (Camel), Hal Holbrook (Old Jacob), Mark Povinelli (Kinko/Walter) and Richard Brake (Grady); and Tai (Rosie), Uggie (Queenie), Ice (Silver Star) and Major (Rex). ||||| Roger Ebert dead at 70 after battle with cancer BY NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg@suntimes.com 
 
 Updated: 
 
 Roger Ebert loved movies. 
 
 Except for those he hated. 
 
 For a film with a daring director, a talented cast, a captivating plot or, ideally, all three, there could be no better advocate than Roger Ebert, who passionately celebrated and promoted excellence in film while deflating the awful, the derivative or the merely mediocre with an observant eye, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that delighted his millions of readers and viewers. 
 
 “No good film is too long,” he once wrote, a sentiment he felt strongly enough about to have engraved on pens. “No bad movie is short enough.” 
 
 Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. 
 
 “We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away,” said his wife, Chaz Ebert. “No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition.” 
 
 He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland. 
 
 He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity. 
 
 On Tuesday, Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December and would be taking “a leave of presence.” In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the Sun-Times film critic, Ebert wrote “I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.” 
 
 Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His site, rogerebert.com, had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feed had more than 841,000 followers. 
 
 Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize — the first film critic to do so — but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide. 
 
 The same year Ebert won the Pulitzer — 1975 — he also launched a new kind of television program: “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” with Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel on WTTW-Channel 11. At first it ran monthly. 
 
 The combination worked. The trim, balding Siskel perfectly balanced the bespectacled, portly Ebert. In 1978, the show, retitled “Sneak Previews,” moved to PBS for national distribution, and the duo was on its way to becoming a fixture in American culture. 
 
 “Tall and thin, short and fat. Laurel and Hardy,” Ebert once wrote. “We were parodied on ‘SNL’ and by Bob Hope and Danny Thomas and, the ultimate honor, in the pages of Mad magazine.” 
 
 His colleagues admired him as a workhorse. Ebert reviewed as many as 306 movies a year, after he grew ill scheduling his cancer surgeries around the release of important pictures. He eagerly contributed to other sections of the paper — interviews with and obituaries of movie stars, even political columns on issues he cared strongly about on the editorial pages. 
 
 In 1997, dissatisfied with spending his critical powers “locked in the present,” he began a running a feature revisiting classic movies and eventually published three books on “The Great Movies” (and two books on movies he hated). A second column, his “Movie Answer Man,” allowed readers to learn about intriguing details of cinema that only a Roger Ebert knew or could ferret out. 
 
 That, too, became a book. Ebert wrote more books than any TV personality since Steve Allen — 17 in all. Not only collections of reviews, both good and bad, and critiques of great movies, but humorous glossaries and even a novel, “Behind the Phantom’s Mask,” that was serialized in the Sun-Times. He even wrote a book about rice cookers, “The Pot and How to Use It,” despite the fact that he could no longer eat. In 2011, his autobiography, “Life Itself,” won rave reviews. “This is the best thing Mr. Ebert has ever written,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times. It is, fittingly enough, being made into a documentary, produced by his longtime friend, Martin Scor­sese. 
 
 Roger Joseph Ebert was born in Urbana on June 18, 1942, the son of Walter and Annabel Ebert. His father was an electrician at the University of Illinois, his mother, a bookkeeper. It was a liberal household — Ebert remembers his parents praying for the success of Harry Truman in the election of 1948. As a child, he published a mimeographed neighborhood newspaper and a stamp collectors’ newspaper in elementary school. 
 
 In high school, he was, as he later wrote, “demented in [his] zeal for school activities,” joining the swim team, acting in plays, founding the Science Fiction Club, co-hosting Urbana High School’s Saturday morning radio program, co-editing the newspaper, being elected senior class president. 
 
 He began his professional writing career at 15, as a sportswriter covering the high school beat for the News-Gazette in Champaign-Urbana. 
 
 Ebert went on to the University of Illinois, where he published a weekly journal of politics and opinion as a freshman and served as editor of the Daily Illini his senior year. He graduated in 1964 and studied in South Africa on a Rotary Scholarship. 
 
 While still in Urbana, he began free-lancing for the Sun-Times and the Chicago Daily News. 
 
 He was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he planned to earn his doctorate in English (an avid reader, Ebert later used literary authors to help explain films — for example, quoting e.e. cummings several times in his review of Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) 
 
 But Ebert also had written to Herman Kogan, for whom he free-lanced at the Daily News, asking for a job, and ended up at the Sun-Times in September 1966, working part time. The following April, he was asked to become the newspaper’s film critic when the previous critic, Eleanor Keen, retired. 
 
 “I didn’t know the job was open until the day I was given it,” Ebert later said. “I had no idea. Bob Zonka, the features editor, called me into the conference room and said, ‘We’re gonna make you the movie critic.’ It fell out of the sky.” 
 
 Ebert’s goal up to that point had been to be “a columnist like Royko,” but he accepted this new stroke of luck, which came at exactly the right time. Movie criticism had been a backwater of journalism, barely more than recounting the plots and stars of movies — the Tribune ran its reviews under a jokey generic byline, “Mae Tinee.” But American cinema was about to enter a period of unprecedented creativity, and criticism would follow along. Restrictive film standards were finally easing up, in part thanks to his efforts. When Ebert began reviewing movies, Chicago still had an official film board that often banned daring movies here — Lynn Redgrave’s “Georgy Girl” was kept off Chicago screens in 1966 — and Ebert immediately began lobbying for elimination of the censorship board. 
 
 He had a good eye. His Sept. 25, 1967, review of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in “Bonnie and Clyde” called the movie “a milestone” and “a landmark.” 
 
 “Years from now it is quite possible that ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s,” he wrote, “showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to.” 
 
 It was. Though of course Ebert was not infallible — while giving Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” four stars in the same year, he added that the movie’s “only flaw, I believe, is the introduction of limp, wordy Simon and Garfunkel songs.’’ 
 
 Ebert plunged into what turned out to be a mini-golden age of Chicago journalism. He found himself befriended by Mike Royko — with whom he wrote an unproduced screenplay. He drank with Royko, and with Nelson Algren and Studs Terkel. He wrote a trashy Hollywood movie, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,’’ for Russ Meyer, having met the king of the buxom B-movie after writing an appreciation of his work. 
 
 In later years, Ebert was alternately sheepish and proud of the movie. It was the first “sexploitation” film by a major studio, 20th Century Fox, though Time magazine’s Richard Corliss did call it one of the 10 best films of the 1970s. 
 
 It was not Ebert’s only foray into film writing — he was also hired to write a movie for the Sex Pistols, the seminal British punk band in the late 1970s. 
 
 Eventually, Sun-Times editor James Hoge demanded that Ebert — who took a leave of absence when he went to Hollywood to write “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” — decide between making films and reviewing them. He chose newspapering, which increasingly became known because of his TV fame, which grew around his complex partnership with Gene Siskel on “Sneak Previews.” 
 
 “At first the relationship on TV was edgy and uncomfortable,” Ebert wrote in 1999, after Siskel’s untimely death, at 53. “Our newspaper rivalry was always in the air between us. Gene liked to tell about the time he was taking a nap under a conference table at the television station, overheard a telephone conversation I was having with an editor, and scooped me on the story.” 
 
 In 1981, the program was renamed “At the Movies” and moved to Tribune Broadcasting. In 1986, it became “Siskel & Ebert & The Movies” and moved to Buena Vista Television, and the duo began the signature “thumbs up, thumbs down” rating system that Ebert invented. 
 
 “When we left to go with Disney . . . we had to change some things because we were afraid of [violating] intellectual property rights,’’ he said. “And I came up with the idea of giving thumbs up and thumbs down. And the reason that Siskel and I were able to trademark that is that the phrase ‘two thumbs up’ in connection with movies had never been used. And in fact, the phrase ‘two thumbs up’ was not in the vernacular. And now, of course, it’s part of the language.” 
 
 “Two thumbs up” became their registered trademark and a highly coveted endorsement that inevitably ran at the top of movie advertisements. 
 
 After Siskel died in 1999, Ebert auditioned a number of temporary co-hosts and settled on Sun-Times colleague Richard Roeper in 2000. At its height, “Ebert & Roeper,” was seen on 200 stations. 
 
 “Everyone keeps asking me for my favorite Roger Ebert story, or the one thing about him most people might not have known. Here’s the thing: Roger Ebert has already told all the best Roger Ebert stories in far better fashion than I ever could,” said Roeper, who continued the show after health troubles forced Ebert from the airwaves in 2006, until both men quit in 2008 after a contract dispute. 
 
 “And whether you ‘knew’ him only through his reviews or his Twitter feed or his blog, or you were lucky enough to have been his friend for many years, with Roger, what you saw and heard was the 100 percent, unvarnished, real deal,” Roeper said. “There was no ‘off camera’ Roger. He was just as passionate, smart, stubborn, genuine and funny behind the scenes as he was in the public eye. He was a great writer and an even better friend. 
 
 “They can remake movies, but no one will ever be able to recreate or match the one and only Roger Ebert.” 
 
 All that need be mentioned of Ebert’s social life was that in the early 1980s he briefly went out with the hostess of a modest local TV show called “AM Chicago.” Taking her to the Hamburger Hamlet for dinner, Ebert suggested that she syndicate her show, using his success with Siskel as an example of the kind of riches that awaited. While she didn’t return his romantic interest, Oprah Winfrey did follow his business advice. 
 
 In his memoir, Ebert writes of a controlling, alcoholic, faith-obsessed mother whom he was frightened of displeasing. “I would never marry before my mother died,” he wrote. She died in 1987, and in 1992 he got married, for the first time, at age 50, to attorney Chaz Hammel-Smith (later Chaz Hammelsmith), who was the great romance of his life and his rock in sickness, instrumental in helping Ebert continue his workload as his health declined. 
 
 “She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she is the love of my life, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone,” he wrote. 
 
 In addition to his TV and newspaper work, Ebert was a fixture at film festivals around the world — Toronto, Cannes, Telluride — and even created a festival of his own, The Overlooked Film Festival, or just “Ebertfest,” which he began in Champaign in 1999 and dedicated to highlighting neglected classics. 
 
 Between 1970 and 2010, Ebert made yearly visits to the University of Colorado’s springtime Conference on World Affairs, where he has presented frame-by-frame critiques of classic movies to enraptured audiences. 
 
 He had also used the conference to speak on a variety of subjects, from his romantic life to his recovery from alcoholism — he stopped drinking in 1979 — to the problem of spam email. In 1996, Ebert coined the “Boulder Pledge,” considered a cornerstone in the battle against spam. 
 
 “Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message,” Ebert wrote. “Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.” 
 
 Not only was Ebert eager to correspond with and encourage skilled movie bloggers, but he also put his money where his mouth was, investing early in the Google search engine and making several million dollars doing so. 
 
 Ebert received honorary degrees from the American Film Institute, the University of Colorado and the School of the Art Institute. He is a member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame and was honored with a sidewalk medallion under the Chicago Theatre marquee. 
 
 He first had surgery to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid in 2002, and three subsequent surgeries on his salivary gland, all the while refusing to cut back on his TV show or his lifelong pride and joy, his job at the Sun-Times. 
 
 “My newspaper job,” he said in 2005, “is my identity.” 
 
 But as always with Roger Ebert, that was being too modest. He was a renaissance man whose genius was based on film but by no means limited to it, a great soul who had extraordinary impact on his profession and the world around him. 
 
 “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs,” he wrote, at the end of his memoir, “Life Itself.” “No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.” 
 
 Survivors, in addition to his wife, include stepchildren Sonia and Jay, and grandchildren Raven, Emil, Mark and Joseph.
– Water for Elephants, based on the bestselling book, tells the story of a young man who joins the circus during the Depression, working with an elephant and falling for a married performer. Critics are mixed: The film “provides a constant wash of scenic pleasure,” and is true to the book, writes Todd McCarthy in the Hollywood Reporter. “But the vital spark that would have made the drama truly compelling on the screen is missing.” Roger Ebert welcomes the film. “In an age of prefabricated special effects and obviously phony spectacle, it's sort of old-fashioned (and a pleasure) to see a movie made of real people and plausible sets,” he notes in the Chicago Sun-Times. Writing in Variety, Peter Debruge cheers the movie. It’s “a splendid period swooner that delivers classic romance and an indelible insider's view of 1930s circus life.” But in the New York Times, Stephen Holden strongly disagrees. The “timid screen adaptation,” he writes, “short-circuits the novel’s quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life.”