Ebert looks forward to return to work
CHICAGO - Film critic Roger Ebert, who is battling cancer in a Chicago hospital, says he looks forward to coming back to work despite a hard road to recovery that has kept him hospitalized for two months.
"I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't tell you when, but I sure look forward to being back on the movie beat," he said in a statement Thursday.
Ebert, famous for his "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" critiques, had surgery June 16 to remove a cancerous growth on his salivary gland. He also had emergency surgery July 1 after a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation.
"When I announced that I had a recurrence of salivary cancer that required surgery, I had no idea when I went into the hospital on June 16 that I would still be here on August 16," Ebert said.
The 64-year-old had undergone cancer surgery three times before the June operation — once in 2002 to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid gland and twice on his salivary gland the next year.
Ebert said in the statement his voice has been affected by the cancer treatment and part of his overall rehabilitation will include having to strengthen his vocal cords. He added that "doctors are moving cautiously, but they are enthusiastically optimistic about my recovery."
Ebert has been a film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, the same year he teamed up with Gene Siskel of the rival Chicago Tribune to launch their movie-review show. Siskel died in 1999. Ebert has co-hosted the show with fellow Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper since 2000.
"Snakes on a Plane" slithers into audience embrace
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Early audiences lured to "Snakes on a Plane" by its sensational title and Internet hype say the film lives up to their expectations for an over-the-top thriller.
"It was just so ridiculous it was a good movie," said Colin Cowes, 15, from Minnesota, after seeing a morning screening in New York on Friday. "I went and saw it because I saw an ad for it on the Internet. Definitely the title got me in because it just sounds so random and stupid."
The movie, whose title also convinced actor Samuel L. Jackson to star it , opens in theaters across the United States and Britain on Friday.
There were no advance showings of the $30 million dollar movie after the name alone managed to spark an enviable run of publicity by spawning endless parodies, Web postings and videos that tried to flesh out the story.
The Internet hoopla started with a blog posting by screenwriter Josh Friedman's a year ago praising Jackson for threatening to quit the movie when the studio considered changing the title, saying he'd taken the job based on the name.
At the early New York screening moviegoers laughed and cringed as they watched an FBI agent try to regain control of a plane that the Mafia had filled full of poisonous snakes to try and kill a witness under protection.
Smart moviegoers usually avoid a film released without advance screenings because it can indicate a studio knows the movie is bad. But people who have not seen "Snakes on a Plane" are calling themselves "fans" and many hope it will be awful, in an entertaining way.
Natasha Sokolov, 33, said she came to see the movie because it starred Jackson.
"I'm not sure that's exactly a movie I would regularly see though. It was scary, fun, exciting. It was just a little piece of entertainment, nothing serious," she said.
Marcus Levy, 29, of New England, said it was action-packed. "I think at first it was the actual preview that got me interested and then the title obviously explains everything. I despise snakes," he said. "It was actually entertaining."
New Line Cinema, the Time Warner Inc. subsidiary that is distributing "Snakes," has fueled the hype and the producers even included a line created by an imaginative blogger in the movie and used it in previews.
But the hype didn't get to everyone.
"I didn't even know about it, but (my friend) was just, like, 'We have to go and see this movie'," said 15-year-old Imogen Kwok.