Daily Inspiration Quote by Roger Ebert

Ebert is doing that quietly devastating thing he does best: sounding like a friendly guide while smuggling in an ethical judgment. He isn’t scolding people for liking explosions; he’s diagnosing a habit of consumption that treats movies like vending machines for appetite. The sting is in “preexisting.” It suggests a closed loop: you arrive with a craving, you purchase reinforcement, you leave unchanged. Cinema, in this view, stops being an art that can unsettle you and becomes a mirror that flatters you.

Then he sharpens the blade with “not so noble.” It’s an old-fashioned phrase, almost polite, which makes the accusation land harder. Ebert’s target isn’t taste so much as motive: the impulse to seek out revenge fantasies, domination, punishment without consequence, the pleasure of simple moral arithmetic. “Action pictures, and things like that” is dismissive on purpose, the critic’s version of a shrug. He doesn’t need to litigate genres; he’s pointing to how genre becomes an alibi. If it’s “just” an action movie, you don’t have to ask what it’s feeding.

Context matters: Ebert spent decades arguing that popular film could be great, and that seriousness wasn’t a synonym for slowness. So this isn’t elitism; it’s a critique of audience self-management in a mass market designed to keep desire predictable. The line doubles as a challenge to criticism itself: if movies can enlarge empathy, then choosing only what confirms you isn’t harmless escapism. It’s a refusal of the medium’s most radical offer: the chance to want differently.