Give My Regards to Roger Ebert

Notes from the Front Lines of the Simulation

LAST NIGHT, LIKE SO MANY NIGHTS, I just couldn’t fall asleep. My wandering mind settled upon, of all people, legendary film critic Roger Ebert. I began trying to calculate how many movies he must have watched in his 70 years on Earth. I mean, the guy lived and breathed films, right? So, I made a rough estimate — thousands, maybe tens of thousands of movies. Who really knows for sure.

As I started to doze off, a wild thought hit me: what if Ebert could fully immerse himself as the lead character in every movie he watched? What if he immersed himself so fully into each character’s story that he couldn’t distinguish whether he was experiencing the movie in real-time or merely watching it in his capacity as a reviewer?

I also thought about Woody Allen’s fantastic 80s flick, The Purple Rose of Cairo. It’s the one where Jeff Daniels’ character, a movie hero named Tom Baxter, steps out of the screen and into the real world. Baxter breaks free from the script of the movie that plays every day at the local theater, much to the shock and amazement of the audience.

As Baxter navigates the real world, he’s pursued by Gil Shepherd (also portrayed by Daniels), the actor who played the fictional Baxter. Gil is desperate to return Baxter to the film to avoid a career-ending scandal…