Well said, Roger Ebert.

I am ashamed to say that, in the past, I have held Roger Ebert in contempt. I read his reviews, saw that he rated JFK higher than Boyz N the Hood, or that he hated Blue Velvet, and wrote him off as a fool.
Recently I have begun to reevaluate him. For one thing there's the "Brown Bunny Incident." At the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, Vinvent Gallo's movie The Brown Bunny had an historically bad premiere, in which several hundred people walked out, dozens more stayed behind to heckle, and numerous critics, among them Mr. Ebert, proclaimed it the worst film ever shown at Cannes. Afterward, Gallo lashed out, cursing Ebert's colon and saying "If a fat pig like Roger Ebert doesn't like my movie then I'm sorry for him." Mr. Ebert responded by saying:
"Gallo all but wept in a Cannes interview as he described the pain of 'growing up ugly,' but empathy has its limits, and he had no tears for a fat pig and slave-trader such as myself. It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."

Several weeks after reading about this, I found out that Roger Ebert's wife is black. Maybe it's ridiculous to like someone on the basis of their interracial relationship, but it drastically changed the way I thought of him. And then the other day I read the following paragraph on the Internet Movie Database, and I am now totally won over.

"I have been criticized recently for giving a pass to films of moderate achievement because they accomplish what the audience expects, while penalizing more ambitious films for falling short of greater expectations. There may be some truth in such observations, but on the other hand, nobody in the real world goes to every movie with the same kind of anticipation. If I see a film by Ingmar Bergman, as I recently did, I expect it to be a masterpiece, and if it is not, Bergman has disappointed me. If I attend a horror film in which Jennifer Connelly and her daughter are trapped in the evil web of a malevolent apartment building, I do not expect Bergman; if the movie does what it can do as well as it can be done, then it has achieved perfection within its own terms."
Roger Ebert gave Dark Water three stars.