Ebert's Web Site to Post Movie Reviews
Wednesday, August 1, 2007; 8:02 PM
CHICAGO -- For someone who can't talk, film critic Roger Ebert is saying a lot _ at times in a British accent.
Open a newspaper and his reviews are in there. He's published three books since last fall and has two more on the way. All the while, he's recuperating from cancer surgery and a subsequent operation that left him unable to speak.
  In this undated photo released by Disney-ABC Domestic Television, movie critics Roger Ebert, right, and Gene Siskel are shown. Starting Thursday, Aug. 2, 2007, a new web site touted as the largest collection of video-based movie reviews online will begin. The site will feature clips from the show that made the thumb famous and include 5,000 movie reviews, spanning more than 20 years of the show hosted by newspaper film critics Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel and columnist Richard Roeper. (AP Photo/Disney-ABC Domestic Television) (AP) 
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"I'm writing as much as ever," Ebert said in a Wednesday interview with The Associated Press, during which an electronic voice with a British accent spoke the words he typed onto a laptop computer.
And now he's adding a page to the "Ebert & Roeper" Web site that is all thumbs: His, the late Gene Siskel's, Richard Roeper's and those of others who have been filling in on the movie review show.
Touted as the largest collection of video-based movie reviews online, http:/
Starting Thursday, the site will offer visitors a chance to watch spirited _ sometimes really spirited _ discussions about movies that always ended with reviewers assigning them a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" designation.
"You can tell when we were mad at each other and when we were together against the world," Ebert, 65, said of his longtime partner, Siskel.
Sitting in the living room of his home in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, Ebert talked about his show that looks pretty much as it did when he and Siskel _ competing film critics at rival Chicago newspapers _ first sat down in the late '70s on PBS and talked about movies. He answered questions about his health, his work and his plans for the future.
Ebert's neck is wrapped in gauze and his mouth hangs open, but he appears robust. As he fiddled with his computer before the interview, he even gave a sly smile and his trademarked _ literally _ thumbs-up when it started speaking his words.
Ebert has been battling cancer. After undergoing a series of operations, he was operated on again in June of last year, with doctors removing a cancerous growth from his salivary gland and part of his right jaw. Two weeks later, a blood vessel burst near the site of the operation, forcing emergency surgery.
He can't talk because doctors did a tracheostomy, opening an airway through an incision in his windpipe.
Ebert, who has been the film critic for the Sun-Times since 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, said he isn't quite sure when he might return to the TV show. He still needs surgery that he hopes will restore his voice, but he said he is cancer-free. After being hospitalized so long that he had to learn how to walk all over again, he said he is getting stronger and he and his wife, Chaz, take daily long walks.
