To me his relevance dropped off the table after Gene Siskel’s death. RE is a fairly competent movie fan but then so is my Mom.
You’re right.
Most of the time when he says something that I think is ridiculous on he show, his partner (Roper or Siskel) often call him on it.
To each his or her own. I do think he has good tastes, I’m just not sure (like all of us) he always knows WHY he likes a certain movie.
Thumbs up.
I think he’s genreally knowledgeable and fair. He writes well and tends not to give away too much information in his reviews. He’s a good source for finding good, obscure movies that don’t get wide release.
He reports quality when he finds it, whether it be in anime, foreign art films, or slob comedy.
This is indeed the mark of a good critic. Too many people judge a critic on the basis of his taste, rather than the skill with which the critic reports his reaction and the qualities of the film that led to that reaction. The former is easy to do, anyone can tell their opinion. The latter is very difficult to do well; being able to identify exactly what in a movie moved you to tears or laughter, and why it worked takes skill, knowledge, and experience.
He’s the most famous, popular, and influential critic in the United States. Until a few years ago, he shared this title with Gene Siskel, but since Siskel’s death, he’s solo at the top. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were among the first celebrity movie critics, if not the first.
He and Siskel were rival movie critics for, respectively, the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune. They were paired by a Chicago public tv station in the early 70’s for a tv show called Sneak Previews. The title was later changed to Siskel and Ebert at the Movies to capitalize on the surprise popularity of the two hosts. The show eventually became a big enough hit that PBS couldn’t keep up with the salary demands, and Siskel and Ebert went to direct syndication, with a title change to Siskel and Ebert and the Movies because PBS owned the rights to Sneak Previews and At the Movies.
The tv show grew so popular that it spawned many imitations with only slight variations on the formula established. These follow ups didn’t have the chemistry Siskel and Ebert had on screen. Though they respected each other, they each harbored a bit of resentment that their success depended largely upon theirl association with the other. At times, it seemed the two actively disliked each other, and they would get into heated arguments when their opinons differed.
As their tv show grew in popularity their newspaper reviews became more and more largely syndicated. Most news markets in the US have a paper that carried the syndicated reviews of one or the other. Today, Roger Ebert is the most syndicated movie critic in the US.
I think you’ll find these are usually two different groups of people. The people who don’t respect him seem unlikely to cite him as an authority.
Often this is due to his giving an unfavorable review to a favorite movie. The most notorious examples are Fight Club and The Usual Suspects, both of which got negative reviews, and both of which have rabid fans all over the internet, some of whom take a criticism of the movie as if it were a criticism of them.
More recently, he gave the two Lord of the Rings movies positive reviews, but for the more ardent fans, this wasn’t enough, because he didn’t declare them to be great movies. The people who obsessively analyze the minutia of the books and the movies sometimes seem to label others less knowledgeable than they unfit to offer criticism, unless such criticism agrees with them.
I read Ebert and Cranky Critic (Chuck Shwartz) at crankycritic.com every week. Cranky has the annoying habit of referring to himself as “we” in his reveiws, but he offers a nice “everyman” type of review. He tends to dislike “artsy-fartsy” type stuff, but he has a specific set of criteria he uses (never compare to source material, a movie should be comprehensible in a single viewing) very consistently.
Ebert recommends James Berardinelli, and I like him too. He offers a nice middle ground between art-house snobs (Rex Reed) and Joe Six Pack type reveiwers (Joe Bob Briggs).
Start a pit or IMHO thread griping about some rule of grammar. Everyone who responds will nit-pick your posts to death.
The Flick Filosopher is far and away my favorite movie reviewer, better than Ebert by far. She’s clever, original in her writing, and articulates her opinions intelligently, demonstrating the geeky love for film that Harry Knowles does without the need to go into rambling, incoherent rants about unrelated subjets. Her review of A.I. is one of my favorite reviews, even though I disagreed with her opinion of the film (I thought it was excellent until the last half hour or so, at which point it took a straight nosedive into the ground).
If you like Ebert and can get to Champaign, IL (or is it Urbana?) for a weekend in April, Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival is a blast. Great movies shown in a beautiful old theatre, with the directors and stars of the movie often there to do a Q&A afterwards.
The day I was there, they showed the documentary On the Ropes with one of the three boxers in attendance and the other–the one who was jailed–live on the phone from NYC. They also showed Jesus’ Son with Billy Crudup for a Q&A, and A Simple Plan–which Ebert admitted was not exactly overlooked but he felt it was underappreciated, as it was one of the best movies he’d seen in recent years–with Bill Paxton talking about it afterwards.
I think his reviews are very insightful, both before and after the movie, and we agree probably 80% of the time on good movies. (He’s a lot more forgiving than I am about bad ones, but that isn’t saying much.)
Dr. J
Ebert gave “Daredevil” a good review - suffice to say that any credibility he once had in my estimation is gone and gone for good.
I prefer to use the “Rotten Tomatoes” site for an amalgam of reviewers’ opinions:
Why, cause he liked it and you didn’t?
This is a pretty good example of “he disagreed with me and that means he sucks.”
I also use Rotten Tomatoes for my reviews, but when there, I always scan the “Cream of the Crop” section to see what Ebert thought.
The reviewer that baffles me is the guy from EW. He has had soon incredibly bizarre grades over the last few years.
You are, I take it, referring to the notorious Owen Gleiberman?
I don’t understand that guy at all . . .
I really like Ebert, mainly because he writes well. He certainly knows how to turn a phrase. His reviews are frequently extremely funny, especially for the movies he pans.
I can’t count how many “obscure” films I have seen after reading an Ebert review. Or not necessarily obscure, but ones I would never have picked off the cuff. Take Antoine Fisher for a recent example. Would I have seen it anyway? Maybe, maybe not. But after reading Ebert’s review I made a beeline for the theater, and was able to take my wife, mom, and stepdad. It made for a wonderful afternoon.
Sure, sometimes I disagree, but he is very good at pointing out why he liked or disliked a particular movie. I don’t get all in a huff if he pans a personal favorite (The Hudsucker Proxy comes to mind).
Plus, his commentary on the Dark City DVD was excellent. (Another example of a movie I saw based on his review).
Thumbs up. His really negative reviews are things of beauty, even if you disagree with them. How can you dislike someone who says something like:
“Mad Dog Time should be cut up to provide free ukelele picks for the poor.”
“You remember Doug McClure. Good. I don’t.”
“After six months, a week, and two days of suspense, we can now relax: the worst movie of 1979 has opened.”
“I don’t want to review Friends and Lovers, I want to flunk it. … I get tapes in the mail from tenth graders that are better made than this.”
“This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”
Let’s not forget his infamous review of North:
Heheheh.
Roger Ebert is the only reviewer who can consistently give me an idea whether or not I will like the movie (and not just whether or not he did). I like him because he isn’t afraid to give a “thumbs up” to movies that he personally likes just because they are easy pickins for critical commentary. I also like the fact that he gives you a classical critique but then just ends up saying whether it made for a fun two hours or not.
thanks for the flickfilosopher link, Tarrsk, she’s pretty damn good.
ebert is one of the best–love of movies, doesn’t try to give quotable onliners, good cinematic knowledge…
harry knowles i like now and then, but i just cannot stand his tangents into stuff that is absolutely boring to me but seems fascinating to him (the drive to the theater, who he sat with, how the weather was…) i do like his enthusiasm for movies, though.
i also like rottentomatoes.com what could be more democratic?
this is a no-capital day.
Ebert gave the original ‘Die Hard’ two stars. He later gave three-and-a-half stars to an unwatchable, much-hated sequel to a rip-off of ‘Die Hard!’ (‘Speed 2,’ in case you didn’t know).
Buh bye, credibility…
It’s not a sequal, it’s a remake. More like a spoof, really.
I’m not crazy about Ebert, but I don’t think he’s as evil as people make him out to be, either. He does a fairly good job of doing away with all the pretense, and will frequently judge a movie on its own merits instead of whether it’s high-brow or low-brow. Few things are as tiresome as people who talk about movies as if they have something to prove, that they need to validate their opinions by talking about cinema and mise-en-scene and such.
But I think that whole “populist movie reviewer” thing is also what damaged Ebert’s credibility. When Siskel and Ebert got to be really big names, to the point where they were celebrities themselves and even doing cameos in movies as themselves, it made a lot of people perceive them as being too mass-market, or having no semblance of objectivity anymore. Probably the most damaging was when they started the whole “two thumbs up” business; it seems shallow enough to reduce your opinion of a piece of art to a number of stars or something, but when you go all the way down to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” it just seems meaningless. Of course, they always did more lengthy recaps of the movie and explained their reviews on the show, but the “thumbs up” was what got all the attention.
My biggest problem with Ebert is that his writing is often very sloppy. There’s at least one factual error in just about every review of his I’ve ever read. Usually it’s something trivial, but it just lends an air of incompetence to the whole thing. And actually, I take it back – my biggest problem with Ebert is that he’s won a Pulitzer Prize for his film criticism. And that bugs me because a) I’ve never won a Pulitzer Prize (although the fact that I’ve never written anything counts against me), and 2) the whole field of film criticism feels like bottom-feeding to me, instead of truly creating something of artistic merit.
That’s just not true. There was a whole thread about it on this message board and the complaints were crystal clear. Whether or not he gave the movie three stars or whatever, is irrelevant. The annoying part was that he kept harping on the same point – that the movies weren’t as tranquil and whimsical as the book. That’s not obsessive minutiae, that’s the whole theme of the book. And it’s nonsensical; the books aren’t light and airy but are about a world-wide war.
The reason that bugs people, myself included, is because it just comes across as arrogant and sloppy. He makes the same criticism over and over again about the movies’ not being faithful to the source material, and then admits that he’s not that familiar with the source material, either.
Entertainment Weekly has that weekly box of movie grades given by other reviewers. It’s amazing how many times the EW grade will either be the highest or lowest of them all. Many weeks, they will be highest or lowest (or at least tied) for every single movie on the list. I’ve noticed this for years so it’s not a one-time or new phenomena.
Of course, according to my local movie reviewer we recently had twelve pictures rated 10 out of 10 playing simulataneously. I don’t think there are twelve 10-worthy pictures released over a decade, so one of us has bizarre tastes.
<< C K Dexter Haven says he didn’t know much about movies 35 years ago. Maybe not, but he’s learned a lot since. His reviews just drip with details about the movie business, obscure movie references, and inside knowledge of directors, writers, and actors. >>
Well, that was the problem 35 years ago, too. Only he’d get the facts wrong, the details wrong, the references wrong, etc.
Besides Rotten Tomatoes, there is MetaCritic and the Movie Review Query Engine.
Laughing Lagomorph
My main criticism is he sometimes reviews the movie he expected to see, rather than the movie he actually saw.
Don’t all of us do this ? We have prejudices formed about actors (from past roles), directors, topics. We also form an impression from trailers, from gossip, from reviews. Heck, from our general prejudices of what constitutes a good movie.
As long as a critic realizes what his/her prejudices are and reveals them implicitly or explicitly, I think we can expect a good review.
Narrad
Also “an year” and “that request [in] my sig” in your last post are errors.
The first error is indeed an error in most dialects of English, although “an year” is pretty common in Indian English.
The second, might not be an error, if the OP meant to indicate that the request should be his new sig verbatim rather than in the new sig.