Several folks mentioned that Ebert made a lot of errors in his reviews. I’m a fan of Ebert and even I remember one. Anyway, I’m wondering if it was as bad as folks remember.
I actually am up for making a list so we can see how many he had. Please explain the errors so we can understand. Don’t just post the quote. Tell us what is wrong in case we have not seen the movie.
I’ll go first.
In Wanted, he messes up how Wesley meets Angelina Jolie.
He says:
But…there was no scene like that. They met in a pharmacy before a big action sequence.
Sometimes he reviews movies that are being screened early at a film festival (Sundance, Toronto, Cannes, etc), and that might be re-cut depending on how it’s received. He often made mistakes, yes, but it could be that he reviewed a different edit of the film than the final version.
It was so common at one point I wondered if he did it on purpose because mistakes generate letters and that let’s you know someone is reading.
That said, having had my own experience with reviewing films I can say that when you’re watching a lot of movies, just once each, and writing reviews on short deadlines with no easy way to confirm your memory of things it is hard to catch mistakes or for editors to fact check them.
Um…what? This is egregiously wrong if you’ve paid attention to the movie at all, since you would know that this guy is actually one of the new breed of assassin, sent to kill Bourne.
There was some plot point he didn’t get about the second Matrix movie. It was a simple point, not a ‘convulated metaphor’ one. Between that and his stupid attack on some kid for wearing an American flag t-shirt to school on Cinco De Mayo*, I was done with him at that point.
*“How would feel if somebody walked around with a Russian flag t-shirt on the 4rth of July?”
ok,
I wouldn’t give a rats ass. I’d think he was being ironic, and in any event I would fully support his freedom of speech.
Isn’t Cinco De Mayo mostly an American construct and mostly ignored in Mexico?
In his original review of Raise the Red Lantern, he says that Songlian’s mother betrays Songlian by selling her as a concubine. Actually, the mother warns her that if she marries a rich man she will only be a concubine, and Songlian replies, “Let me be a concubine. Isn’t that a woman’s fate?” It was Songlian’s idea to marry a rich man (if she had to marry anyone), and her mother tried to talk her out of it.
I found them all the time. I’d read his review. See the movie. Find differences.
But since he isn’t writing new reviews, and I don’t check his reviews for any movie old enough for him to have written about, the memory/fact checking would be tedious.
Here’s a post I made mentioning an error in Parenthood. He said something about Steve Martin doing a happy dance after his son saved the game. I think he said he hit a home run when he actually made a catch. (Or vice versa. See, memory issues after all this time has passed.) And the current review online doesn’t mention anything like this.
I am noticing the same thing. I think someone has been cleaning them up. I remember in his review of Sunshine, he had a problem with the one-way nature of the trip. He thought it was a huge plot hole, but that issue was specifically addressed by the crew and they all agreed they were on a suicide mission beyond a certain point.
Now when I checked the review of Sunshine online, I see nothing about that issue. Also, it says “thumbs up” and 4 stars, but most of what Ebert writes is negative. Seems there is some whitewashing going on.
From his review for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story:
What the father actually says, and he says it (often more than once) in almost every scene in which he appears, is “The wrong kid died.” I’m curious how Ebert got such a simple and oft-repeated phrase wrong. It’s like saying Citizen Kane’s last word was “Rosebutt.”
I’ve noticed a bunch of errors in Ebert’s reviews - here’s a list I made a few years back (coincidentally, I started a thread about one of them the other day)
Iron Man II: Ebert wrote "The best CGI sequence in the movie comes at midpoint, when Tony Stark decides to drive his own car in the Monaco Grand Prix, and Ivan Vanko stands fearlessly in the middle of the race, dressed like a kinky gladiator and wielding electric whips that can slice a car in two. He nearly destroys Stark, which is so exciting that we forget to wonder how he knew that Tony was driving his own car. "
I thought it was pretty obvious that Ivan didn’t know that Tony was in the car and didn’t care - he expected Tony to be at the race (that was public knowledge) and was issuing a public challenge to Tony by disrupting the race, hoping either to humiliate Tony by demonstrating that the Ironman suit is not unique (or to humiliate Tony by showing that Tony is too much of a coward to accept the challenge). The fact that Tony was in the car was gravy.
“Parenthood” - Roger loved the movie and so did I, but Roger wrote "Kozak plays a sensible mother whose husband is insanely obsessed with his theories about tapping the genius within young children; he reads Kafka at bedtime to their daughter, not yet 4, and proudly demonstrates that she can look at a group of paper dots and calculate the square root of the total (the child is only human and later eats the dots). " The last bit is completely wrong - it’s another child (Steve Martin’s character’s kid) who eats the dots, which forms the punch line to that scene.
Last example - “Princess and the Frog” - Roger writes: "We meet a young girl named Tiana, who is cherished by her mother Eudora and father James. Her mom is a seamstress, her dad a hard-working restaurant owner who stirs up a mighty gumbo. " This is a major error, since Tiana’s father, though a great cook who aspires to own a restaurant someday, is in fact a laborer not a restaurant owner, who dies with his dream unfulfilled, motivating Tiana in her own quest to own a restaurant.
The exterior scenes for all three were filmed in Spain, including the main street and Spanish-syle hacienda in Fistful. Interior scenes were filmed at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. Agreed that it’s misleading to say they were all shot in southern Italy.
I actually wrote to Ebert taking him to task for his Godzilla review. In it, he compared Godzilla negatively to the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, claiming that our first glimpse of the dinos made our spirits soar, or something like that.
That perplexed me because I remembered that he’d specifically criticized Speilberg for trotting out the dinosaurs early and often, instead of taking the same tack he’d taken in Jaws and made the audience wait good and long before finally showing them the shark.
After a few months he wrote me back, insisting that the was right, despite what was right there in black and white, which I thought was amusing.
Here’s the Jurassic Park review, and here’s Godzilla. He does criticize Spielberg right away for showing the dinosaurs too early and spending too much time on them, but it looks to me like he was making a different point: he says Godzilla is almost always obscured by rain and darkness to disguise the fact that the special effects are crappy, and Spielberg didn’t resort to that kind of trickery. But you’re right that he says ‘our hearts soared’ without mentioning that he didn’t seem to think anybody’s hearts were soaring at first.