# Errors in Roger Ebert's reviews. How many are there? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 18, 2014, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383 "2014-04-18T02:14:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/1 "2014-04-18T02:14:06Z")
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. [Six years ago, I pointed out an error in Wanted and gaffa said the following then.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=475243) > [@Roger Ebert and the movie "Wanted"(minor spoilers inside)](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/roger-ebert-and-the-movie-wanted-minor-spoilers-inside/456205/3): > > I find a glaring error in nearly every Ebert review. I’m sure they exist in every review, but I just haven’t noticed. At one point I had considered starting a web site devoted to them, but then he got ill and it would have been cruel. And then the other day, it was mentioned again. > [@What is your favorite Roger Ebert review?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-your-favorite-roger-ebert-review/686202/55): > > It seemed that every single Ebert review I read had at least one error. It was astonishing, and I began to assume that he did it deliberately. 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: > [@](#): > > This happens after he is picked up in a bar by Fox (Angelina Jolie), who confides that he is now a member of the Fraternity, a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins who kill bad people. I suppose a lot of people, if they were picked up in a bar by Angelina Jolie, would go along with that story. But…there was no scene like that. They met in a pharmacy before a big action sequence. What other ones are there? ---
**Author:** ![GrandWino](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grandwino/32/67_2.png) [@GrandWino](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GrandWino)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/2 "2014-04-18T02:26:00Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![obfusciatrist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/4af34b/32.png) [@obfusciatrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/obfusciatrist)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/3 "2014-04-18T03:41:42Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/4 "2014-04-18T03:59:06Z")
Moneyball: > [@](#): > > In the 2002 season\*\*, the nation’s lowest-salaried Major League Baseball team\*\* put together a 20-game winning streak, setting a new American League record. **The team began that same season with 11 losses in row.** What happened between is the stuff of “Moneyball,” a smart, intense and moving film that isn’t so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics. > > I walked in knowing what the movie was about, but unprepared for its intelligence and depth. It centers on the character of the Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who after a bad start as a MLB player, moved over to management and was driven by his hatred of losing.\*\* In his previous season, he’d taken the A’s to the World Series,\*\* only to have them lose and see their best three players hired away by richer teams offering much bigger salaries. All three of the bolded sentences are untrue, and nowhere in the movie are they stated as fact. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/5 "2014-04-18T04:09:14Z")
Bourne Legacy: > [@](#): > > the police give chase, and one particularly determined undercover cop with dark aviator glasses persists beyond all reason. Since he doesn’t have a single word of dialogue, it’s impossible to say if he has any idea how important Cross and Shearing are, but he keeps coming like the Energizer Bunny. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/6 "2014-04-18T04:39:32Z")
In his [original review](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-1968) of _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_, he wrote (speaking of the entire _Dollars_ trilogy): > [@](#): > > All three were shot on low budgets in southern Italy. Their American actors – Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach – had no box-office followings. Most of the other actors were unknown Italians, largely amateurs, with their English dialog dubbed. Not true, at least for the third movie. _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_ was filmed in Spain. (I’m not sure about the other two.) However, he got it right when he [reviewed](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-1968) it again for his Great Movies series 35 years later: > [@](#): > > Perhaps it is the subtly foreign flavor of the spaghetti trilogy, and especially the masterpiece “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” that suggests the films come from a different universe than traditional Westerns. Instead of tame Hollywood extras from central casting, we get locals who must have been hired near the Spanish locations–men who look long-weathered by work and the sun. Consider the legless beggar who uses his arms to propel himself into a saloon, shouting, “Hand me down a whiskey!” ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/7 "2014-04-18T04:45:25Z")
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, 1. 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. 2. Isn’t Cinco De Mayo mostly an American construct and mostly ignored in Mexico? ---
**Author:** ![Jeff\_Lichtman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jeff_lichtman/32/1531_2.png) [@Jeff\_Lichtman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jeff_Lichtman)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/8 "2014-04-18T05:54:38Z")
In his [original review](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raise-the-red-lantern-1992) 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. ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 6:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/9 "2014-04-18T06:17:32Z")
My [contributions](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13680461&postcount=42) from an earlier thread. (There are some others in there too) ---
**Author:** ![Dale\_Sams](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/779978/32.png) [@Dale\_Sams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dale_Sams)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/10 "2014-04-18T12:09:46Z")
> [@Morbo](#): > > My [contributions](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13680461&postcount=42) from an earlier thread. (There are some others in there too) Not Ebert, Rex Reed I think…but I recall his review of _Poseidon_: > [@](#): > > This isn’t your father’s Poseidon Adventure! We jump right into the action. Modern audiences are are too smart to want to wait an hour for the main action to start! Like in oh…_Titanic_ or _Pearl Harbor_? ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 12:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/11 "2014-04-18T12:35:18Z")
This is going to be hard. 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](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14947818&postcount=16) 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. ---
**Author:** ![Sterling\_Archer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Sterling\_Archer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sterling_Archer)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/12 "2014-04-18T13:52:53Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/13 "2014-04-18T14:06:12Z")
From his review for _Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story_: > [@](#): > > Dewey Cox is out in the barn playing with machetes with his own brother one day when he inadvertently slices him in half. Fatally? The doctor observes: “It’s a particularly bad case of somebody being cut in half.” > > Life after that is never quite right for Dewey, whose father turns up at every triumph to remind him, “The wrong brother died.” 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.” ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/14 "2014-04-18T14:17:14Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Ellis\_Aponte\_Jr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@Ellis\_Aponte\_Jr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellis_Aponte_Jr)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/15 "2014-04-18T14:41:35Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > In his [original review](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-1968) of _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_, he wrote (speaking of the entire _Dollars_ trilogy):Not true, at least for the third movie. _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_ was filmed in Spain. (I’m not sure about the other two.) > > However, he got it right when he [reviewed](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-1968) it again for his Great Movies series 35 years later: 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. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/16 "2014-04-18T14:47:12Z")
These are great. Should I have specifically stated “plot errors”? I thought his main problem was missing key points of the plot. ---
**Author:** ![Ellen\_Cherry](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellen_cherry/32/3600_2.png) [@Ellen\_Cherry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellen_Cherry)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/17 "2014-04-18T14:50:57Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/18 "2014-04-18T15:13:46Z")
> [@Ellen\_Cherry](#): > > 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. [Here’s the Jurassic Park review](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/jurassic-park-1993), and [here’s Godzilla](http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/godzilla-1998). 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. ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/19 "2014-04-18T15:57:57Z")
I can’t believe that nobody has pointe out that it’s _ **Roger** _… ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2014, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383/20 "2014-04-18T16:13:37Z")
> [@Sterling\_Archer](#): > > I am noticing the same thing. I think someone has been cleaning them up. My Wanted error from six years ago remains there. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/errors-in-roger-eberts-reviews-how-many-are-there/686383.md?page=2)