For years I thought I disagreed with him about Raising Arizona. He said he hated it and was told at least once a week that he was wrong. I thought him wrong too, as I remembered liking it when it first came out. But I must have been stoned or just a stupid punk back then, because a year or two ago I found a copy over here and watched it with my wife, who is a big Coen Brothers fan (thanks to me). Watching it now, I was completely embarrassed by how juvenile it seemed. The wife thought it was rubbish too. Turns out that Ebert was right – Raising Arizona is the Coens’ only bad movie, a real sack of shit.
Raising Arizona is one of those cases where the people that love it REALLY LOVE IT. I was badgered for years to watch it and when I finally did I thought it was amusing, but not life changing. Of course, when I told those same friends I watched it, I let them know it was… THE. BEST. MOVIE. EVER.
Just remembered another one that I started a thread about.
After Raising Arizona, you knew I’d do The Big Lebowski next.
Ebert did two reviews. A basic review when it first came out giving it 3 stars. And then a longer review in 2010 giving it 4 stars and putting it in his Great Movies category. Interesting.
The first one has mainly just small misquotes. But the second one is noticeably worse.
Let’s start with the first review.
Ebert: … and is described by the narrator as "the laziest man in Los Angeles County.‘’
Actual line: “and even if he’s a lazy man, and the Dude was certainly that–quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County.”
Ebert throws out one odd bit: Here, in a film set at the time of the Gulf War, are characters whose speech was shaped by earlier times: Vietnam (Walter), the flower power era (the Dude) and "Twilight Zone’’ (Donny).
Both Walter and The Dude were from the same Nam/Anti-war era, etc. I don’t get the Twilight Zone reference at all.
Ebert: Here, too, note that when the In & Out Burger shop is suggested for a rendezvous, the Dude supplies its address: That’s the sort of precise information he would possess.
A: It’s “In-N-Out Burger”. (Shop?) B: It’s cited as a reference, only later does Donny suggest going there. C: It’s Walter that first mentions a particular location, with The Dude offering another location. Both are street names only. Was Ebert aware that this is a chain?
Ebert: "That rug really tied the room together,‘’ the Dude mourns.
Variations of this phrase abound, but not this one.
Ebert has Walter saying: "this aggression will not stand’’
Only Bush on TV says this. The Dude semi-quotes it. But not Walter at all.
Ditto Ebert quotes Walter: "draw a line in the sand.‘’
Actual line: “I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude.”
Ebert on Maude: … she covers her body with paint and hurls herself through the air in a leather harness.
She is not covered in paint. She waves paintbrushes around and might get a little splattered, but she is shown basically paint-free. Certainly not covered.
Ebert: … and guzzles White Russians made with half-and-half …
The Dude makes his own drinks with just milk, as shown in his first scene where he’s buying milk at Ralphs. He is a cheapskate, after all.
(In both reviews, Ebert calls Walter a Vietnam Vet. I thought Walter never actually served in Vietnam. Vietnam-era, maybe. That this was a myth of his own creation. But I can’t find a line that explicitly says this.)
The Great Movie review:
Ebert repeatedly refers to Malibu, including that both Lebowskis live there. Of course not! He goes to Jackie Treehorn’s Malibu beach home, has a run-in with the Malibu Chief, but is promptly thrown out of town and told not to come back.
Ebert: He and the Dude never mention politics.
What??? Walter and The Dude talk about politics repeatedly. Lenin, Nihilists, National Socialism, the (first) Gulf War. Sheesh.
Ebert quoting someone on the rug: “it pulled the room together”
Agh.
Ebert: the cops who know the hero by name …
The only cops who call him by name call him (Mr.) Lebowski. The Chief because he’s looking at the Ralphs card and the cop at the car lot who presumably got the name when The Dude showed up to claim his car. No indication that either knew him before.
Ebert: “That will not stand,”
The Dude says “This will not stand, ya know, this will not stand, man.”
Ebert: With the earliest flags of the republic, he insists, “Don’t tread on me.”
I don’t understand this reference. There is no “Don’t tread on me.” line in the movie. Is he just giving a reference rather than trying to quote?
Ebert: He has a fortune dangled before his eyes, only to have it replaced by telephone books and used boxer shorts.
There is no reference to telephone books in the movie. The closest is at one point Walter lies to the cops and says he had business papers in the ransom briefcase in the stolen car.
Ebert: If a man has a roof over his head, fresh half-and-half for his White Russians, a little weed and his bowling buddies, what more, really, does he need?
Again, the half-and-half. But the big error is something Ebert repeatedly mentions. The Dude also needs a urine-free rug.
FTG, the vast majority of the errors you detail are so extremely nitpicky that I’m half tempted to suspect you are parodying the “Ebert makes lots of errors” position. While I am coming up short on specifics, my memory of the errors that bothered me were that they were fundamental misunderstandings about which characters were involved in major story arcs, or what their fundamental relationships and motivations were. Or he would complain that some plot element or motivation did not make sense, and his judgment to that effect was based on a misunderstanding of something that was fairly clearly spelled out on screen.
Have you seen all their movies? I have seen all but* Inside Llewyn Davis* (which I shall see soon), Intolerable Cruelty, and The Ladykillers. The latter two I do not have high hopes about, but I can’t really say yet obviously. Of those I have seen, two are flat out landmarks of cinema (No Country for Old Men and Miller’s Crossing); one is just barely below that level but still a masterpiece (True Grit); and another is clearly in “great film, with minour reservations” territory (Fargo). But the others lie all along a spectrum of quality, and there are two that I would call significantly worse than Raising Arizona: The Hudsucker Proxy and especially Burn After Reading, which I could not even get through, it was so atrocious.
Some more examples, some already listed in this thread but quite a few that haven’t been.
That is not Ebert who put the fourth star on the Great Movies review. As long-time readers know, he never included stars in his Great Movies reviews, only in his regular reviews. I note that now his review of Groundhog Day, which also was originally three stars, now has four stars in his Great Movies review. But again, before his death, no stars were ever included in his Great Movies reviews. In fact, I clearly remember an Answer Man question in which a reader asked him about originally giving Groundhog Day three stars but then later including it as a Great Movie. The reader asked why Ebert didn’t go back and bump the star rating. I clearly remember this. Ebert replied that his opinions do change over time but explicitly stated that he did not want to go back and start changing the number of stars on his past reviews, because that could result in all manner of confusion. He said he wanted to leave his reviews standing as is. It seems obvious to me that someone has come along after his death and just arbitrarily assigned four stars to each of his Great Movies reviews. Someone at the website is monkeying around and just sticking four stars to every Great Movie review…
I have watched every single Coen Brothers film, and now so has the wife with our viewing of Raising Arizona. We like every one, some more than others, except for Raising Arizona, which is a sack of shit, completely unworthy of the Coens. (The wife’s favorite hands down is Miller’s Crossing. I have a three-or even five-way tie for mine.)
Oh, and those three you mention as not having seen yet – Inside Llewyn Davis, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers – are not among our favorites. Among just those three, Intolerable Cruelty is probably the best IMHO. We were disappointed in Inside Llewyn Davis, but it still was not bad.
I am mainly presenting data. In some reviews there is a significant error or two. In others basically just not getting secondary quotes right. So he isn’t routinely wrong in major ways in all reviews. If only the major error prone reviews were discussed, then that would be a biased view.
For example, I have not looked at a review, seen that it was error free and decided to skip making a post about it.
My choice of reviews to cover is, as I said, mainly movies that I am quite familiar with so it is easier for me to notice most errors. The bias with this selection, of course, is that this means movies that I like quite a lot. Maybe he has more/fewer errors in movies in the kinds of movies that I don’t like or never saw.
In terms of pickiness, I waver on quotes. E.g., in one post I skipped doing major checking on his quotes. OTOH, getting a major, repeated quote wrong is non trivial. (Unless I do it, of course. :p)
The one that comes to my mind was when the first Fantastic Four movie came out, Ebert said it was a rip off of the Disney animated flick, The Impossibles.
I remember that too. It may have been on the TV show.
That’s possible. I heard it second hand.
On this excerpted page from Ebert’s 2007 yearbook, he addresses being taken to task over his comments about his mistatements about the FF. Of course being the egomaniac he was, he doesn’t actually say, “Sorry, I made a mistake.” He rationalizes it, and basically blames the fans for being over-enthusiastic.
I just scanned your post again looking for the first really egregious example (not necessarily the most egregious, because I stopped when I found one):
To say that is getting the quote “wrong” is just…c’mon.
Okay, okay. Here’s one. Searching For Bobby Fischer.
Nothing obviously wrong that I can see. (But with the usual caveat that the original review might have been cleaned up.)
OTOH, he talks a lot about generalities and gives little details of the movie. So that limits the possibilities of errors.
(There are two punctuation marks wrong from the original quote at the start plus a period missing after it. But only a horrible nitpicker would point out stuff like that.)
According to Wiki, she was an exotic dancer at night and a welder during the day.
Depends on your definition. She did kind of artsy but also sexy dances, while keeping her clothes on (something that I doubt exists in real life). The “villain” of the movie owned another club where the women did dance nude, which was portrayed as extremely sleazy; and he was constantly trying to get Beals to come work there.
I have said I thought many of the examples were nitpicky. But when he misunderstood a basic plot element that would undermine how much sense the movie would make at a basic level, and then gave a movie (that I’d consider good) a poor rating as a result, that was a problem.
Does a two-and-a-half month hiatus make a thread a zombie? Probably a gray area.
Anyway, I just saw another one: Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left. Ebert writes:
Actually, the locket was given to one of the killers by the victim, in hopes of softening his heart. It almost worked, and was one of the (very few) touching moments in the film.
Yes, his reviews are full of errors, but I still liked reading them. I think of Ebert as a “big picture” kind of guy, but not too accurate with details.