According to a poster on Opal’s board, Ebert’s accussed the Fantastic Four flick of ripping off The Incredibles so far as the characters powers go.
Why for shame? More than likely, that error was corrected soon after the review was originally published. I doubt Ebert would deny changing it if asked about it, and would likely say that the reviews posted on his website are meant simply to be his reviews, not a historical document of exactly what the Chicago Sun-Times printed on a certain date. In fact, if you read the most recent Movie Answer Man column about the tripods in War of the Worlds, he mentions changing a single word in the online version of his review. I don’t see a problem with that.
I must now see this movie, no matter how bad it is.
Eberts comments on the Fantastic Four can be found about 3 minutes into the review here.
That proves he’s ignorant, but it actually proves he DID watch the movie.
What did he actually say? I’m not able to listen to clip on the web right now? Did he compare it to The Incredibles, which would be perfectly fair, or did he actually say Fantasic 4 was ripping it off?
Ebert is saying that the whole cast of characters seems like a set of “second-tier” characters all of whom we’ve seen before. Then he goes through the characters one-by-one: The Thing is kind of like the Hulk, the Invisible Woman is kind of like Storm, and “Mr. Fantastic is kind of like the Incredibles.”
He never says that The Fantastic Four ripped off The Incredibles. He’s just saying that this movie presents us with characters that remind us of characters in movies we’ve already seen. He doesn’t claim that the stretchy guy was an original idea in The Incredibles that was copied by this movie.
Incidentally, my boss’s son did some of the computerised animation for The Fantastic Four and he told her that the studio went into a panic after The Incredibles came out because some of the plot points were too similar and they didn’t want it to seem like they had ripped off The Incredibles and so they had to rejigger The Fantastic Four to make it different.
I’ve noticed Ebert making tons of factual errors, but only one springs to mind:
The Red Violin
“The violin passes from the rich to the poor, from Italy to Poland to England to China to Canada.”
It passed from Italy to a monastery somewhere to Austria to England to China to Canada. Not sure where the monastery was but since the monks spoke German in the old days and French in modern times, and it has some physical proximity to both Italy and Austria, I suspect it’s somewhere in the Swiss Alps. It’s decidedly not in Poland.
I think Mr. Ebert isn’t quite sure what country Vienna is in.
Small point, but glaring to me.
Correction: Later in the review he says:
“Flash-forward. The violin is in the possession of gypsies (I am not revealing the details of the transfers). It is played by many hands and travels from Poland to England, where in the 19th century, it is heard by a rich virtuoso named Frederick Pope.”
I’m still not sure where he got Poland from. The violin went from Switzerland(?) to England via Gypsies, but in a series of dialogless shots of mountains and seas. If Ebert can identify any of these as Polish, he’s better at geography than me. There is certainly no mention of that country in the movie.
And in a movie about music, he forgets to mention Vienna? An entire 5th of the story takes place there!
roughly: put-YOM-kin.
I stopped reading Ebert way way back in the 1970s, partly because of his predictable taste but partly because of factual errors. I don’t recall any specifically, and I don’t dislike him enough to go searching through his reviews (which might be corrected anyway.) He would constantly say things like, “This performance reminds me of John Wayne in GONE WITH THE WIND…” to try to prove that he had a vast knowledge of old films, which (at that time) he was sorely lacking.
This is the example I mentioned in the other thread, and which Cat Fight refers to above.
There are two important components to this that support the central argument: There’s no possible way Ebert could have made this mistake if he’d actually been watching the movie while the plot points were playing out, and (this is the critical bit) he bases an aspect of his critical response on his misunderstanding.
I was discussing this last night with some Dopers at Seattle Trivia Night. There is a distinction to be made between factual errors that don’t impact the critical reaction, and those that do. It doesn’t make any difference at all if Ebert transposes the character names of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in Armageddon. (Not saying he did. Just an example.) However, it does make a difference if he went out to the snack bar and missed the scene where Shanghai gets wrecked, and then complains in his review that because we see New York and Paris destroyed, the film has a Western bias, disregarding the impact of the crisis on the rest of the world. (Again. Not saying he did. Just illustrating the point.)
His Italian Job mistake, I think, falls into the second category. He makes the movie out to be more illogical and silly than it actually is, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the basis for the initial heist. The movie is silly, yes, but it’s not that silly, and his misrepresentation of the story does the film a disservice, particularly coming from a high-profile critic who’s supposed to know better. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, would never be that sloppy. Of course, Rosenbaum doesn’t typically bother to write up Hollywood fluff like The Italian Job, so perhaps it’s understandable that Ebert’s attention would be frequently elsewhere during such fare. But the point is, it is, regularly, elsewhere.
That’s exactly the problem I had in the thread I started about his review of Ronin, which I linked to on Page 1.
Another example is Along Came A Spider, which I saw a couple of nights ago then read his review. While I agree that it wasn’t all that great of a movie, he rips it to pieces b/c of what he perceived to be plotholes, but I think it was more like he didn’t get it. Here’s an example from his review:
He totally missed the point. Dr. Cross deliberately gave that character the wrong amount b/c he already suspected him of not being behind the ransom. You know this b/c he acts all suspicious after the drop, thinking that asking for money wasn’t this guy’s profile, then when he confronts the character he says “I see you got your sense of humor back…” - in other words, the guy he spoke to on a scrambled phone while delivering the ransom didn’t joke around with him like this character did.
So giving him the wrong amount was simply to confirm whether or not he would react and say “no, it was ten million!” To use that as an example of why there are plotholes is stupid - it wasn’t a plothole, it was something he didn’t pick up on.
Another example:
There aren’t 103,000 possibilities - Cross was looking at a video of the classroom taken the day of the kidnapping, not at an Internet page at all.
And the whole “Come to think of it, has it?” line again shows that he completely missed the point. Of course it has - the profile of this guy was that he wanted to be as famous as Lindbergh - he wanted Cross to find the video link to his apartment so he could figure out the passage in the book that he gave to Cross earlier over the phone. That’s kinda why he removed a picture of Charles Lindbergh from the wall, and left the words “Charles Lindbergh” on the chalkboard, Roger.
IOW, Ebert was totally confused about a plot point b/c he missed it, then passed it off in his review as “bad plotting.” Sloppy.