Years ago, I remember a review of the TV show The Avengers where it was clear that the reviewer had only seen one episode – the one where Mrs. Peel leaves and Tara King arrives. They said that Steed had two female sidekicks.
I first noticed Ebert doing this sort of thing with Ronin:
Uh, yeah, great characterization there, and what a scolding finger ye doth wag.
Except that they were madly chasing Dierdre, Seamus and the case in another car, so nobody was “choosing” anything. Oh, and Larry was already dead during the chase through the Pont D’Alma tunnel - it was DeNiro doing the driving.
He talked about how they cut holes in the floors of the building so the safe would fall through to a waiting boat below, and bitched and moaned at the notion that the safe would fall onto the boat below and not through it. Which of course didn’t happen - the safe landed in the water; the fleeing boat was deliberate misdirection so the police would chase it.
This wasn’t a blink-and-you-miss-it scene - the movie then spends about four minutes showing them SCUBAing down to the safe, breaking in, extracting the gold, then sneaking away in an underwater sub thingy.
If you think that Ebert’s reviews are bad, you should check Ben Lyons. There are a few of his reviews on youtube, watching them you cannot help but wonder how an idiot of that caliber ever got such a job (ha, his dad is himself a famous movie critic? That might help…).
Philip Norman’s piece on The King’s Speech in the Daily Mail is spectacularly dumb. The central thrust of his article, and the headline, was entirely based on a mishearing of a line in the film (“Do you like sweeties?” as “Do you like Sooty?”). He also misidentified the child in question.
No, “quantum” can metaphorically mean a large movement as well. The key point is that it’s a discontinuous movement.
I always thought Roger Ebert was clueless about the story in the Lord of the Rings movies.
Wow, all of this Ebert bashing. I like his reviews!
Except his review of 2010 complained that it explained too much. He praised 2001 for leaving things purposely ambiguous and letting the audience use its imagination. But in his review of Agnes of God, he complains about the ending being ambiguous!
tdn, sometimes ambiguity is good, sometimes not so much.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to say, here.
The only really clueless movie review I remember is a guy on the TV news reviewing The Empire Strikes Back. He hadn’t seen Star Wars, but must have seen all the bad knockoffs it inspired in the next couple years. He liked Empire, but felt that the humorous robot thing had already been done to death.
I remember a review of Moon by someone (maybe Ebert) who hadn’t figured out how many clones of Sam there were, or what happened to the original.
Yeah, I know, it just struck me as oddly inconsistent. I think his problem with Agnes was that we never found out who got her pregnant, and it’s Very Important that that loose end get tied up. Personally I liked not knowing better. It really didn’t matter to the story.
Chris Tookey’s Daily Mail review of Kick Ass, entitled “Don’t be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood” must surely tower above all others in the “missing the fucking point” stakes. Really, really astonishing (and should serve as a big neon sign to anyone who ever wishes to cite the Daily Mail in a debate on the SDMB).
I’m reminded of a review for Shaun of the Dead which complained that the film plays well for Brittish audiences, but that Americans would fail to understand the metaphor of a man sleepwalking through life and missing the world around him - not to mention that the soundtrack is mainly performed by Queen, “a band most Americans probably haven’t heard of.”
:eek:
This was an American film critic, btw. I forget who.
Wow.
Many years ago a local paper had a review of Flash Gordon. I didn’t read it, but someone sent a letter to the editor explaining why the reviewer was wrong. I don’t remember much, but the reviewer complained that the title character spent most of the film traipsing around in nothing but a jockstrap. The letter writer said that it was a 2-minute scene, tops. She really dressed the guy down and made him look like an idiot.
The letter writer was an 11 year old girl.
Only because the scientifically illiterate use of the term is so prevalent.
(I wonder if there were any dumb reviews of Night of the Living Dead?
That’s a good one: not only does he screw up details of the movie he’s reviewing, his attempt to throw in a dig at an entirely unrelated movie also falls flat when he criticizes Kill Bill for the scene where Uma Thurman takes her new katana as carry-on luggage for the flight home, completely missing one of the best jokes in the film: the Japanese airplane actually has sword-holders attached to each seat. You can see at least two other passengers with their swords neatly racked next to them.
:rolleyes:
It’s not a scientifically illiterate usage, it’s a metaphorical one.
You might be confused by the scale. Surely an electron transition is very tiny. Well compared to people yes. The point is, it’s discontinuous. It’s large relative to it’s own scale. It’s not a big distance, but it is a big change. And that’s what matters.
Or shall we start complaining that technically speaking, the minutes in New York are pretty much the same length as they are everywhere else?
Exactly. A quantum leap means something went from one state directly to a completely different state. So somebody saying that Star Wars was a quantum leap from 2001 was making a valid point - Star Wars completely changed the SF movie genre.
The reference to a quasar leap on the other hand was just stupid.
I think Ebert’s a great writer, but his reviews are much easier to swallow if you accept that he’s really a crotchety old man. He hates science fiction, refuses to acknowledge the artistic merit of video games, and seems to apply his own moral framework to films rather than taking them on their own turf. I was beyond furious when he panned Kickass because it featured violence involving children and therefore may be a bad influence. He judged the entire film based on his moral outrage about children being portrayed as violent superheroes. Give me a fucking break.
Oh, Ebert’s been a longtime fan of SF. I think he’s just… getting older, and of course (and I hate to say it) his illness probably puts him in a less tolerant frame of mind. He is less patient than he used to be – and remember, compared to Siskel, Ebert was the “nice” one. He has been pretty clear over the years that his reviews are meant to be him saying, “I saw this movie, had a completely subjective experience with it, and I’m going to share it with you.” I suppose he is more sensitive to, say, violence in movies or stupid stuff in movies than he used to be. But I don’t really know, because I don’t read him regularly any more. He’s changed too much.
Ebert is an old-line sf fan. He wrote for sf fanzines as a teenager.
What that probably means is that like me, he hates the utter crap that is marketed as sf in the movie world but bears no resemblance to good science fiction. It’s the stuff that used to be denigrated as sci-fi and is now proudly proclaimed to be sci-fi. It’s still crap.
I’m fond of saying that sf is about ideas, not about spaceships. You can combine the two but 99% of sci-fi movies leave out the idea half. Star Trek and Star Wars may have had some virtues, but those pale to their legacy, which is blowing up stuff in stuff.
The problem with Kickass had nothing to do with the violence and everything to do with it being idiot fanboy porn. That people are now calling stuff like Kickass science fiction is a real problem. And whatever reason Ebert may have had with hating it is irrelevant to his liking or not liking science fiction.