Another problem with Ebert is he watches so many movies, there’s no way he can be paying attention intently to every one, every time.
Yeah, as a pathologist I feel that way about biopsies.
just kidding, honest!
Ya know if I hire a plumber I expect them to pay attention to my plumbing. If you hire me to fix your car, you probably expect me to pay attention and fix your car. If Roger Ebert reviews a movie, I think it is only fair for his readers / vewers/ employers to expect him to pay attention to the movie and small details like the plot. I don’t have a video clip of his review of Last Action Hero, but I recall him saying (roughly) that the plot was incomprehensible. Excuse me? The plot of an Arnold movie is incomprehensible? To what, a three toed sloth? Frankly if you can’t understand that plot, you probably should not be allowed into movies alone. Or maybe you should be required to go alone so you don’t interrupt the audience with asking your seat mate What? Why did he do that?
In the case of the other reviewer I mentioned he assumed that because the movie took place in downtown Chicago and had suburban teenagers it must be racist. Talk about phoning in your work. It was obvious he did not watch the movie, or he was not awake while he was in the theater.
Rotten Tomatoes put at 35% positive reviews pretty bad but it still beats out What Happens in Vegas and Made of Honor.
I took the trouble to find Ebert’s review of The Last Action Hero.
Guess what? There’s not one word that the plot of the movie is incomprehensible. What Ebert actually says is:
He gives the movie two-and-a-half stars, while his readers rated it as two stars.
How about a retraction and an apology?
astro writes:
> When something is so widely panned isn’t that often an indicator (like Starship
> Troopers) of the fact that they just didn’t “get” what the directors were trying
> to accomplish?
Do you truly believe this? Then go rent several dozen random films that have very low ratings at Rotten Tomatoes. Watch them all. Come back when you’re finished and tell us what you thought of them. I’ll bet that you’ll find that they mostly are pretty poor films.
I’m afraid that"s no help. Ebert missed that the plot of the “Slater movie” is totally irrelevant. In fact, in true Action Hero tradition, the Slater movie doesn’t realy need a plot, and is only even an issue at all for part of the first half of Last Action Hero. The fact that Ebert even made this comment quite blatantly shows that he was not paying attention.
Watch the review
Nope sorry, It’s a movie within a movie. You are off by 50%. Thanks for playing.
He completely missed perhaps the funniest in joke in the movie. Where Slater gets out of the tar pit, he is covered in tar. His daughter hands him a Kleenex and 5 seconds later he is completely clean of tar. Had Siskel been awake during this scene he would have realized that the entire movie inside the movie was a parody of action films. But I guess this was too subtle for him. Whatever.
NO shit, stunts are manufactured? Here I thought you grew them on trees.
Pardon me Sparky, but without that duality, there would be no movie. :rolleyes:
It’s called suspension of disbelief. you should try it sometime. Plus, just what the hell is he trying to say here? If I have never seen a movie before, how do I know that a scene is a big payoff, or just filler until I have seen it? I don’t go to the movies with a crystal ball.
The movie is only confusing if you slept though half of it, or were drunk.
Christ on a cracker, it’s an Arnold movie, the plot is not exactly involved. I recall I was out of town when the movie came out, and I went and saw it opening night. That weekend, I saw the Sisbert show, and sat there with my mouth wide open thinkg WTF? How could they not understand this movie?
What these guys and many other reviewers forget is many of us go to the movies to be entertained, and suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. We don’t want to see Citizen Kane every night. Sometimes we just want to grab a tub of popcorn and a coke and kick back. On that level LAH works very well.
I stand by my comments
One reviewer described the sound as “ear-buckling”. I found that pretty funny.
Susan Sarandon: Still hot.
That’s what I was thinking. Could be fun.
You guys got a***?! Gimme some!
There is no way to justify paying money to see Speed Racer. It was a short-lived, crudely-made, bunch of nonsense for the grade school set. In the 1960s in Japan.
The previews seem to imply that there is some noble, more worthy quest against EVIL going on in the Racer Family.
I hope the producers lose their shirts. Not because I’m offended (I’m not), but because thre was no reason to make this film.
Anyone remember Judge Dredd? Never saw that one either. Hear it lost the studio something like $70m. Just because it’s a comic book does not mean that the media geeks will not be selective.
It would have been so easy to MAKE UP a mythology of suicidal/homicidal racecar maniacs tearing about the world. And they would not have had any liscensing issues. But no. They invoke the name of Speed Racer, who was never more than a minor cult figure, if even that.
Serendipity Strikes! Last year, there was this video rental place going out of business, and I picked up all sorts of junk for nothing. Yes- a disc with uncensored Speed Racer! 
Steve MB writes:
> They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright
> Brothers.
(Of course, Steve MB is here only approximately quoting someone and doesn’t believe it himself. It’s a well-known attitude though, and that’s what I want to talk about. The following is a reply to that attitude, not to Steve MB himself.)
In fact, no one laughed at Christopher Columbus. All the authorities agreed that the Earth was round and that it was possible to reach China by travelling west from Europe. The authorities were right and Columbus was wrong about the diameter of the Earth. If North and South America hadn’t been there, Columbus and his men would have starved or died of thirst before reaching China. All that Columbus’s voyage shows is that sometimes by making a wrong assumption you can do an unexpected right thing.
No one laughed at Robert Fulton or Wilbur and Orville Wright either. They were inventors working at problems that were well-known in their times. There were other inventors working on those problems. Fulton and the Wrights just happened to have a little bit better ideas for steam engines and airplanes.
A reviewer’s job is to say how good the movie is, not how dumb the audience might be.
Actually, the Wright Brothers’ airplane ideas were terrible and none of them are used in modern airplanes. They managed to launch a powered glider into the air with a fricken catapult for a short hop, “published” the result in a bee-keeping magazine and then proceeded to sue the genuinely talented inventors who actually gave us the modern airplane into bankruptcy. They should be laughed at.
gaffa writes:
> Actually, the Wright Brothers’ airplane ideas were terrible and none of them are
> used in modern airplanes.
Take a look at this:
According to Wikipedia the Wright Brothers’ new developments were in control, since the ideas for wings and engines were worked out by previous inventors. Do you have a citation for your claims? I’m not an expert in aeronautics, so I’m willing to learn something new. The Wright Brothers weren’t laughed at as far as I can tell (and that’s the only thing relevant to this discussion). Some people didn’t think their inventions were as important as the brothers thought themselves, but they didn’t laugh at them.
Sir, you deserve the Pit for your crude, ignorant, and hateful remarks.
Their control system was wing warping and was not adopted by other inventors. Ailerons were invented by Glenn Hammond Curtiss and the Aerial Experiment Association and first used in the “June Bug”. The Wrights, meanwhile, were not interesting in competing or proving that their aircraft could perform - they were too busy suing anyone who built a better airplane.
I didn’t claim they were laughed at in their time, but that the idea that people who fired a glider into the air with a catapult should be credited with the first powered airplane flight, and that their claim would be announced in “Gleanings in Bee-Keeping”. They’re a great example of the sort of thing one was taught in school that later proved to be either dumbed-down or an outright lie.
Sorry, this is a hijack, and I probably should Pit the Wright Brothers.
So do it. We’ve got plenty air history geeks on the SDMB. I’d be fascinated in a discussion of the Wright’s accomplishments or lack thereof. Might be better as a GD, though the Pit would be more entertaining.
I just came back from seeing Speed Racer with my 5 year old son. Growing up, I loved the cartoon and based on the trailer I was expecting it to be shite. I loved it. The Wachowskis somehow captured the essence of the cartoon in a live action movie. My son was bored when there was no racing on the screen, but I really enjoyed it. I can see why critics wouldn’t like it, but I would take a WAG that the Wachowskis were big fans of the anime series too.
I second that you should start a thread in GD. This is the first that I’m hearing about this.