Look up his review of The Usual Suspects. He was the rare critic who gave it a low rating. When he found himself in such a minority of viewers, he gave it another try. He still didn’t like it.
I think most people like Raising Arizona and some even have it as one of their all time favorites.
Ebert didn’t seem to care for it.
I do love the one-word quotes on the Mr. Magoo poster: “Slapstick!” - Los Angeles Daily News “Thrills!” - New York Post.
I wonder how much of that is just getting used to the Coen Brothers’ style - that was only their second movie. But I actually don’t like Raising Arizona either and I’d rank it near the bottom of the Coen pile.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2? Battlefield Earth? Armageddon? Thor?
Mr. Ebert was just plain mistaken. I’m grateful to the directors, producers, writers and fine actors in each of them. Those are five of my favorite [del]movies[/del] rifftrax!
It’s always more fun to write a scathing review than a glowing one (the latter is tougher to pull off sometimes, because it can seem fawning). It’s more fun to gleefully flay the movie for its crappiness.
Roger Ebert, above all, wrote his reviews based on his own opinions. Some I don’t agree with. Many I do. Even when I don’t agree with them, I can see his reasoning - usually. It’s a rare Ebert review that makes no sense. I think he missed the point of Paranormal Activity (the first one), for example. But that’s an exception to the rule for him.
For me, Roger Ebert made reading reviews fun, not a chore, not some opinion that was being forced on me. Most critics today are happier being on TV, so they write flowery prose and use sound bites to get attention. I don’t think Ebert did that. He wrote from the heart, and I don’t think anyone ever accused him of phoning in a review. And that’s why he was my inspiration and is my hero.
One of the things I liked about Ebert was that he liked movies. He liked good movies and not so good movies. And while I didn’t like all the movies he liked, and liked some he didn’t, he didn’t usually spoil the fun by calling the stupid movie you liked really stupid.
Take that American Classic “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” which Ebert gives three stars to. It isn’t a great movie - but it lives up to its billing:
Sounds like a good movie, but when I got the Sun-Times I used to gravitate to his zero stars choices. A movie with one star was usually just lousy and boring, but something that got zero stars was usually something special. I didn’t read the Tribune because they just had Siskel and some loser named Dave Kehr, who did nothing after that and less than nothing before.
I also found it annoying that Ebert gave four stars to so many films. Between 1967 and 2007 he gave four stars to 742 films. That’s a bit more than 18 a year. It’s about five or six times as often as I would give out four stars if I were a film critic.
I agree very much with the first sentence here. I enjoyed reading Ebert’s reviews even if I had no intention of seeing the movie. I don’t know about the ambitions of most contemporary critics, though. Sounds simplistic. And I doubt that Ebert never once phoned in a review. He was thoughtful, yes, but he was at it for 40 years. Even Homer nods.
I think part of the appeal of Ebert for me was that while he (too often, IMO) expressed a taste for the art house, he enjoyed and recommended a lot of simpler movies (ones that I might actually enjoy). Or, what Dangerosa said about him just plain liking movies.
I’ve already recommended them recently but my two favorite smartass Ebert columns are for Constantine and Season of the Witch.
Grude, I Spit on Your Grave really was a bad movie. I didn’t even enjoy it that much in my teens when I was a fan of low budget horror. Ebert frequently drew the line at exploitation films.
Exactly! 
Don’t these critics all go to the same film festivals where they collude to generate buzz around bullshit films like “The Tree of Life”? Maltin’s description, “inscrutable and unsatisfying” about sums it up. I would have added the word “terrible,” but enough about me and what movies I hate.
That’s why there was a Siskel.
I missed it at the theater and I think I may be better off taking his word on this one.
Though Thor has a few annoying flaws, I liked it okay.
I may actually be the only person in the world who liked North.
Ebert really did not like ***Beetlejuice ***and I could never understand why.
I always felt that the key difference between him & Siskel was that Siskel judged all films on a rather narrow, specific, unchangeable set of criteria. Ebert always took into account what kind of a film it was and what it’s goals were. And even if it wasn’t his cup of tea he would still acknowledge that a film could be good because it achieved exactly what it set out to and he’d give it a positive review.
But he just didn’t ‘get’ Beetlejuice. He unfairly judges it based on its very sweet, quaint opening scene with Baldwin & Davis as a happy couple, who die in a “silly accident” and then have to deal with an even sillier afterlife. He wanted it to be a romcom, not a fantasy-comedy. And worst of all he totally missed the genius of Keaton’s titular performance. You just found his character “annoying”.
Another that comes to mind was Fight Club. This one was worse, because he *did *get all the rich subtext and funny but intelligent commentary that the film had. But my god, he thought it was a sign of the collapse of Western Civilization or something! He felt the film’s ‘message’ was pure evil disguised as palatable whit & comedy. He practically thought that every print & negative of it should be rounded up and burned for the sake of future generations! Personally, I thought the film was self-aware enough that it was the exact opposite: Scathing satire.
And a more recent example was Battle: Los Angeles. I was very pleasantly surprised to find this film to be a very well made, effective, Blair Witch meets *Independence Day *action/scifi film. And both he and I liked Blair Witch and despised ID4, but he just torn Battle: Los Angeles a new one! He went so far as to say to girl readers that if this is the kind of film your boyfriend likes, you should dump him! Jeez… 
I really enjoy this movie, despite agreeing with Ebert’s review. 
I guess I’m just a sucker for glurge. But hell, what do I know- I liked Armageddon, too! 
Good, I hated that movie also and was the only one in my high school who did.
I also remember that Ebert panned both Die Hard and Blade Runner which are now considered classics.
Reading that review now, yeah he’s absolutely correct. That movie is, to me anyway, akin to Forrest Gump (which actually Ebert *did *like). It had lofty, high-brow goals that it failed miserably to achieve except in an incredibly pedestrian, shallow, TV movie sort of way.
I’d even go one further about Dead Poets and say that Robin Williams’ character ***was ***completely at fault, and Kurtwood Smith’s character was not to blame. Here’s a father who’s gotten himself & his family into just the edge of the upper middle class thru nothing but determination and hard work, and he wants his son to emulate these (rather worthy) ideals. Then he goes and sees him prancing around in a little fairy costume and telling his father this is what he wants to do with his life! The father was right to try and knock some sense into him! Of course there’s the caveat of an undercurrent of long term dysfunction in the family and that this is merely a small part of it, but that just adds to it’s cliched and ham-fisted nature.
I also liked Battle: Los Angeles and when I started a thread here about it, I mentioned how odd Ebert’s scathing review seemed. Like the movie personally insulted him.