Roger died just over one year ago and I miss him more than any celebrity. I followed him on twitter and gradually discovered that the reviewer was also an all around brilliant and insightful man and a great guy.
He wrote me a brief comment one time regarding something I sent him and I was thrilled.
What are your favorite reviews of his? Positive or negative does not matter, it is entirely up to you.
I love:
Battlefield Earth - ““Battlefield Earth” is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way.”
Jack Frost - “The snowman gave me the creeps. Never have I disliked a movie character more. They say state-of-the-art special effects can create the illusion of anything on the screen, and now we have proof: It’s possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light and Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects, and I am not forgetting the Chucky doll or the desert intestine from “Star Wars.””
Knowing - ““Knowing” is among the best science-fiction films I’ve seen – frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome. In its very different way, it is comparable to the great “Dark City,” by the same director, Alex Proyas. That film was about the hidden nature of the world men think they inhabit, and so is this one.”
"Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.
And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we’re back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets."
I’ve only seen the Siskel and Ebert show a couple of times, if memory serves me right they were on Saturday nights around 7:00, when we all went out. I didn’t see many of his reviews.
like I said I saw them together a couple of times. It was a long time ago.
I liked a comment Ebert made more than once on his old TV show with Siskel, after Siskel pontificated about how the movie at issue would’ve been better if the director had done X, Y and Z, and Ebert just said something like “Gene, just review the movie they did make, not the one you think they should’ve made.”
I also liked a quip Dave Letterman made on his show when some random guest asked Dave why he had two chairs side by side for his guests and Dave pointed at the chairs and said, “Siskel & Ebert.”
He gave a four star review to a Nicolas Cage movie that wasn’t directed by Spike Jonze?
My favorite Ebert review is that of Frankenheimer’s Ronin, not because it is a good review (it’s not) but because it is both readily apparent that Ebert went to the snack bar at least three times during the film (he was notorious for missing crucial plot points while snacking down or taking a smoke break), misses plot developments that were made absolutely clear in dialogue, and also bashes the screenplay without realizing that it was almost entirely written by his buddy, David Mamet, who he elsewhere fawns over. He also has a reputation–at least, when he was still drinking–of being a tremendous prick and attempting to get Gene Siskel removed from their show because Siskel would mock him for showing up too hammered to speak clearly.
Wonderful guy, great critic. In a parallel universe, perhaps.
Siskel and Ebert’s review of the Jim Jarmusch (sp?) Neil Young and Crazy Horse film “Year Of The Horse” left a memory with me. Poor Roger didn’t get Crazy Horse, and he lamented how the songs went on and on. If my memory dosen’t fail me, he said that the band played the same thing “over and over and over” with an obvious frustration. His outlook was not improved when Gene Siskel (paraphrasing) replied: I don’t know, I kinda like Neil Young and Crazy Horse.
Ebert was a man who couldn’t see art when it was right in front of his face, if it happened to be in the form of a video game, and he almost couldn’t even bring himself to admit that someday, somewhere far in the future, a video game may one day approach being art. Good riddance to him. Thus, my favorite review of his was when he tried a few games that were presented as art to him, and he bashed them all cluelessly, putting his bias and irrational opinions out in the open for everyone to see.
Right. Because a good reviewer always sticks with his preconceptions and knows that bad actors can never make a good film.
Your comment is doubly ironic since you castigate Ebert for not watching all of a film. How much of Knowing did you watch?
In any case, Ebert was clearly the top critic of his time. He was a better writer than anyone else (name another film critic who won a Pulitzer), and his opinions were always sound and well reasoned. If he liked a film, he told you why; if he disliked it, he’d tell you that.
And he clearly wouldn’t hate a movie for the sole reason that is had Nicholas Cage and it wasn’t directed by Spike Jonze.
Ebert did frustratingly miss plot points, but not as often as some in this thread say.
I loved that he reviewed movies “in context”. A horror film might not be better than an Important drama in absolute terms, but with Ebert you knew if it was a four-star horror movie or a two star drama.
My favorite comment was his reply to Vincent Gallo calling Ebert a “fat pig with the physique of a slave trader”, which was, “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.”
