All of this. Plus he re-reviewed the re-cut “The Brown Bunny” more favorably, so he wasn’t averse to reconsidering works.
Ironic in light of how Roger would often do exactly that in his twilight years (The Lovely Bones, for ex.).
His negative reviews shone brightest. Here’s his summary of Pearl Harbor:
I’m sorry to report that I’ve seen Knowing and that it is the same shitty, totally derivative film that Cage has been remaking ever since that craptastic Gone in Sixty Seconds remake. At least Liam Neeson can elevate the gutter level screenplays he’s elected to star in; Cage sinks to the level of the work. As long as there is a paycheck, he’ll show up and chew scenery until the cows come home without a hint of irony.
And yet, after Gallo cut The Brown Bunny into an equally horrible shorter cut, Ebert praised it as part of a negotiated reconciliation with Gallo.
Ebert had a clever way with words, especially in excoriating a film he disliked. But there are offhand easily a dozen notable film critics who were much better critics by any technical standard and who were also much more accomplished than Ebert in writing, directing, and producing instead of just being notable for film criticism, whose film work outside of criticism pretty much consists of writing the Russ Meyer schlockfest Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Ebert was inconsistent, often wrong, and generally noted for being abrasive and dismissive. He is hardly the genial personality that some have made him out to be, and not mich accomplished outside the field of marketing himself as a film critic extraordinaire who too often repeated his “accomlishment” of performing a frame-by-frame analysis of Casablanca as if that should quality him for the Nobel Prize for Film Criticism should it come into existence.
Stranger
My favorite Ebert review was for a film I never saw, Atlas Shrugged. It contained this brilliant summation of Ayn Rand’s worldview: “For me, that philosophy reduces itself to: ‘I’m on board; pull up the lifeline.’”
Ebert was never my favorite film critic. He loved to pounce on logical lapses which sometimes weren’t lapses at all; I sometimes wondered if he missed important plot points because he was busy scribbling in his notebook. I also remember how he castigated the makers of Troy for omitting the gods from the storyline; he evidently forgot (or was unaware) that Shakespeare wrote a play about the Trojan War and didn’t include the gods either. But when Ebert ventured into politics or social criticism he was always right on target, and I wish he had developed a second career as a political columnist.
As far as I can tell, Ebert never smoked. His parents died of lung cancer and he said he hated smoking. Seems in poor taste to falsely accuse a person who had oral cancer of being a smoker.
Ebert quit drinking a long time ago-- 1979, according to a blog post of his. Do you have any cites that he tried to get Siskel booted off one of their shows?
Nobody in the thread claimed that Ebert was a wonderful person. I feel certain, however, that he would have better sense and taste than to write something about a person who died not so long ago that was as sketchy and mean as your post.
I opened the thread thinking of a couple of Ebert’s reviews that I wanted to share. I don’t feel like it anymore.
One paragraph from the review of “Armageddon”:
“Disaster movies always have little vignettes of everyday life. The dumbest in Armageddon involves two Japanese tourists in a New York taxi. After meteors turn an entire street into a flaming wasteland, the woman complains, ‘I want to go shopping.’ I hope in Japan that line is redubbed as ‘Nothing can save us but Gamera!’”
Don’t pout-it’s unseemly. Post your comments.
Some people in this thread like Ebert, some don’t, but only Stranger seems to have a hard-on for him that’s out of proportion. His attacks seem personal rather than professional.
I agree that citations would be nice.
My favorite Ebert line is the last line from his review of “Lake Placid.”
“This is the kind of movie that actors discuss in long, sad talks with their agents.”
(Bolding mine)
I’m sorry, did you just…say “good riddance” to Roger Ebert’s unfortunate, horrifying, long term battle with Thyroid Cancer, to which he finally succumbed, because he didn’t treat video games as art? I don’t recall you being so despicable.
His review of “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Empire” opens with
He gave it 3 stars.
There’s also this quote from “Freddy Got Fingered”
which really was that awful.
I met him when he came to town for a film festival, before he lost his voice.
Actually, my favorite articles were his Answer Man columns which came out before tvtropes.
Agreed. I vehemently disagreed with Ebert’s perceptions of video games, having been reduced to tears on more than one occasion by various video games over the years (including the end of Gone Home), but no fucking way would I cheer on his demise over such a slight.
Ebert musing on the “National Geographic loophole” (which treated topless shots of ‘native’ women as non-erotic) in a review for “Rapa Nui”:
“For years in my liberal youth, I thought this loophole was racist, an evil double standard in which white women were protected from exposure while ‘native’ women were cruelly stripped of their bras, not to mention the equal protection of the MPAA. Watching Rapa Nui, in which there are dozens if not hundreds of wonderful bare breasts on view, I have changed my mind. Since female breasts are the most aesthetically pleasing part of human anatomy, it is only a blessing if your culture celebrates them.”
(His collaboration with Russ Meyer makes a lot more sense suddenly.)
Armageddon. The whole thing is great, but the intro and conclusion are especially good:
I have a much higher opinion of Ebert than Stranger On A Train does, and even joined the “Ebert Club”; but I do have to admit he constantly got elements of plot wrong. I had never before heard that it was because of actually leaving the screening room though.
Everyone’s quoting his negative reviews, and while those are fun the thing that endeared him to so many people was the humanity and warmth he communicated in his writing. (On that note, to those who claim he was rude or abrasive in real life: I don’t know if he was, I suspect you don’t either, and I don’t really care. He communicated the exact opposite of that in his work, and for me that’s what matters. Aside from that, this thread is not “let debate Roger Ebert’s legacy;” if that’s what you want to do, could you please just go post elsewhere?)
What I remember from a Roger Ebert review is him talking about how the older he got the more moved he was not by love or heroics, but simply by watching people trying their best to be good. I can’t remember which review that was in (I thought Casablanca, but apparently not), but he wrote on the theme in an article here:
[QUOTE=Roger Ebert]
What kinds of movies do I like the best? If I had to make a generalization, I would say that many of my favorite movies are about Good People. It doesn’t matter if the ending is happy or sad. It doesn’t matter if the characters win or lose. The only true ending is death. Any other movie ending is arbitrary. If a movie ends with a kiss, we’re supposed to be happy. But then if a piano falls on the kissing couple, or a taxi mows them down, we’re supposed to be sad. What difference does it make? The best movies aren’t about what happens to the characters. They’re about the example that they set.
“Casablanca” is about people who do the right thing. “The Third Man” is about two people who do the right thing and can never speak to one another as a result. The secret of “Silence of the Lambs” is buried so deeply that you may have to give this a lot of thought, but its secret is that Hannibal Lecter is a Good Person. He is the helpless victim of his unspeakable depravities, yes, but to the limited degree that he can act independently of them, he tries to do the right thing.
[/QUOTE]
There was another review, I think in the Great Films series, where he wrote pretty movingly about seeing a movie at age 20, then seeing it again at 30 and how different things stood out to him, and then at 40, and 50. I’m getting to an age where I’m starting to relate to that myself.
I do miss that guy.
To me, the thing I liked about his reviews is that they were helpful. Not only did he review the movie for what it was (in the category of raunchy frat boy comedies, was it a good one or a bad one?) but his tastes mostly agreed with mine. If he disliked a movie, he usually disliked it for the same reasons I would have.
Witty writing and clever put-downs can be fun in and of themselves, but to me, the primary function of a reviewer is advising on whether or not I, the reader, should invest my time and money to see a movie. Since one’s enjoyment of a movie is a matter of individual tastes, any random reviewer may not be ‘helpful’ in that way. But when you find one that matches your tastes, keep reading him.
Here is the first paragraph of his review of Almost Famous (a semi-autobiographical Cameron Crowe movie). It’s a great movie, but I think he also identified with the teenage lead character. Ebert was a high-school and college journalist and so is the William Miller character in the film.
I couldn’t possibly pick my favorite Ebert review. But I do have my favorite Ebert quotes:
“No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”
and
"It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”