# Why the reverence for Ebert? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 5, 2019, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083 "2019-06-05T16:35:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Lamoral](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lamoral/32/16078_2.png) [@Lamoral](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamoral)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/61 "2019-06-06T03:45:56Z")
I and most of my fellow 90s kids find _Freddy Got Fingered_ to be hilarious, but I’ll grant that it’s extremely over the top. I wouldn’t hold it against Ebert to not “get” _that_ particular piece of cinema. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 3:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/62 "2019-06-06T03:53:16Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > an entire tradition of powerful critics whose single word could **shit** down a show. Hee hee. ---
**Author:** ![garygnu](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/garygnu/32/2924_2.png) [@garygnu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/garygnu)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/63 "2019-06-06T04:04:17Z")
Roger Ebert was very much like the fictional food critic , Anton Ego, from Pixar’s _Ratatouille_. Roger LOVED movies, and if he had to watch a bad movie, he wasn’t shy about saying so. This obvious passion was expressed in wonderful writing. If anyone thinks he’s just done two-bit wannabe who got famous accidentally, I challenge then to actually read his stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Helmut\_Doork](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e8c25b/32.png) [@Helmut\_Doork](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helmut_Doork)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/64 "2019-06-06T04:09:21Z")
> [@Lamoral](#): > > I and most of my fellow 90s kids find _Freddy Got Fingered_ to be hilarious, but I’ll grant that it’s extremely over the top. I wouldn’t hold it against Ebert to not “get” _that_ particular piece of cinema. In its defense, if you repackaged it as a lost collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Picasso, pompous types like Ebert would probably drool over it. Similarly, if you took the piano/sausage contraption and had someone play it and chant the tune in a modern art gallery in London in 1969, some art critics may have loved that as well, finding it replete with some deep meaning. If nothing else, if forced, a decent case can be made for it as an example of avant-garde experimental cinema, even if that wasnt the intent. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/65 "2019-06-06T04:28:48Z")
> [@Helmut\_Doork](#): > > In its defense, if you repackaged it as a lost collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Picasso, pompous types like Ebert would probably drool over it. Similarly, if you took the piano/sausage contraption and had someone play it and chant the tune in a modern art gallery in London in 1969, some art critics may have loved that as well, finding it replete with some deep meaning. If nothing else, if forced, a decent case can be made for it as an example of avant-garde experimental cinema, even if that wasnt the intent. I’m one of the few who loved _Freddy Got Fingered_. Granted, I’ve only seen it once (actually, maybe twice) , so I don’t want to ruin my fond memories of it. It’s just so over-the-top, anarchic humor, that I loved it. I was a little bit isolated from North American culture when I saw it: living abroad with no idea who Tom Green was or what his humor was like. Saw it at the English language video store and rented it. The movie was one WTF after another, but done so well that I could not help but appreciate it. I had no idea the movie was so universally trashed, but felts some vindication that A.O. Scott of the New York Times liked it. ---
**Author:** ![Helmut\_Doork](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e8c25b/32.png) [@Helmut\_Doork](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helmut_Doork)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/66 "2019-06-06T05:19:43Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > I’m one of the few who loved _Freddy Got Fingered_. Granted, I’ve only seen it once (actually, maybe twice) , so I don’t want to ruin my fond memories of it. It’s just so over-the-top, anarchic humor, that I loved it. I was a little bit isolated from North American culture when I saw it: living abroad with no idea who Tom Green was or what his humor was like. Saw it at the English language video store and rented it. The movie was one WTF after another, but done so well that I could not help but appreciate it. I had no idea the movie was so universally trashed, but felts some vindication that A.O. Scott of the New York Times liked it. I can say without hyperbole that I got more laughs out of Freddy Got Fingered than last year’s Happytime Murders and Holmes and Watson combined. Whatever he yelled at the person as he was driving off at the beginning was hilarious! ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 5:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/67 "2019-06-06T05:41:56Z")
> [@Kent\_Clark](#): > > I consider Oprah to have been an overall net positive for America, so that’s one for Ebert. What were the good parts of [what she has done](https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/9/16868216/oprah-winfrey-pseudoscience)? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 7:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/68 "2019-06-06T07:38:07Z")
Even if Ebert could cause a film to flop… so what? So some investors lose some money. Big whoop. The lighting technicians still get paid. Same think about careers. I don’t see any problem with threatening artists with career destruction - the pressure just makes them better. Survival of the fittest, baby! And if they do crash and burn, some other artist will come and replace them. There’s no shortage of film students graduating each year. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 7:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/69 "2019-06-06T07:56:30Z")
> [@Loach](#): > > Cimino ruined Cimino’s career. A flop can be forgiven a bloated unnecessarily expense flop can not. His career was ruined before the movie came out due to his own actions. It would have had to be the best movie ever to overcome the production issues. It wasn’t, in any form. Michael Cimino was the quintessential case of a man with one great movie in him (well, one and a half - \*Thunderbolt and Lightfoot \*was pretty good). _Heaven’s Gate_ was mediocre at best; _Year of the Dragon_ was crap; and the less said about _Desperate Hours,_ the better. I think all Ebert did was help Hollywood figure out the truth: that _Deer Hunter_ was a fluke. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 10:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/70 "2019-06-06T10:42:46Z")
> [@garygnu](#): > > Roger Ebert was very much like the fictional food critic , Anton Ego, from Pixar’s _Ratatouille_. Roger LOVED movies, and if he had to watch a bad movie, he wasn’t shy about saying so. This obvious passion was expressed in wonderful writing. If anyone thinks he’s just done two-bit wannabe who got famous accidentally, I challenge then to actually read his stuff. And I suspect he would agree with Ego when he said: > [@Anton Ego](#): > > In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. In the end, a movie review is just a movie review. I enjoyed Ebert’s writing well enough but was never a particular fan (I enjoyed his interactions with Siskel but frankly agreed with Siskel more than Ebert and once Siskel was gone I didn’t really follow Ebert). That he enjoyed such fame and professional success was down to hard work, talent and a certain amount of luck; if writing reviews that people take seriously was such an easy task there presumably wouldn’t be so many mediocre critics working in the business today. While all critical work involves stating a personal opinion, like the aforementioned English papers the opinions need to be backed up by a substantial argument in support and appropriate context, or else they fail in their purpose, which is to convince the audience of the rightness of the conclusions. And a critic that cannot convince others that their review is justified is a critic soon out of work (or at least out of work at any credible publication). Personally I’m a big fan of Mark Kermode who reviews for the BBC and various print media; he’s another critic with a clear and evident love of the medium (and no snobbish pretensions - his doctoral dissertation was on the horror genre and he’s made no secret of his personal love for _Cannibal Holocaust_). Kermode admits that he doesn’t always get it right but he is always able to justify why he said what he said about a film. (And, BTW, I enjoyed _My Dinner With Andre_.) ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/71 "2019-06-06T12:39:01Z")
> [@Helmut\_Doork](#): > > I can say without hyperbole that I got more laughs out of Freddy Got Fingered than last year’s Happytime Murders and Holmes and Watson combined. Whatever he yelled at the person as he was driving off at the beginning was hilarious! Damning with faint praise there. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/72 "2019-06-06T12:52:53Z")
> [@Helmut\_Doork](#): > > I dont recall critiquing anything as an English major… That is impossible. You may be confusing critique with review. REVIEWS are a dime a dozen. A review is just “this is good” or “this is bad.” CRITICISM, in the literary sense, is not a review; it means an examination of the technical and artists elements of a movie (or book, album, whatever) and what the movie is meant to do, does or doesn’t do, and what it means in the history and context of cinema. It being June 6, I’ll use “Saving Private Ryan” as my example; if I say that “Saving Private Ryan” is a great movie, that’s a **review**. I could go on to review parts of the movie - Tom Hanks is great, the movie is well paced and the use of humor well timed, the script has a few holes in it, etc. etc. That’s all my opinion of how good it is, a review. If I say that “Saving Private Ryan” fundamentally changed the way war movies have been made in the last 21 years because Spielberg and his crew decided to make it extremely, graphically realistic in a manner and to an extent almost never seen in Hollywood war films before that, while abandoning many of the cliches typical of the genre, that’s **criticism**. I could also point out that his use of washed-out color in the film was also relatively novel at the time, and was meant for a 1998 audience to perceive the events the way they might a black-and-white war film of the era, and and since been copied by many, many films in the genre but is often overused, even in movies where the use of drained color really doesn’t make any sense … you get the idea. You had to have engaged in criticism, in the literary sense of the word, as an English major, or you wouldn’t have lasted a month. Criticism is what being an English major IS. ---
**Author:** ![DesertDog](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/desertdog/32/11503_2.png) [@DesertDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DesertDog)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/73 "2019-06-06T13:19:06Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > I always felt Ebert was top notch in his criticism. He saw more in movies and was a far better writer than anyone else. > > Siskel was also fine, though if they differed I’d go with him if it was a comedy and Ebert if it was a drama. But Ebert opinion was always a solid one and he was able to articulate the reasons for it better than just about anyone – a key but overlooked element in any review. Huh. When they were more alive I’d go with Ebert for the comedies and Siskel for the dramas. I must have a warped sense of humor. [Mr. Nightlinger]That has been said of me.[/M N] ---
**Author:** ![Helmut\_Doork](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e8c25b/32.png) [@Helmut\_Doork](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helmut_Doork)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/74 "2019-06-06T14:17:28Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > That is impossible. > > You may be confusing critique with review. REVIEWS are a dime a dozen. A review is just “this is good” or “this is bad.” CRITICISM, in the literary sense, is not a review; it means an examination of the technical and artists elements of a movie (or book, album, whatever) and what the movie is meant to do, does or doesn’t do, and what it means in the history and context of cinema. > You had to have engaged in criticism, in the literary sense of the word, as an English major, or you wouldn’t have lasted a month. Criticism is what being an English major IS. I get what you’re saying, and agree and truth be told, I didn’t last much longer than a month! ---
**Author:** ![typoink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@typoink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/typoink)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/75 "2019-06-06T14:17:39Z")
Ebert was my favorite critic, for a two basic reasons: 1. He was an entertaining writer. 2. I could always kinda tell if I’d agree with him. I have unusual and highly varied tastes, so there’s no critics I agree with 100% of the time. Ebert was good enough at explaining what he observed that I could generally tell whether his assessment held water for me. I didn’t always agree with HIM, but I almost always agreed with the impression I took away from his reviews. Also, he gets bonus points for correctly praising Escape from LA, a movie that never quite got the cult following it deserved, and for introducing me to Sita Sings the Blues, a movie that’s easily in my personal top fifty and I doubt I ever would have heard of if he didn’t champion it. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/76 "2019-06-06T16:20:28Z")
I liked Ebert, I watched him on TV and I even owned one of his books at one time. I didn’t always agree with him, but I generally found his reasons for liking or disliking a movie to be interesting and worthy of consideration. I often was able to use his reasons to decide whether or not to see a movie, because he liked it for reasons that meant I would not, or hated it for reasons that would make me like it. It wasn’t just contrarianism - often he and I liked the same movies, or hated them, but his reasons were always better articulated than mine. It didn’t always work - he hated _Freddy Got Fingered_ and so did I, but I came out of _FGF_ at least with the recognition that it was driven by a unifying artistic vision - that of being so over the top that it grossed out anybody, even a jaded film critic. And let’s face it - a creatively scathing review of a genuinely bad movie is often more entertaining than the movie itself. Plus he and I shared a taste - a half-sneaking admiration for the Really Bad Movie. A Really Bad Movie is completely, un-self-consciously, un-ironically awful, so much so that it has its own charms. _The Lair of the White Worm_ was like that, and I saw it based entirely on Ebert’s review of how charmingly atrocious it was. And was not disappointed. See also the incomparable _Infra-Man_, a sci-fi, kung-fu, chop-schlocky celebration of all that is least forgivable in films. Art criticism is an inherently trivial occupation - those who can, do, those who can’t, criticize - at its best, criticism can inform and enhance, as well as poor mouth and pan. Sometimes he was wrong, but he was never boring. RIP, Roger. Two thumbs up. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/77 "2019-06-06T16:36:29Z")
> [@Helmut\_Doork](#): > > In its defense, if you repackaged it as a lost collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Picasso, pompous types like Ebert would probably drool over it. Similarly, if you took the piano/sausage contraption and had someone play it and chant the tune in a modern art gallery in London in 1969, some art critics may have loved that as well, finding it replete with some deep meaning. If nothing else, if forced, a decent case can be made for it as an example of avant-garde experimental cinema, even if that wasnt the intent. No, no, no. Ebert was the opposite of that. He was one of the earliest critics to champion genre and popular films. He was not part of the Andrew Sarris/Pauline Kael cadre who Americanized Truffaut’s auteur notions (and by doing so altered them, bringing in cultural pomposity that Truffaut and his followers scorned, at least at first). Ebert was a nerd. As a teen, he wrote letters to the science fiction magazines and had his own fanzine. He had two stories published in \*Amazing \*and \*Fantastic \*magazines. Most people don’t remember how amazingly, fantastically uncool it was to be an sf nerd in the years before _Star Trek_ and _Star Wars_. I was one and I know. You were a cultural outsider, deemed a priori to be an illiterate, incapable of understanding true art. Ebert postulated that a film was good or not good at its own level, whether or not it accomplished its goals, not whether it conformed to theory or an outsider’s template. That’s why he could write a cult classic like _Beyond the Valley of the Dolls_, which works almost perfectly in being the kind of movie it is. To hammer this point home, read the reviews of Star Wars by [Ebert](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/star-wars-1977), by [Kael](https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/06/23/pauline-kael-star-wars/), and by New York magazine’s [John Simon](https://books.google.com/books?id=QuQCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA71&dq=%22george+lucas%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OO_FVLH3EonyoATh2IG4DA&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAjge#v=onepage&q&f=false), the person you can and should work up a really fine hate for. And also note that all three are indeed **reviews** , not criticism. Ebert’s primary fault was that he reviewed for a daily newspaper. He churned out several reviews a week for decades. Nobody can be brilliant five days a week. Kael and Simon had the luxury of writing once a week for magazines, and Kael only reviewed six months of the year, alternating with Penelope Gilliat, whose one movie credit was the high-brow, Oscar-nominated _Sunday, Bloody Sunday_. _Sneak Previews_ contained no criticism of anything ever. Judging him as a critic for tv work is objectively wrong. Ebert’s actual criticism probably was found only at the seminars in which he dissected a great film shot-by-shot to see what made it work and what decisions went into it. I never went to any but they are generally lauded. Ebert was not primarily a film critic. He was not the first nationally-known film reviewer. (That probably was Judith Crist, Simon’s predecessor at _New York_ and a regular on the \*Today \*show, preceding Gene Shalit, who for many years was far more the face of film reviewers than Ebert, both of them before _Sneak Preview_ started.) He was a television personality as frosting to a solid career outside the lights. “Thumbs up/Thumbs down” is a gimmick, but a good one. It’s lasted. Get it right. ---
**Author:** ![Helmut\_Doork](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e8c25b/32.png) [@Helmut\_Doork](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Helmut_Doork)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/78 "2019-06-06T16:43:43Z")
And then there’s his whole ‘video games can never be art’ deal… ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/79 "2019-06-06T16:57:50Z")
> [@Helmut\_Doork](#): > > And then there’s his whole ‘video games can never be art’ deal… Just for context and to note that [others support Ebert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_as_an_art_form#Roger_Ebert_on_video_games_as_art): > [@](#): > > the notion that video games are ineligible to be considered fine art due to their commercial appeal and structure as choice-driven narratives has proved persuasive for many including video game luminary Brian Moriarty who in March 2011 gave a lecture on the topic entitled An Apology For Roger Ebert.[28] In this lecture Moriarty emphasized that video games are merely an extension of traditional rule-based games and that there has been no call to declare games like Chess and Go to be art. He went on to argue that art in the sense that Romantics like Ebert, Schopenhauer, and he were concerned with (i.e. fine art or sublime art) is exceptionally rare and that Ebert was being consistent by declaring video games to be without artistic merit inasmuch as Ebert had previously claimed that “Hardly any movies are art.”[28] Moriarty decried the modern expansion of the definition of “art” to include low art, comparing video games to kitsch and describing aesthetic appreciation of video games as camp. After addressing the corrupting influence of commercial forces in indie games and the difficulty of setting out to create art given the “slippery” tools that game designers must work with, Moriarty concluded that ultimately it was the fact that player choices were presented in games that structurally invalidated the application of the term “art” to video games as the audience’s interaction with the work wrests control from the author and thereby negates the expression of art.[28] This lecture was in turn criticized sharply by noted video game designer, Zach Gage.[28] ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [June 6, 2019, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083/80 "2019-06-06T17:02:29Z")
> [@Helmut\_Doork](#): > > And then there’s his whole ‘video games can never be art’ deal… Eh, I play a lot of games and I can still see his point. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten truly emotionally invested in a game and (and I’ve played most of the go-to titles for “this game touched me so much”) I think that the inclusion of game mechanics and basic act of needing to play it is a big part in keeping me separated. Can have astounding music, visuals, etc but there’s a bajillion second-rate songs and movies that affected me more in the moment than the most lauded video games ever have. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-reverence-for-ebert/835083.md?page=5)