Ebert later abjured his declaration that “video games cannot be art”, after encountering some video games that, in his opinion, were art. Cosmology of Kyoto, for example.
When you’re reviewing 200-300+ films per year, it’s hard to pay serious attention to developments in painting, novels, computer games, and so on. I’m not sure he had time to review games that take 10, 20, or 40 hours to play through to completion.
I disagree completely, but I wouldn’t expect anything else from a man of his generation.
One of the things I liked about him was that he evaluated genre films within that genre. If he was reviewing a movie that was designed to be schlock, he judged it against other schlock movies, and gave useful info about whether or not fans of that genre would like the film.
I believe one time he reviewed one of the soft-core Emanuelle series, noting that it turned him on and thus succeeded in its aims.
ETA: Or, on review, what Shodan said.
agree, and that’s my issue- ‘I don’t play games, don’t know anything about them, but somehow know they are they not art, and know they can never be art’. I don’t play them either, but wouldn’t make such a statement about something I admittedly know zero about.
So who cares? The world is full of people with opinions about stuff. You hear about opinions from famous people because they’re famous but that doesn’t mean you need to give a shit. If Ebert was writing for PC Gamer or running Electronic Arts at the time, maybe there’d be room for complaint but the whole “games aren’t art” debate was mostly just something for gamers to yell about.
It never would have occurred to me to not consider chess or go art and the people who over the years crafted and refined their structures as artists.
You’re calling the guy who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls “pompous.”
That’s sort of my basic issue- pot meet kettle. The writer of BTVOTD has the temerity to slam Freddy Got Fingered- the biggest critic of lowbrow film used to write them!
Given your OP, this is absolutely hilarious.
Ebert was a fan of a lot of low brow fare - but he wasn’t an indiscriminate fan of it. (Which is good, because otherwise he’d be a shit critic.) It’s possible to like Russ Meyer, and think Tom Green sucks, and not be a hypocrite.
But Freddy Got Fingered was awful lowbrow film. You can appreciate the genre and still think there are bad examples of that genre. And in this case, Ebert was dead on. Same with Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo, which actually made the first Deuce Bigalow film seem halfway decent.
His job is to review films. Some of those films are going to suck. It’s his job to tell you which ones suck.
Interesting. May 1972 Amazing and Feb 1972 Fantastic. The Amazing one, which I just pulled out, seems concerned with the movie business and the blurb mentions his column. Ted White’s blurb for the Fantastic story mentions meeting Ebert at a con.
Ebert was one of the first reviewers who grew up with sf concepts and who thus understood sf movies that didn’t explain everything. Forget Star Wars - Kael’s review of 2001 was a travesty, and she wasn’t the only one with no clue.
I kind of got the impression, based on his reviews of Personal Best and Bound, that he liked lesbian scenes in particular. Not that it affected his reviews, necessarily, but he did seem to get more enthusiastic than usual.
Both Personal Best and Bound were good movies, IMO. I haven’t seen the Emanuelle series.
Everyone’s got their own kinks, I suppose. If they ever make a movie about whipped cream, hats on women, and nude, female, full-contact karate, no doubt that would affect my reviews as well.
Regards,
Shodan
I see his blog was mentioned earlier, but no link to it.
Darren Garrison, that’s a fair criticism, so I’ll give you my reply.
Yes, Oprah unleashed Dr. Oz on the world, and Dr. Phil’s tough-love-Big-Tex style wore out its welcome with me a looooooong time ago. But all the criticisms about those two in that article belongs to them, not to Oprah.
I’ll even go further and say Oprah’s views on beef (“I will never eat another hamburger!”) are stupid.
That takes us to the core issue in the article: Oprah vs. vaccines. Yes, she let Jenny McCarthy plug her book. But smack in the middle of the article that’s cited in your cite, we find this:
(Published 09/18/2007)
Where’s the big fat THAT’S BULLSHIT from the CDC? Where’s the opportunity to say Wakefield’s study was flawed and the results were the very definition of junk science. Why did they send the blandest of responses instead of asking for the opportunity to have a live human being respond.
In fact, the CDC wasn’t Oprah’s only outreach to credible responses. Here’s a pro-vax voice who was invited to appear on that very show, and he turned down the invitation, because he was convinced Oprah was going to make him the villain.
Oprah gave science at least TWO chances to answer Jenny McCarthy on that very episode, and science blew it. And every single criticism I could find about Oprah and vaccines goes back to that single episode. Nothing after that. When she interviewed Melinda Gates this spring, Oprah specifically gave Gates an opening to talk about vaccinations.
Should Oprah take the Jenny McCarthy episode off her website? Depends on whether you believe the* New York Times* and Washington Post should remove editions where they made stupid mistakes in stories from their archives.
Now that I’ve answered that, I’ll give you my pro-Oprah opinions:
1)When* Oprah* debuted in 1986 the gold standard in talk show hosts, Phil Donohue, was running out of gas (although he’d continue for several more years.) The other talk shows were the likes of Sally Jesse Raphael,who started serious and slid into tabloid trash, Geraldo Rivera, and “Jerry Jerry Jerry” Springer.
Oprah’s Book Club generally had some pretty worthy titles, and her pushing To Kill a Mockingbird returned that book from not-taught-in-the-South English classes to being a cultural touchstone.
Without Oprah, it’s unlikely Barack Obama would have become President.
As I said, an overall net positive.
Helmut Doork, sorry for the hijack. You can go back to criticizing Roger Ebert now.
I do not think this is actually true.
I loved At the Movies. I liked it when I agreed with them, I liked it when I didn’t. I especially liked when they disagreed with each other. If they didn’t like a film, it did not affect at all whether I was going to see it. The clips they showed had more of an effect on that then the review did.
But Freddy got Fingered was terrible. So was Heaven’s Gate.
To quote Orac/David Gorski:
To be precise, he reviewed the first one in the series. I never remember him reviewing another. The last in the series, if I remember correctly was Emanuelle and Howdy Doody.
I enjoyed reading his reviews. He was a fairly good writer, thought provoking, etc. I can definitely get the respect, esp. compared to just about all other reviewers.
But …
I had to take his reviews with a grain of salt. His tastes and mine sometimes diverged. The classic example is Raising Arizona. His original review wasn’t so good so I skipped it for a while. Wished I had seen it earlier.
We did a thread a while back about the mistakes he made in his reviews. Getting basic things wrong about who is who, key plot points, quoting things that aren’t remotely in the movie, plus a ton of lesser stuff. A real shame.
But a good read nonetheless. Sort of like Cecil.