Why the reverence for Ebert?

[Helmut_Doork]

Oprah, wonderful example. While we can never know with absolute certainty how a Ebert review affected a films box office, we do know for a fact that if Oprah goes on TV today and tells everyone that Portnoy’s Complaint is the best work of fiction, ever, tomorrow it will be a best seller on Amazon, this we know, it has played out several times before. Now, we also know the cult of Oprah is apparently stronger than any other celebrity- but from this, would it not be safe to say that if a large many people buy a book because Oprah says its great, that a large number of people might not go see a film because Ebert says it sucks? And if he admittedly missed parts of that movie as he has done before, that might not be cool? At least I assume Oprah reads the books she touts.

And Emmanuelle is recommended because it succeeded in its aim of giving him an erection- Freddy Got Fingered’s aim was to disgust the viewer, and it clearly did that, so there’s that contradiction…

[Jophiel]

@Helmut_Doork

but from this, would it not be safe to say that if a large many people buy a book because Oprah says its great, that a large number of people might not go see a film because Ebert says it sucks?

No, it wouldn’t. Oprah’s popularity and media empire was magnitudes greater than anything Ebert ever commanded (not that he tried to).

Obviously Ebert’s influence was something greater than zero otherwise he’d be a terrible film critic and media personality but he wasn’t making films into blockbusters or flops with a single television episode or newspaper column.

That said, Beloved was produced by and starred Oprah and Ebert gave it 3.5/4 stars – and it still flopped hard. Sometimes movies just don’t resonate.

[Telemark]

@Helmut_Doork

And Emmanuelle is recommended because it succeeded in its aim of giving him an erection- Freddy Got Fingered’s aim was to disgust the viewer, and it clearly did that, so there’s that contradiction…

Some disgusting movies just suck, there’s no contradiction there.

FgF garnered the following awards:
[ul]
[li]DFW Film Critics 2002 - Worst Film[/li][li]Golden Schmoes 2001 - Worst movie of the year[/li][li]Razzie Awards 2010 - Worst picture of the decade[/li][li]Razzie Awards 2005 - Worst picture of the last 25 years (nominee)[/li][li]Razzie Awards 2002 - Worst Picture, Worst Actor, Worst Screen Couple, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay[/li][li]Stinkers Bad Movie Awards 2001 - Worst Actor, Worst On-screen Couple, Most Painfully Unfunny Comedy, Worst Sense of Direction, Worst Picture[/li][/ul]
The “Toronto Star” instituted an all-new rating for this film–Negative 1 star out of 5.

Some great quotes from reviews:
[ul]
[li]You could say that this was the second worst thing to happen in 2001. - Mike Stoklasa[/li][li]Green, who looks like a chinless, hollow-eyed pederast at the best of times, is simply out of his league here, and the fact that the film drags interminably when it’s actually a very average 90 minutes long betrays its essential emptiness. – Marc Savlov[/li][li]So awful it qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment. - Lou Lumenick[/li][li]To dismiss this movie for being “offensive” would be to offer it high praise. - Owen Gleiberman[/li][li]Bad decision after bad decision occurs over 93 minutes. - Robert K. Elder[/li][li]One of the most brutally awful comedies ever to emerge from a major studio. - Robert Koehler[/li][li]The movie is simply not professional. It’s not, even by the lowest standards of Republic B-westerns in the '30s or bad, cheap horror films in the '50s, releasable. - Stephen Hunter[/li][li]It’s a performance that screams “Look at me!” louder and bigger than an elephant dick. And every bit as subtle. - Stephanie Zacharek[/li][li]This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels. - Roger Ebert[/li][/ul]

So it’s not like Ebert was out on an island by himself. I’m pretty sure his review wasn’t a major factor in the movie’s dismal failure.

[Just_Asking_Questions]

Data point:

We watched Three Days of the Condor yesterday. As I was looking at imdb for trivia, I noticed there is an Ebert reviewavailable, written concurrent with the film.

The review is good, it makes you want to see the film, it gives you most of the things that a review should, but…yet it has two examples where Ebert needed to have paid more attention.

One is this line from the review:

@Roger Ebert

He’s a reader for something called the American Literary Historical Society…The society is a CIA front. The movie doesn’t exactly make its activities transparently clear, but it seems to devour and computerize foreign books and magazines in a search for codes and messages.

Not clear? Redford explicitly spells out exactly what he does to Dunaway’s character. He even adds, “Who’d invent a job like that?”

The second is more of a transcription error, but it distorts the point:

@Roger Ebert

“Why is it,” he reasonably asks a telephone contact, “that I have to identify myself to you, but you don’t have to identify yourself to me?”

That’s not what Redford says. His quote is “How come I need a code name and you don’t?” While Redford’s previous contact at the CIA was “The Major”, Higgins did indeed identify himself as Deputy Director Higgins. Ebert makes it sound like the scene is cynical spy shenanigans, but in reality it is the scene where Higgins begins to treat “Condor” as a person. He starts calling him by his real name after this scene.

[Miller]

@Helmut_Doork

And Emmanuelle is recommended because it succeeded in its aim of giving him an erection- Freddy Got Fingered’s aim was to disgust the viewer, and it clearly did that, so there’s that contradiction…

That’s not a contradiction, unless the only criteria by which Ebert judged these movies was, “Did it meet its goal?” There’s a lot of other criteria involved there, some mentioned in the review, some not mentioned because he’s got to fit his review into a certain limited number of column inches. He might also disagree with you about FgF goal being nothing more than “be disgusting.” Was that the film’s only goal? My understanding is that it’s also supposed to be funny. He might also feel that some goals are not worthwhile goals - a well made film that does a good job of advocating for a white supremacist ideology should still be given a bad review, because it’s “goal” is abhorrent. Lastly, and most tellingly, you’re comapring reviews he wrote twenty five years apart. Is a critic not allowed to have his tastes change over the course of a quarter of a century?

[TimfromNapa]

@Helmut_Doork

True, Canby savaged the original four hour cut, but this was shown as a premiere, one theatre only. It was recut and given a wider release. Ebert and Kael savaged that cut. The dreadful reputation pre-release was mainly known only to film insiders and was due to, among other things, way over budget, great amount of waste (rebuilding an entire set because Cimino wanted it a foot closer or something), animal cruelty, etc. None of which matters to the viewer, except maybe the animal cruelty. Viewers don’t care what it cost, their ticket cost was the same at 1 million or 40 million. Average person in 1980 did not know inside info on movie dailies.

So agree, in this case, Canby savaged it and Ebert piled on, which is still a problem in film criticism today- monkey see, monkey do.

For further reading:

Would the Internet Have Rescued “Heaven’s Gate”? | The New Yorker

Wastefulness, budget busting, and carelessness may not matter to viewers, but all of those matter to producers, especially if the film is not a financial success. Sounds like Cimino himself caused the death of his career.

[Andy_L]

@Just_Asking_Questions

Data point:

We watched Three Days of the Condor yesterday. As I was looking at imdb for trivia, I noticed there is an Ebert reviewavailable, written concurrent with the film.

The review is good, it makes you want to see the film, it gives you most of the things that a review should, but…yet it has two examples where Ebert needed to have paid more attention.

One is this line from the review:

Not clear? Redford explicitly spells out exactly what he does to Dunaway’s character. He even adds, “Who’d invent a job like that?”

The second is more of a transcription error, but it distorts the point:

That’s not what Redford says. His quote is “How come I need a code name and you don’t?” While Redford’s previous contact at the CIA was “The Major”, Higgins did indeed identify himself as Deputy Director Higgins. Ebert makes it sound like the scene is cynical spy shenanigans, but in reality it is the scene where Higgins begins to treat “Condor” as a person. He starts calling him by his real name after this scene.

Previous thread about errors in Ebert’s reviews Errors in Roger Ebert's reviews. How many are there? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

[wolfpup]

@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.

I agree. Roger Ebert was always my most trusted reviewer, often writing with insight, passion, and a perspective that I often found I shared. In his review of My Dog Skip, for example, a film that I found so deeply emotional that it’s hard to watch, only Ebert could write with this kind of intellectual honesty: “A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don’t have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.”

For an example of a useless reviewer, I give you the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. I hate to say it because I love the New Yorker, and I have nothing against Brody, but he inhabits some sort of strange art-house world of his own that has very little in common with mine.

@Helmut_Doork

Because I still often hear people quoting the North and FGF reviews, and the Rob Schneider and Vincent Gallo insults and find it offensive a man could take pleasure in ruining careers and lives and not really care about it.

You find it “offensive” that the man had opinions, and had the right to express them, and had earned the intellectual stature to be considered worth listening to? And I find it difficult to believe that any single critic has the awesome power to “ruin careers and lives”, much less that someone of Ebert’s ethical and intellectual standing would have engaged in such pursuits just as a form of malicious fun. I suspect that the real issue here is Ebert dared to criticize some of your personal sacred cows.

[NDP]

@TimfromNapa

Wastefulness, budget busting, and carelessness may not matter to viewers, but all of those matter to producers, especially if the film is not a financial success. Sounds like Cimino himself caused the death of his career.

Cimino didn’t just kill his career. He killed a major studio (United Artists). In the last 38 years, while there have been bigger and more wasteful flops, no single movie has been so financially disastrous that it literally drove a long-established Hollywood studio to bankruptcy.

[RickJay]

@wolfpup

I agree. Roger Ebert was always my most trusted reviewer, often writing with insight, passion, and a perspective that I often found I shared. In his review of My Dog Skip, for example, a film that I found so deeply emotional that it’s hard to watch, only Ebert could write with this kind of intellectual honesty: “A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don’t have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.”

See, this is CRITICISM. Ebert, rather than saying “movie good” or “movie bad,” is consciously stepping back and discussing whether rating a movie on a linear scale from good to bad is always relevant in understanding the film and what it means. He’s discussing cinema as art and how the viewer relates to it. That’s the kind of smart, insightful criticism one hardly ever sees in movie reviews.

@NDP

Cimino didn’t just kill his career. He killed a major studio (United Artists).

And the thing is, “Heaven’s Gate” didn’t kill his career. It took a few years for him to be handed the reins of a movie again, but he got more chances. He made more films and they were all mediocre to bad.

[Voyager]

@Jophiel

Obviously Ebert’s influence was something greater than zero otherwise he’d be a terrible film critic and media personality but he wasn’t making films into blockbusters or flops with a single television episode or newspaper column.

That said, Beloved was produced by and starred Oprah and Ebert gave it 3.5/4 stars – and it still flopped hard. Sometimes movies just don’t resonate.

Another example of lack of influence was that both he and Siskel railed against what they called “dead teenager movies.” Didn’t do a damn bit of good.

As for errors, you try taking notes in the dark and then rushing to your office to write a review. Sure there will be errors. I’ve seen plenty of other critics screw up things about movies I know. They had neither a pause nor a rewind button.
I’ve also seen movie academicians screw up plot points of movies they had DVDs of.

[Kent_Clark]

@Helmut_Doork

And Emmanuelle is recommended because it succeeded in its aim of giving him an erection- Freddy Got Fingered’s aim was to disgust the viewer, and it clearly did that, so there’s that contradiction…

My wife and I saw the original uncut Emmanuelle (the one with Sylvia Kristel) in a legitimate movie house. It was fairly explicit (although not in your face, so to speak) but it was also a big budget, richly photographed film that actually had a storyline and at least passable acting. One non-sex scene was done so well the audience actually broke into applause. As for its sexual appeal, all I’ll say is that I agreed with Ebert.

[Andy_L]

@Voyager

As for errors, you try taking notes in the dark and then rushing to your office to write a review. Sure there will be errors. I’ve seen plenty of other critics screw up things about movies I know. They had neither a pause nor a rewind button.

Fair enough. I wouldn’t notice the errors if I didn’t enjoy reading Ebert’s reviews so much - there are probably a lot of reviewers with worse errors but I don’t read them - because they are nowhere near as interesting as Ebert was.

[Miller]

@Voyager

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.

He reviewed the second one, but not kindly.

It’s also worth noting that his review of the original was a lot more nuanced than, “It gave me a boner, so I guess it was alright.” He spends a lot of time explaining why, in the context of not-quite-hardcore “skin flicks,” this one stands out as pretty good. Similarly, his review of Freddy Got Fingered is aware of the genre in which it exists - he name checks Un Chien Andalou as another film that relied on gross-out imagery and non-sensical storylines to shock the audience - and grades it on that standard, by which he feels it fails.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

I agreed with Ebert more often than not, and thought he wrote well. Much to his credit, he agreed with me as to the genius of Dark City and Breaker Morant.

But I don’t revere him, and never did.

[Alessan]

@Miller

He reviewed the second one, but not kindly.

It’s also worth noting that his review of the original was a lot more nuanced than, “It gave me a boner, so I guess it was alright.” He spends a lot of time explaining why, in the context of not-quite-hardcore “skin flicks,” this one stands out as pretty good. Similarly, his review of Freddy Got Fingered is aware of the genre in which it exists - he name checks Un Chien Andalou as another film that relied on gross-out imagery and non-sensical storylines to shock the audience - and grades it on that standard, by which he feels it fails.

Compare, also, his review of The Human Centipede, the one time I know of where he refused to give a film a star rating, good or bad:

I have long attempted to take a generic approach. In other words, is a film true to its genre and does it deliver what its audiences presumably expect? “The Human Centipede” scores high on this scale. It is depraved and disgusting enough to satisfy the most demanding midnight movie fan. And it’s not simply an exploitation film.

…

I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don’t shine.

[Mean_Mr.Mustard]

@Telemark

…Some great quotes from reviews: You could say that this was the second worst thing to happen in 2001. - Mike Stoklasa

Ouch.

Ebert was my favorite reviewer and I was saddened when he died. I certainly did not agree with all of his reviews, but he was, to me, the best writer of any critic I have read by far*.

Maybe I’m different than most, but deciding whether to see a film is just part of the reason I read reviews. The other is to be entertained by reading about something I am interested in. In this regard, Ebert excelled.

I haven’t seen his memoir, Life Itself, mentioned yet. It is my favorite autobiography.
mmm

*Anthony Lane of The New Yorker is my main guy now, for the same reasons stated above

[DKW]

Ummm…

He had books. Reading was one of the extremely few things about childhood I actually enjoyed, and he had huge books of reviews I could spend hours on. Highly intelligent and skillfully nuanced even if I didn’t agree.

He also had some compelling articles about numerous subjects. His perspective on Chris Ofili’s contentious painting and coverage of the Bush/Gore presidential debates were some of the finest writing I remember from the era.

Never caught the “video games aren’t art” thing (and I never gave a damn either way to begin with), so that didn’t bother me.

Reverence? What am I, a choirboy? I like me some brains. Nuthin’ fancy 'bout that.

[Mahaloth]

I had a few interactions with Roger Ebert online and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I will say that for me, it began with his reviews and eventually went past that. Once he got on twitter and started his blog, we got a better picture of who Roger was. He began to write and post about politics, religion, science(he was interested in evolution), and many other topics.

When he died, I thought of movies. But I also knew we lost a great mind for just about any topic.

It’s a crying shame he missed out on Trump. He would have both hated him and also not been entirely surprised we ended up with him.

@Andy_L

Previous thread about errors in Ebert’s reviews Errors in Roger Ebert's reviews. How many are there? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board

I am the creator of that thread and still think most of his reviews are accurate and he didn’t make that many mistakes.

[Sage_Rat]

Late to the thread…

Personally, I always just watched the trailers for the movie and, if it looked good, then I went to see it and if it didn’t, then I didn’t. A good reviewer would, really, just tell me what to expect from the movie - I already got that from the trailer. A bad reviewer would give his opinion of the movie, but that’s an opinion and mine may be wildly different. Ultimately, it’s still all entertainment. Very few wide-release films are worse than watching paint dry.

But I did once decide to see what all the fuss was and read through a dozen or so Ebert reviews of movies I had seen.

So far as I could tell, the main thing that seemed to make him decide to like movie was whether it had good cinematography.

Maybe that’s just his taste, but I could see that also being a key to his success and a good focus for any reviewer who did want to be successful. Most of the film-going audience is big on the visuals. A reviewer who rates based on that as their main condition will be popular. Personally, I don’t give a crap about that. Star Wars is just a good v. evil story with mostly bad acting, if you don’t care about the visuals. Most people were amazed by the visuals, and they loved it. Ebert loved it. I was entertained but didn’t find it anywhere near as good as, say, Enemy Mine.

Obviously, I’m unlikely to gain a big following as a movie reviewer. But certainly you would appreciate that I’m unlikely to find much interest in Ebert’s reviews.

A couple of his negative reviews were relatively funny, but I’m sure that I’ve seen more blistering diatribes than his. Even the posters here have outdone it.

I assume that he was a reasonable good person. I assume that he wallowed in obscurity for a while, and certainly had to bear with a pretty tough illness for a while, but he also had a sizable portion of his life where he was a big success and probably made a healthy living. Hopefully, the overall balance was pretty good.

His reviews weren’t for me, but that’s okay.