At the library, I picked up a dvd of Casablanca with Ebert giving a running commentary throughout. Absolutely brilliant. Ebert could see things in Casablanca that I hadn’t seen in 10+ viewings, and he could express those things better than I will ever be able to.
No critic should be judged based on which movies he liked or disliked. Ebert himself hated having to give ratings to film. You need to read his comments to understand where he’s coming from. The quality of a critic is in how perceptive he is, in how well he understands what was intended with a film (or book or whatever) and to perceive as well whether or not those goals were achieved. The number ratings do not tell you that. It’s about how the critic communicates why he felt what he felt that is important. A good critic can tell you if you should have any interest in a film, not based on whether he liked it or not, but in how he describes the film. What moves a any given person, critic or not, is not always going to be the same thing that moves you. That’s why you READ the review to understand where that critic is coming from. It was Ebert’s vast understanding of film that allowed him to put each new movie into perspective.
I enjoyed reading Ebert even when I totally disagreed with his opinion on a film, because he more often than not, would have something to tell you that maybe did not realize when you first saw that film.
BTW, Gene Siskel was also an interesting critic and friendly to his fans (he helped me obtain an old vhs copy of Solaris years ago). I always prefered Ebert because some of Siskel’s ‘rules’ with regards to how to judge a film didn’t seem right to me.
I went through a course that analyzed the movie over a few days, once. It’s a strange one in that it seems to garner a lot of analysis - given that the thing was a stand-out hit in its time - yet it was basically thrown together from random parts and just happened to luck into being really good.
To some extent, all of the everything explaining how good it is - implying that someone did something right for it to have ended up that way - is probably not correct. It’s less like explaining the works of a genius and more like explaining why Yosemite Valley is beautiful but the Tswaing Crater is just sort of…meh. You can work out rules to explain the difference, but implying that there was intelligence behind it is wrong.
Whether Ebert did that or not, I don’t know since I haven’t seen the documentary. Just musing.
I liked that Ebert would sometimes host public screenings of movies that he loved. Whenever anyone in the crowd said “Stop,” the film would be stopped, and there would be a discussion of whatever that person had noticed or wanted to talk about. Obviously you wouldn’t want to do that the first time you ever saw a film, but if you loved it and knew it by heart, I always thought that would be a pretty cool way to deep-dive into it.
My reverence for Ebert – and “reverence” is the correct word – stems from the fact that we had near-identical tastes. And even on the few occasions I disagreed with him, he could at least cogently explain his point of view.
Or at least, the times I thought I disagreed with him. Case in point: I’m a big Coen Brothers fan, and so is the wife since I introduced their movies to her. But the one movie of theirs that she had not seen, and which I had not seen since it first came out, was Raising Arizona. That is the one Coen Brothers film Ebert absolutely hated. He said that at least once a week, someone told him he was wrong in his view of Raising Arizona. I thought he was wrong too, a rare instance of us disagreeing. Then one day when the wife and I were still in Bangkok, I found a copy of the film and watched it with her. I had remembered it as being hilarious. When we watched it all these years later, I found it to be a complete piece of garbage. The wife agreed. She wanted to know what could have been wrong with the Coen Brothers that they could put out all these other wonderful films and yet issue this stinker. Ebert was right once again.
Some bozos will seriously try to say you must watch all movies and then decide for yourself which ones are good. But who the hell has time for that? My old drama teacher back in uni told us the thing to do was find a reviewer you tend to agree with, and I certainly found that in Ebert. By the same token, his old partner Gene Siskel I found to be a negative barometer. If Siskel hated a movie, odds were good I would like it.
And I will always be profoundly grateful to Ebert for introducing me to the films of Yasujiro Uzo, particularly the great Tokyo Story, on my personal top-10 list. I still remember 25 years ago in Bangkok, the local chapter of the Goethe Institute ran a film festival that lasted for two or three weeks. Each night they would screen one film by Uzo and one by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Wenders, whom I also discovered via Ebert, lists Uzo as one of his greatest influences. One Saturday there was a free daylong seminar, with a lecture on Wenders by a German reviewer who was flown in and a lecture on Uzo by the late Donald Richie, who was flown in from Tokyo. And for lunch, the entire audience was taken down the street and treated to a hotel’s buffet lunch at no charge. It was all free – the seminar, the lunch. That was a great time.
I’ll always remember Ebert’s death. April 2013. The news came as the wife and I were leaving on a trip to Japan. I really miss him.
I dropped Pauline Kael from my list of reviewers to pay attention to when in her review for Jeremiah Johnson she said that in the last scene Jerry had given the Indian the finger.
Yes, the freeze-frame was in the theatrical print. Perhaps she was rushing to meet a deadline but it’s as if she said in a review of Citizen Caine, “… and ‘Rosebud’ remains a mystery to this day.”
I don’t think that there is anything like an established body of film criticism (or reviewing) with widely agreed-upon judgments about most films. What exists is a diverse set of movie critics (or reviewers) who disagree about many things. Oh, if you were to average their opinions about current films, you would find a vague agreement about what the best recent movies are. That’s what happens in all the various best-of-the-year awards - some more-or-less agreement with wide divergence.
That’s part of why I think it’s hopeless to decide who the best critics were. They were all flawed. I think there’s a better case to make that Pauline Kael was overrated than that Roger Ebert was overrated. Kael, with her job at The New Yorker, was more respected back then than Ebert, with his job at The Chicago Sun-Times and Sneak Previews. But she wasn’t that great. As Woody Allen said, “She has everything that a great critic needs except judgment. And I don’t mean that facetiously. She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising.”
Film reviewers don’t have that much effect on how movies do. As I said earlier, they have almost no effect on how blockbusters do. They can get little-known films to be seen by more people and hence make more money. So what should you do to choose what films to see? I don’t rely on any single critic. I look at several reviews, talk with other people about what they like, and make an imperfect choice of what movies to see. I only have time to see fifty to one hundred new movies each year. I know that, try as I might, these won’t be quite the best fifty to one hundred of them.
A charming review (of the sequel), that provided multiple pleasures.
Life is pleasant. Emmanuelle’s husband has no apparent line of work, although he maintains a little office at home - primarily, I suspect, because one scene requires a desk for Emmanuelle to crawl under. Such are the demands of sexual liberation.
…
The attractive elements of the original “Emmanuelle” are present here, too: the pretty Sylvia Kristel, the languorous color photography, the exotic locations, the outrageous fantasies. But somehow the characters seem to have lost track of their sanity; they wander from one encounter to another like wife-swappers at a post-lobotomy ball. They have glazed looks in their eyes, and think with their mouths open.
I had the distinct, but unfortunately brief, opportunity to work with Ebert at the Sun-Times. He was far nicer to the copy desk than anyone of his talent needed to be. He produced reams of copy (which may account for the errors some crow about), but it was grammatically perfect and always interesting. He put in long hours.
Granted, I didn’t know him during his drinking years, when, by his own admission, he could be a handful. But he was the opposite of pompous; he recognized his own faults and was humble about his abilities. He had a dizzyingly wide range of knowledge.
I never saw evidence that he took delight in ruining a career, but of course he took delight in skewering a bad movie – just as much as he did in praising a good one.
Heh. That makes me think of this incredibly lame Malaysian reviewer at one of the newspapers I worked at in Bangkok. After thoroughly trashing the atrocious Mary Reilly (1996), he then gave it six stars, saying any movie that had Julia Roberts and John Malkovich together deserved it. He was truly awful.
Are you sure about that. His 1969 review gave the film 3.5 stars out of four:
His 1969 review didn’t give any kind of star rating to the movie. The link you’re giving is to a 2004 webpage which says that he would at that point give three-and-a-half stars to the movie. It’s not clear what he means in saying that. Has he changed his opinion about the film? Does he still think the same, but now he wants to say that he would give that star rating based on the same arguments he made in 1969?
His review of NotLD isn’t about the movie at all - it’s about the rating system, and about how little kids really shouldn’t be watching contemporary horror movies. The movie itself is almost incidental to the article.
Reported