- Joined
- Apr 22, 2015
Roger Ebert. Half of the legendary Siskel & Ebert. Frequently considered the more audience friendly critic and overall considered less of a fuckhead than Siskel (AKA the number 1 fan of Roger Corman's Carnosaur). Ebert has gotten unrelenting praise by the critical elite, normies and Doug Walker as the Nostalgia Critic. But Roger Ebert was a faggot and I have proof.
"Roger was the movies." Barrack Hussein Obama
Example #1:
You will notice that Ebert took personal offence to anything that made him feel bad. So a movie is not supposed to challenge the audience or make them feel bad because... Niggers.
Ebert's 2 star review of A Clockwork Orange:
This has become my go-to for showing people how retarded Ebert's takes often were. Behold, his batshit insane (most likely drunken) 2 star review of the werewolf classic The Howling:
There's only one appropriate reaction to this shitpost of a review:
Oh, but it gets better!
Siskel and Ebert jump on their soapbox (crushing it under the sheer fattitude of Ebert) to condemn horror films, more specifically the slashers, but Ebert sets special sights on the likes of Blood Sucking Freaks and the immortal rape/revenge classic I Spit On Your Grave which he awarded 0 stars, rallied for the movie to be banned and insisted the movie would lead to viewers wanting to rape and kill women.
You think "You know, it was 1980. Maybe he mellowed out?" No. He still included the movie in his books for worst movies of all time.
The ultimate irony is that Ebert liked the French rape/revenge film Irreversible and awarded it 3 stars. Go figure?
To add insult to injury, Ebert awards one of Fulci's best films The Beyond half a star. He insults the movie every chance he gets, points out the flaw of lime acid dissolving a body (which it can and has been used to do so) and even mocks one of Fulci's objectively best films Don't Torture A Duckling because it had an alternate title.
In conclusion: fuck Roger Ebert. There used to be a site that chronicled all the reviews he got horribly wrong but it was taken down but you can search "Ebert got it wrong" and find a plethora of bad takes.
"Roger was the movies." Barrack Hussein Obama
Michelle and I are saddened to hear about the passing of Roger Ebert. For a generation of Americans - and especially Chicagoans - Roger was the movies. When he didn't like a film, he was honest; when he did, he was effusive - capturing the unique power of the movies to take us somewhere magical. Even amidst his own battles with cancer, Roger was as productive as he was resilient - continuing to share his passion and perspective with the world. The movies won't be the same without Roger, and our thoughts and prayers are with Chaz and the rest of the Ebert family.
Example #1:
You will notice that Ebert took personal offence to anything that made him feel bad. So a movie is not supposed to challenge the audience or make them feel bad because... Niggers.
Ebert's 2 star review of A Clockwork Orange:
Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex.
I don't know quite how to explain my disgust at Alex (whom Kubrick likes very much, as his visual style reveals and as we shall see in a moment). Alex is the sort of fearsomely strange person we've all run across a few times in our lives -- usually when he and we were children, and he was less inclined to conceal his hobbies. He must have been the kind of kid who tore off the wings of flies and ate ants just because that was so disgusting. He was the kid who always seemed to know more about sex than anyone else, too -- and especially about how dirty it was.
Alex has grown up in "A Clockwork Orange," and now he's a sadistic rapist. I realize that calling him a sadistic rapist -- just like that -- is to stereotype poor Alex a little. But Kubrick doesn't give us much more to go on, except that Alex likes Beethoven a lot. Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the same way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music -- to add a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension.
Now Alex isn't the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British movies of the early 1960s. No effort is made to explain his inner workings or take apart his society. Indeed, there's not much to take apart; both Alex and his society are smart-nose pop-art abstractions. Kubrick hasn't created a future world in his imagination -- he's created a trendy decor. If we fall for the Kubrick line and say Alex is violent because "society offers him no alternative," weep, sob, we're just making excuses.
Alex is violent because it is necessary for him to be violent in order for this movie to entertain in the way Kubrick intends. Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization and not by creeping fascism -- but by the producer, director and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick. Directors sometimes get sanctimonious and talk about their creations in the third person, as if society had really created Alex. But this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being too modest: Alex is all his.
I say that in full awareness that "A Clockwork Orange" is based, somewhat faithfully, on a novel by Anthony Burgess. Yet I don't pin the rap on Burgess. Kubrick has used visuals to alter the book's point of view and to nudge us toward a kind of grudging pal-ship with Alex.
Kubrick's most obvious photographic device this time is the wide-angle lens. Used on objects that are fairly close to the camera, this lens tends to distort the sides of the image. The objects in the center of the screen look normal, but those on the edges tend to slant upward and outward, becoming bizarrely elongated. Kubrick uses the wide-angle lens almost all the time when he is showing events from Alex's point of view; this encourages us to see the world as Alex does, as a crazy-house of weird people out to get him.
When Kubrick shows us Alex, however, he either places him in the center of a wide-angle shot (so Alex alone has normal human dimensions,) or uses a standard lens that does not distort. So a visual impression is built up during the movie that Alex, and only Alex, is normal.
Kubrick has another couple of neat gimmicks to build Alex into a hero instead of a wretch. He likes to shoot Alex from above, letting Alex look up at us from under a lowered brow. This was also a favorite Kubrick angle in the close-ups in "2001: A Space Odyssey," and in both pictures, Kubrick puts the lighting emphasis on the eyes. This gives his characters a slightly scary, messianic look.
And then Kubrick makes all sorts of references at the end of "A Clockwork Orange" to the famous bedroom (and bathroom) scenes at the end of "2001." The echoing water-drips while Alex takes his bath remind us indirectly of the sound effects in the "2001" bedroom, and then Alex sits down to a table and a glass of wine. He is photographed from the same angle Kubrick used in "2001" to show us Keir Dullea at dinner. And then there's even a shot from behind, showing Alex turning around as he swallows a mouthful of wine.
This isn't just simple visual quotation, I think. Kubrick used the final shots of "2001" to ease his space voyager into the Space Child who ends the movie. The child, you'll remember, turns large and fearsomely wise eyes upon us, and is our savior. In somewhat the same way, Alex turns into a wide eyed child at the end of "A Clockwork Orange," and smiles mischievously as he has a fantasy of rape. We're now supposed to cheer because he's been cured of the anti-rape, anti-violence programming forced upon him by society during a prison "rehabilitation" process.
What in hell is Kubrick up to here? Does he really want us to identify with the antisocial tilt of Alex's psychopathic little life? In a world where society is criminal, of course, a good man must live outside the law. But that isn't what Kubrick is saying, He actually seems to be implying something simpler and more frightening: that in a world where society is criminal, the citizen might as well be a criminal, too.
Well, enough philosophy. We'll probably be debating "A Clockwork Orange" for a long time -- a long, weary and pointless time. The New York critical establishment has guaranteed that for us. They missed the boat on "2001," so maybe they were trying to catch up with Kubrick on this one. Or maybe the news weeklies just needed a good movie cover story for Christmas.
I don't know. But they've really hyped "A Clockwork Orange" for more than it's worth, and a lot of people will go if only out of curiosity. Too bad. In addition to the things I've mentioned above -- things I really got mad about -- "A Clockwork Orange" commits another, perhaps even more unforgivable, artistic sin. It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.
This has become my go-to for showing people how retarded Ebert's takes often were. Behold, his batshit insane (most likely drunken) 2 star review of the werewolf classic The Howling:
Now for America's favorite newspaper team, Uncle Roger and Little Jimmy. As we join them inside the Movie Lab, we hear --
(Whoo! Whoooo!)
I'm ol' Uncle Roger, and this is Little Jimmy!
(Arf! Barf!)
What's in the news today, Unca' Rog???
Well, Little Jimmy -- new movie in town -- name of THE HOWLING.
(Whoooo! Chortle, chortle. Siren sound. Growwwwwl.)
What's it about???
Werewolves! Little Jimmy. Mean, nasty animals -- story here -- about a girl who went OUT ON A DATE -- didn't know the guy too well -- one thing led to another -- the guy GROWS FANGS, Little Jimmy -- starts dripping saliva all over her Gloria Vanderbilts.
(Whoooo!!)
Holy Alpo, Unca' Rog! What happened then!
Girl turns to the guy -- doesn't know what to say -- says, "GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME!" Werewolf -- hardly listens. Doesn't SEEM TO HEAR!
Awful things can happen on a date, Unca' Rog.
Right, Little Jimmy. She said -- she'd been out on dates with a wolf before -- BUT NEVER A WEREWOLF!
What else happened?
(Pant, pant.)
Weird CALIFORNIA CULT, Little Jimmy. Up the coast from the big city. People -- sitting around campfires -- singing songs -- getting their heads back together. One wanders off into the underbrush -- NEVER SEEN AGAIN!
Holy lurking terrors!
Says here -- this broad who was a TV ANCHORWOMAN. Investigating weird cults. Went into one of those adult movie arcades with the doors that lock from the inside -- you know, Little Jimmy?
Two bits in the slot?
Right, Little Jimmy. Gets in there -- locks the door -- lights off -- guy standing there in the dark -- she wants to GET THE STORY. Guy says, "Turn around."
(Snaaaarrll!!!)
What happened then???
GUY'S A WEREWOLF! Cop comes in, blasts hell out of the private viewing booth -- they take the body to the morgue -- next day, the BODY IS MISSING! Says here -- CLAW marks on the inside of the stainless steel door!
Holy Toledo Steel Works!
There's more. Broad follows the trail to the cult's summer camp -- advice of her psychiatrist -- turns out -- WEREWOLVES are running the camp. She's not just hearing things -- the underbrush DOES have noises in it.
What next?
Guy says -- tells her -- says, "I want to give you a piece of my mind!"
Does he?
GIVES HER -- a piece of his mind. Pulls it out and gives it to her. Nauseating. Research indicates -- if you're bitten by a werewolf, so long, baby -- you ARE a WEREWOLF. Legendary story -- they come out only at night -- NOT TRUE. Can come out anytime. Daytime not safe.
(Barf!)
Unca' Rog?
Yes, Little Jimmy?
What's the SCARIEST THING in this movie?
In the whole movie?
The MOST AWFUL THING in the whole movie, please, please, tell me, please?
All right -- you asked for it -- WORST thing -- you've ever seen -- MOST DISGUSTING SIGHT in the history of films -- you don't believe what you're seeing -- here it comes, Little Jimmy: Before your VERY EYES -- this movie CHANGES INTO A DOG!
Holy White Fang!!! Is it worth seeing?
Yes, Little Jimmy, in a sense, it is. Ridiculous -- yes. Comical at times -- yes. Silliest film seen in some time by the Animals Movies Critics' Team. BUT -- great special effects as men BECOME werewolves. WOMEN, too. Before your eyes. Done with -- says here -- HYDRAULICS! Sensational!
Is it worth my money?
It sure is, Little Jimmy. Says here -- worth your money, IF you get it two for one.
There's only one appropriate reaction to this shitpost of a review:
Oh, but it gets better!
Siskel and Ebert jump on their soapbox (crushing it under the sheer fattitude of Ebert) to condemn horror films, more specifically the slashers, but Ebert sets special sights on the likes of Blood Sucking Freaks and the immortal rape/revenge classic I Spit On Your Grave which he awarded 0 stars, rallied for the movie to be banned and insisted the movie would lead to viewers wanting to rape and kill women.
A vile bag of garbage named "I Spit on Your Grave" is playing in Chicago theaters this week. It is a movie so sick, reprehensible and contemptible that I can hardly believe it's playing in respectable theaters, such as Plitt's United Artists. But it is. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of, my life.
This is a film without a shred of artistic distinction. It lacks even simple craftsmanship. There is no possible motive for exhibiting it, other than the totally cynical hope that it might make money. Perhaps it will make money: When I saw it at 11:20 a.m. on Monday, the theater contained a larger crowd than usual.
It was not just a large crowd, it was a profoundly disturbing one. I do not often attribute motives to audience members, nor do I try to read their minds, but the people who were sitting around me on Monday morning made it easy for me to know what they were thinking. They talked out loud. And if they seriously believed the things they were saying, they were vicarious sex criminals.
The story of ''I Spit on Your Grave" is told with moronic simplicity. A girl goes for a vacation in the woods. She sunbathes by a river. Two men speed by in a powerboat. They harass her. Later, they tow her boat to a rendezvous with two of their buddies. They strip the girl, beat her and rape her. She escapes into the woods. They find her, beat her, and rape her again. She crawls home. They are already there, beat her some more, and rape her again.
Two weeks later, somewhat recovered the girl lures one of the men out to her house, pretends to seduce him, and hangs him. She lures out another man and castrates him, leaving him to bleed to death in a bathtub. She kills the third man with an axe and disembowels the fourth with an outboard engine. End of movie.
These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit.
How did the audience react to all of this? Those who were vocal seemed to be eating it up. The middle-aged, white-haired man two seats down from me, for example, talked aloud, After the first rape: "That was a good one!" After the second: "That'll show her!" After the third: "I've seen some good ones, but this is the best." When the tables turned and the woman started her killing spree, a woman in the back row shouted: "Cut him up, sister!" In several scenes, the other three men tried to force the retarded man to attack the girl. This inspired a lot of laughter and encouragement from the audience.
I wanted to turn to the man next to me and tell him his remarks were disgusting, but I did not. To hold his opinions at his age, he must already have suffered a fundamental loss of decent human feelings. I would have liked to talk with the woman in the back row, the one with the feminist solidarity for the movie's heroine. I wanted to ask If she'd been appalled by the movie's hour of rape scenes. As it was, at the film's end I walked out of the theater quickly, feeling unclean, ashamed and depressed.
This movie is an expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures, Because it is made artlessly, It flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering. As a critic, I have never condemned the use of violence in films if I felt the filmmakers had an artistic reason for employing it. "I Spit on Your Grave" does not. It is a geek show. I wonder if its exhibitors saw it before they decided to play it, and if they felt as unclean afterward as I did.
You think "You know, it was 1980. Maybe he mellowed out?" No. He still included the movie in his books for worst movies of all time.
The ultimate irony is that Ebert liked the French rape/revenge film Irreversible and awarded it 3 stars. Go figure?
"Irreversible" is a movie so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable.
The camera looks on unflinchingly as a woman is raped and beaten for several long, unrelenting minutes, and as a man has his face pounded in with a fire extinguisher, in an attack that continues until after he is apparently dead. That the movie has a serious purpose is to its credit but makes it no more bearable. Some of the critics at the screening walked out, but I stayed, sometimes closing my eyes, and now I will try to tell you why I think the writer and director, Gaspar Noe, made the film in this way.
First, above all, and crucially, the story is told backward. Two other films have famously used that chronology: Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," the story of a love affair that ends (begins) in treachery, and Christopher Nolan's "Memento" (2000), which begins with the solution to a murder and tracks backward to its origin. Of "Betrayal," I wrote that a sad love story would be even more tragic if you could see into the future, so that even this joyous moment, this kiss, was in the shadow of eventual despair.
Now consider "Irreversible." If it were told in chronological order, we would meet a couple very much in love: Alex (Monica Bellucci) and Marcus (Vincent Cassel). In a movie that is frank and free about nudity and sex, we see them relaxed and playful in bed, having sex and sharing time. Bellucci and Cassel were married in real life at the time the film was made and are at ease with each other.
Then we would see them at a party, Alex wearing a dress that makes little mystery of her perfect breasts. We would see a man hitting on her. We would hear it asked how a man could let his lover go out in public dressed like that: Does he like to watch as men grow interested? We would meet Marcus' best friend, Pierre (Albert Dupontel), who himself was once a lover of Alex.
Then we would follow Alex as she walks alone into a subway tunnel, on a quick errand that turns tragic when she is accosted by Le Tenia (Jo Prestia), a pimp who brutally and mercilessly rapes and beats her for what seems like an eternity, in a stationary-camera shot that goes on and on and never cuts away.
And then we would follow Marcus and Pierre in a search for La Tenia, which leads to a s&m club named the Rectum, where a man mistaken for La Tenia is discovered and beaten brutally, again in a shot that continues mercilessly, this time with a hand-held camera that seems to participate in the beating.
As I said, for most people, unwatchable. Now consider what happens if you reverse the chronology, so that the film begins with shots of the body being removed from the night club and tracks back through time to the warm and playful romance of the bedroom scenes. There are several ways in which this technique produces a fundamentally different film: 1. The film doesn't build up to violence and sex as its payoff, as pornography would. It begins with its two violent scenes, showing us the very worst immediately and then tracking back into lives that are about to be forever altered.
2. It creates a different kind of interest in those earlier scenes, which are foreshadowed for us but not for the characters. When Alex and Marcus caress and talk, we realize what a slender thread all happiness depends on. To know the future would not be a blessing but a curse. Life would be unlivable without the innocence of our ignorance. 3. Revenge precedes violation. The rapist is savagely punished before he commits his crime. At the same time, and this is significant, Marcus is the violent monster of the opening scenes, and the crime has not yet been seen; it is double ironic later that Marcus assaulted the wrong man.
4. The party scenes, and the revealing dress, are seen in hindsight as a risk that should not have been taken. Instead of making Alex look sexy and attractive, they make her look vulnerable and in danger. While it is true that a woman should be able to dress as she pleases, it is not always wise.
5. We know by the time we see Alex at the party, and earlier in bed, that she is not simply a sex object or a romantic partner, but a fierce woman who fights the rapist for every second of the rape. Who uses every tactic at her command to stop him. Who loses but does not surrender. It makes her sweetness and warmth much richer when we realize what darker weathers she harbors. This woman is not simply a sensuous being, as women so often simply are in the movies, but a fighter with a fierce survival instinct.
The fact is, the reverse chronology makes "Irreversible" a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral - at a structural level.
As I said twice and will repeat again, most people will not want to see the film at all. It is so violent, it shows such cruelty, that it is a test most people will not want to endure. But it is unflinchingly honest about the crime of rape. It does not exploit. It does not pander. It has been said that no matter what it pretends, pornography argues for what it shows. "Irreversible" is not pornography.
To add insult to injury, Ebert awards one of Fulci's best films The Beyond half a star. He insults the movie every chance he gets, points out the flaw of lime acid dissolving a body (which it can and has been used to do so) and even mocks one of Fulci's objectively best films Don't Torture A Duckling because it had an alternate title.
"The Beyond" not only used to have another title, but its director used to have another name. First released in 1981 as "Seven Doors of Death," directed by Louis Fuller, it now returns in an "uncut original version" as "The Beyond," directed by Lucio Fulci.
Fulci, who died in 1996, was sort of an Italian Hershell Gordon Lewis. Neither name may mean much to you, but both are pronounced reverently wherever fans of zero-budget schlock horror films gather. Lewis was the Chicago-based director of such titles as "Two Thousand Maniacs," "She-Devils on Wheels" and "The Gore-Gore Girls." Fulci made "Zombie" and "Don't Torture the Duckling." Maybe that was a temporary title, too.
"The Beyond" opens in "Louisiana 1927," and has certain shots obviously filmed in New Orleans, but other locations are possibly Italian, as was (probably) the sign painter who created the big "DO NOT ENTRY" sign for a hospital scene. It's the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.
The plot involves ... excuse me for a moment, while I laugh uncontrollably at having written the words "the plot involves." I'm back. The plot involves a mysterious painter in an upstairs room of a gloomy, gothic Louisiana hotel. One night carloads and boatloads of torch-bearing vigilantes converge on the hotel, and kill the painter while shouting, "You ungodly warlock!" Then they pour lots of quicklime on him, and we see a badly made model of his body dissolving.
Time passes. A woman named Liza (played by Catriona MacColl, who was named "Catherine" when the director was named "Louis"), inherits the hotel, which needs a lot of work. Little does she suspect it is built over one of the Seven Doors of Evil that lead to hell. She hires a painter, who falls from a high scaffold and shouts "The eyes! The eyes!" Liza's friend screams, "This man needs to get to a hospital!" Then there are ominous questions, like "How can you fall from a 4-foot-wide scaffold?" Of course, one might reply, one can fall from anywhere, but why did he have a 4-foot-wide scaffold? Next Liza calls up Joe the Plumber (Giovanni de Nava), who plunges into the flooded basement, wades into the gloom, pounds away at a wall, and is grabbed by a horrible thing in the wall, which I believe is the quicklimed painter, although after 50 years it is hard to make a firm ID.
Let's see. Then there is a blind woman in the middle of a highway with a seeing-eye dog, which later attacks her (I believe this is the same woman who was in the hotel in 1927), and a scene in a morgue, where the wife of one of the victims (the house painter, I think, or maybe Joe) sobbingly dresses the corpse (in evening dress) before being attacked by acid from a self-spilling jar on a shelf.
But my favorite scene involves the quicklime-decomposed corpse, which is now seen in a hospital next to an oscilloscope that flat-lines, indicating death. Yes, the rotting cadaver is indeed dead--but why attach it, at this late date, to an oscilloscope? Could it be because we'll get a shot in which the scope screen suddenly indicates signs of life? I cannot lie to you. I live for moments like that.
Fulci was known for his gory special effects (the Boston critic Gerald Peary, who has seen several of his films, cites one in which a woman vomits up her intestines), and "The Beyond" does not disappoint. I have already mentioned the scene where the tarantulas eat eyeballs and lips. As the tarantulas tear away each morsel, we can clearly see the strands of latex and glue holding it to the model of a corpse's head. Strictly speaking, it is a scene of tarantulas eating makeup.
In a film filled with bad dialogue, it is hard to choose the most quotable line, but I think it may occur in Liza's conversations with Martin, the architect hired to renovate the hotel. "You have carte blanche," she tells him, "but not a blank check!" The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult showings. Midnight is not late enough.
In conclusion: fuck Roger Ebert. There used to be a site that chronicled all the reviews he got horribly wrong but it was taken down but you can search "Ebert got it wrong" and find a plethora of bad takes.
