Roger Ebert thread

[mlanguishi]

Some shit movies he liked
Home Alone 3 he thought was the best one

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/home-alone-3-1997

Ghost of Mars. he gave a 3/4 to

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ghosts-of-mars-2001

The Phantom Menace

Knowing, 4/4

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/knowing-2009

This is the biggest and craziest Ebert moment of them all. Anything that promoted negroes in any way got a big pass in general, but this one was the most blatant and Siskel's reaction is legendary.

 

[The Token Ethnic]

Remember: Ebert wrote the script for "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" and loved boobs before he turned into an old, curmudgeonly critic. Oddly enough, Ebert didn't get a Chicago theater named after him but Gene Siskel did.

 

[Athena Loves Kiwis]

Good thread. He was so popular when I was young but going through his reviews, they're all either unremarkable or ridiculous.

Amadeus:

This is not a vulgarization of Mozart, but a way of dramatizing that true geniuses rarely take their own work seriously, because it comes so easily for them. Great writers (Nabokov, Dickens, Wodehouse) make it look like play. Almost-great writers (Mann, Galsworthy, Wolfe) make it look like Herculean triumph. It is as true in every field; compare Shakespeare to Shaw, Jordan to Barkley, Picasso to Rothko, Kennedy to Nixon. Salieri could strain and moan and bring forth tinkling jingles; Mozart could compose so joyously that he seemed, Salieri complained, to be "taking dictation from God."

Great art naturally comes easily? Great artists don't take their art seriously? You got to freaking kidding me. This really tells me he knew, like, nothing about art or even film history. (Wouldn't he at least have seen The Agony and the Ecstasy movie?) Couldn't he have done a little research to find out that the thing about Mozart never having rough drafts was bullshit made up for the film/play? This wasn't from a review but a longform serious analysis of the movie.

The Pebble and the Penguin:

What bothered me most about "The Pebble and the Penguin," even more than its inanity and the sappy Barry Manilow songs ("One perfect pebble, just one humble stone, but oh, what a stone can do . . .") was something that annoys me in a lot of children's animated features: color-coding.

If there is one constant in feature cartoons, it's that the evil characters have darker complexions than the heroic ones. At first, I thought maybe I was imagining this, until I realized there were no exceptions to the rule, no movies where the good guys were dark and the bad guys were light.

In "The Pebble and the Penguin," we have to start, I guess, with a definition of what constitutes a penguin's complexion. Most of their coat is black, but not their facial areas, except for around the nose. The rest of their facial coloring is white, in the case of Hubie and all of his friends. But when we meet the evil Drake, a villainous penguin, the corresponding areas on his face are chocolate brown. That goes for Drake's sidekicks.

What do kids learn from this? Nothing overt. Just a quiet, unstated impression: White is good and brave, and brown is scheming and negative. Reinforce that through lots of cartoons (examples: "Aladdin" and "The Rescuers Down Under") and no wonder even black children choose white dolls in some psychological experiments.

Sociologists who wonder how children's values are formed might start by studying the animated films that kids like to look at on video over and over and over again, until they know them by heart - having learned all the lessons, even the unstated ones.

Light to symbolize good and darkness evil is problematic. I'm sorry that H. sapiens' nature as a species whose primary sense is sight and who is thus most vulnerable when that primary sense is deprived and thus makes negative associations with that state of deprivation and vulnerability bothers you, idiot, but even African cultures use that sort of symbolism.

The Two Towers:

With "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," it's clear that director Peter Jackson has tilted the balance decisively against the hobbits and in favor of the traditional action heroes of the Tolkien trilogy. The star is now clearly Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), and the hobbits spend much of the movie away from the action. The last third of the movie is dominated by an epic battle scene that would no doubt startle the gentle medievalist J.R.R. Tolkien.

The "gentle medievalist" fought in the Battle of the Somme. You aren't less likely to be "startled" by the products of modern CGI then an old school Chad like him, doughboy.

Garfield: The Movie (THREE STARS!):

In a film mostly involved with plot, there are two scenes that are irrelevant but charming. In one of them, Garfield and Odie perform in sort of a music video, and in the other, at the end, Garfield has a solo, singing "I Feel Good" and dancing along.

You deserved to die.

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

Ebert on The Thing:

"The Thing" is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.

"The Thing" is basically, then, just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen.

These days I don't think it's too much hyperbole to say it's seen as one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Ebert was a hack.

Funnily enough he ended up looking far more horrific than anything that Carpenter could dream up.

 

[ZMOT]

I can't find it, help please, but there was a one particular Howard Stern interview (there are a few) where Ebert claimed to be loosing weight and was dancing to some gerne of Bollywood music and the name of the genre was funny sounding. I will give him this, Ebert could roll with the punches in the day. Too bad he was a corporate shill.

Edit - Near the end he became a thin skinned bitch.

Also, in another Stern interview, he claimed to be "pumping iron".

zumba?

 

[Pitbull Victim]

If we are posting Ebert's absolute shittiest reviews, nothing tops The Usual Suspects. His takes on The Thing and The Beyond were dumb, but at least they were takes. The Usual Suspects review is so lazy it feels like a troll.

The first time I saw "The Usual Suspects" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.

The story builds up to a blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before, and the surprise filled me not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters - those that are real, in any event. I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation.

The movie begins "last night" in San Pedro, Calif., where an enormous explosion rips apart a ship. Who set the explosion? Why? A cop named Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) wants to know. He has one witness to question: a shifty-eyed, club-footed criminal named Verbal, played by Kevin Spacey with the wounded innocence of a kid who ate all the cookies. Kujan and Verbal are closeted much of the time in the cop's cluttered office, where Verbal lives up to his name by telling a story so complicated that I finally gave up trying to keep track of it, and just filed further information under "More Complications." The story is told in flashback. We learn about a truck hijacking some weeks earlier, and the five suspects who were picked up by the police. They're a mixed bag of low-life characters, played by Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak, in addition to Spacey. I'm not sure if they were all involved in the hijacking, but the way Verbal tells it, in jail they began to plot a much larger crime, involving millions of dollars of cocaine.

This is no ordinary heist, because the dope belongs to a mysterious figure named Keyser Soze (sounds like "so-zay"), a Hungarian mobster so fearsome that when some bad guys threaten his family to get to him, he kills his family himself, just to make it clear how determined he is. This Soze is like the hero of a children's horror story; the very mention of his name curdles the blood of even these tough guys. But no one has ever seen him, or knows what he looks like. And then there is Mr. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), Soze's right-hand man, who is himself so sinister that we begin to wonder if perhaps Kobayashi himself is Soze.

The interrogation between the cop and the suspect falls into a monotonous pattern: friendliness, testiness, hostility, a big blow-up, threats, reconciliations and then full circle again. We hear amazing stories about Soze (one survivor of the boat explosion, with burns over most of his body, drifts in and out of a coma but can talk of no one else). As Verbal talks, we see what he describes, and his story takes on an objective quality in our minds - we forget we're only getting his version.

To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.

 

[BrunoMattei]

His takes on The Thing and The Beyond were dumb

It does really piss me off that he belittles Fulci's Don't Torture A Duckling (a LEGITIMATELY great fucking movie and one of the best movies to come out of Italy) because it had an alternate title as if no other movie has ever had an alternate title in other territories.

Fuck him.

 

[Mussolini’s Merkin]

The Usual Suspects review is so lazy it feels like a troll.

That is a godawful review of a good movie. Even if you don't like it, I think you can appreciate the narrative structure of it.

I've been going back over some of his reviews after reading this thread. I am honestly kind of baffled by what he considers a good movie, his opinions are over the place. At least I could respect Siskel for admitting he liked Carnosaur

 

[Internet War Criminal]

Ebert was a fucking faggot… but not as much as OP.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Ebert was a fucking faggot… but not as much as OP.

View attachment 5231702

Oh shit, you're back. I missed you too, nigger.



Was making TOR work too difficult for your Boomer ass?

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

because it had an alternate title as if no other movie has ever had an alternate title in other territories.

wtf
at least most times I can understand Ebert just being a retard for retard reasons but how in the actual fuck can you just be like "it had other names in various territories" as a reason a movie sucks

 

[Waifu Days]

zumba?

I think it was something more akin to Haryanvi or Chutney. Real pelvis gyrating jams like Zumba but not that exactly. Ebert, to his credit, appreciated Bollywood and Japan as a source of some talented moviemakers when most critics only ventured as far as France for they foreign fix.

I haven't seen any gamer hate in this thread. Though he backtracked, Ebert did say video games could never be art because giving the "viewer" control of the experience, auteur theory could never apply. Ebert is from a branch of franco-loving cinephiles that believed art can only be art if it is the product of one person's vision. Films are a product of many artist but the critics couldn't have that, gave the director ultimate authority and now films can be are if one dude rubber stamps everything. Although I can explain his logic, it doesn't mean it is a good bit of logic.

Another thing, I hate his 4 stars rating system. 5 stars is the superior system for many reasons. 4 stars has to depend on half stars to have any legs. It's ugly and vague. At least the thumbs up or down was marketing simplicity, when it see this - ☆☆☆ . . . it doesn't instantly mean good to me. I know that's my bias going into it.

Some Movies that Ebert really liked:
Junior (1994) - ☆☆☆ 1/2
Home Alone 3 (1997) - ☆☆☆
The Honeymooners (2005) - ☆☆☆
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000) - ☆☆☆

Movies he didn't like:
Home Alone (1990) - ☆☆ 1/2
Dead Poets Society (1989) - ☆☆
Gladiator (2000) - ☆☆
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) - ☆

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Japan

iirc he only gargled balls from Miyazaki and Kurosawa and other basic bitch shit
his face would have melted like Raiders if you showed him Slayers- well, maybe somebody did

 

[BrunoMattei]

iirc he only gargled balls from Miyazaki and Kurosawa and other basic bitch shit
his face would have melted like Raiders if you showed him Slayers- well, maybe somebody did

Someone should have showed him Violence Jack.

 

[Waifu Days]

iirc he only gargled balls from Miyazaki and Kurosawa

You are totally correct and I did think about making that point. Both Ebert and Miyazaki were big commies with mommy issues so they were jointed at the hips or at least cock and mouth.

In his essay on My Neighbor Totoro, Ebert makes the point that there are on mustache twirling villains that make the plot happen. He would latter state that most if not all children's media should be this way. I swear, Ebert did not understand kids nor want to be on the same planet as them.

If I recall, he hated the Godzilla franchise, giving the more artful first film one star.

Someone should have showed him Violence Jack.

He loved Akira but that was seen as culturally significate at its time. I bit of a poser/hipster opinion, really. Violence Jack doesn't have enough waifu potential to "perk" his interest. If Go Nagai bribed Ebert with a few bowls or ramen, I'm sure the fat slob could find at least 600 words to say it is high art.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Someone should have showed him Violence Jack.

I'd rather hear his hot take on the Devilman comic about that art student in Austria

 

[The Cunting Death]

I'll post a few reviews of his that still piss me off:

Halloween 3: spent most of the time complaining how the only character he cared about (Ellie) gets killed off. Notable in that it's the only review that has one and half stars on his most hated films list. Personally it's my second favorite Halloween film after the original.

Blue Velvet: was more concerned about Isabella Rossellini and was offended by the tone shifts caused by Frank Boothe's presence (it's entirely deliberate and it's supposed to evoke his utter inhumanity). Even Rossellini had to issue a press statement essentially saying: "Ebert, fuck off, while it wasn't an easy shoot, I did this entirely out of my own will and I'm perfectly fine." This review is so infamous it's actually on the most recent, non criterion Blu-ray of Blue Velvet.

Brazil: to this day he's the only critic on RT that gave it a negative review. He cites that the film is way too confusing and thinks other films have done what it attempted to do better.


As Waifu days mentioned, the original Godzilla: Not the redub that came out a year or two after the original, he saw the 2004 re-release which was the first time American audiences saw the original version uncut outside of speciality Japanese theaters when it originally came out. He gave it the same rating as the 1998 TriStar version and called it just as idiotic as the ReDub. Which is the dumbest fucking take I've ever heard.



I've got more and more but I'd be here all day.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I'll post a few reviews of his that still piss me off:


Brazil: to this day he's the only critic on RT that gave it a negative review. He cites that the film is way too confusing and thinks other films have done what it attempted to do better.


I've got more and more but I'd be here all day.

I wonder which cut of Brazil he saw? That might explain it somewhat. But even truncated it's a great film. The only flaw is the love interest but even Gilliam admitted he fucked up and cast the wrong actress for the part.

 

[TVB]

He was pretty much the Mr. Enter of that generation as he gave away the address for the writers behind one of the Friday the 13th movies. I'll say one good thing about Ebert and it's that he claims video games are not art. Still, he was a shitty critic that ruined a whole generation of film journalism.

 

[mlanguishi]

I wonder which cut of Brazil he saw? That might explain it somewhat. But even truncated it's a great film. The only flaw is the love interest but even Gilliam admitted he fucked up and cast the wrong actress for the part.

Yeah, wtf was up with that chick. She wasn't attractive or quirky or anything really. Just so bland. Still one of my favorites otherwise though. He did a great choice later with Uma Thurmon as Venus in Munchausen. Mysterious and quiet.

Imagine if in Brazil he managed to get Sean Young or someone actually good in that timeframe.

ETA: Ian Holm and Pryce mostly make up for it though. (My fav Holm performance, then Time Bandits, then LOTR then 5th Element)