Roger Ebert thread

there is, but it's not secret. they just do things different because they're japanese (or eastern). so on the rare occasion some of those works make it across the pond they are perceived as something special. or in a food analogy asians eat a fuckload of rice, it's nothing special, but give some african bushmen some rice and it will be super exotic.

the problem is you'd expect a "critic" to know enough how this shit works on a fundamental level to understand that and know the difference, basically all the "tradecraft" involved. otherwise he's a shit critic who doesn't know what he's talking about...

It's just the usual shit where the fact Japanese media is filtered to its most popular creators makes the illusion it's immune the 95% is shit rule.
 
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Mike and Jay > Siskel and Ebert
"rey isn't a mary sue"
their id4 re:view is also farthuffing as fuck on the level of cinemasins going "hurr pandas can't talk" in an animated movie for kids with anthropomorphic animals...
even fucking honest trailers understands sometimes a dumb fun movies is simply a dumb, but fun movie.
 
If a critic (or in the case of Ebert, him & Siskel together) is humorous, and their biases, however stupid, are obvious and predictable, I don't give a shit how bad their takes are: I know what I like, I know what they like, and I can use their reactions to my advantage. If I watch an old Ebert review of a horror film I haven't seen before, and he performs the usual moralizing hand-wringing, then I have a good reason to think that's a movie I'd like.
 
He rated my favorite movie "Big trouble in little china" poorly for playing to asian stereotypes even though all of the Asians in the movie are badass with exception for the lawyer, so I hope hell is as awful as possible for him.
He couldn't see that it was actually an inversion of the whole "yellow peril" thing, with the white guy being the stereotyped sidekick and the Asian guy best friend being the straight man? It also starred lots of famous actors from Chinese cinema so if you think anyone had a problem with the film being "racist", they would've.
 
Ebert was a virtue-signaling dipshit leftist. His blind spots were immense, and he was proud of them like so many true believers.

That said, if I see a movie that came out before his death, I usually go and check to see what he wrote about it. Many of his "film essays" are fantastic and filled with valuable insights. The new, post-Ebert content on the Roger Ebert website is usually abominable, woketarded trash.
 
I actually like Siskel and Ebert, Ebert had fairly balanced takes even if they werent necessarily agreeable. Mike and Jay are better and I love em but after binging most of Kermode and Mayo, I will say I much prefer Siskel and Ebert to them especially Ebert cause Kermode is a smug commie bastard with a massive superiority complex.
 
All critics are faggots
Except for The Critic. He's a gentleman of fine taste.
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All critics are faggots
There was this one American lady who QT and many others cite as the best movie critic in history, I forgot her name and I havent really read her work but shes supposed to be a big inspiration for Roger Ebert specifically. Personally yes critics are faggots and every "school" be it art film music whatever tends to produce critics more than industry people and auteurs cause auteurs tend to do shit on their own and have a massively strong work ethic compared to snobby arthouse fags who graduated from shitty film school complaining about how bad movies are. But there is a difference especially nowadays between film analyst and critic, very generally but its becoming more specific nowadays with most people falling into analyst category than critic.

Edit: Its Pauline Kael
 
All critics are faggots
The biggest issues with critics is that they never admit their biases and always imagine some objective truth to reviews rather than just "it's my opinion" (which both are highly ironic and hypocritical when critics routinely use post modernism in their reviews).

If a reviewer doesn't like a genre or a director he should just not fucking review it since it's tainted by his bias.

Another big issue with critics is that the knowledge from learning cinema and watching a metric fuckton of films makes a lot of their opinion not matter to the average viewer. Like a twist ending is mind bending to a normie but if you already saw that twist in ten other niche films you wouldn't be impressed, likewise a fantastic set design and camera work won't matter to people who only care for explosions.
 
The biggest issues with critics is that they never admit their biases and always imagine some objective truth to reviews rather than just "it's my opinion" (which both are highly ironic and hypocritical when critics routinely use post modernism in their reviews).

If a reviewer doesn't like a genre or a director he should just not fucking review it since it's tainted by his bias.

Another big issue with critics is that the knowledge from learning cinema and watching a metric fuckton of films makes a lot of their opinion not matter to the average viewer. Like a twist ending is mind bending to a normie but if you already saw that twist in ten other niche films you wouldn't be impressed, likewise a fantastic set design and camera work won't matter to people who only care for explosions.
Critics do the arthouse english teacher thing of "the curtains were blue because the author was depressed" and they think theyre intelligent for doing it when its either completely fabricated and stupidly false or a very context sensitive observation/interpretation. What they dont get is that films should be judged based on several things and not just """"theme"""", theme and tone are two of the most useless and abused metrics used in media history. For films especially if youre going to judge the writing and only the writing, you should first judge the intelligence logic and coherence of the writing, then comes subtext nuance and the themes, never judge the themes directly, this isnt fucking poetry or prose. E;R is one of the few people on youtube who gets this properly while most people including EFAP pay lipservice to the concept and tend to ignore shit like referential context, authorial intent, action and outcome while jumping straight into themes and worldbuilding. The line between criticism and analysis especially for stuff like comics movies and games is getting very very blurred because those three are agglomerative mediums, there are several things to analyze and judge there especially when they coalesce to be greater than the sum of their parts, unlike music or literature where youre just judging one thing. Its fine to judge that one thing but you should judge it properly which critics dont do cause theyre failed abortions who dont fucking care and are LA nutjobs who suck at their jobs. Also the average viewer metric is a pretty bad metric for overall analysis, its a good metric to judge a films quality and appeal cause usually the larger a films audience and wider target demographics, the more intelligent it usually is (Akira, Inglourious Basterds, Robocop, Bioshock, Deus Ex are examples of stuff which are both intelligent and dumb simultaneously on multiple levels, appealing to a large audience). But generally if youre judging stuff like visual language, communication, shots all that it is a good practice to reference other films in the process.
 
I'm glad for this thread. While Ebert was often a goofy sperg, he was really a good writer. Even if you didn't agree with his opinion, they were usually well written and easy to follow. He had a great style.

If you go to his zero-star reviews, there are a lot of gems. Wolf Creek is a good one. He basically treats it as crime against humanity. Mad Dog Time and North are also classics. She's out of Control too. If you look at this list he did in 2005, you'll see that almost all of them are truly some of the worst movies of their times.

 
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