Roger Ebert (1942 – 2013)
American film critic and screenwriter.
This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do.
I've been reviewing movies for a long time, and I can't think of one that more dramatically shoots itself in the foot.
Life's missed opportunities, at the end, may seem more poignant to us than those we embraced — because in our imagination they have a perfection that reality can never rival.
I didn't have a stop watch, but it seemed to me the elephantine action scenes were pretty much spaced out evenly through the movie. There was no starting out slow and building up to a big climax. The movie is pretty much all climax. The Autobots® and Decepticons® must not have read the warning label on their Viagra. At last we see what a four-hour erection looks like.
I recently published a book about movies I hated, and people have been asking me which reviews are harder to write — those about great movies, or those about terrible ones. The answer is neither. The most unreviewable movies are those belonging to the spoof genre — movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun and all the countless spin-offs and retreads of the same basic idea... the bottom line in reviewing a movie like this is, does it work? Is it funny? Yes, it is. Not funny with the shocking impact of Airplane! which had the advantage of breaking new ground. But also not a tired wheeze like some of the lesser and later Leslie Nielsen films. To get your money's worth, you need to be familiar with the various teenage horror franchises, and if you are, Scary Movie delivers the goods.
It's the kind of movie where you ask people how they liked it, and they say, "Well, it was well made," and then they wince.
Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. That was on Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame..."This movie," said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, "is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen."
Remember the words George Carlin said could not be said on TV? There's now a kind of movie that cannot be made without using all of them except one. Even the online trailer may startle you. It's one of those adults-only Red Band Trailers which you have to give your age in order to view. I lied about my age. Nobody under 17 would ever do that.
In my very first review I was already jaded, observing of "Galia," an obscure French film, that it "opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it's pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave." My pose in those days was one of superiority to the movies, although just when I had the exact angle of condescension calculated, a movie would open that disarmed my defenses and left me ecstatic and joyful.
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... The day may come when "Freddy Got Fingered" is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.
Especially in its opening scenes, Ballast is "slower" and "quieter" than we usually expect. You know what? So is life, most of the time. We don't wake up and immediately start engaging with plot points. But Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.
Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.
This sort of scenario has happened, I imagine, millions of times. It has rarely happened in a nicer, sweeter, more gentle way than in Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise," which I could call a "Love Affair" for Generation X, except that Jesse and Celine stand outside their generation, and especially outside its boring insistence on being bored.
The R rating for this film, based on a few four-letter words, is entirely unjustified. It is an ideal film for teenagers.
I saw The Lonely Guy all by myself. It was one of those Saturday afternoons where the snow is coming down gray and mean, and you can't even get a decent recorded message on the answering machines of strangers ... "Good luck," an usher told me. "You're going to need it." He was right ... The Lonely Guy is the kind of movie that seems to have been made to play in empty theaters on overcast January afternoons ... [It] is the kind of movie that inspires you to distract yourself by counting the commercial products visible on the screen, and speculating about whether their manufacturers paid fees to have them worked into the movie. I counted two Diet 7-Ups, two Tabs, and Steve Martin.
They say baseball is popular because everyone thinks they can play it. Similar reasoning may explain the popularity of the Olsen twins: Teenage girls love them because they believe they could be them. What, after all, do Mary-Kate and Ashley do in New York Minute that could not be done by any reasonably presentable female adolescent? Their careers are founded not on what they do, but on the vicarious identification of their fans, who enjoy seeing two girls making millions for doing what just about anybody could do.
The audience I joined was perhaps 80 percent female. I heard some sniffles and glimpsed some tears, and no wonder. Eat Pray Love is shameless wish-fulfillment, a Harlequin novel crossed with a mystic travelogue, and it mercifully reverses the life chronology of many people, which is Love Pray Eat.
Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer.
Well, what is a political film? A film about politicians? Or a film about issues — sexism, racism, the environment, nuclear policy? I decided on the broader definition. If I'd limited myself to films about politicians, it would have been a short list: How many characters in any mainstream American movie seem aware of the political process, or belong to a party?
The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... is the movie vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.
The vast majority of the members of all religions, I believe and would argue, don't want to kill anybody. They want to love and care for their families, find decent work that sustains life and comfort, live in peace and get along with their neighbors. It is a deviant streak in some humans, I suspect, that drives them toward self-righteous violence, and uses religion as a convenient alibi... I am trying as hard as I can to imagine the audience for this movie. Every time I make any progress, it scares me.