Okay, stop being stupid... now

[seriousfic]

Now, I admire the hell out of Roger Ebert, but good god, the man is racking up blowhard points and not just when it comes to videogames (I will fight you if you say a Michael Bay movie is superior in any respect to Uncharted 2). Take his review of The Lovely Bones. You can look it up on his website. 'Flawed' would be a generous way to describe the film, yet the central beef Ebert seems to take with it is that it depicts an afterlife. Or at least he has a problem with the movie failing to make the consequences of a murder tragic enough, but if so, he's phrasing it really awkwardly, which is death for a critic. Take this quote.

The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends.

They haven't given thought to the possibility that there isn't a heaven? IT'S A MOVIE ABOUT A MURDERED GIRL NARRATING HER STORY FROM HEAVEN. If that's such a deal-breaker for you, why are you even reviewing it? Really now, could that statement get any dumber?

J.K. Rowling writes her Harry Potter books with no inkling that there might not be such a thing as magic.

J.J. Abrams directs the latest Star Trek installment with no consideration for the possibility that faster-than-life travel is impossible.

The new Mad Max movie gives no thought to the possibility that in the future, the Singularity will turn us all into gods. I will be a god! I will be a naughty movie critic god!

Ebert spends so much time talking about how the movie fails on his terms that he gives no thought to how the movie fails on its own terms, which is bad criticism and bad cinema-going. Two thumbs down.

Comments

[nonky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is a dumb reason to tell other people not to see a movie. Some films just have a faulty premise that makes it impossible for me to get past - which seems like what Ebert is arguing here. "I couldn't suspend disbelief for A, therefore B and C are useless to me and I hated the whole lot of it." If he told a buddy not to see if for this reason, fine, but he told the world.

See the world already should know it's about a girl, who happens to be dead. So she does all these things in heaven that alive girls are usually doing, while checking in on the people she used to live with. The subplot with the murderer and the investigation was never meant to be the big plot of the movie, so right away you have to be on board with the heaven bits. I never thought it would make a good movie because while it sounds like enough action happens to make it very exciting, most of the writing emphasizes the emotions of Susie, the murdered girl, and her family's breakdown.

It's a wonderful novel, but very sad. And I think the ending is one that would never satisfy an audience in North America. There is far too much lost for anything really be gained, so in that way it shows the consequences of violence very poignantly.

As for unrealistic portrayals of teenage girls, was Ebert ever a teenage girl? Because they come in all varieties, but usually don't grow up to be men. Maybe she's a bit odd because she was brutally raped and murdered? That would stunt the emotional growth of anyone, I'd think. A lot is made of heaven about it being what you want, and what she wanted was a nice, safe place. Not an incredibly out of line request for a recently dead girl. Sounds like sloppy reviewing and a general lack of clarity. Bad Ebert.

[mcity.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Ebert is aware that the movie is adapted from a critically acclaimed book?

>(I will fight you if you say a Michael Bay movie is superior in any respect to Uncharted 2)

Besides in "volume of explosions"?

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

Besides in "volume of explosions"?

Dude, Uncharted 2 blows up the entire country of Nepal.

[mcity.livejournal.com]

Well, that's it, I'm getting a PS3.

[rann.livejournal.com]

Ebert's problem is that he comes from an era of the review press when you used to need to have gotten a lucky break to get into it, and now anyone can get into it with an email account and the ability to find livejournal's homepage. Ebert isn't any better at reviewing movies than your average livejournaler, and has the same set of prejudices and angst that he works into every vaguely-applicable review ("Bawwwwww Xtians sux!"), and it's not like he's measurably funnier or more insightful. Nowadays you can trip over five McDonald's employees that can type a Roger Ebert quality review before they put on their silly shirt and go off to work.

Seriously, if he had tried to break into the business today, instead of getting a break back in the day by being "the fat one" reviewing movies on TV as the bastard child of Statler and Waldorf & Burt and Ernie, no one would "admire the hell out of Roger Ebert". He'd be some nobody with a blogspot and empty comments pages. His only marketable quality is a name, and half the marketable quality of that died awhile back.

I'm sure the Hollywood establishment appreciates Ebert pushing their underlying premises and giving a smack on the head to those that deviate from them. It's likely why he still gets any reviewer-bennies at all. But at this points it's even odds on whether he'll die or be forgotten first.

[iteari.livejournal.com]

That review still leaves me exasperated. Not to mention it bothers me with the idea that apparently it's a bad thing to put any religious theology in a movie or book nowadays, including "teh evil Xtians!" :/

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

I disagree with that. Ebert and Siskel revolutionized film criticism for a popular audience and brought it into the mainstream. Quite apart from his expertise and knowledge of films being better than most people, he (and Siskel) were the most famous film critics of the childhood of the current generation; their influence among how movie reviews are written on the web is pervasive.

[rann.livejournal.com]

His film expertise and knowledge is better than most people? Aside from the fact that it's an entertainment medium, and thus having seen the 1941 film "The Unbearable Eternal Chess Game of Gripping Tedium" does not render someone more qualified to judge whether the 2006 film "All Your Fat Mommas" is more entertaining or not, and that expertise is so subjective and vague as to have no meaning whatsoever... the man can't even set aside his own prejudice to see that something is an intrinsic part of a story. Did you maybe read the entry you're replying to? Seriousfic rather neatly skewered the sheer ridiculousness of Ebert's criticism of the movie, but hey, surely Ebert must know what he's doing due to his knowledge and expertise. Perhaps his statements merely look idiotic to us mere film-viewing mortals.

Even were we to give him that he "revolutionized" film criticism, his revolution is over. He's now basically the Paris Hilton of film review... famous for being famous.