Roger Ebert!

“I lost faith in the Oscars the first year I was a movie critic–the year that Bonnie And Clyde didn’t win.”

-Roger Ebert, 20 questions with Playboy.

He’s not Pauline Kael, but you know what, he doesn’t need to be. Film review is a tricky patch of dangerous woods to get lost in. Nobody is going to share your thoughts and feelings on a film more than you are, with your own voice, so your best best is to find someone close. For me, there’s probably four or five reviewers I always check for a movie, sometimes just because I want to dip into the quality of their words and their opinions, and while the critics on that list shift from time to time, Ebert is always on there. I’d say that he and I agree something like 93% of the time on a movie, and that’s even better than you can get from your friends sometimes.

Roger Ebert and his wife, Chaz.

For example, I just got a text from a friend telling me how good Transformers 2 was and have I seen Knowing yet because they thought the trailer looked really, really, really, really, really, really cool.

Unrelated, email me if you want to be my friend. Please be interesting and not sucky. And have good taste in movies?

I grew up on Siskel and Ebert at the Movies and their simple thumbs up/thumbs down. Too simplistic a criterion sometimes, sure, but the there were two things I absolutely loved about their show: It was for the regular people and the reviews were based around having a modicum of intelligence. Were you Joe Average movie goer who wanted to know if a movie was good or not? Great, they could tell you. Were you a snarky pretentious film major who wanted to talk about metaphors and eros being sick and the shapes of regrets in the shadows and the male gaze? That’s cool, but you could slum it nicely with Siskel and Ebert.

Another thing I loved about those guys that I didn’t realize to much, much later was the fact that they probably hated each other:

Sometimes the bigger the asshole you are, the more authoritative you seem. In that regard, Gene was like us and Roger was a prick. Catholic and Jew. Good cop and bad cop. Holmes and Watson? Close, but no. Together, they were Tango and Cash, even though one looked like a car salesman and the other looked like an old school lesbian.

Remember when they guest starred on Jon Lovitz’ horrendously underrated The Critic back in the 90s?

Ha ha, Brilliant!

“Dammit, Gene, I’m not Roger! I’m never gonna be Roger! I wish I were!”

Ah… RIP Siskel.

RIP sleazy porn mustache:

Also, Roeper fucking sucks. Seriously.

Some of my favorite bits of Ebert:

- Dated Oprah way back when. Credited with suggesting to her that perhaps she should go national? And then she became one of the most powerful entities in the universe.

-His favorite actor is Robert Mitchum and his favorite actress is Ingrid Bergman.

-He actually went to the other side of the biz and co-wrote three films!

And they were wonderfully horrible: Russ Meyer’s Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Beneath The Valley Of The Ultra-Vixens, and Up!

Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert, OG film people, in 1970.

And no, not this Up:

Though that does look like a crotchety old version of Ebert, right?

-By the way, that quote referenced in Austin Powers: “It’s my happening and it freaks me out!” is from Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls.

-He’s written more than 15 books (some just collections of his reviews) and his column is syndicated to over 200 newspapers. And in 1975, he became the first film critic to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

-In 2007 Forbes magazine named him “the most powerful pundit in America,” taking a lovely shit on even bigger windbags like Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly.

-He has his own film festival! And it’s charmingly called Ebertfest.

-I’m so jealous of that last bit (though, to be fair, even no talent hacks like Harry Knowles have their film fests so really, it’s no big deal, I know) that in a few months I’ll be hosting my own film fest: Marco Sparks Beyond Thunderdome! Email me for details.

-In 2005, Rob Schneider criticized a Los Angeles Times reviewer for giving an unfavorable review to Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, and said that the reviewer was unfit to comment upon the film because he didn’t have a Pulitzer. Ebert then stepped in and said that since he did have a Pulitzer, he was qualified enough to say to Schneider: “Your movie sucks.”

-They later mended fences as human beings when Ebert had some health problems.

-He’s a big public supporter of Werner Herzog, even as Herzog’s popularity has waned. In a move of special thanks, Herzog dedicated his 2008 film Encounters At The End Of The World to Ebert.

-Back in 2004, while guesting on Howard Stern’s show, he predicted that the then-junior senator from Illinois, a guy named Barack Obama, would be very important to the future of this country.

-in 2002 Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and has had a slew of health problems relating from that, including having a part of his jaw removed, causing him to lose his ability to speak (but not the ability to write, so suck it, Clive Barker). This is hardly one of my Ebert greatest hits, but I love that he not only has one of those computerized voice systems (think: Stephen Hawking) but that for a long time, he programmed it to speak for him in a British accent and he named it Lawrence.

-Oh, and let’s not forget that he sometimes chills with party animals like the eternally classic Peter O’Toole and the forever skeezy Jason Patric:

And then, of course, there’s always…

The Brown Bunny.

Yes, the Vincent Gallo movie. My personal take on it: This is a really bad movie, almost unwatchable. But if you do watch it, you can kind of – if you squint and are hopeful – see what Gallo was going for, and see that he has a filmmaker’s soul somewhere within (though he may have snorted it off of someone’s asshole). Sadly, you can also see his dick.

But back in 2003, Ebert saw the movie at Cannes and said that it wasn’t just bad, it was the worst film in the entire history of the Cannes film festival. Upset by that, Gallo then cursed Ebert health, and put a hex on him, wishing that he got colon cancer.

Ebert, in response: “I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.”

Gallo then, in response to that, took the high road and mocked Ebert’s obesity, saying that he has the physique of “a slave-trader,” to which Ebert came back with: “It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.“

They’ve since worked out their differences and have probably even hugged a few times.

The best of Ebert’s reviews for films that recieved zero stars:

- “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.”

from the review of Freddy Got Fingered.

- “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.’”

from the review of Caligula.

- “Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes. … Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film’s producers … should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.”

from the review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.

- “I like good horror movies. They can exorcise our demons. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t want to exorcise anything. It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams. I think of filmgoers on a date, seeing this movie and then — what? I guess they’ll have to laugh at it, irony being a fashionable response to the experience of being had. … Do yourself a favor. There are a lot of good movies playing right now that can make you feel a little happier, smarter, sexier, funnier, more excited — or more scared, if that’s what you want. This is not one of them. Don’t let it kill 98 minutes of your life.”

from the review of the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

- “Dirty Love wasn’t written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn’t rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent… I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.”

from the review of Dirty Love. And last, but not least…

- “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

from the now infamous review of North.

I’m glad Roger Ebert’s still with us, I really am. And more importantly, I’m glad he hasn’t stopped doing what he does best: going to the movies and reporting back to you what he’s found there. He’s treated the public like a friend and shared wonders and horrors with them. He’s the reviewer for everyone. He can talk to you, he can talk to the people smarter than you, and he’s not too scary for the people who are dumber. And he’s waiting there in the dark for the projector to start.