Roger Ebert

In case you’ve missed it, Esquire is running an article on Mr. Ebert this month:

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/roger-ebert-0310

The thing that most people are going to take away from it, I think, is “oh my word what happened to his FACE?”, which is fair, I guess. The man’s had several surgeries to remove first his salivary glands and later his entire lower jaw and is, frankly, lucky to be alive. He’s also now unable to talk, eat, or drink. Part of me wonders, then, how it’s possible for him to be so prolific right now. But then, there’s nothing about his situation that would interfere with his ability to watch movies and tell us in print what he thinks about them.

I can’t remember when I first heard Ebert. From At the Movies, I imagine. I knew about him from watching the show now and then well enough to get that the Jon Lovitz animated sitcom The Critic was more or less about him. But I do remember, more or less, when I really got into him as a critic. It was about the time that I went back to college to complete my degree (I’m one of those ne’er do wells who dropped out of school, only to drop myself back in after a series of crap jobs). I’d always thought of him as just part of that semi-critical American background of film reviewers along with Gene Siskel, Rex Reed, Gene Shalit, local guy Tom Shales (I’m not going to say he belongs up there with the rest of the folks I mentioned; he was just a guy whose reviews I ended up reading a bunch of), and so on. So when I went to his website for the first time, it was actually something of a shock. Here was a guy who not only reviewed movies, but did them so well that you wanted to see the films in question just to see if you could experience the same things he did.

To paraphrase Lord Buckley, I come to hip you to Roger Ebert, not to lay him out. Most reviewers, I think, exist for two reasons:

1. To allow us, their readers, to calibrate our tastes with theirs and at the same time heighten that sense in small increments. On one level, I guess, we gravitate to people whose overall views on what constitutes art and what constitutes crap matches more or less with ours. There’s a reason why I’m writing this about Ebert and not Michael Medved, for instance. These are guys who have the time and the money to basically go out there and see everything that’s worth seeing and who are erudite enough to tell us why they liked or didn’t like it. Of course, being able to see everything is going to allow a reviewer to improve his “what makes a good movie” skill, and that gets passed along as well, but there are some core beliefs that don’t change whether you’ve watched 1 film in the past year or 1,000.

2. A reviewer also exists to steer the readers towards stuff they may not make an effort to go out and see. Roger Ebert does this an awful lot; in fact, one potential criticism of him is that he’ll often eschew the big-name Hollywood blockbuster that is what it is in favor of some small-run indie flick or documentary. I guess this isn’t bad in and of itself, and I know that if I were in Ebert’s position I’d use whatever excuse I could to watch good stuff instead of mediocrity, but there’s also a point where one wants to calibrate Ebert vs. other Ebert. How good is Date Movie compared to that movie where Rob Schneider is an animal trapped in a human body in Roger Ebert terms? We’ll never know because Roger got out of reviewing the former.

But I digress. The point there is that lots and lots of reviewers see it as their duty, if you will, to send audiences to films off the beaten path.

Roger Ebert goes one step further. He’s a very, very knowledgeable guy when it comes to the film industry. I think that along with that knowledge he has gained a healthy respect with regard to just how hard it is to make a film, not just a good film, but any film. He, of course, wrote the screenplay to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which is very silly and camp, but he did write it and what’s more he’s wise enough not to have written anything for the screen since then. Because, perhaps, of that relative failure to succeed in the arena, he doesn’t assume like so many of us do (I include me in the “us”, given that I have written 6 whole reviews for this site) that a crap film is just crap and that’s all there is to it. He goes out of his way to find talent in the talentless. Witness his review of Gigli, to which he gave 2 1/2 stars:

******

Doesn't actually suck.

So the movie doesn’t work. The ending especially doesn’t work, and what’s worse, it doesn’t work for a long time, because it fails to work for minute after minute, and includes dialogue which is almost entirely unnecessary. But there is good stuff here. Affleck and Lopez create lovely characters, even if they’re not the ones they’re allegedly playing, and the supporting performances and a lot of the dialogue is wonderful. It’s just that there’s too much time between the good scenes. Too much repetitive dialogue. Too many soulful looks. Behavior we can’t believe. I wonder what would happen if you sweated 15 minutes out of this movie. Maybe it would work. The materials are there.

******

I actually ended up seeing the movie on his review, and you know what? He’s right. If you found somebody 50 years from now who had never heard of Bennifer and didn’t know Gigli from Gigi and sat them down and made them watch this movie, they would say “meh”. Not “OMG THIS IS THE WORST THING EVAR MADED!!!!”, which was the general consensus of the critical media. More interesting to me is what Roger touches upon when he notes exactly what *is* wrong with the movie. It’s not so much Bennifer as it is that it’s just too long and doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. If you believe in alternate universes, there is a world in which Gigli was actually a good movie, and Ebert details exactly what that world is like (it’s very similar to our own. Strangely, chocolate is commonly mixed with bacon in that one).

This is not to say that Ebert will never give a movie a poor review. One of the more amusing things about him, in fact, is that he’ll say something along the lines of “this movie sucked balls but Dane Cook was kind of funny” and sure enough you’ll see an ad for it that says “DANE COOK WAS… FUNNY!!! – ROGER EBERT”. That being said, his affinity for the genre also causes him to take greater offense than it may be possible for normal people to take. Here’s what he had to say about Funny Games, a movie nominally included in the “horror” category:

******

Actually sucks.

You (the lab rat) are placed in a Skinner box (the movie theater) and subjected to random negative stimuli (filmed violence, as a substitute for painful electrical jolts). [Writer-director Michael] Haneke, whose academic background is in psychology, philosophy and theater, assumes the role of empirical taskmaster. He hypothesizes that his box will shock you into a knee-jerk ethical dilemma. To pass the test, you must reject the false premise of the experiment itself (if only on the grounds of insufferable smugness) and walk out.

An even better response, theoretically, would be to storm the booth and rip the film out of the projector, thus symbolically declaring your refusal to swallow the force-fed medicinal doses of synthesized abuse the film is administering. And if you really wanted to ace the challenge, you would just not see the movie.

******

I laughed the first time I read this (and as it happens, I was on the fence about going to see Funny Games but this review led me to spend my money on something else). A lot of film critics (and video game critics, and music critics, etc.) make reviews of bad works of art that make you laugh. The problem there is that a lot of the initial humor comes with the audacity of the person making the review in, as above, “jokingly” encouraging the audience to take over the cinema in the manner of a government coup. When it comes out of a genuine outrage that so much time and effort was spent to create something that, in this case, was actively created to revile people, it works great. When it comes out of mean-spiritedness and a desire to attract more readers through shock value, well, I’m not going to say it’s never funny or thought-provoking but it loses a certain elan.

Anyway, it kind of saddens me that we may be approaching the end of the Ebert Era. Perhaps we’re not; from the tone of the Esquire article and the wonderful work he still provides for us on a daily basis, he could have 20 or 30 years left in the tank. At the same time, Kurt Vonnegut passed before I could ever write a gooey fanboy letter to him. Why make the same potential mistake with Mr. Ebert when we have this wonderful series of tubes that we call the Internet available to us? Roger Ebert, if you ever come across this, I think you are awesome.

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