ROGER EBERT: A REAL FILM CRITIC

Home Culture ROGER EBERT: A REAL FILM CRITIC

In honor of Roger Ebert, I recently cycled through his reviews of films he particularly hated. One line stood out.

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

When Roger Ebert didn’t like a movie, he made sure you knew it. He wouldn’t just dismiss it as “bad.” Oh no. He would lambast it, rip it to shreds, call the producers and writers idiots, and then make some remark like how he would rather chew a golf ball than watch the same bad movie again.

Obviously, he expressed appreciation for good films, too, but he was a hell of a lot funnier when he dissed movies like “The Brown Bunny.”

The thing is, Ebert performed the job of a film critic so much better than anyone else.

Most film critics try to tell you why a film is good or bad. Ebert instead showed his readers why. He incorporated dialogue into his reviews; he placed readers within movie scenes with vivid illustrations that were verbally rich but never flowery or unnecessary.

His leads were sometimes ridiculously long and generally speaking, Ebert defied many of the conventions of journalistic writing. More importantly, he wasn’t afraid to be brutally honest about the films he watched. And that only made his reviews all the more entertaining.

I suppose Ebert was my go-to guide when I needed to find out which movies I should or should not watch.

He made my interest peak, even when I had never seen or heard of the movies being reviewed.

It’s easy for people to disagree with Ebert’s views on many films. After all, he hated “Star Trek,” of which I am a fan, and loved “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” a movie I consider to be a pimple on film history.

The misconception by people when it comes to film critics seems to be that you’re supposed to agree with them. This is certainly an impossibility because everyone has different taste in film.

Why, then, bother reading reviews by someone like Ebert?

The answer is that Ebert understood that there are two parts to films: watching them and talking about them. That’s how we find entertainment in films after we are done with them (provided we don’t watch them again immediately after).

Ebert knew that his movie preferences weren’t the same as others’. That’s why he strayed from offending readers in his reviews. His in-depth analysis of films always considered both sides of the coin.

Regardless of whether people liked or disliked a movie, Ebert’s mastery was in making them rewatch those movies again to see the film from another point of view –– to see nuances that were overlooked before.

Even when he reviewed really bad films, I felt compelled to see them –– except for maybe “The Human Centipede 2.” Unlike so many other critics, Ebert avoided yellow journalism and backed his sentiments up with extensive support for why a movie rocked or fell short.

I myself have been strangely inspired by Ebert to write reviews of films myself because I love talking about them. There is a place for everyone –– not just critics –– to discuss film. Like Ebert, many of us view films as a magical form of escapism that continues to thrill us with its adventures, epic action set pieces, drama, romance, and mystery.

So in the words of Ebert himself, thank you for going on this journey with me. May he remind us to keep loving and hating the movies we see.

 

 

                                                      mhedenberg@hillsdale.edu