Monday, April 08, 2013

Shit

"I learned to be a movie critic by reading Mad magazine... Mad's parodies made me aware of the machine inside the skin—of the way a movie might look original on the outside, while inside it was just recycling the same old dumb formulas. I did not read the magazine, I plundered it for clues to the universe."
Be sure to enjoy 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes.

I can't quite get his less-than-glowing reviews of Blue Velvet, (especially given that he co-wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) and A Clockwork Orange.

But that may be just me -- I tend to like the worst artist about 100 times more than the best critic. Fuck Pitchfork and whatnot.

R.I.P. Mr Ebert. For telling us how bad The Village was:
"To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets."

3 comments:

Dave said...

I definitely felt the same way about The Village. Awesome. Growing up, Siskel and Ebert At the Movies was a staple of my viewing week.

Eric said...

I probably agreed with Siskel more, but certainly appreciated Ebert's contributions. And he totally rules for founding Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival.

Mike said...

Never heard the Mad tie-in before, that's awesome!