Re: When Roger Ebert was mean

On Thu, 26 Sep 2024 18:04:41 -0700, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

7 of Roger Ebert's Most Brutal Movie Reviews
https://time.com/2957019/roger-ebert-life-itself-brutal-reviews/

North (1994) has some good gags in it, that's better than a lot of
Ebert's choices.

He dumped on Walker (1987) for "anachronism". Parts were funny,
and the music was great, the anachronism was a virtue, and
an inherent part of the movie.

He dumped on Clifford (1994), lots of funny stuff, but he
and Siskel couldn't get over a 40 year old playing an obnoxious
10 year old to find any comedy and that instead he thought it
should be played by a real 10 year old, which wouldn't be funny.
How would a real kid be funnier than a fake?

I agree with him about Caligula (1980) being bad, but the
ancient history history references are the most interesting
thing about, except there was only about 1 minute of text
diluted into a 3 hour movie. It's not porn, if pornography is
defined as Appealing To The Prurient Interest, the X rating
was for something other than porn, because in either the cut
or uncut version there wasn't anything sexy in it.
Medical pictures in textbooks are sexier.

Ebert praised as 'hilarious' Larry Cohen's Bone (1970),
a supposed comedy whose theme is that women like and enjoy
being kidnapped and raped, a concept, and a movie, that I
find not funny at all. But to Ebert, a Black man raping
a white woman is supposed to be funny.