Roger Ebert, Your Movie Sucks
2007, Andrews McMeel Publishing
About Anatomy of Hell :
No doubt the truth can be unpleasant, but I am not sure that unpleasantness is the same as the truth.
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They talk. They speak as only the French can speak, as if it is not enough for a concept to be difficult, it must be impenetrable. No two real people in the history of mankind have ever spoken like this, save perhaps for some of Catherine Breillat’s friends that even she gets bored by.
About Pearl Harbor :
Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is forty minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them.
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They enter the Army Air Corps and both fall in love with the same nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale)—first Rafe falls for her, and then, after he is reported dead, Danny. Their first date is subtitled “Three Months Later” and ends with Danny, having apparently read the subtitle, telling Evelyn, “Don’t let it be three months before I see you again, OK?” That gets almost as big a laugh as her line to Rafe, “I’m gonna give Danny my whole heart, but I don’t think I’ll ever look at another sunset without thinking of you.”
About The Village :
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.
About Levity :
In this district a preacher named Miles Evans (Freeman) runs a storefront youth center, portrayed so unconvincingly that we suspect Solomon has never seen a store, a front, a youth, or a center.
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A bad Victorian novelist would find nothing to surprise him here, and a good one nothing to interest him. When this film premiered to thunderous silence at Sundance 2003, Solomon said he had been working on the screenplay for twenty years. Not long enough.
About Life or Something Like It :
To quote another ancient proverb, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.
About London :
At one point in London, a Japanese experiment is described. Scientists place containers of white rice in two different rooms. One container is praised. Nice rice. Beautiful rice. The other container is insulted. Ugly rice. Bad rice. At the end of a month, the rice in the first container is fresh and fragrant. The rice in the other room is decayed and moldy. If there is any validity to this experiment, I expect London to start decaying any day now. Bad movie. Ugly movie.
About The One :
The film opens with a narration informing us that there are parallel universes, and that “a force exists who seeks to destroy the balance so that he can become—The One!” Apparently every time one of your other selves dies, his power is distributed among the survivors. If Yulaw kills 123 selves, he has the power of 124. Follow this logic far enough, and retirement homes would be filled with elderly geezers who have outlived their others and now have the strength of 124, meaning they can bend canes with their bare hands and produce mighty bowel movements with scornful ease.
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The movie offers brainless high-tech action without interesting dialogue, characters, motivation, or texture. In other words, it’s sure to be popular.
About The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement :
The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement offers the prudent critic with a choice. He can say what he really thinks about the movie, or he can play it safe by writing that it’s sure to be loved by lots of young girls. But I avoid saying that anything is sure to be loved by anybody. In this case, I am not a young girl, nor have I ever been, and so how would I know if one would like it? Of course, that’s exactly the objection I get in e-mails from young readers, who complain that no one like me can possibly like a movie like this. They are correct. I have spent a long time, starting at birth and continuing until this very moment, evolving into the kind of person who could not possibly like a movie like this, and I like to think the effort was not in vain.
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Director Marshall puts his cast and plot through their paces with the speed and deliberation of Minnesota Fats clearing the table.
