Roger Ebert Quotes About Film
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A lot of people just go to movies that feed into their preexisting and not so noble needs and desires: They just go to action pictures, and things like that. But if you go to foreign films, if you go to documentaries, if you go to independent films, if you go to good films, you will become a better person because you will understand human nature better. Movies record human nature in a better way than any other art form, that's for sure.
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Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.
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Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica.
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Here is a children's film made for the world we should live in, rather than the one we occupy. A film with no villains. No fight scenes. No evil adults. No fighting between the two kids. No scary monsters. No darkness before the dawn. A world that is benign. A world where if you meet a strange towering creature in the forest, you curl up on its tummy and have a nap.
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Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else.
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Films to the degree that they glorify mindlessness and short attention span they are bad, to the degree that they encourage empathy with people not like ourselves and encourage us to think about life, they are good.
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The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
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I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: 'A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people.' I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy.
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Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.
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Horror fans are a particular breed. They analyze films with such detail and expertise that I am reminded of the Canadian literary critic Northrup Frye, who approached literature with similar archetypal analysis.
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When I had been a film critic for ten minutes, I treated Doris Day as a target for cheap shots. I have learned enough to say today that the woman was remarkably gifted.
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Much has been written about Generation X and the films about it. Clerks is so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. When they think of "X," it's on the way to the video store.
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It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'
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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.
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I was instructed long ago by a wise editor, "If you understand something you can explain it so that almost anyone can understand it. If you don't, you won't be able to understand your own explanation." That is why 90% of academic film theory is bullshit. Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.
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One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.
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Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.
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Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.
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One of the gifts one movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered
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It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
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"Dirty Love" wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.
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Fellini was more in love with breasts than Russ Meyer, more wracked with guilt than Ingmar Bergman, more of a flamboyant showman than Busby Berkeley... Amarcord seems almost to flow from the camera, as anecdotes will flow from one who has told them often and knows they work. This was the last of his films made for no better reason than Fellini wanted to make it.
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Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.
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When we go to the movies, we identify with the characters we see. That's why we go to the movies; we have a voyeuristic experience; we have an out of the body experience. The screen is more real than our thoughts are at the moment we are looking at the film and we place ourselves in the place of the people on the screen, and when they behave nobly, it makes us feel noble, when they are sad and when they have lost love, we feel sad; we can identify with that.
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Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy . Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience.
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Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival... it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.'
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A film like Hoop Dreams is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and makes us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.
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It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.
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Film theory has nothing to do with film.
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