The Critic(al) Condition: Roger Ebert

I dunno, I think Matrix 2 was my favorite of the bunch. I really enjoy the worldbuilding, the way when you think about it long and hard you can understand why everyone acted the way they did. I liked watching the programs as a sort of third faction. I liked that Smith was supposed to be one of the Machines but ultimately became human, and I like the way he had to become human in that every iteration of agents had to be able to interact with humans a little better than the last. Ultimately, agents would have had to develop into something indistinguishable from humans.

I also really enjoyed all the vaguely hokey kung fu stuff, but in spite of the sliiiight campy element I liked the fact that the Agents used chinese kung fu. It means that the Wachowski's kinda had to pick a martial art to choose as the most efficient way to engage in combat with a human body, and I'm glad that the one they choose also happened to be the most artistic and elegant.

I really liked the fact that Neo was just as inevitable as Smith, that they were sort of reciprocal sides of the same coin. I loved that a part of Smith's humanization was just irrational all-consuming rage at his inability to understand everything. I really enjoyed his little speech at the end of the third movie - "Why, Mr. Anderson? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Could it be that you believe that you're fighting FOR something? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know?" He is taunting Neo but he is also genuinely curious - he doesn't understand, and that scares him. And I loved that Neo's final solution wasn't to beat him, it was to synthesize with him - to accept Smith as a part of himself. Ultimately the battle was fought over understanding, and Neo won because he "got it" and Smith didn't.

Ebert's review bothered me not just because it overlooked all of these wonderful things plus a thousand more little details that only come out with repeat viewings and late-night brainstorming but because he simply got some facts wrong that were clearly explained in the movie, like he dozed off halfway through. That was kinda crummy.

But man, I love movies that only work if you have enough faith that they can and then you dig and dig and dig until everything that didn't make sense resolves itself. In the Matrix, as in Star Wars, I think it does resolve itself and the final package is a lot tighter and more consistant than it may at first appear. That's just my taste- I like having to work for it. ;)

I only wish Ebert the best, and I don't want to attack anyone else's feelings for him, but I would like to offer a different view.

Roger Ebert does not, to my estimation, know film. Films are about something, but Ebert insists on interacting with them in a limited way. ET begins with a suburban family home where the father is away and the mother is drinking. These are important elements to the film (in that they become non-problems once ET arrives) which is about the dysfunctional suburban family (as nearly all Spielberg movies are) on a deeper level than the one where it's about an alien and a boy. I want a reviewer who will focus more on things like that. The review of The Matrix is a good example where I think Ebert fails:

It interested me so much, indeed, that I wanted to be challenged even more. I wanted it to follow its material to audacious conclusions, to arrive not simply at victory, but at revelation. I wanted an ending that was transformational, like "Dark City's," and not one that simply throws us a sensational action sequence.

He want the film to answer his questions inside the film. At the time I saw the movie I was dating someone who knew quite a lot about religion including early Christianity. Turns out there's some serious theology about love from the Holy Ghost resurrecting Jesus. So, it isn't "just an action sequence." (In fact, it never is.) Here's a review (from an amateur critic, no less) that demonstrates the sorts of things I want in a critic:

Nobody in the film seems to be particularly ethnic; and that's appropriate. They are products of a culture without roots. The film's best gag is the fact that the teenagers in 1958 are generally undistinguished to those in 1980. The teens in the film are extremely bored. Time can't be wasted quickly enough, and in the film we see them go swimming, sing songs, play strip Monopoly. There is an aggressive anti-intellectualism in the characters; and for that matter anti-spiritualism.

Now, I didn't like the film reviewed there. But this is an interesting take on it. If I saw it again, I might understand better what the filmmaker was going for where perhaps I was too bored before. I might like th film a lot more than I did. Probably not, but then this is a film that spawned a lot of sequels - it's certainly reflective of something in the culture worth understanding better. Here is another from the same reviewer of a film I love:

The movie isn't quite so crass as to say that the priest, the recruiter and the therapist are Nazis. The film makes them out to be more silly than dangerous. But there is a connection that needs to be made here. The evil of the Nazis is purely a product of institutional groupthink. Both those who ran the Holocaust and those who were killed in it were individuals degraded into objects. They were able to kill because they were devalued as individual moral entities, and they were able to BE killed because they were devalued as individual living entities. The film is arguing that the priest, the recruiter and the therapist are products of the same dysfunction that produced the Holocaust.

I think that bit is just flat wrong, has completely mistaken the reference. But it's something that makes me ask myslef why it's wrong, that guides me (even in it's being wrong) to getting more from the film. Now, these are not the sorts of reviews (completely casual about spoilers, for instance) that you'll find in most newspapers. But there are some critics in newspapers who have this sort of framework (Elvis Mitchell, for example) and I find them far more informative in helping me decide. More than that, though, I find them interesting to read.

To love a film is to see it as art, to see it as communicating, and to engage in a dialogue with the film. For Ebert, he wants the film to be a monologue. Not only does that bore me most of the time, but it never really gets into the interesting things that make film into film. How does, for example, Charlie Chaplin (as a director) imitate Leni Riefenstahl to give small bits of The Great Dictator a different feel? If you love film (and not just stories where a film is one way of telling a story) those are the questions I think you'd be interested in.

Here'sa bit from an Ebert review:

Astaire and Charisse get into a furious fight the first time they meet, and then, in the scene where the movie's magic first begins to work

I quote that only to contextualize something else:

The opening credits of Vincente Minnelli's "The Band Wagon" play over a top hat and cane, which would remind us of Fred Astaire even if he weren't the star of the movie. Then we join an auction of movie memorabilia. The top hat and cane don't sell, even when the auctioneer pleads, "50 cents, anyone?" They belonged to a has-been hoofer named Tony Hunter, and now we see him, played by Astaire, on a train to New York City. Maybe he can make a comeback on Broadway. From the way he sings "By Myself," he doesn't seem hopeful.

I saw this with a class that fully expected to be bored to tears by a musical. They weren't. I expected to be bored to tears, too, but I agree with Ebert that this is a great film. Thing is, as Ebert opens his review, he doesn't talk about how the film is making self-deprecating jokes right from the start, which is a big part of how this film won everyone in that class over. Ebert treat that bit as pure formalism, but it's much more the magic of the movie than when Astaire first meets Charisse. Mostly, he talks about the relationship between the subject matter and an actual theater production - as if it weren't the case that "backstage" musicals are a major subgenre of both stage and screen musicals. But he doesn't really connect with it as if he's paying attention.

I don't see Ebert doing the sorts of things I'd like to see a respected critic do. The link you provided confirms this for me. I haven't seen the film but a few points about the review particularly stand out:

It tells a simple story of survival.

I doubt that.

Their story is told not as melodrama, but simply, directly, in the neorealist tradition.

Neorealism was highly political, and it's hard to make any sense of the description that it's "a simple story of survival" told "in the neorealist tradition." Beyond that this is not true of Japanese animation in general and is severely limited even in respects to American animation:

"Grave of the Fireflies" is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation. Since the earliest days, most animated films have been "cartoons" for children and families.

The bit on Ozu (who is one of the greatest ever) is better, but probably unoriginal and limited.

I think you're describing a critic who is in no way accessible to anyone other than the most devoted to film history. (In fact, you appear to be discussing a film historian -- of the sort who "lectures" about film, rather than reviewing them.)

To some extent, this is true. It's not a film historian, but a film critic in the same sense of the word critic we use when we speak of literary critics. There are plenty of examples in popular (if perhaps snobbish) media, though - Elvis Mitchell who I mentioned in passing above, Pauline Kael who used to be at The New Yorker. There isn't really a need to be inaccessible, though. You don't have to be a film historian to understand them, though certainly the more you know about film the deeper their reviews are, I'm sure. If they tend to be inaccessible, that's just an historical quirk.

But that is a politics. There's no getting around that.

I don't get your dislike of Ebert. I know some don't like him because they feel he is too popular and mainstream but I don't think that makes him bad. I used to not pay attention to him for that reason but the more I read of him - not the light stuff but his essays - the more I was impressed.

Also, if Ebert is so bad why did he win the Pullitzer? They don't just hand those out to anyone and if they did, well, then I want one too.

It's not his popularity. It's not his taste even. There's more to criticism than what he offers, and on the criteria one would reasonably set there, Ebert is just not good. What drives me crazy is a tendency to view films as something less than art.

Compare this:

He increasingly feels like he is fighting alone – and he is right. His life becomes a sordid combination of separation anxiety and rejection. Even Avner's mother, in a brief conversation toward the end of the film, becomes an appendage of the state. When he asks her "Do you want me to tell you what I've done?" (in a sense, begging her to be his mother and listen to his anguish) she responds by saying, "whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth, at last," a syrupy dose of Zionist propaganda that rings hollow in Avner's ears.

to Ebert's version:

The film has deep love for Israel, and contains a heartfelt moment when a mother reminds her son why the state had to be founded: "We had to take it because no one would ever give it to us. Whatever it took, whatever it takes, we have a place on earth at last." With this statement, I believe, Spielberg agrees to the bottom of his soul.

Now, of course, though these are about the same movie, they serve slightly different purposes. Ebert wasn't about to go into the sort of descriptive depth that Magid did. But if you watch the movie again, I'm sure you'd agree that Ebert is off the mark here, and in contrast just how relevant Magid is to the film, how alive the theme of family is. (As an aside, I noted above that pretty much all Spielberg was about healing the dysfunctional, suburban family?) And the reason he is off the mark is that he takes the film too casually. He won't treat it as art - good or bad, all films are art - he won't go into it on that level.

I don't think the Magid article is inaccessible at all. Yes, it is political, but it's a political film! Whether you take a stand or not, how can you analyze it without getting into politics?

But I didn't say the comparison was invalid. I acknowledged that the goal of the two articles was different, but from the bit I excerpted from Ebert, you can see that he gets an important detail wrong because he won't go to that level. Different people want different things from a critic, and that's fine, but even if Ebert doesn't present his reviews at that level he should go there to get it right before coming back to us at a simpler level. The film just plain doesn't have the deep love for Israel that Ebert says it does. Ebert is just flatly wrong on that, and there are other reviewers who are better that kind of stuff.

Make that four. I've always been a big fan of Ebert. Back in the Siskel & Ebert days, I was actually a bigger fan of Siskel (mostly because I agreed with him more often), but since his death I've really grown to appreciate what a great writer Ebert is, besides being arguably the most influential film critic in history.

Three other points of interest which might augment your excellent article, Brian:

I managed a local video store for about four years, and over that time my staff and I discovered that Ebert's zero-star reviews (of which North is one) are usually the most fun to read of all of his work. He's written fewer than sixty of them in all the years of reviews that are archived on suntimes.com; compare that with the one or two four-star reviews he writes per week and you can see just how rare they are. We actually put together a section of his zero-star movies in the store along with a few of the reviews themselves. You'd be surprised how many movies would rent just 'cause his review was so amusing. You can get to an archive of all of his zero-star reviews from the Advanced Search page at rogerebert.suntimes.com.

Also, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the best-known of the three films which Ebert actually wrote (which are all interestingly rated X, by the way), was just released for the first time on DVD by Fox as a nice special edition which includes an Ebert commentary track.

And lastly, speaking of Ebert commentary tracks, every one of them is a gem. In fact, they tend to be worth the price of the DVD they're on all on their own. The one on Dark City is particularly good. And the track on Citizen Kane is a classic in its own right. I thought I appreciated that movie before I'd heard Ebert talk about it, but boy was there so much more going on than I had ever been aware (that movie, for instance, is just as much a special effects flick as Star Wars or King Kong even though you'd never know it at this point).

Anyway, here's hoping Roger gets well incredibly soon.

I like that

I'm all for that as well.

I really like the movie night idea and was thinking about it over the weekend.

I would love to do a newsvine movie nite or a movie discussion. This can be done via people posting separate reviews connected with tags or are sharing a thread.

I've led movie discussions at my church and since it's a Unitarian church I get the joy (especially with my Catholic background) of showing movies like Dogma and Life of Brian.

The biggest crowd I drew was for Supersize Me and Michael Moore movies