R.I.P., Roger Ebert

R.I.P., Roger Ebert. A sad day.

I’ll miss his reviews, his sensibilities and his open mind.

Here are all his top ten lists from 1967 to 2006

I’ll also miss his sharp barbs. Here are a few. [Via]

North, 1994
"I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."

Stargate, 1994
"The movie Ed Wood, about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for Stargate."

Mad Dog Time, 1996
"Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line."

B.A.P.S., 1997
"My guess is that African Americans will be offended by the movie, and whites will be embarrassed. The movie will bring us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom."

Armageddon, 1998
"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out."

Godzilla, 1998
"Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica."

Battlefield Earth, 2000
"Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way."

Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles, 2001
"I've seen audits that were more thrilling." 
 
Freddy Got Fingered, 2001
"This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."

The Brown Bunny, 2003
"I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny."

The Village, 2004
"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."

A Lot Like Love, 2005
To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water."

Bucket List, 2007
"I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens."

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, 2009
"If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination." 
 
The Last Airbender, 2010
"The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented."

Seven Days In Utopia, 2011
"I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again."

National Society of Film Critics

National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film:

Year Winner Director(s)
1966 Blow-Up - Michelangelo Antonioni
1967 Persona - Ingmar Bergman
1968 Shame - Ingmar Bergman
1969 Z - Costa-Gavras
1970 MASH - Robert Altman
1971 Claire's Knee - Éric Rohmer
1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie - Luis Buñuel
1973 Day for Night - François Truffaut
1974 Scenes from a Marriage - Ingmar Bergman
1975 Nashville - Robert Altman
1976 All the President's Men - Alan J. Pakula
1977 Annie Hall - Woody Allen
1978 Get Out Your Handkerchiefs - Bertrand Blier
1979 Breaking Away - Peter Yates
1980 Melvin and Howard - Jonathan Demme
1981 Atlantic City - Louis Malle
1982 Tootsie - Sydney Pollack
1983 The Night of the Shooting Stars - Paolo and Vittorio Taviani
1984 Stranger Than Paradise - Jim Jarmusch
1985 Ran - Akira Kurosawa
1986 Blue Velvet - David Lynch
1987 The Dead - John Huston
1988 The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Philip Kaufman
1989 Drugstore Cowboy - Gus Van Sant
1990 Goodfellas - Martin Scorsese
1991 Life Is Sweet - Mike Leigh
1992 Unforgiven - Clint Eastwood
1993 Schindler's List - Steven Spielberg
1994 Pulp Fiction - Quentin Tarantino
1995 Babe - Chris Noonan
1996 Breaking the Waves - Lars von Trier
1997 L.A. Confidential - Curtis Hanson
1998 Out of Sight - Steven Soderbergh
1999 Being John Malkovich - Spike Jonze & Topsy-Turvy - Mike Leigh
2000 Yi Yi: A One and a Two - Edward Yang
2001 Mulholland Drive David Lynch
2002 The Pianist - Roman Polanski
2003 American Splendor - Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman
2004 Million Dollar Baby - Clint Eastwood
2005 Capote - Bennett Miller
2006 Pan's Labyrinth - Guillermo del Toro
2007 There Will Be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson
2008 Waltz with Bashir - Ari Folman
2009 The Hurt Locker - Kathryn Bigelow
2010 The Social Network - David Fincher
2011 Melancholia - Lars von Trier
2012 Amour - Michael Haneke

Critics

Criticism of critics is in the air again. It's the usual old arguments rehashed for a new year; What good are critics? etc. Below  is my main issue with the argument that critics are just failed screenwriters / filmmakers / artists. Along with some other thoughts.

1) Critics are artists. They are writers. Writers are artists.
2) The argument that critics are failed screenwriters [etc] ends up making the false assumption that screenwriters are not themselves critical of movies, which is absurd.
3) Everyone is a critic. So even if we somehow got rid of critics many more would pop up. So eliminating them is essentially eliminating people.
4) The more critics that get eliminated [or marginalized] the bigger, stronger or more authoritative the movie marketing machine gets. Do we really want that?
5) Critics love movies. They are drawn to criticism because they find that they have a particular gift for imparting their love of movies to others.
6) The idea that critics are only reviewing to let people know whether they should plop down $12.00 for a movie and therefore if they are critical it is because they want to ruin the experience of the common man is really absurd.
7) There is a difference between critics and reviewers. If you've been around long enough you know the difference.
8) People hate critics when they don't agree with them. People love critics when they agree with them.
9) If someone criticizes the way a bridge is built would it be fair for someone else to say the criticism is invalid unless you are a bridge engineer or an architect?
10) Anyone with a brain will realize that ultimately it all comes down to opinion. Why should opinions really bother us? [I guess some opinions bother me too so voilà].