Roger Ebert, 1943-2013

From his glossary:

“Fruit Cart!”

An expletive used by knowledgeable film buffs during any chase scene involving a foreign or ethnic locale, reflecting their certainty that a fruit cart will be overturned during the chase, and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street to shake his fist at the hero’s departing vehicle.

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Oh God. I’m not very familiar with his quotes, and that one about Freddy Got Fingered had me laughing so hard.

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 as barrels….

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“We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others.”

Also: “I believe empathy is the most essential quality of civilization.” (I may have paraphrased; don’t have the exact quote in front of me.)

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“This is my happening and it freaks me out!”

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“In one scene, a man has his head split open with a ferocious blow from a sword. On the screen we see his lips opening in an anguished scream. On the soundtrack we hear him say, in English: ‘Oh, no!’ It is possible to respect his opinion while questioning his sincerity.”

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“‘Mad Dog Time’ should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.”

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On Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990):

“This movie is nowhere near as bad as it might have been, and probably is the best possible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie.”

I hope he knew how much he would be missed. RIP.

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“It is quite possible a game could someday be great art.”

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“Farrelly was going for a 21st century version of ‘The Groove Tube’ and ‘Kentucky Fried Movie,’ two very funny, very raunchy and very influential sketch-comedy flicks of the mid-1970s.

The only thing ‘Movie 43’ has in common with those movies is it’s in color.”

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“You don’t find true love. You meet someone and build it from the ground up.”

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“There is a Hollywood law requiring fictional characters in such a situation to fall in love, and the penalty for violating it is death at the box office.”

“… a Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude, that old standby where they walk through the park, eat hot dogs, etc., in a montage about a great day together. I do not remember if they literally walk through the park or eat hot dogs, but if they don’t, then they engage in park-like and hot dog-like activities.”

-“Alex and Emma,” review

“More rounds of ammunition are expended in this film than in any in recent memory, and I have seen The Transporter.”

-“Equilibrium,” review

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Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo makes a living prostituting himself. How much he charges I’m not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only 75 minutes…. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

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It’s a bit of a cheat because he’s quoting Gene Siskel, but it’s still pretty much my favorite pan of any movie ever:

“Little Indian, Big City’ is one of the worst movies ever made. I detested every moronic minute of it. Through a stroke of good luck, the entire third reel of the film was missing the day I saw it. I went back to the screening room two days later, to view the missing reel. It was as bad as the rest, but nothing could have saved this film. As my colleague Gene Siskel observed, ‘If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, this movie still would have sucked.’ I could not have put it better myself.”

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My favorite, from the ’98 Godzilla: “The movie played at Cannes, and was shown at the end of the festival, for much the same reason that the elephants come at the back of the parade.”

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Battlefield: Earth

“The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.”

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A question to the Movie Answer Man from Miguel E. Rodriguez of Tampa, Fla.: “I am an English major, so I’d like to think I’m on top of things when it comes to grammar. When did it become a Rule to capitalize the word ‘Realtor?'”

Ebert’s answer, in part: “‘Realtor’ is a ‘federally registered collective membership mark owned exclusively by the National Association of Realtors,’ and only members can use it. I have decided I am in sympathy with them, since ‘Two Thumbs Up’ is a trademark registered by Gene Siskel and me, and people are ripping it off all the time. Just the other day some Realtor used it in an ad. Now I am thinking of trademarking Reviewor, and can think of other possibilities, such as Lawyor, Singor, and Proctologor.”

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I was fond of his zero-star review of Chaos, but when its director wrote an indignant letter in its defense, Ebert’s response to that letter was magnificent. In closing:

“What I object to most of all in Chaos is not the sadism, the brutality, the torture, the nihilism, but the absence of any alternative to them. If the world has indeed become as evil as you think, then we need the redemptive power of artists, poets, philosophers and theologians more than ever.

“Your answer, that the world is evil and therefore it is your responsibility to reflect it, is no answer at all, but a surrender.”

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The opening to his review of Goodbye Lover, which is unusual, because it’s not because of it’s mind-numbing stupidity, but of its extreme mental strain:

“I’ve just transcribed no less than 11 pages of notes I scribbled during “Goodbye Lover,” and my mind boggles. The plot is so labyrinthine that I’d completely forgotten the serial killer named The Doctor, who murders young women by injecting curare into their veins with a syringe. When a character like The Doctor is an insignificant supporting character, a movie’s plate is a little too full, don’t you think?”

Then there’s the assassin who does everything the hard way in The Jackal (not to be confused with Day of the Jackal)

“The Jackal strikes me as the kind of overachiever who, assigned to kill a mosquito, would purchase contraband insecticides from Iraq and bring them into the United States by hot air balloon, distilling his drinking water from clouds and shooting birds for food.”

Then there’s the opening notes he took for Halloween: H20:

Medical science should study Michael Myers, the monster who has made the last two decades a living hell for Laurie Strode. Here is a man who feels no pain. He can take a licking and keep on slicing. In the latest `Halloween’ movie, he absorbs a blow from an ax, several knife slashes, a rock pounded on the skull, a fall down a steep hillside and being crushed against a tree by a truck. Whatever he’s got, mankind needs it

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I loved his Death to Smoochy review, which he quoted on the clip Jon Stewart aired this week: “It took a lot of supremely talented people to make a movie this bad.”

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“That is why the Greek tragedies were poems: The language ennobled the material.”

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