Sublime Hate

Roger Ebert has a list up of the worst movies he's ever seen. But if it is bad movies that pushes Ebert into writing as sublimely as he does below, I for one want more:

1. On Rob Reiner's film "North":

"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.

I hold it as an item of faith that Rob Reiner is a gifted filmmaker; among his credits are "This is Spinal Tap," "The Sure Thing," "The Princess Bride," "Stand by Me," "When Harry Met Sally" and "Misery." I list those titles as an incantation against this one.

"North" is a bad film - one of the worst movies ever made. But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover - possibly sooner than I will." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, July 22, 2004).

2. On "One Woman Or Two":

"Add it all up, and what you've got here is a waste of good electricity. I'm not talking about the electricity between the actors. I'm talking about the current to the projector."

3. On "Mad Dog Time::

"'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 "" is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.... "" should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor."

4. On "The Hot Chick":

"The movie resolutely avoids all the comic possibilities of its situation, and becomes one more dumb high school comedy about sex gags and prom dates.... Through superhuman effort of the will, I did not walk out of "," but reader, I confess I could not sit through the credits. The MPAA rates this PG-13. It is too vulgar for anyone under 13, and too dumb for anyone over 13."

5. On "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo":

"'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."

6. On "B.A.P.S.":

"The movie doesn't work, but was there any way this material could ever have worked? 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."

7. On "Baby Geniuses":

"This is an old idea, beautifully expressed by Wordsworth, who said, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy." If I could quote the whole poem instead of completing this review, believe me, we'd all we happier. But I press on."

8. On "Spice World":

"The Spice Girls are easier to tell apart than the Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that is small consolation: What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names? They occupy "" as if they were watching it: They're so detached they can't even successfully lip-synch their own songs."

9. On "Burn Hollywood Burn":

In taking his name off the film, Arthur Hiller has wisely distanced himself from the disaster, but on the basis of what's on the screen I cannot, frankly, imagine any version of this film that I would want to see. The only way to save this film would be to trim 86 minutes."

10. On "The Waterboy":

"Do I have something visceral against Adam Sandler? I hope not. I try to keep an open mind and approach every movie with high hopes. It would give me enormous satisfaction (and relief) to like him in a movie. But I suggest he is making a tactical error when he creates a character whose manner and voice has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard, and then expects us to hang in there for a whole movie."

11. On "Sour Grapes":

"How to account for the fact that Larry David is one of the creators of "Seinfeld''? Maybe he works well with others. I can't easily remember a film I've enjoyed less. "North,'' a comedy I hated, was at least able to inflame me with dislike. "Sour Grapes'' is a movie that deserves its title: It's puckered, deflated and vinegary. It's a dead zone."

12. On "The Dukes of Hazzard":

"It's a retread of a sitcom that ran from about 1979 to 1985, years during which I was able to find better ways to pass my time. Yes, it is still another TV program I have never ever seen. As this list grows, it provides more and more clues about why I am so smart and cheerful.... Bo and Luke are involved in a mishap that causes their faces to be blackened with soot, and then, wouldn't you know, they drive into an African-American neighborhood, where their car is surrounded by ominous young men who are not amused by blackface, or by the Confederate flag painted on the car. I was hoping maybe the boyz n the hood would carjack the General, which would provide a fresh twist to the story, but no, the scene sinks into the mire of its own despond."

13. On "Tommy Boy":

"'Tommy Boy' is one of those movies that plays like an explosion down at the screenplay factory. You can almost picture a bewildered office boy, his face smudged with soot, wandering through the ruins and rescuing pages at random. Too bad they didn't mail them to the insurance company instead of filming them."

14. On "Freddy Got Fingered":

"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."

15. On "Battlefield Earth":

"Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money, since we can't recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look like they were purchased from the Goodwill store on the planet Tatooine. Travolta can be charming, funny, touching and brave in his best roles; why disguise him as a smelly alien creep? The Psychlos can fly between galaxies, but look at their nails: Their civilization has mastered the hyperdrive but not the manicure."

16. On "The Village":

"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."

17. On "The Skulls":

"'The Skulls' is one of the great howlers, a film that bears comparison, yes, with "The Greek Tycoon" or even "." It's so ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur. It's in a category by itself."

18. On "Flashdance":

"'Flashdance'is like a movie that won a free 90-minute shopping spree in the Hollywood supermarket. The director (Adrian Lynn, of the much better "") and his collaborators race crazily down the aisles, grabbing a piece of "," a slice of "Urban Cowboy," a quart of "Marty" and a 2-pound box of "Archie Bunker's Place." The result is great sound and flashdance, signifying nothing."

19. On "The Green Berets":

"There is an Irishman named Muldoon, a doubting journalist, a Negro, a little refugee kid with a pet dog, a hard-bitten veteran and the rest of the stock characters who fight every war for us. Everybody is there except the Jewish kid from the Bronx and the guy named Ole with a Swedish accent."

20. On "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery":

"Columbus encounters friendly Indians, of which one -- the chief's daughter -- is positioned, bare-breasted, in the center of every composition. (I believe the chief's daughter is chosen by cup size.) Columbus sails back to Europe and the story is over. Another Columbus movie is promised us this fall. It cannot be worse than this. I especially look forward to the chief's daughter."

(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, August 11, 2005).

What Is It Like To Be A Bat?

Via the files of DC Media Girl, some excerpts from Peggy "Magic Dolphins" Noonan on the Elian standoff a few years back:

"From the beginning it was a story marked by the miraculous. It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward; a miracle that a fisherman saw him bobbing in the shark-infested waters and scooped him aboard on the morning of Nov. 25, 1999, the day celebrated in America, the country his mother died bringing him to, as Thanksgiving.

And of course this Saturday, in the darkness, came the nightmare: the battering ram, the gas, the masks, the guns, the threats, the shattered glass and smashed statue of the Blessed Mother, the blanket thrown over the sobbing child’s head as they tore him from the house like a hostage. And the last one in the house to hold him, trying desperately to protect him, was the fisherman who’d saved him from the sea -- which seemed fitting as it was Eastertide, the time that marks the sacrifice and resurrection of the Big Fisherman.

It is interesting that this White House, which feared moving on Iraq during Ramadan, had no fear of moving on Americans during the holiest time of the Christian calendar. The mayor of Miami, Joe Carollo, blurted in shock, “They are atheists. They don’t believe in God.” Well, they certainly don’t believe the fact that it was Easter was prohibitive of the use of force; they thought it a practical time to move. The quaint Catholics of Little Havana would be lulled into a feeling of safety; most of the country would be distracted by family get-togethers and feasts. It was, to the Clinton administration, a sensible time to break down doors.

Which really, once again, tells you a lot about who they are. But then their actions always have a saving obviousness: From Waco to the FBI files to the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory during impeachment to taking money from Chinese agents, through every scandal and corruption, they always tell you who they are by what they do. It’s almost honest.

........

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend. Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred, and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did.Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we’ll find out what really happened.

.......

And some of us, in our sadness, wonder what Ronald Reagan, our last great president, would have done. I think I know. The burden of proof would have been on the communists, not the Americans; he would have sent someone he trusted to the family and found out the facts; seeing the boy had bonded with the cousin he would have negotiated with Mr. Castro to get the father here, and given him whatever he could that would not harm our country. Mr. Reagan would not have dismissed the story of the dolphins as Christian kitsch, but seen it as possible evidence of the reasonable assumption that God’s creatures had been commanded to protect one of God’s children. And most important, the idea that he would fear Mr. Castro, that he would be afraid of a tired old tyrant in faded fatigues, would actually have made him laugh. Mr. Reagan would fear only what kind of country we would be if we took the little boy and threw him over the side, into the rough sea of history. He would have made a statement laying out the facts and ended it, “The boy stays, the dream endures, the American story continues. And if Mr. Castro doesn’t like it, well, I’m afraid that’s really too bad.”

But then he was a man." (Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2000)