Friends of Ebert: Weekend

It is safe to say that any aspiring critic in his or her day writes with Roger Ebert’s style lingering in their head. In retrospect, there are few things we can say about the life and work of Ebert, as he most certainly could have said them better himself. Ebert is always right, but here, we will let the man speak for himself:

“Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen” (2009)

EBERT “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. 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.”
WEEKEND “Michael Bay, you win. Your second ‘Transformers’ film might be the best film ever made. Seriously, people like to think you just enjoy blowing up everything in sight, forgetting about plot structure and featuring as much gratuitous people-walking-away-from-explosions-in-slow-motion shots as possible. And those people are right. But what they don’t see is what makes you a true artist. Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg might get the word ‘great’ attached to their names, but only because we haven’t come up with a word to describe your talents.”

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (2003)

EBERT “The new version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it. Those who defend it will have to dance through mental hoops of their own devising, defining its meanness and despair as ‘style’ or ‘vision’ or ‘a commentary on our world.’ It is not a commentary on anything, except the marriage of slick technology with the materials of a geek show.”

WEEKEND “The cinematography is astounding ... one of the most beautiful looking horror flicks ever — yes, I mean beautiful ... The way colors reduce to sepia and how light dramatically pours through the forest canopy and cracks in the dank, rotting slaughterhouse paints an eerily breathtaking aesthetic ... What places this flick above others in its genre are the characters and tone. Instead of rooting for the kids’ demise, you genuinely care and long for their escape. There is none of the self-reflexive teen-comedy camp prevalent in today’s ‘horror’ films. This is balls-to-the-wall terror.”

“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1” (2011)

EBERT “The Twilight movies have devoted three episodes to Bella Swan’s clinging to her virginity despite the compelling appeal of Edward Cullen...What happened? We have no idea. The movie doesn’t show us! Yes, the most eagerly awaited deflowering in recent movie history takes place entirely off-screen. That something momentous took place is indicated 14 days after the wedding ceremony, when Bella (Kristen Stewart) urps in the morning and discovers she is pregnant. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) may have been dead for more than a century, but he’s still producing industrial-strength sperm. Can humans and vampires mate? What’s the blood chemistry on that? What will be in the wee one’s bottle? Milk, or the unthinkable?”

WEEKEND “The most interesting part of the movie for me was the wolves. Jacob Black’s pack splits because of the half-vampire baby, which means we got some great shots of giant dogs growling at each other and skulking around in the woods. The movie added more drama to the encounters than the book had, but it was worth it. The scary shot of a huge wolf silently backing into the dark forest was great.

The one thing this didn’t lack (besides drama and long looks) was great imagery. The colors are vibrant, the scenes beautiful. I really enjoyed the dramatic shift during the course of the movie.”

We agreed on:

“The Spirit” (2008)

EBERT “The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material. The movie is all style — style without substance, style whirling in a senseless void. The film’s hero is an ex-cop reincarnated as an immortal enforcer; for all the personality he exhibits, we would welcome Elmer Fudd.”

WEEKEND “Though he succeeded with the black-and-white-that’s-really-just-greenscreen approach with ‘Sin City’ under Robert Rodriguez’s tutelage, Frank Miller’s ‘The Spirit’ was over-the-top awful in every conceivable way. No one should ever let Frank Miller direct a film again. Ever.”

“The Last Airbender” (2010)

EBERT “The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.”

WEEKEND “Shyamalan clearly hasn’t the first clue about how to pace a movie outside of the horror genre. The film’s breakneck pace mangles a confusing plot and forgoes any development that would attach the audience to the characters. Scenes will often change mid-conversation, and on-screen action is inexplicably substituted with unnecessary narration.”