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Friday, July 4, 2014

Friday's Top 5... Roger Ebert's Reviews of Bad Movies

In honor of the Roger Ebert documentary Life Itself, which opens in limited release today.


#5: Breaking the Rules (1992)

"A movie about a guy who finds out he has a month to live, and decides to spend it in the worst buddy movie ever made... It is a long, painful lapse of taste, tone, and ordinary human feeling. Perhaps it was made by beings from another planet, who were able to watch our television in order to absorb key concepts such as cars, sex, leukemia and casinos, but formed an imperfect view of how to fit them together."Full Review



#4: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

"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."Full Review


#3: The Last Airbender (2011)

"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... You know something is wrong when the screen is filled with flames that have the vibrancy of faded Polaroids. It's a known fact that 3D causes a measurable decrease in perceived brightness, but "Airbender" looks like it was filmed with a dirty sheet over the lens." Full Review


#2: Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005)

"Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo"... As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks." Full Review


#1: North (1994)

"There is an idiocy here that seems almost intentional, as if the filmmakers plotted to leave anything of interest or entertainment value out of these episodes...[I h]ated 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." Full Review

2 comments:

thevoid99 said...

Ebert's North review is probably the greatest film review ever. All of that hate spewed into a review and indicated why it is such an awful film. I wish I had my money back for seeing that back in the theaters. I didn't like it and I wondered why I'm forced to see this at a time when Speed was in the theaters.

Norma Desmond said...

It was pretty hard to decide on the #1 - Ebert could really get on a roll when he didn't like a movie and his zero/1 star reviews are some of the funniest things I've ever read.