One of the greatest leads ever

Great read, but honestly can't say anything Ebert has ever written has given me goosebumps.

When SF said it gave him goosebumps, that nearly gave me goosebumps. Almost, but not.

 

I hadn't read that one.

I'll still go with Ebert's Transformers review, because it's going to be hard to top "cue up a male choir singing the music of hell".

 

fantastic ending:

But 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" while passing on the opportunity to participate in "Million Dollar Baby," "Ray," "The Aviator," "Sideways" and "Finding Neverland." 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.

 

No goosebumps, but great stuff.
Best line is the ending: "It’s certainly the biggest something of all time."

 

Hmmm....

 

I enjoyed Ebert's takedown as well but when it comes to the evisceration of films, it's hard to top Mr. Anthony Lane. Here's an excerpt from his review of the last of those craptacular "new" Star Wars films:

>>>>
The general opinion of "Revenge of the Sith" seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones." True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor's accent. "Another happy landing"-or, to be precise, "anothah heppy lending"-he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in "Gremlins" when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink-squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. "Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose," he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you'd leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we're here, what's with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. "I hope right you are." Break me a fucking give.

 

I'm having a great time on review nastiness today.

 

SF: A great example of taste spliced with common sense.

 

Three people I know who took their kids all the said the same thing: total waste of a movie ticket.

 

Ebert's having a flat-out great writing week.

This is one of the best pieces I've seen on Jackson in the past 18 hours:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090625/PEOPLE/906259982

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0740763660?tag=rogerebcom-20&linkCode=as2

Roger Ebert's book, "Your Movie Sucks."

 

That's a pretty nice summation line there.