Roger Ebert Died

Because we didn't manage to get through the whole thing? In fact, it was a fairly soul-destroying experience, because most of the films he gave zero stars received them because they feature violence, often sexual, without artistic justification. We went off this list here. So we watched 10 To Midnight, thought it was indeed, awful, and then realized following the whole thing would entail watching lots of nasty exploitation schlock and/or racist propaganda, and decided, with mutual consent, after getting to I Spit On Your Grave (first version) to only watch the ones we "liked" the sound of, such as Jaws The Revenge.

It was also pretty hard to get hold of a lot of them.

edited 30th May '13 10:11:26 AM by Achaemenid

I don't see how that's the movie's fault.

Critcizing a film for being "morally reprehensible" doesn't resonate with me, because films don't have to conform to the sensibilities of their viewers. Ebert was entitled to his opinion, and I can even see where he was coming from to a point, but the way he expressed his views rubbed me the wrong way.

edited 30th May '13 10:32:53 AM by Robotnik

Ah, got it then. Whoa, never realized he gave that many movies zero stars.

It isn't, technically speaking. For instance, I imagine if he went to see, say, The Pianist, and a neo-Nazi audience member cheered the scenes of the Jews being "evacuated", he'd forgive it, because that wasn't a particularly predictable reaction, nor one that the film, explicitly or implicitly, aimed for. But ISOYG's luridness in depicting rape and gore, coupled with it's complete lack of artistic care, would seem to suggest that the filmmakers cared only about flaunting violence in the hope that the audience would be thrilled by it.

Alternatively, Ebert could argue that his reviews are critiques of his experience of a film and not the film in its isolation, though I would consider that somewhat unjust.

edited 30th May '13 2:23:54 PM by Achaemenid

Context is everything. The seventies were a macabre period in pop culture, even moreso than today, typified by the infamous Hustler cover (here). What began as 'free love' had devolved into the basic male power fantasy. Ebert had every reason to interpret IPOYG as another cash-in on exploitation and gore, especially since there was already a whole audience of mouth-breathers who regularly attended those things.

(edit: And yes, I did accidentally abbreviate it as I Pee On Your Grave. Imma leave that in.)

edited 30th May '13 1:08:48 PM by johnnyfog

And something tells me that's not all of them.

edited 30th May '13 3:59:31 PM by LordCrayak

I will probably take this to the Writer's Block forum next, but for now I will place it here:

A contest by Chaz Ebert: Finish Roger's Science-Fiction Story!

His hometown Urbana will be building a statue of him. Sit with him and argue about the best and worst movies!

That's nice.

So an Indiegogo campaign is going on to create a documentary about Ebert's life. It's going to be played at Sundance and they have 2/3rds of their budget so far and they've added an interesting new incentive: whoever refers the most contributors becomes a "film critic for a day" and gets their review posted in the Chicago Sun-Times. Pretty cool, I think.

Apologies if this sounds like an advertisement, but I felt it was posting about this.

"Roger was always an early adapter of technology, but he resisted going on Twitter or Facebook for some reason, I don't know why. So I kept after him. 'Roger you must join Twitter, you should!' And he said, 'No! Twitter is for twits. I'm a real writer, I can't be limited to 140 characters.' And of course once he joined Twitter he became the king of Twitter. He used to tweet like a teenager. Then he'd look to see how many followers he had, it was 10,000 and then 20,000. Around the time he got up to 800,000 he was like, 'Wow this is OK!' Later he did say that if he didn't have social media and his blogs as an outlet when he lost his physical voice, he probably would have died insane. Because he had all of these ideas churning around. And Roger not only wanted to express his ides, he was a communicator, and it was important to him that there be a two way communication. He didn't want to just send something out one way. He really liked giving things back for people. So I just really thank anyone who ever really communicated with him. "