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Roger Ebert: 528 quotes2 likes

“I began to realize that I had tended to avoid some people because of my instant conclusions about who they were and what they would have to say. I discovered that everyone, speaking honestly and openly, had important things to tell me.”

Roger Ebert

“There are no guarantees. But there is also nothing to fear. We come from oblivion when we are born. We return to oblivion when we die. The astonishing thing is this period of in-between.”

Roger Ebert

“I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/seven-days-in-utopia-2011 of Seven Days in Utopia (31 August 2011) Reviews, One-star reviews

“We can laugh at comedies like this for two reasons: Because we feel superior to the characters, or because we pity or like them. I do not much like laughing down at people, which is why the comedies of Adam Sandler make me squirmy (most people, I know, laugh because they like him). In the case of Napoleon Dynamite, I certainly don't like him, but then the movie makes no attempt to make him likable. Truth is, it doesn't even try to be a comedy. It tells his story and we are supposed to laugh because we find humor the movie pretends it doesn't know about.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/napoleon-dynamite-2004 of Napoleon Dynamite (18 June 2004) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

“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… The movie has been signed by Michael Bay. This is the same man who directed The Rock in 1996. Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Faust made a better deal.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-revenge-of-the-fallen-2009 of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (23 June 2009) Reviews, One-star reviews

“Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/godzilla-1998 of Godzilla (26 May 1998) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

“It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/snake-eyes-1998 of Snake Eyes (7 August 1998) Reviews, One-star reviews

“This is a painful movie to watch. But it is also exhilarating, as all good movies are, because we are watching the director and actors venturing beyond any conventional idea of what a modern movie can be about. Here there is no plot, no characters to identify with, no hope. But there is care: The filmmakers care enough about these people to observe them very closely, to note how they look and sound and what they feel.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/naked-1994 of Naked (18 February 1994) Reviews, Four star reviews

“Your Highness is a juvenile excrescence that feels like the work of 11-year-old boys in love with dungeons, dragons, warrior women, pot, boobs and four-letter words. One of the heroes even wears the penis of a minotaur on a string around his neck. I hate it when that happens.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/your-highness-2011 of Your Highness (April 6, 2011) Reviews, One-star reviews

“This film is based on an actual 2004 event that took place at a McDonald's in Mount Washington, Ky. Google it and you'll find most of the same details. If you're not one of the film's walk-outs, you'll discover at the end that 70 similar deceptions have occurred in the United States… If the stunt worked 70 times, they must prove something — perhaps that we are afraid of authority. I know that when a traffic cop pulls me over, I'm frightened — scared enough that I drive safely and am almost never pulled over.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/compliance-2012 of Compliance (29 August 2012) Reviews, Three star reviews

“There are few lonelier sights than a good comedian being funny in a movie that doesn't know what funny is.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/wedding-crashers-2005 of Wedding Crashers (14 July 2005) Reviews, Two star reviews

“One of the remarkable things about Russ Meyer's films is that they continue to live and play, long after the other work of the soft-core era has been forgotten. That is partly because of their craftsmanship, partly because of Meyer's leading ladies, and partly because of a spirit of paramilitary commitment that can be sensed as the cast and crew struggle through rugged terrain to enact their rural melodramas. But the central reason, I believe, is that Meyer is an auteur whose every frame reflects his own obsessions. Like all serious artists, he doesn't allow any space between his work and his dream.”

Roger Ebert

"Russ Meyer busts sleazy stereotype" Chicago Sun-Times (15 November 1985) http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/russ-meyer-busts-sleazy-stereotype

“I missed the enormously popular movie that introduced these characters, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and felt myself blessed at the time. But now I'm not so sure. Their Bogus Journey is a riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones. It's the kind of movie where you start out snickering in spite of yourself, and end up actually admiring the originality that went into creating this hallucinatory slapstick.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/bill-and-teds-bogus-journey of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (19 July 1991) Reviews, Three star reviews

“When I think about the kinds of movies that make me cry, that make tears come to my eyes, I usually don't think about sad films. Sad films, I sort of just look at it. It's movies that are about selflessness, that are about sacrifice, about humans that believe in the good of the human race that sometimes move me.”

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert's DVD commentary for Casablanca

“Censors feel they are safe from objectionable material but must protect others who are not as smart or moral. The same impulse tempts the reviewer of 'The Believer'… If the wrong people get the wrong message - well, there has never been any shortage of wrong messages. Or wrong people.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-believer-2002 of The Believer (14 June 2002) Reviews, Three star reviews

“After seeing Orphan, I now realize that Damien of The Omen was a model child. The Demon Seed was a bumper crop. Rosemary would have been happy to have this baby.
Do not, under any circumstances, take children to see it. Take my word on this.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/orphan-2009 of Orphan (22 July 2009) Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews

“Why bother to remake Fame if you don't have clue about why the 1980 movie was special? Why take a touching experience and make it into a shallow exercise? Why begin with a R-rated look at plausible kids with real problems and tame it into a PG-rated after-school special? Why cast actors who are sometimes too old and experienced to play seniors, let alone freshmen?”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fame-2009 of Fame (23 Sep 2009) Reviews, Two star reviews

“The beautiful Monique insists on joining their expedition and cannot be dissuaded; we think at first she has a nefarious motive, but no, she's probably taken a class in screenplay construction and knows that the film requires a sexy female lead. This could be the first case in cinematic history of a character voluntarily entering a movie because of the objective fact that she is required.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/around-the-world-in-80-days-2004 of Around the World in 80 Days (16 June 2004) Reviews, Three star reviews

“Pearl Harbor is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pearl-harbor-2001 of Pearl Harbor (25 May 2001) Reviews, One-and-a-half star reviews

“Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.”

Roger Ebert

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/freeway-1997 of Freeway (24 January 1997) Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews