How many movies has roger ebert seen

The heroine of " The Marriage of Maria Braun " does some terrible things, but because we know some of the forces that shaped her, we understand them, and can at least admire her resourcefulness. Of the other movies I love, some are simply about the joy of physical movement. When Gene Kelly splashes through " Singin' in the Rain ," when Judy Garland follows the yellow brick road, when Fred Astaire dances on the ceiling, when John Wayne puts the reins in his teeth and gallops across the mountain meadow, there is a purity and joy that cannot be resisted.

In "Equinox Flower," a Japanese film by the old master Yasujiro Ozu , there is this sequence of shots: A room with a red teapot in the foreground. Another view of the room. The mother folding clothes. A shot down a corridor with a mother crossing it at an angle, and then a daughter crossing at the back.

A reverse shot in a hallway as the arriving father is greeted by the mother and daughter. A shot as the father leaves the frame, then the mother, then the daughter. A shot as the mother and father enter the room, as in the background the daughter picks up the red pot and leaves the frame. This sequence of timed movement and cutting is as perfect as any music ever written, any dance, any poem.

I also enjoy being frightened in the movies, but I am bored by the most common way the movies frighten us, which is by having someone jump unexpectedly into the frame.

The trick is so old a director has to be shameless to use it. Alfred Hitchcock said that if a bunch of guys were playing cards and there was a bomb under the table and it exploded, that was terror, but he'd rather do a scene where there was a bomb under the table and we kept waiting for it to explode but it didn't. That was suspense. It's the kind of suspense I enjoy.

I'm not so sure. I don't much care for movies that get all serious about their love affairs, because I think the actors tend to take it too seriously, and end up silly. I like it better when love simply makes the characters very, very happy, as when Doris Day first falls for Frank Sinatra in "Young at Heart," or when Lili Taylor thinks River Phoenix really likes her in " Dogfight. Most of the greatest directors in the history of the movies were already well known when I started as a critic in There was once a time when young people made it their business to catch up on the best works by the best directors, but the death of film societies and repertory theaters has put an end to that, and for today's younger filmgoers, these are not well-known names: Bunuel, Fellini, Bergman, Ford, Kurosawa, Ray, Renoir, Lean, Bresson, Wilder, Welles.

Most people still know who Hitchcock was, I guess. Of the directors who started making films since I came on the job, the best is Martin Scorsese. His camera is active, not passive.

It doesn't regard events, it participates in them. There is a sequence in "GoodFellas" that follows Henry Hill's last day of freedom, before the cops swoop down. Scorsese uses an accelerating pacing and a paranoid camera that keeps looking around, and makes us feel what Hill feels.

It is easy enough to make an audience feel basic emotions "Play them like a piano," Hitchcock advised , but hard to make them share a state of mind. Scorsese can do it. Which of today's actors will become immortals? Not very many. Nicholson and De Niro, and not many women, because Hollywood no longer has a lifetime of roles for them. Compared to the great movie stars of the past, modern actors are handicapped by the fact that their films are shot in color. In the long run, that will rob most of them of the immortality that was obtained even by second-tier stars of the black-and-white era.

Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are, and will remain, more memorable than most of today's superstars with their multimillion-dollar paychecks. Color is too realistic. It is too distracting. It projects superfluous emotional cues.

It reduces actors to inhabitants of the mere world. Black-and-white or, more accurately, silver-and-white creates a mysterious dream state, a simpler world of form and gesture. Most people do not agree with me. They like color and think a black-and-white film is missing something. Try this. If you have wedding photographs of your parents and grandparents, chances are your parents are in color and your grandparents are in black and white.

Put the two photographs side by side and consider them honestly. Your grandparents look timeless. Your parents look goofy.

The next time you buy film for your camera, buy a roll of black-and-white. Go outside at dusk, when the daylight is diffused. Stand on the side of the house away from the sunset. Shoot some natural-light closeups of a friend.

Have the pictures printed big, at least 5 x 7. While the hero plays a rat, however, the villain Rains becomes an object of sympathy. He does love this woman. He would throw over all of Nazi Germany for her, probably -- if he were not under the spell of his domineering mother, who pulls his strings until they choke him. Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese's " Taxi Driver " was on my list of the ten best films. I think " Raging Bull " addresses some of the same obsessions, and is a deeper and more confident film.

Scorsese used the same actor, Robert De Niro , and the same screenwriter, Paul Schrader , for both films, and they have the same buried themes: A man's jealousy about a woman, made painful by his own impotence, and expressed through violence. Some day if you want to see movie acting as good as any ever put on the screen, look at a scene two-thirds of the way through " Raging Bull.

He is fiddling with a TV set. His wife comes in, says hello, kisses his brother, and goes upstairs. This begins to bother LaMotta. He begins to quiz his brother Joe Pesci. The brother says he don't know nothin'. De Niro says maybe he doesn't know what he knows. The way the dialog expresses the inner twisting logic of his jealousy is insidious. De Niro keeps talking, and Pesci tries to run but can't hide. And step by step, word by word, we witness a man helpless to stop himself from destroying everyone who loves him.

This movie is on the altar of my love for the cinema. It was so sad, so beautiful, so romantic, that it became at once a part of my own memories -- as if it had happened to me. Harry treats her horribly, but she loves her idea of him, he neither he nor Holly can ever change that. Apart from the story, look at the visuals!

The tense conversation on the giant ferris wheel. The giant, looming shadows at night. The carnivorous faces of people seen in the bombed-out streets of postwar Vienna, where the movie was shot on location. The chase through the sewers.

And of course the moment when the cat rubs against a shoe in a doorway, and Orson Welles makes the most dramatic entrance in the history of the cinema. All done to the music of a single zither. I have very particular reasons for including this film, which is the least familiar title on my list but one which I defy anyone to watch without fascination.

No other film I have ever seen does a better job of illustrating the mysterious and haunting way in which the cinema bridges time. The movies themselves play with time, condensing days or years into minutes or hours.

Then going to old movies defies time, because we see and hear people who are now dead, sounding and looking exactly the same. Then the movies toy with our personal time, when we revisit them, by recreating for us precisely the same experience we had before. Then look what Michael Apted does with time in this documentary, which he began more than 30 years ago. He made a movie called "7-Up" for British television.

It was about a group of British 7-year-olds, their dreams, fears, ambitions, families, prospects. Fair enough. Then, seven years later, he made "14 Up," revisiting them.

Then came "21 Up" and, in The miracle of the film is that it shows us that the seeds of the man are indeed in the child. In a sense, the destinies of all of these people can be guessed in their eyes, the first time we see them. Some do better than we expect, some worse, one seems completely bewildered. But the secret and mystery of human personality is there from the first. This ongoing film is an experiment unlike anything else in film history.

Film can take us where we cannot go. It can also take our minds outside their shells, and this film by Stanley Kubrick is one of the great visionary experiences in the cinema. Yes, it was a landmark of special effects, so convincing that years later the astronauts, faced with the reality of outer space, compared it to " An ape uses to learn a bone as a weapon, and this tool, flung into the air, transforms itself into a space ship--the tool that will free us from the bondage of this planet.

And then the spaceship takes man on a voyage into the interior of what may be the mind of another species. Having said that, let's take a look at 10 particularly noteworthy titles — from bonafide classics to fan favorites — and explore why Roger Ebert hated them so. While 's Tommy Boy was never a critical darling, it does have its fair share of loyal and hearty fans. Tommy Boy has played in constant rotation on Comedy Central and it has been quoted consistently since its release in comedy-loving circles, but it didn't earn the affections of Roger Ebert, to say the least.

Here are some choice excerpts from Roger Ebert's dismissive review. Tommy Boy is one of those movies that plays like an explosion down at the screenplay factory. You can almost picture a bewildered office boy, his face smudged with soot, wandering through the ruins and rescuing pages at random. Too bad they didn't mail them to the insurance company instead of filming them. It has only one original idea, and that's a bad one: The inspiration of making the hero's sidekick into, simultaneously, his buddy, his critic and his rival.

It's like the part was written by three writers locked in separate rooms Admittedly, John Waters' cult classic Pink Flamingos isn't a movie for everyone. It's a raunchy, rigorously obscene movie that only grew to find its audience over time. Nevertheless, the Pope of Trash's filthy masterpiece is utterly divine — at least, if you're willing to appreciate its brand of low-rent crass absurdism.

Evidently, that wasn't the case for Roger Ebert. In his review, Ebert claims that Pink Flamingos "appeals to that part of our psyches in which we are horny teenagers at the county fair with fresh dollar bills in our pockets," as well as armed with a strong "desire to see the geek show with a bunch of buddies, so that we can brag about it at school on Monday. John Waters' Pink Flamingos has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won't have to see it again for another 25 years.

If I haven't retired by then, I will I am not giving a star rating to Pink Flamingos, because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object. For some moviegoers, there are few movie twists more surprising than the final moments of 's The Usual Suspects. While the sleeper hit movie hasn't gotten as much notice these days as it did upon release, the two-time Oscar-winning movie is still revered for its bending structure and the way it plays with expectations.

Nevertheless, Roger Ebert wasn't impressed by what he saw, and he admitted as much in his review, noting at one point that he would prefer to be "amazed by motivation, not manipulation. Here's what he wrote. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me.

Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: 'To the degree that I do understand, I don't care. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests. While his movies aren't always accessible, to say the least, David Lynch has proven himself to be one of the boldest, most distinctive, striking, and unpredictable filmmakers in cinema history.

And one of his finest accomplishments remains 's mesmerizing Blue Velvet , which is still one of the director's most haunting and memorable movies. Alas, this is not an opinion shared by Roger Ebert. The late critic famously detested Lynch's movie, believing that Blue Velvet isn't worthy of such a powerful performance from Isabella Rossellini due to its approach to the subject material at hand.

Blue Velvet contains scenes of such raw emotional energy that it's easy to understand why some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece. A film this painful and wounding has to be given special consideration. And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tipoff to what's wrong with the movie. They're so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that is sincere, honest and true.

But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke. In the early 21st century, David Fincher solidified himself as one of the most distinctive and celebrated working directors today. With the cult classic Fight Club , Fincher earned a reputation for making hard-edged cinematic social commentaries that certainly pack a wallop of a punch — in more ways than one, of course.

But that's not how Roger Ebert saw Fincher's fourth film.