The Best of Ebert

On the interwebs I found this blog entry collecting some of Roger Ebert's best and most cutting lines from his movie reviews. And the man can write. A sample:

"Dear God is the kind of movie where you walk out repeating the title."

"That makes Hellbound: Hellraiser II an ideal movie for audiences with little taste and atrophied attention spans who want to glance at the screen occasionally and ascertain that something is still happening up there. If you fit that description, you have probably not read this far, but what the heck, we believe in full-service reviews around here."

"Eventually the secret of Those [in The Village] is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backwards out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets."

"Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica."

"On the first page of my notes [for Exit to Eden], I wrote "Starts slow." On the second page, I wrote "Boring." On the third page, I wrote "Endless!" On the fourth page, I wrote: "Bite-size shredded wheat, skim milk, cantaloupe, frozen peas, toilet paper, salad stuff, pick up laundry."

"The press notes [for Pootie Tang] say it comes 'from the comedy laboratory of HBO's Emmy Award-winning Chris Rock Show.'' It's like one of those lab experiments where the room smells like swamp gas and all the mice are dead."

And the best one:

"I didn't feel like a viewer during Frozen Assets. I felt like an eyewitness at a disaster. If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is being shown, and leading the audience to safety."

It must be nice to know your review is often more entertaining than the movie itself. There are several dozen more, so take fifteen minutes out of your life and click through. The whole thing is certainly worth a read.