A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck
Roger Ebert
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1449410251
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
More scathing than a thumbs down, more inflamed than burning film in an overheated projector—such are the reviews that Roger Ebert has penned about bad movies. Collected here are more than 200 of his most biting, sarcastic, and funny critiques, selected from those unlucky movies that garnered a rating of a mere two stars or fewer.
Roger Ebert's I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie and Your Movie Sucks, which gathered some of his most scathing reviews, were best-sellers. This new collection continues the tradition, reviewing not only movies that were at the bottom of the barrel, but also movies that he found underneath the barrel.
A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length collects more than 200 of his reviews since 2006 in which he gave movies two stars or fewer. Known for his fair-minded and well-written film reviews, Roger is at his razor-sharp humorous best when skewering bad movies. Consider this opener for the one-star Your Highness:
"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. That this is the work of David Gordon Green beggars the imagination. One of its heroes wears the penis of a minotaur on a string around his neck. I hate it when that happens."
And finally, the inspiration for the title of this book, the one-star Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a doglike robot humping the leg of the heroine. If you want to save yourself the ticket price go, 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."
Movie buffs and humor lovers alike will relish this treasury of movies so bad that you may just want to see them for a good laugh!
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example might be “The Siege of Synecdoche, April 1, AD 1239.” Anyway, there’s a slew of them. Crusaders in armor do battle with fierce desert tribesmen under the blazing sun. Heads are lopped off and roll across the plain. Horses whinny, women scream, children flee, warriors are disemboweled, limbs are severed, dogs would bark if there were dogs. The horror! After about a dozen years of this, we pause for a discussion between the two hero Crusaders, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron
film so much as a toy tie-in. Children holding a Transformer toy in their hand can invest it with wonder and magic, imagining it doing brave deeds and remaining always their friend. I knew a little boy once who lost his blue toy truck at the movies and cried as if his heart would break. Such a child might regard Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with fear and dismay. The human actors are in a witless sitcom part of the time, and a lot of the rest of their time is spent running in slo-mo away
We hear about Sudan all the time. There is little ambiguity there. A warlord named Joseph Kony runs something called the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has murdered hundreds of thousands, burned villages, and kidnapped as many as fifty thousand children, forcing the boys to become soldiers and making the girls sex slaves. He is an evil man, and while we’re occupied in trying to bomb Gadhafi, we might profitably drop a few on him. In Pennsylvania, we meet Childers (Gerard Butler), who with his
The third does not. That is the movie’s tragic low point. Mr. Popper seems more distressed than the parents, or perhaps Carrey is the better actor. My Life in Ruins 1/2 (DIRECTED BY DONALD PETRIE; STARRING NIA VARDALOS, RICHARD DREYFUSS; 2009) Nia Vardalos plays most of My Life in Ruins with a fixed toothpaste smile, which is no wonder because her acting in the film feels uncomfortably close to her posing for a portrait. Rarely has a film centered on a character so superficial and
forget Bubba Ho-Tep. In fact, start with them before My Name Is Bruce, which is low midrange in the Master’s ouvre. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (DIRECTED BY RAWSON MARSHALL THURBER; STARRING JON FOSTER, PETER SARSGAARD; 2009) After that summer, nothing would ever be the same again. Where have we seen that movie before? Most recently in Adventureland, another movie set in 1980s Pittsburgh. If you think about it, after every summer nothing will ever be the same again. But The Mysteries of