This collection of movie reviews by film critic Roger Ebert concentrates on the turkeys, the stinkers, and the flops -- as one might expect from the title.
Best taken in small doses, the reviews take unerring aim at miscasting, plot failures, editing disasters, and atrocious performances. It might better have been organized along those lines, rather than simply set up in alphabetical order by title.
Ebert also has a tendency to wander off-topic, at least when reviewing movies he doesn't like. Occasionally he devotes more words to the director's last hit or a better film with a similar plot than he spends on the flick he's supposedly writing about.
Quibbles aside, movie fans will undoubtedly find opinions they agree with as well as those they disagree with. Less avid fans of the cinema will at least have a list of movies to avoid. And pretty well everyone will come away with a favorite quote about badness -- "This movie is eye candy for the blind", or "watching it is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time". My personal favorite was "the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance."
Best taken in small doses, the reviews take unerring aim at miscasting, plot failures, editing disasters, and atrocious performances. It might better have been organized along those lines, rather than simply set up in alphabetical order by title.
Ebert also has a tendency to wander off-topic, at least when reviewing movies he doesn't like. Occasionally he devotes more words to the director's last hit or a better film with a similar plot than he spends on the flick he's supposedly writing about.
Quibbles aside, movie fans will undoubtedly find opinions they agree with as well as those they disagree with. Less avid fans of the cinema will at least have a list of movies to avoid. And pretty well everyone will come away with a favorite quote about badness -- "This movie is eye candy for the blind", or "watching it is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time". My personal favorite was "the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance."
The title references a review Mr. Ebert did of the horrifically bad Rob Schneider film, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. I love reading Mr. Ebert's reviews, mostly because he and I tend to agree about what we don't like with respect to films. I disagree with him on a few things, though: I loved the Transformers trilogy, simply because I knew going in that I was going to watch giant robots and collateral damage. And that's all I wanted to see, really. Plot and characterization were secondary (if Michael Bay considered them at all).
This second book, which follows the amusing "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie" (a title which refers to the woeful 1994 film North)is a collection of Ebert's most scathing reviews of films that didn't live up to anyone's expectations. If the film industry demands that we, the viewers, pony up at least $10 to see a film (add $5 for 3-D) then they should at least give us something good to look at.
This second book, which follows the amusing "I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie" (a title which refers to the woeful 1994 film North)is a collection of Ebert's most scathing reviews of films that didn't live up to anyone's expectations. If the film industry demands that we, the viewers, pony up at least $10 to see a film (add $5 for 3-D) then they should at least give us something good to look at.
