Glorious Beat-Downs

There are movies that come out that I regret that Roger Ebert didn’t get to see because he would have loved them so much. It saddens me that he never got to see Moonlight or Women Talking. He would have loved Knives Out. Conclave would’ve been the exact kind of religious catty fun he would have adored. With performances he could have praised. And, yeah, I’m sad about that for him. For me, I’m always going to be a little sad that he didn’t see Morbius. That would have been a review for the ages.

It doesn’t take skill to write a mean review. What takes skill is a mean review that is a joy to read. We’re still quoting “Later, they bone” eleven and a half years after Scott Tobias penned those glorious words. And that was the same day as his review in which he called Iñárritu a pretentious fraud. Hell of a week in the Old Country, that. Keith Phipps suggested Catwoman could only be made worse with a Tom Green cameo or with an accident in which the cast caught fire. Tasha Robinson said of the recent Beauty and the Beast remake that “The whole film felt like someone shouting the original script at me as loudly as possible, while wearing a ridiculously loud sweater.”

But you search for funny negative reviews, and Roger is the champ of all time. No one did it better than him. Movies that don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as barrels. Movies that should be cut into ukulele picks and distributed to the poor. Movies that were horrible experiences of unbearable length. Movies he hated hated hated hated hated and movies that suck. When you saw one and a half stars or lower on a Roger Ebert review, you braced yourself for something magnificent.

What’s more, unlike Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert seldom got mean about the people in them. Gene famously doxxed not just studio executives over Friday the Thirteenth but actress Betsy Palmer so people could write cruel things to them. And I’m sure he thought Palmer needed to think more about the roles she took, but it doesn’t take much creativity to think of ways that’s a very bad idea. Contact information, okay, but home addresses, especially for a working actress, is too far.

When you don’t like a movie, you don’t have to be kind. There is nothing saying you have to beat around the bush; sometimes, you can and should beat down and beat hard. You should just go with more than “movie bad! Hate movie!” And, yes, this is the same place people go wrong with riffing. The more clever you are, the better your review, even if the movie itself is simply terrible.