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Creator / Roger Ebert

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/roger_ebert_portrait.jpeg
Mr. Ebert, seen deliberating as to whether his thumb should go up or down.

"As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks."
— Roger Ebert on Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, a movie on his most hated film list.

The First Troper.

Roger Joseph Ebert (June 18, 1942 – April 4, 2013) was a film critic who in his later life was probably the most famous film critic in the United States. He was the reviewer-in-chief at the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013.

Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, Ebert began his writing career as a teen, both as a sportswriter for the local newspaper, and as the proprietor of his own self-published Science Fiction fanzine. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in English from the nearby University of Illinois, he harbored ambitions of becoming a professor and maybe a novelist, before taking the job with the Sun-Times (ostensibly to help pay for graduate school, but he ended up dropping out). His informal reviewing style (in which he frankly discussed his personal reactions to film) and wide-ranging knowledge of film made him a fast-rising star in the world of film reviewing. He even made a jump to television, hosting The World of Ingmar Bergman, a weekly presentation of the legendary director's films airing on Chicago PBS station WTTW in 1973. Ebert became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1975.

That same year, Ebert went back to WTTW, where he paired up with Gene Siskel, reviewer in chief at the Chicago Tribune, to present a film review program called Opening Soon...at a Theater Near You, the great-grandfather of the Video Review Show. The program went to the full PBS network as Sneak Previews in 1978, and in 1982 the duo moved to syndication on commercial stations across America, with a new but very similar program called At the Movies with Siskel & Ebert (or vice versa), or Siskel & Ebert as it was commonly known. Unexpectedly, this made Ebert one of the two most important movie critics in America. Because the show was televised, many more Americans saw it than read the reviews in the newspapers; because Ebert and Siskel had credentials in real newspapers in a major city first, and didn't review every movie favorably, they could be taken more seriously than most other movie reviewers on television. Films that received their signature "Two Thumbs Up" review (indicating that both of them had liked it) got a reliable boost at the box office.

Siskel and Ebert's passive-aggressive chemistry was the stuff of legend. It was often thought, due to their occasionally hostile on-screen presence when they disagreed, that the two hated each other in Real Life. However, while this was initially true when their collaboration started out, each man eventually regarded the other as a close friend, even if their professional relationship remained inherently a competitive one. In 2009, on the tenth anniversary of Siskel's death, Ebert posted a touching remembrance of his friend on his blog.

When Siskel died in 1999, Ebert kept on the show with guest hosts until it was settled that it would be At the Movies with Ebert and Roeper, with Richard Roeper, another Sun-Times critic. This made him the most important living movie critic in America. The show ended in 2008 partially because his throat cancer (which he had first been diagnosed with in 2002) was preventing him from doing most of the episodes for over a year and a half (to do film reviews on television, you obviously have to be able to speak). Sadly, due to a few surgeries that successfully eradicated his cancer, Ebert lost the ability to speak entirely and part of his lower jaw was removed. During the last few years of his life, he "spoke" through handwritten notes and a computer speech program. In 2010, a Scottish company created a voice similar to Ebert's own for him to use as his new "voice," using his DVD commentaries and recordings from his TV appearances.

In 2011, to replace the new At the Movies which had been canceled by its distributor, Ebert and his wife Chaz started their own movie review show on PBS called Ebert Presents at the Movies hosted by Christy Lemire of the Associated Press and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of Mubi, which follows largely the same format as Ebert's other shows. Ebert himself appeared in a segment on the show called "Roger's Office" which features voice over narration (either with the help of either his new "voice," or a famous friend such as Werner Herzog or Bill Kurtis) of one of his recent reviews or musings. Ebert still wrote weekly review columns as well as a daily blog and maintained a very active Twitter account, where he was still an influential force in movie criticism's new dominant medium. His last cancer "treatments" had been such tough going through that he vowed that if the cancer re-emerged, he would let it take its course; this eventually transpired in 2013. His website continues to publish reviews, now written by a team of reviewers.

Ebert loved movies, and this was shown in his reviews. He was a fairly lenient criticnote  who liked a range of genres and was primarily concerned with whether or not a film was made with passion and craft. To him, even a "bad" movie was worthy of praise if those involved were sincere in their intent. Those who cynically ticked the necessary boxes earned his scorn, doubly so if they did a bad job ticking those boxes. He also tended to rate films compared to others of their genre, not "overall"; Superman, for example, was pretty much the best superhero film going, but it was not on the same level as, for example, The Godfather. Any subsequent superhero film would, at some level, be compared to Superman, and so on.

His wrath, when deployed, was the stuff of legend. He published three compilations of bad reviews: I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie! (reviews published in 1999 and earlier), Your Movie Sucks (reviews published from 2000-2006) and A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length (reviews published from 2006-2011). He printed annual compilations of his movie reviews from The '80s onward, and wrote three books of essays about his favorite movies entitled The Great Movies. These essays are also available on his website in a condensed form. He also wrote Ebert's Glossary of Movie Terms, Ebert's Little Movie Glossary and Ebert's Bigger Little Movie Glossary, which are books of Film Tropes in The Devil's Dictionary form. (An even bigger movie glossary is on his web page.) They could be considered a proto-TV Tropes in a sense (and the Trope Namer for many)note .

He also maintained a column called The Movie Answer-Man, where he addressed various topics given to him by reader comments. Sometimes addressing fandom aspects like...

Ebert was one of the great proponents of film preservation, letterboxing (back when most televisions were square and most movies in theaters weren't) and giving credit to directors and screenwriters; he probably helped make these issues important. He was also a proponent of seeing films in theaters, but he accepted modern viewing habits enough to write DVD reviews. He did a few audio commentaries — notably ones for two of his all-time favorite films, Citizen Kane and Dark City, which have appeared on most releases of those films on DVD. He was also a master at uncovering the Freeze-Frame Bonus — for years, he would spend a week at the University of Colorado's World Affairs Conference dissecting a film frame-by-frame with an audience's help to reveal small details.

He was one of the major opponents to colorization. He often liked Deliberately Monochrome films, and ones that were monochrome because of when they were made, because of the light and shadow effects. Ebert also protested censorship in the name of Avoid the Dreaded G Rating or avoiding the dreaded X/NC-17 rating. He advocated for years for a properly trademarked A rating to replace X since that sounds more respectable, and basically called out the MPAA for trying to enforce American morality from behind the veneer of arbitrary letterings (he'd hoped NC-17 would become a respectable alternative, and was disappointed when it didn't, thanks in no small part to the failure of Showgirls). In the last few years of his life, he was critical of what he saw as an overuse of 3D technology in movies, though this was more because of how dim he felt the picture ended up in that format than because of the "gimmickiness" of it.

He was also the screenwriter for a Cult Classic film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Since that film was released in 1970, this hasn't affected his stature as a critic much. He made fun of it himself, but said he was proud of it regardless.

He gained a bit of flak from the gamer community when he declared video games not to be an art form, but he eventually came around and at least decided he's not in a position to judge them (although, despite popular opinion to the contrary, he had been known to play them). Despite that episode, he was considered as the most One of Us of major critics, as he admired Japanese animated film and had an incredible knowledge of science fiction, which was among his favorite genres. While he claimed ignorance to a lot of TV shows due to his heavy schedule of writing and watching films, he found time to become a fan of the WWE (having found a fascination with wrestling after viewing Beyond the Mat), South Park, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. (During their 1979 review of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Siskel suggested that he might not have cared about the characters since he wasn't a fan of the show. Ebert said that he was a fan and he didn't care about them as presented in this film.) Heck, he even gave The Nostalgia Critic his due after seeing his tribute video to Siskel and him via a Twitter message (Nostalgia Critic creator Doug Walker was so thrilled, he printed and framed it◊). Ebert also had a fondness of other film analysis and criticism, such as Tim Dirk's Filmsite.org (which Ebert frequently quoted) and RedLetterMedia; of the Revenge of the Sith review, Ebert stated: "I was pretty much sure I didn't have it with me to endure another review of [Revenge of the Sith.] Mr. Plinkett demonstrates to me that I was mistaken." This is especially interesting considering that said review criticized critics, specifically naming Ebert, who gave a free pass to George Lucas based on prior successes and not his recent output of work.

All his reviews are available on his website. The website of his 2011 show can be found here and there's an archive of the old Siskel & Ebert episodes here. His own life was brought to the screen in the 2014 documentary Life Itself.

Ebert's final public statement, in a blog post titled "A leave of presence," was: "I'll see you at the movies." Thumbs up.

Trope Namer for:

    Best films of the year 
Ebert compiled "best of the year" movie lists beginning in 1967 until 2012, thereby helping provide an overview of his critical preferences. His top choices were:

"I hated hated hated hated hated these tropes":

  • Actually Pretty Funny: Several instances. Ebert wasn't afraid to note when what he considered an otherwise poor comedy managed to come out with a really funny joke.
    • He wasn't the biggest fan of Dumb and Dumber, but he admitted to laughing hard at the dead parakeet gag.
    • He really didn't like Weekend at Bernie's, but thought the dead body being considered "Never better!" by his (unaware) girlfriend was really funny, mostly because the audience didn't really know what happened.
  • Animation Age Ghetto:invoked Highly disliked it. From his review of Ratatouille:
    Ebert: This is clearly one of the year's best films. Every time an animated film is successful, you have to read all over again about how animation isn't 'just for children' but 'for the whole family,' and 'even for adults going on their own.' No kidding!
    • On the other hand, his reviews of some animated films such as An American Tail and Bambi complained that some of the themes could be too dark and depressing for children. (Then again, considering how heavily said films were marketed to kids, this isn't always an invalid concern.)
  • Author Appeal: He began his review of Mr. Magoo by mentioning that the titular character drives a red Studebaker, going on to explain that he mentioned this because he loved Studebakers and this was the only thing he liked about the film.
    • Part of his positive reception to films like Angus and Rookie of the Year was that they were kid/teen films where the young heroes who got the victory spoils were like him: nerdy, unpopular, and unathletic, but good-natured enough to succeed despite that.
  • Bait-and-Switch Comment: The opening to his Great Movies review of Star Wars: A New Hope:
    It's as goofy as a children's tale, as shallow as an old Saturday afternoon serial, as corny as Kansas in August—and a masterpiece.
  • Berserk Button:
    • Movies that were exploitative, racist, or trying too hard to be "hip" tended to ignite his rage the most.
    • As a lapsed Catholic himself, Ebert hated when the movies got Catholicism wrong, and was particularly snarky to schlocky religious horror like End of Days or Constantine.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: Ebert was considered pretty generous with his star ratings, and kinder on films than most critics. However, when he really hated a movie, his negative reviews were legendary.
  • Big Fun: Was often mocked for being overweight, but had an ever-present wit and could frequently be seen smiling and joking in his show.
  • Broke the Rating Scale:
    • Ebert occasionally gave out zero-star ratings. These differed from his occasional "no-star rating" ratings in that to earn zero stars, a movie had to be (1) bad and (2) offend his moral sensibilities in some way, while a no-star rating means that the film is bizarre in some way such that he feels he can't properly assess the quality of the film. This is why The Human Centipede II got zero stars (as opposed to the first movie, which got no rating) and why the original version of Death Race got zero stars vs. the remake's half-star even though Ebert admitted that he felt the former was more competently made.
    • He sometimes didn't give a rating at all.
      • From his review of Pink Flamingos:
        Ebert: Note: 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.
      • In his review of The Human Centipede, he was more explicit in his refusal:
        Ebert: I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.
  • Catchphrase: "See you at the movies." These were also his sign-off words for his last essay.
  • Caustic Critic: While he certainly didn't hate everything, and was more than ready to give praise to films when he felt they deserved it, he also didn't hold back his disdain, either.
  • Cool Old Guy: Took on this role in the Roeper years, due to the age gap between Roger and Richard. It was played for laughs as well, such as when Ebert claimed to be more in touch with younger viewers during his review of Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.
  • Comically Missing the Point: Ebert frequently referenced a reader who once wrote him that he enjoyed The Third Man, except for the zither music, apparently missing the film's deliberate Soundtrack Dissonance.
  • Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: On occasion, he goofed some significant details in his reviews (usually due to taking notes while watching films, or lack of notes when trying to recall a movie when writing a review). A couple of notable instances:
    • His review of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which he mistakenly believed to be an Immediate Sequel to Halloween II and confused the assassin who immolates himself in the film’s opening for Michael Myersnote .
    • Roger found the practice vault in Ocean's Eleven to be wildly superfluous and wondered why it had to be an exact replica; it's because the "practice" vault was also used to stage a fake robbery to fool the mark via Camera Spoofing, maybe the most vital part of the whole con.
    • When giving a synopsis of Rookie of the Year, he mentions Henry going to the fateful Cubs game with his dad. Henry went with just his friends and his mom got him the ticket; Henry's Disappeared Dad is the biggest part of his personal backstory.
    • He wondered in his review of The Dark Knight Rises where Bane had the financial resources to pull off his coup of Gotham; while it's mentioned rather quickly, it is revealed Bane was bankrolled by John Daggett under the pretense of taking over Wayne Enterprises.
    • In his The Twilight Samurai review, Ebert notes that the movie takes place in the same period as The Last Samurai and Seven Samurai, during the Mejii Restoration (19th century). Seven Samurai takes place in the 16th century.
    • In his review of Part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he wrote that Dumbledore had more important things on his mind than evacuating the students of Hogwarts before the impending final battle. Dumbledore died in the previous film.
    • He was on the receiving end of this once: a mother wrote in to tell him how her daughter was upset at his negative review of one of the Twilight movies, and she comforted her by telling her that Ebert also panned Star Wars when it was new, saying it would bomb. Ebert's response was to awesomely and politely direct the irate mother to his glowing 1977 review of A New Hope, which was easily found on his website the entire time.
    • In one of his Movie Answer Man columns, answering a question about the earliest use of an F-bomb in a film, he wrongly claimed that there were two cases of a Precision F-Strike in The Pre-Code Era: Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid calling the villain "the dirty fuck" in Bosko's Picture Show (it sounds more like "the dirty fock", and possibly might've been "fox" with the final consonant unintentionally chopped off) and Miriam Hopkins as Gilda Farrell in Design for Living denouncing the "whole fuckin' Egelbauers!" (it's clearly "flock of Egelbauers" when you listen closely, but Hopkins says it fast and it does kind of sound like she's cursing if you're not paying full attention).
  • Critic Breakdown: Ebert didn't often lose his temper at a film, but when he did, the results were legendary, as most famously seen in his zero-star pan of North:
    I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
  • Deadpan Snarker: His sarcasm could be particularly sharp.
  • Died During Production: Ebert had mentioned that he was working on a "Great Movies" review for The Sacrifice, but passed away before he could finish it.
    • Similarly, his review of ''Rust And Bone" before the end of his life was implied to be a candidate for Great Movies, but he never formally added it likely due to his death.
  • Dissimile: "Charlie's Angels (2000) is like the trailer for a video game movie, lacking only the video game, and the movie."
  • Empty Chair Memorial: Films are screened for Chicago-area film critics in a small theater, the Lake Street Screening Room. When Ebert died, flowers were placed on his usual chair in the theater, and nobody has sat there since.
  • Four-Point Scale: Following the Sun-Times editorial policy, Ebert assigned his movie reviews four-star ratings, but often commented on the limitations of the system, such as in his blog post "You Give Out Too Many Stars." He notes that his reviews do tend to skew positive, and that he considered 2.5 stars to be a pannote . He also wrote a lengthy series of appreciations of Great Movies, all of which were given four stars. That said, he never hesitated to award low marks to bad movies, though for one to earn zero stars, he had to consider it not just bad but somehow immoral.
  • Guilty Pleasures: Invoked in his reviews of You Don't Mess with the Zohan and Rapa Nui.
  • Half Empty Two Shot: He named this kind of camera trick as "Bogeyman Shot".
  • He Also Did: Has not only wrote many books on film but also wrote a cookbook for using a rice cooker. Said cookbook was written after he lost his lower jaw and thus his ability to eat; he relied on his "food memory" to write the recipes.
  • Innocently Insensitive: In his review of Death to Smoochy, Ebert describes the Show Within a Show as "what kiddie TV would look like if kids wanted to see an Ann Miller musical starring midgets." Dwarf actor Danny Woodburn, who was in Smoochy and known for his stint on Seinfeld, wrote to Ebert informing him that it was a highly insensitive slur to little people. Ebert apologized in reply, noting that not only had he not known it was considered as such, but even the Associated Press style guide for newspaper writers did not consider it as one. They continued to correspond as Ebert wanted to know more about the context of its offensive use, and with Woodburn's blessing, published it as a column in hopes that others would never use the word again, as Ebert vowed he would not.
  • Insane Troll Logic: Conan O'Brien called him out on this for his negative review of Kazaam.
    "You were upset about the lack of realism in a movie starring Shaquille O'Neal as a rapping genie?"
  • Insult to Rocks:
    • Ebert's review for Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered is as follows:
      Ebert: This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.
    • And A Lot Like Love:
      Ebert: To call A Lot Like Love dead in the water is an insult to water.
    • And The Spirit:
      Ebert: To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.
    • And, of course, The Village (2004):
      Ebert: Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.
    • Of Battle: Los Angeles, he said:
      Ebert: Here's a science-fiction film that's an insult to the words 'science' and 'fiction,' and the hyphen in between them.
  • Let's See YOU Do Better!:
    • The best known example of Ebert's law that actually involves Ebert himself comes from a review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. Star Rob Schneider took offense to an article by Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times, pointing out that several major studios turned down the chance to finance the year's Best Picture nominees while financing a sequel to a crude sex comedy. After reading it, he took out a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter and called Goldstein a "hack" because he had never won a Pulitzer Prize.note  In Ebert's review of the film, he taunted Schneider and said that he himself actually did win the Pulitzer, and thus by Schneider's criteria he was fully qualified to tell Schneider that "your movie sucks". The story took an unexpected turn after several back-and-forth barbs in the press. After one of Ebert's cancer surgeries, Schneider sent Ebert flowers and a "get well" card signed "Your Least Favorite Movie Star, Rob Schneider". Ebert conceded that "although Rob Schneider might (in my opinion) have made a bad movie, he is not a bad man, and no doubt tried to make a wonderful movie, and hopes to again". Schneider later admitted that Ebert's review of the film was "mean but fair" and that their exchanges helped Schneider reassess how he approached his work.
    • Roger Ebert himself is an Inverted Trope of this; he's a revered, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, but his actual filmography is something else.
  • Mistakes Are Not the End of the World: Took this approach to reviewing movies, including awarding films four stars even if he took issue with something in the movie.
    Ebert: Titanic (1997) is not perfect. It has some flaws, but I hate the way film critics employ that word "flaw," as if they are jewelers with loupes screwed into their eye sockets, performing a valuation. We can say there are elements that could have been handled differently.
  • No Animals Were Harmed:
    Ebert: I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe's Apartment. That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production.
  • Old Shame: When one works as long and prolific as Roger did, this is bound to happen from time to time:
    • He sincerely regretted his infamous quote on video games not able to be art. Ebert later likened his original statement to a movie critic complaining about a movie they had never watched.
    • Ben Stiller revealed after Ebert's death that Roger personally apologized to Ben regarding his harsh review of Zoolander, which Roger trashed for the subplot of assassinating the prime minister of Malaysia in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which Zoolander opened in the shadow of and fell into Dude, Not Funny! for Roger. After some distance from the tragedies, Roger gave it another chance on his own time and told Ben it made him laugh.
    • His review of Dumb and Dumber was a middling two-star reception, saying while it had a couple of big laughs, it flubbed other comic payoffs. As he reviewed other, lesser comedies in its wake, while becoming an ardent fan of the Farrelly Brothers, he would lament short-changing Dumb and Dumber, saying at least it had a scene that nearly killed him with laughter (the dead parakeet reveal), compared to truly average comedies that could muster nothing more than mild chuckles out of him.
    • In his review of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, he offered a mea culpa of his vicious half-star review of the original film, in which he took some notably personal shots at the trio of actresses slumming (in his mind) to such a work. He chalked it up to probably being in a foul mood that day, and while he fell short of recommending Full Throttle, he noted there was nothing harmful about a few actresses getting to play secret agents that was worth that kind of vitriol.
  • Overly Narrow Superlative: In his review of the movie Leaves of Grass, he calls it "the most intelligent, philosophical and poetic film I can imagine that involves five murders in the marijuana-dealing community of Oklahoma and includes John Prine singing 'Illegal Smile.'"
  • Pen Name: While he wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls under his own name, his later fame as a critic led him to use pseudonyms on two other films he wrote for Russ Meyer, to spare him from extra scrutiny: Reinhold Timme on Up (1976) and R. Hyde on Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens.
  • Poe's Law:
    • Ebert admitted that the paradox is true of all satire, to some extent. In order to poke fun at something, you first have to play it straight, and unless you beat your audience over the head with the point that you really don't agree with what you're depicting, there's always going to be someone who takes you seriously.
    • Ebert went political and wrote a blog post giving a statement of creationist beliefs, with the intention of making a point about people's inability to recognize irony. While many people did see the satire, a significant number of readers either thought he was being serious or assumed the site had been hacked. PZ Myers criticized the article, pointing out that when there are so many people making the same claims without irony, the joke becomes undetectable to anyone who doesn't already know Ebert's stance on the issue.
    • Ebert records in his biography that after producing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, an infamously over-the-top parody of sexploitation films, he and Russ Meyer met the Sex Pistols, and were nonplussed when Johnny Rotten said he admired the film because it was so true to life.
  • Positive Discrimination: Was very much not a fan. When an audience member at a screening of Better Luck Tomorrow asked director Justin Lin if it was irresponsible of him to portray other Asian-Americans in such a negative light, Ebert angrily stood up and said (paraphrased) "Nobody would say to a bunch of white filmmakers, 'How could you do this to your people?'"
  • Precision F-Strike: The end of his trashing of Caligula:
    "'This movie', said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, 'is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen.'"
  • Quotes Fit for a Trailer: Ebert observed in Eberts Glossary Of Movie Terms that this is apparently the only reason a character ever exclaims "This just keeps getting better and better!"
  • Reality Is Unrealistic:
    • When reviewing the 1998 remake of Psycho he complained of the evident electronically tweaked voice of the cop to make it sound unusually deep for effect. After someone wrote to him in the "Questions for the Movie Answer Man" column correcting him, he had to add a footnote to later versions of the review saying "I was wrong: that's James Remar's real voice."
    • His original review of Walk the Line was under the impression that a) Joaquin Phoenix was lip-synching to Johnny Cash's music, as he felt it was too uncanny to be Phoenix and b) Johnny Cash proposing to June Carter mid-song was a Hollywood fabrication, although one that Ebert liked anyway. To his astonishment, he learned through the credits that Phoenix did indeed do his own singing, and thorough responses to the Movie Answer Man, that Cash proposed to Carter as depicted in the film, which was then amended in the review.
    • In his scathing review of notorious flop Heaven's Gate, he calls out as ridiculous the scene where Christopher Walken's character Nate Champion, trapped in a burning cabin that's under siege by the bad guys, writes a farewell letter to his friends. While Heaven's Gate was a heavily fictionalized version of the "Johnson County War", Champion was a real person, this scene actually happened in Real Life, and the text of Champion's actual letter was used.
  • Review Ironic Echo: He sometimes used the dialogue or title from a movie against them when he really disliked it.
    • "'This sucks on so many levels.' — Dialogue from Jason X. Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself."
    • From his review of The Last Airbender: review: "I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic."
    • "Dear God is the kind of movie where you walk out repeating the title."
    • "All I want for Christmas is to never see All I Want for Christmas again."
    • "Oh no, not You Again."
    • "I know this all sounds so stupid and offensive and unbelievably amateurish that it's hard to believe, but... Why Would I Lie?
  • Sci Fi Ghetto:invoked Disliked this view, especially as a fervent fan of the genre; he noted that he reviewed movies based on both their artistic worth and how much he thought their intended audience would enjoy them.
  • Scenery Porn: Ebert was willing to give high scores to movies solely for being visually impressive and creative, even if their stories may be lacking. Examples include TRON, The Matrix, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the latter of which he stated in the review how much he loves this trope:
    Ebert: I have a love of astonishing sights, of films that show me landscapes and cityscapes that exist only in the imagination.
  • Self-Demonstrating Article: He begins his review of Fantastic Four (2005) with a dry, lifeless recitation of the characters and their powers, then interrupts himself to explain that this is what watching the movie felt like.
  • Self-Deprecation: At a tribute to the late Chicago columnist Mike Royko, Ebert gamely read Royko's snarky review of Ebert's screenplay for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
  • Shipper on Deck: Ebert shipped Po & Tigress in his Kung Fu Panda 2 review, and Jacob & Edward in his The Twilight Saga: Eclipse review.
  • Significant Birth Date: Born the exact same day (June 18, 1942) as Paul McCartney. Ironically, though, he only gave Give My Regards to Broad Street one star.
  • Smoking Is Cool: As he put it in his commentary for Casablanca, "I don't approve of smoking, except in the movies". (He was referring to their effectiveness in providing a sense of action during "quiet" moments of characters talking or thinking.)
  • So Bad, It's Good: He gave movies like this 1-star, as opposed to zero-star ratings, which he reserved for films either so bad they were terrible or which morally offended him with racism or voyeuristic violence. This means his shit-list of films given zero-stars is not as fun to watch as you might think, since it is composed almost entirely of truly awful films mixed with soul-destroying Gorn.invoked
  • Sophisticated as Hell: Despite his somewhat highbrow image, he could mix it up with lowbrow language. See the page quotation, for instance.
  • Strawman Has a Point: invoked Ebert's review of The Life of David Gale, which is a different type of this trope wherein the movie's central characters go so ridiculously far to show that their position is right, you cannot help but be disgusted with them. He also provides the page quotation for this trope, referring to i am sam.
  • Teen Horror: Not a fan. He came up with the dismissive phrase "Dead Teenager Movies" to describe them, and saw them as plotless, exploitative, derivative junk that cheapened the horror genre.
  • Trailers Always Spoil: Because of Roger's endless work cycle — watching movies, writing reviews, filming At The Movies, as well as conducting interviews and writing thinkpieces — he rarely saw trailers or even any advertising for most films and went into them cold, which was reflected in his reviews. So unaffected he was by this trope, he was even unaware of the basic premises for such films like The Truman Shownote , Field of Dreamsnote , and Iron Mannote 
  • Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: As indicated by his evisceration of the likes of Robocop 2 and Kick-Ass, Ebert despised films that turned children into psychopaths or gleeful killers, with exceptions including Orphan and Hanna where there were story-baked reasons for their violent children beyond exploitation.
  • Vitriolic Best Buds: With Gene Siskel, which was a big part of what made their eponymous show so enjoyable to watch. See these outtakes for instance. In this blog post Ebert reminisces fondly on how much they enjoyed insulting each other. After a while they practically became Like an Old Married Couple.
    Siskel: [Ebert] may be an asshole, but he's my asshole.
  • Volleying Insults: A war of words erupted between The Brown Bunny director Vincent Gallo and Ebert, with Ebert writing that The Brown Bunny was the worst film in the history of Cannes, and Gallo retorting by calling Ebert a "fat pig with the physique of a slave trader." Ebert then responded, paraphrasing a statement attributed to Winston Churchill: "One day I will be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny." Gallo then claimed to have put a hex on Ebert's colon, cursing the critic with cancer. Ebert then replied that watching a video of his colonoscopy had been more entertaining than watching The Brown Bunny. note 
  • Walking Out on the Show:
    • He didn't do it very often, but he did leave Caligula and Jonathan Livingston Seagull before they were over.
    • He wrote a review of the obscure indie film Tru Loved with the punchline in the last sentence: he stopped watching a mere eight minutes in. His editor didn't accept the review as-is.
  • Willing Suspension of Disbelief: "I know full well I'm expected to Suspend My Disbelief. Unfortunately, my disbelief is very heavy, and during Ocean's Thirteen, the suspension cable snapped."
  • Worst News Judgment Ever: He noted with amusement in his review of Never Been Kissed that the film's portrayal of journalists at the Chicago Sun-Times wasn't entirely accurate:
    Ebert: Josie's adventures in high school are monitored at the Sun-Times through a remarkable invention, a brooch that contains a miniature TV camera and transmits everything she sees back to the office. We do not actually have such technology at the Sun-Times, and thank heavens, or my editors would have had to suffer through "Baby Geniuses.'' [...] Apparently at both papers the way to get a big salary and an office is to devote thousands of dollars and weeks of time to an assignment where you hardly ever write anything.
"...And until next time, the balcony is closed."

 
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Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, discussing and debating the week's new films. Many modern day critics -- from professional mainstream critics to internet reviewers -- owe themselves to these two.

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Caustic Critic

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Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert

Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, discussing and debating the week's new films. Many modern day critics -- from professional mainstream critics to internet reviewers -- owe themselves to these two.

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