How Roger Ebert made society love to hate terrible movies
Although there are plenty of filmmakers out there who make a point of avoiding reviews of their own movies, there is no shortage of those who devour as many as possible to gauge the consensus. As one of the most noted and respected critics of the modern era, getting a glowing appraisal from Roger Ebert was seen as a badge of honour.
There’s barely a director to have ever picked up a megaphone that didn’t make at least one underwhelming motion picture, and there are an unfortunate few who have never been able to make anything any better than that. Ebert was known for his razor-sharp takedowns of cinema’s worst offenders, which in turn helped kickstart the popularity of embracing a terrible film.
Every single person has at least one movie they know fine well, which is completely irredeemable, but they love it anyway. Ebert himself was guilty of both trashing widely acclaimed classics and giving hearty recommendations to dumpster fires alike, but becoming eviscerated in one of his reviews suddenly made them a must-see among the legions of readers who hung on his every word.
It’s easy to shit all over a feature-length abomination, but thanks to his talents as a wordsmith, Ebert painted an incredibly vivid picture of just how awful the worst offenders really were. One of the most venomously hilarious examples came when he annihilated Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, which came after Rob Schneider had openly blasted critic Patrick Goldstein for panning the dismal comedy.
The star attacked Goldstein by saying he wasn’t qualified to call a bad movie a bad movie because he’d never been recognised by his journalistic peers, which was admittedly a strange defence coming from somebody who’d win a Golden Raspberry in the ‘Worst Actor’ category for that very film.
When Ebert caught wind, he reduced Schneider to absolute rubble. “As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified,” he wrote. “Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.” Just like that, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo gained a new lease of life for being so reprehensible it required a recipient of an esteemed prize to set it ablaze.
Such were the levels of respect Ebert carried, though; Schneider sent him flowers when he was laid up in the hospital along with a message of encouragement, which he signed as “your least favourite movie star”. That was the relationship between the critic and bad movies in microcosm; even the people who made them held Ebert in such high esteem that they never took it personally.
These days, there are entire websites, countless social media accounts, and innumerable YouTube channels dedicated specifically to either tearing terrible films apart piece-by-piece or defending them to the hilt as misunderstood masterpieces. Ebert had been doing that very thing since the late 1960s, and as the most prominent mainstream critic in the business for almost the entire duration of his career, he helped blaze a trail to turn negative criticism into an art form unto itself.
