The movie so awful Roger Ebert wanted everyone to see it: “So bad in so many different ways”
Sometimes, you stumble upon a movie that is so bad that you need to show your friends. You might find yourself heading to YouTube to see if you can find a clip of the scene you found laughably bad, hoping that your pals will also see the ridiculousness of it.
There are, quite frankly, too many movies out there that are just bad, simple as that. Sure, it’s a subjective thing, but there’s always going to be a film that leaves you rolling your eyes, wishing you’d chosen something else to waste two hours of your life on.
For Roger Ebert, much of his life was spent watching movies to review, and he must have spent an ungodly amount of hours sitting inside of a cinema – the dim lighting and smell of popcorn probably felt like home to him. I doubt he had the intense film-watching experience as someone like Guillermo del Toro, who aims for three movies a day, practically worshipping the cinematic medium and treating films as having the same sustenance as eating three meals a day.
Still, Ebert watched a lot, and in that time he had to sit through his fair share of God-awful movies – the kind you would classify as an insult to the art of filmmaking. With his job forcing him to recommend movies – or discourage you from certain titles – Ebert often had fun using his platform to tear movies to shreds, but in the case of a specific film, he did so while also urging you to go and watch it.
There’s nothing like watching a film that is so bad it borders on good, and this was the case for Ebert and Love Always, the 1996 film starring Frank Zappa’s daughter, Moon Unit. Directed by Jude Pauline Eberhard, it received just half a star of approval from Ebert, who started his review by writing, “‘You are like a cluster bomb that explodes in a thousand different ways at once,’ the heroine is told in Love Always. As opposed to a cluster bomb that doesn’t? I dunno. This movie is so bad in so many different ways you should see it just to put it behind you.”
Ebert just couldn’t wrap his head around the point of the movie, which seemed to be made up of lots of different scenes that really didn’t have much bearing over the plot. He described the main character, played by Marisa Ryan, as someone “who finds herself in a series of situations that have no point and no payoff, although that is the screenplay’s fault, not hers.”
Intended to be a romantic comedy, Ebert struggled to find the humour in it, asking whether lines like “To be young and in love! I think I’m gonna head out for some big open spaces,” were “intended to be funny.”
“Does this film belong in one of those funky festivals where they understand such things? Alas, I fear not. Love Always is sincere in addition to its other mistakes,” Ebert continued.
So, it might have been almost 30 years since the release of Love Always, but if you’ve ever, for some reason, had an impulse to watch it, maybe listen to Ebert and do so, just so that you can appreciate how much of a mess it is. Or don’t – by the sounds of it, it really is nothing more than a waste of time you’ll be wishing you could get back.
