The Oscar-winning movie Roger Ebert walked out of: “Utterly without redeeming merit”
Obviously, it defeats the entire purpose of a movie critic’s job if they walk out before the film they’re watching has finished, but Roger Ebert didn’t care if he couldn’t review the whole shebang when he’d seen more than enough to know he hated it.
You could make an argument that it’s slightly unprofessional, since he wasn’t really doing his job properly if he didn’t persevere to the end credits. On the other hand, it’s not as if the final reel would suddenly change his mind and turn an apathetic thumbs-down into a full four-star experience.
Of the few flicks he did walk out of, which was a tiny percentage of the 10,000 or so he estimated that he reviewed during his career, almost all of them were either controversial or irredeemably bad. However, the exception to the rule was a certified Academy Award winner, even if Ebert was telling porkies.
“I’ve sat through every single movie I’ve ever seen, except Mediterraneo,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “And it won the Academy Award for ‘Best Foreign Film’. But it’s utterly without redeeming merit. None.” Clearly, he wasn’t sold on director Gabriele Salvatores’ wartime dramedy, but the Academy was.
Unfolding during World War II, the story follows a band of Italian soldiers dispatched to an isolated Greek island, which appears deserted. When they discover that the ship dispatched to pick them up has been destroyed, they end up calling the island home, befriending the locals once they’ve returned to the village.
Did it deserve to win the Oscar? That’s entirely subjective, but it’s worth noting that one of the films Mediterraneo beat out to claim its prize was Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, which was one of the decade’s finest motion pictures, regardless of country. Still, Ebert saw enough of the former to know it was crap, so he decided to bail.
About those aforementioned porkies, though: Ebert claimed that it was the only movie he’d ever seen that he didn’t finish, but either he knew he was talking nonsense, or he forgot that he’d written in his reviews for Rod Amateau’s The Statue, Tinto Brass’ Caligula, and Hall Bartlett’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, that he’d walked out of them, too.
It would be understandable if he’d wiped them from his memory, since they ranked as three of the worst and most diabolical works of cinema that he’d ever laid eyes on, but it’s not true that Mediterraneo was his first and only walkout, when Ebert himself had done it at least three times previously.
He didn’t do it very often, but when he did, it was a matter of principle. The Oscars thought it was a worthy film to honour as the best to hail from outside the United States in 1991, but nobody disagreed more than Ebert.
