The movie Roger Ebert said would “bring us all together in paralysing boredom”
Few movie critics will ever be as iconic as Roger Ebert. The Pulitzer Prize-winning champion of cinema wrote criticism for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until he sadly passed away in 2013, and he was a stalwart presence on television for decades alongside fellow critics Gene Siskel and Richard Roeper. Given how scattered the entertainment industry is these days, with countless outlets offering movie criticism of varying style and quality, it’s hard to imagine one critic being held in such high esteem as Ebert. People would genuinely take his opinion on cinema as gospel, and more often than not, he was dead right.
Sometimes, though, Ebert’s opinions on certain films seem rather surprising in hindsight. Take The Usual Suspects, for example. Ebert wasn’t a fan, stating, “Finally, I wrote down: ‘To the degree that I do understand, I don’t care.’ It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.”
Ebert also hated David Fincher’s Fight Club, seemingly missing the satirical aspect of the film when he wrote: “It is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.” Of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, where Ebert scathingly wrote that the film “lacks joy”, he added: “It employs depression as a substitute for personality, and believes that if the characters are bitter and morose enough, we won’t notice how dull they are.”
On other occasions, Ebert dismissed movies widely lambasted at the time of release by different critics, but then they developed a cult following in subsequent years. A good example of this is B.A.P.S., which stands for “Black American Princesses”. This was a 1997 comedy directed by Robert Townsend and starring Halle Berry, which flopped at the box office. In his review, Ebert awarded the film zero stars and declared: “B.A.P.S. is jaw-droppingly bad, a movie so misconceived I wonder why anyone involved wanted to make it.”
Ebert’s caustic verdict of B.A.P.S. didn’t stop there, either. He wrote: “As a vehicle for the talents of director Robert Townsend and actors Halle Berry and Martin Landau, it represents a grave miscalculation; I hope they quickly put it behind them.”
He then theorised, “The movie will bring us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom.”
To give credit where it’s due, Ebert didn’t just criticise the film for being dull and lacking humour—he was also genuinely offended by it. He found the characterisations of Berry’s Nisi and Natalie Desselle’s Mickey—two young Black waitresses with dreams of opening the world’s first salon/soul food restaurant—deeply problematic.
The legendary critic argued: “There is a thin line between satire and offensiveness, and this crosses it. Its portraits of these two working-class black women have been painted with snobbery and scorn. The actresses don’t inhabit the caricatures with conviction. The result is a hurtful stereotype, because the comedy doesn’t work to redeem it.”
Obviously, Ebert was entitled to his opinion—like anyone—but in the years since the movie’s release, it has become a cult classic and is now considered an important film in Black Hollywood history, solidifying a slightly obscure position in cinema’s many different categories of progress.
