Posted on 11/06/2008 9:05:53 AM PST by weegee
“.... and, yes, even Nixon.”
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What no mention of McCarthyism, bible thumping, war mongering, the military-industrial complex, BigOil, corporate greed, or the hateful Christian right?
Unimaginative Leftists and their mythological dogma are so damn predictable.
Go back to fantasizing about your sphincter, Ebert...
Along with every other critic in America, he gave "W." a thumbs up. How does someone that stupid dress himself?
Gushing drama queen or blunt tool—I can’t decide which.
Both maybe.
People always tell me what a great job I have when they learn that I'm a movie critic, and I reply that, yes, it is a fun job, but unlike ordinary moviegoers, I can never walk out of a film that's sucking. But that's what Roger Ebert did, in effect, when he reviewed the indie film Tru Loved last week after watching just eight minutes of it. At least he acknowledged in the review that he was judging the film based on only the first eight minutes, but not until the end of the review.
I don't mean to be cruel here but I think that Rog will be checking out before the Obama term ends and again is rushing to judgement in his review. Hell, he called the election early in the night.
The guy sits on his ass and watches movies for a living and gets paid to act like he could have done a better job with it than Spielberg could.
He is the DUmmie’s idol because he is getting money to do what they do all day long in their mommy’s basement.
Why post Marxist propaganda here?
Enough.
There is no more "our land". There are two Americas and the gulf between the two is just getting wider.
Obama has promised “peace, land, and bread.”
I don’t read (listen to) his movie reviews either.
And the masses rose to their feet and starting singing “Kumbayah.”
Ebert is a crappy movie reviewer and an even worse pundit. And if he doesn’t lay off the cheeseburgers he will soon be as fat as Michael Moore.
Do I support our troops? Of course. They were sent to endanger their lives
Really? So we send our troops to war not to win battles but to endanger their lives?
This was just too easy. Does anyone on the Left have a functioning brain?
I see that that Rog has revise his "rules" for movie critics:
Roger's little rule book (By Roger Ebert on October 28, 2008 8:25 PM)
I had this thread after the 2004 election:
Jim Emerson: On celebrities, Politics, and movie critics (shilling for Roger Ebert) (with lengthy response from me) (Chicago Sun Times October 14, 2004 Jim Emerson, Editor of RogerEbert.com)
I used to to also dredge up links to assorted articles and headlines from the 2004 campaign as well as comments and reviews from Roger Ebert.
ESSAY: Roger Ebert: (Fahrenheit) '9/11': Just the facts? (in defense of Michael Moore documentaries)INTERVIEW: (Political) Roger Ebert interview (from the Progressive
Q: If you were putting on a progressive film festival, what movies would you show?Ebert: It's a good question, because a movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
Rog forgot that movie about the man who was on death row trying to get his conviction overturned. At some point it is revealed to the audience that he really did commit the crime. Roger thought that this was a horrible thing because it "validated" the death penalty advocates position. He gave it ZERO stars (the lowest he can go) because he absoluted hated the politics of this film. He liked the acting. He liked the direction. He hated the message.
THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE / ZERO STARS (R)
"The Life of David Gale" tells the story of a famous opponent of capital punishment who, in what he must find an absurdly ironic development, finds himself on Death Row in Texas, charged with the murder of a woman who was also opposed to capital punishment. This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do.David Gale is an understandably bitter man, played by Kevin Spacey, who protests his innocence to a reporter named Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), whom he has summoned to Texas for that purpose. He claims to have been framed by right-wing supporters of capital punishment because his death would provide such poetic irony in support of the noose, the gas or the chair. Far from killing Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), he says, he had every reason not to, and he explains that to Bitsey in flashbacks that make up about half of the story.
Bitsey becomes convinced of David's innocence. She is joined in her investigation by the eager and sexy intern Zack (Gabriel Mann), and they become aware that they are being followed everywhere in a pickup truck by a gaunt-faced fellow in a cowboy hat, who is either a right-wing death-penalty supporter who really killed the dead woman, or somebody else. If he is somebody else, then he is obviously following them around with the MacGuffin, in this case a videotape suggesting disturbing aspects of the death of Constance.
The man in the cowboy hat illustrates my recently renamed Principle of the Unassigned Character, formerly known less elegantly as the Law of Economy of Character Development. This principle teaches us that the prominent character who seems to be extraneous to the action will probably hold the key to it. The cowboy lives in one of those tumble-down shacks filled with flies and peanut butter, with old calendars on the walls. The yard has more bedsprings than the house has beds.
The acting in "The Life of David Gale" is splendidly done but serves a meretricious cause. The direction is by the British director Alan Parker, who at one point had never made a movie I wholly disapproved of. Now has he ever. The secrets of the plot must remain unrevealed by me, so that you can be offended by them yourself, but let it be said this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein.
I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters. What I do not understand is the final revelation on the videotape. Surely David Gale knows that Bitsey Bloom cannot keep it private without violating the ethics of journalism and sacrificing the biggest story of her career. So it serves no functional purpose except to give a cheap thrill to the audience slackjaws. It is shameful.
One of the things that annoys me is that the story is set in Texas and not just in any old state--a state like Arkansas, for example, where the 1996 documentary "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" convincingly explains why three innocent kids are in prison because they wore black and listened to heavy metal, while the likely killer keeps pushing himself onscreen and wildly signaling his guilt. Nor is it set in our own state of Illinois, where Death Row was run so shabbily that former Gov. George Ryan finally threw up his hands and declared the whole system rotten.
No, the movie is set in Texas, which in a good year all by itself carries out half the executions in America. Death Row in Texas is like the Roach Motel: Roach checks in, doesn't check out. When George W. Bush was Texas governor, he claimed to carefully consider each and every execution, although a study of his office calendar shows he budgeted 15 minutes per condemned man (we cannot guess how many of these minutes were devoted to pouring himself a cup of coffee before settling down to the job). Still, when you're killing someone every other week and there's an average of 400 more waiting their turn, you have to move right along.
Spacey and Parker are honorable men. Why did they go to Texas and make this silly movie? The last shot made me want to throw something at the screen--maybe Spacey and Parker.
You can make movies that support capital punishment ("The Executioner's Song") or oppose it ("Dead Man Walking") or are conflicted ("In Cold Blood"). But while Texas continues to warehouse condemned men with a system involving lawyers who are drunk, asleep or absent; confessions that are beaten out of the helpless, and juries that overwhelmingly prefer to execute black defendants instead of white ones, you can't make this movie. Not in Texas.
What a pompous ass.
regarding “This Land Is Your Land”
The Communist Woody Gutherie’s original had this lyric:
As I was walkin’ - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin’
But on the other side .... it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
and his Communist buddy Pete Seeger sang it with this addition:
This land is your land, but it once was my land,
Until we sold you Manhattan Island.
You pushed our Nations to the reservations;
This land was stole by you from me
It was the Communist response to “God Bless America” which was Irving Berlin’s gift to this nation that had given him such opportunity.
Irving Berlin wrote it in 1918 and revised it in 1938 changing some lyrics and adding and introduction:
While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.
A genuine cumbaya moment for the fat numbnut and a genuine Maalox moment for me.....
Where is the projectile, wall-staining, hernia-inducing barf alert?
The other one (Siskel) is dead. Or do you mean the other, other one, Dopey Roeper?
Maybe you can appeal to the admin mod for one. I do regret not including one.
Biggest bunch of BS I’ve ever heard. This will be the mantra for all the liberal leftists RATS for the next 4 years.
Just croak.
He used to be the fat one. Now he’s the one who has cancer and can longer speak.
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