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Ebert Gives 'Sith' Positive Review
emerald demon writes "The world's authority on reviewing movies, Roger Ebert, has released his review of "Star Wars--Episode III: Revenge of the Sith." I noticed that Ebert & Roeper gave it a two thumbs up, but I assumed that Ebert was going to go for the minimum for giving his thumb up--two and a half stars. I was delighted to read his three and a half starred review. It seemed like he let a few things slip, but it's obvious that he enjoyed it. '"Episode III" has more action per square minute, I'd guess, than any of the previous five movies, and it is spectacular.' Bad dialogue as usual: 'To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion.'"
But clicking on the submitted link is worth it just for the headline picture and the funny caption.
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How long is a minute squared? I guess it would still be 60 seconds. Or maybe by square they mean dull, as in the ol' "L7" In that case, Ebert is saying that Episode III has more action in its dull scenes than the previous 5 movies combined. Wow!
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He also gave 'The Phantom Menace' 3 and a half stars.
A LOT of people, be it here on Slashdot or on other forus, are trying to convince me really really hard that RotS is a good movie. FINE. Show me a review from a guy who thought the first two movies were dreadfully boring! If THAT GUY can say the movie was decent, I'll have a better attitude about it. Otherwise, you're only appealing to those who are already going to see it.
"Derp de derp."
It's rare to find someone - even a professional film critic - with whom you'll agree 100% on every single film. What's more important, I think, is that you can watch the same film and see how the other person formulated their opinion, regardless if you agree with it. Roger Ebert is one of the few critics where I can successfully apply that test, even if there's a few films where you wonder what he was thinking (like his positive review of "Anaconda"). CABIN BOY rocks!
This is bad! The only thing that was going to save this movie was the low, low expectations!
On the other hand, opinions of the Star Wars movies is so far from being grounded in reality -- there's just too much cultural weirdness -- that maybe people will be particularly swayed by the reviews. Prevailing wisdom and all. I mean, I walked out of Matrix Revolutions on opening night totally entertained and happy, and yet a month later, watching it again, I agreed that it was horrible.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
"Bad dialogue as usual: 'To say that George Lucas cannot write a love scene is an understatement; greeting cards have expressed more passion.'"
Hello? He's a GEEK! Before he got rich the closest he ever came to a love scene was
most likely delivered monthly courtesy of hugh hefner.....
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I forgot where I read the review but I remember something they said, "Revenge of the Sith is better than it's two previous counterparts, but only in a way that dying in your sleep is preferrable to death by crucifiction."
From the Guardian:-
"Henceforth you will be known as Darth Vader!" These dire words, addressed to a tormented Anakin Skywalker as he crosses the threshold to the much-mentioned Dark Side, mark the definitive moment of his Luciferian journey, which will end with him in a black, neo-Wehrmacht helmet-mask, with incipient emphysema and a walk that makes him look as if he has had concrete hip replacements.
It supposedly forms the mythic heart of the gigantic Third Episode of George Lucas's colossally inflated Star Wars prequel trilogy. Yet when this moment happens - after what seems like seven hours of CGI action as dramatically weightless as the movement of tropical fish in an aquarium - I looked blearily around the cinema and sensed thousands of scalps failing to prickle. We had all been bored into submission long ago.
George Lucas is now not so much a director as chief executive-cum-potentate in charge of a vastly profitable franchise empire in which striking back is not an option. And within this empire's boundaries, Lucas is so mind-bogglingly powerful that none of his lieutenants dares tell him the truth: that yet another Something of the Something title, after Attack of the Clones and Return of the Jedi, is pretty annoying. (It's actually his fourth, if you count the original script title to the first Star Wars: Adventures of the Starkiller.) But here at any rate, finally, is the end of the road, or rather the middle of the road - the moment in 1977 where we came in. Lucas has taken three pointlessly long and artificially complicated movies to get to the point: precisely how did Luke Skywalker's father come to embrace the forces of darkness?
Hayden Christensen is Anakin, the talented but mercurial Jedi pupil of Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which role Ewan McGregor wears a big and bushy beard, to indicate the aged wisdom that we know is his destiny. Their mighty contest is to be at the centre of this movie, during which in quiet moments leading characters will gaze out over massive futuristic cityscapes resembling the photorealist artwork once used for 1970s sci-fi paperbacks: pointy buildings with swarms of pointy aircraft criss-crossing overhead, often bathed in crimson sunsets.
Once again, McGregor speaks in a simperingly lifeless Rada-English accent, a muddled and misconceived backdating of the Guinness original - the young fogey with the light-sabre. In boringness he is matched by that Jedi master of woodenness: Hayden Christensen, the flatliner to end all flatliners. As an actor Christensen must show the terrible embryo of future wickedness within himself. And how does he do this? By tilting his head down, looking up through lowered brows and giving the unmistakable impression that he is very, very cross. If Princess Diana had gone to the Dark Side, she would have looked a lot like this.
So why does Anakin desert the forces of light? It is his passionate love and concern for his pregnant wife, Princess Amidala, coupled with a sense of his own slighted dignity that are to be the tragic and fateful factors leading to the most unconvincing evil act you can imagine, an event weirdly neutralised by the bloodless unreality that surrounds everything. The vicious Anakin massacres - oh, horror! - a bunch of innocent Jedi children.
But that is not how Lucas's solemnly high-flown script chooses to refer to them. With sub-Shakespearian gravitas, McGregor intones: "Not even the younglings survived." I'm sorry, not even the what? Is that their surname or something? Are Mr and Mrs Youngling going to come home to find a nursery bloodbath?
One of the things about the previous film, Attack of the Clones, that made you think things might be looking up was the terrific performance by Christopher Lee as the sinister Count Dooku. Almost the very first thing Lucas does here is kill him off. It is a crippling blow that leaves us with a range of scandalously dull secondary characters. People such as Senator Bail Organa, played by Jimmy Smits, and Samuel L Jackson as the fiercely uninte
I don't know about that. The last card I got from Hallmark wasn't all that romantic at all.*
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If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The one that really disappoints me is -- from the review:
First off, C-Span is a lot more watchable than bland dreck like "Everybody Loves Raymond." But more to the point: C'mon, people, the problems with the first two movies weren't to do with their having overly complex plots. They were to do with their having particularly stupid plots. And within those stupid plots, the individual scenes, and the actions taken by the characters, were also often spectacularly brainless.
At the end of EP II, before nonsensically going off to fight the war they cannot be expected to fight, the Jedi Council arrives at a moment that I think sums up the political complexity of these goofy plotlines: "Hmm. Maybe we should keep an eye on the Senate. Almost seems like they can't be trusted..." You could almost see the light go off above Yoda's head. Shrewd thinking by the council.
To say that Anikin buzzing out to visit his mom -- and arriving at JUST the moment of her death -- was bad because the politics of Sand People were overwrought, that would be wrong. That whole sequence was bad because it stunk, period, in maybe 15 distinctly idiotic ways.
Anyone who's read a mediocre Sci Fi epic has read much more complicated, much more convincing political plotting than these movies offer the viewer. Decent but not great Hollywood thrillers -- "7 Days in May" -- are so much better in every way, despite having far more complex plotting.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The existing six films, patchy though they are, tell one overarching story - the fall from grace and subsequent redemption of Anakin Skywalker. Anything else tacked on at the end would ruin the 'shape' of the saga, if you will.
Which is why it's pretty much inevitable that some halfwit in a suit will greenlight them, I'd have thought.
Cry, audience, and let slip the dogs of franchise!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I mean, come on, he gave a great review to the universally panned Phantom Menace, and an equally good review to the moldy cheese production of Anaconda. I like Ebert but this guy is not a barometer to a film's quality. Leave that to Rotten Tomatoes (which looks to be positive so far).
Google has a very good non-biased, objective review system in place. Check it out for this movie:
9 &oi=showtimes&fq=Star+Wars--Episode+III:+Revenge+o f+the+Sith/
http://www.google.com/reviews?cid=ba601666fe1a2e7
It pulls from many different sources
Any plans for a episode IV?
Most importantly, Ebert would tell you to ignore the star rating. He says he puts that there only because it's expected by the readers and required by the newspaper. It's totally lacking in context, for one thing: many people would rather see a two-star chopsocky than a four-star tearjerker. He tries to rate them relative to the expectations of the audience, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.
Beyond that, even if you disagree with him on taste, you can learn a lot from his reviews. His skill is to be able to say why he liked a movie, or disliked it, and you can often use that to judge your opinion by his.
He's a good writer. Or at least I think so. His reviews are fun to read. I find that's different from most reviewers, where the review looks like:
* 1 paragraph snarky comments
* N paragraphs of plot summary
* One sentence each for the leads, the director, and a few other details
It helps to be familiar with the reviewer's baises. Ebert is a huge fan of anime, so he adores some films that bore me silly. One advantage Ebert has over some other reviewers is that he's been at it forever, so there's a large body of reviews to calibrate your taste against.
Ebert will tell you he's a critic, not a reviewer. His goal is to understand why movies succeed and fail. As an actor and director myself I find reviewers infuriating since they rarely understand the craft and usually misapportion blame and credit.
Hey, if you've found a reviewer out there whose tastes match yours completely, bonus. If you're into genre pics, like horror or scifi, it may be easier to find somebody whose taste better matches yours; Ebert's taste runs in favor of dramas and literary types.
For many people, Ebert fits that bill. If not, enjoy the movies anyway.
As most users of this website must be aware, the original Star Wars was an influential worldwide film whose impact still resonates now, almost 30 years later. Unfortunately, some of the themes in the original Star Wars series have, in my opinion, contributed to the mindset of International terrorism, the cancer we see worldwide today.
That's a controversial statement, so here's some proof. First of all, the side we are supposed to sympathise with were the rebels. Yes, a group of paramilitaries and other non-combatants who were fighting against a classical army structure providing order throughout the galaxy, the Empire. Here's the crux: the rebels never fought the empire in a conventional sense - they knew they would lose. So they went for "soft targets". Does any of this sound familiar??
Let's look at this. The Terrorists/Rebels were repressed by a powerful enemy. Deprived of the means to fight back conventionallly, the Terrorists/Rebels were forced into guerilla tactics - concealment, ambush, and brainwashing (of the innocent small bears). It is the latter action I find most repugnant, morally. The rebels bribed the small bears first with food, then by masquerading as a deity figure encouraged them to attack a local outpost of the Empire. Now, there was no evidence the Empire had been anything other than a benevolent overlord to those bears. They were used shamelessly by the so-called good guys, and no-one raised an eyebrow.
It was the movie "Clerks" which first brought this to my attention. In it, a character made the remark that the partially constructed so called "Death-star" must have been full of innocent tradesmen who had been contracted to work on the military project, their wives, their children, their favorite grandparents. The deaths of these innocent civilians was papered over in the film as nothing more than an impressive explosion. The butcher himself, Skywalker, was portrayed as some sort of hero.
I have heard some argue that the rebels actions were justified by the Empires act in blowing up Aldebaran, Leia's home planet. Firstly I would beg you to remember that history is written by the victors. Did this peace loving planet Aldebaran even exist, or was it mere PsyOps? Did the "Deathstar" (actual name: FreedomLoveMoon) destroy anything larger than an asteroid? We can't tell - the filmmaker takes a biased treatment of the story from the outset, and the rebels conveniently destroyed the evidence. No attempt is made to give the Empire the right to reply to the allegations.
My final point (I have many more but space is limited) is to look at Skywalkers conversion to the rebel cause. Does anyone else see something disturbing in the following description?: He goes out to the DESERT where he meets a religious extremist leader (Kenobi) who fills his head with ridiculous tales, ARMS and TRAINS him and then sets him on a veritable SUICIDE MISSION??? Who can honestly justify this?? PULL THIS FILTH OFF THE SHELVES.
You may never have seen the original movies in this light. But it has been present in your subconscious, and the cultural subconsciousness of your elected leaders. Every time they had an opportunity to make a serious impact into terrorism, it was there, whispering treacherous thoughts of platitude. The dangerous mindset is so subtle it eluded notice, but influenced every decision. George Lucas should be hauled in front of Congress, and then executed. The current global terrorism emergency can be traced back to the moral relativism championed by the Star Wars franchise. He made a quick buck, we got global insecurity. Bastard.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
That's what I liked about the old Siskel and Ebert show. You got multiple reviews for each movie.
... the effects?
Ebert likes this one, despite the wooden acting and pathetic dialog, because of
Siskel might pan it because the wooden acting and pathetic dialog overshadowed the effects (or whatever Ebert liked) for him.
So those reviews had more depth. If you were wondering about a specific movie, you would have the advice to not go in expecting anything intellectual or insightful, just lots of action and effects.
And isn't that how you review movies for your friends? You tell them whether it is worth the money to see in the theatre or whether they'd like it more on DVD with beer and pizza so they can laugh loudly.
If you watch the behind the scenes jazz on the fourth disc included with the Trilogy DVD set, that dialog was changed by Empire's director and Harrison Ford, on the fly. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Then there are all of the Special Editions that have to come out, and so on...
The Star Wars franchise becomes bigger than Microsoft and IBM combined!
I was at the Star Wars saga marathon on Monday at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London, England. we saw all the SW movies, including Sith, starting at 7am and finishing at 11.30pm.
;"Absolutely not...but I am working on Indiana Jones", which got a pretty bid roar from the crowd.
George Lucas and others came in before Sith. The film was good, very good.
Anyway, George snuck back into the cinema and stood at the back watching our (very positive) reactions to the movie, he then also came back at the end of the film. This never happens at these kinds of showings and remember, the PREMIERE was happening not 100 meters away at the Odeon cinema in Leicester Square.
So, in answer to the chants of "we want 9", he said
Remember, there is to be a live action SW in the future, so the next film, if there is to be one, (my guess is that it) will be spun from that series.
To be fair, Chrstensen wasn't given that much to work with, either script-wise or direction-wise. Under the best of circumstances, making a role like this compelling is difficult, and circumstances here are not the best.
I have a theory that classically trained actors do better with science fiction and fantasy roles than actors with a more natural style.
If you have to recite a laundry list, say it with flair.
Hey, Ian McKellan was great as Gandalf, but he was also great as Magneto. Granted Magneto has a back story and all that, but I doubt McKellan read any comic books to get into the character's head. I bet he just quickly perused up the script, then headed back into the Shakespearean lumber room, emerging having nailed together a tragic villain performance the way Norm Abrams can transform a discarded shipping pallet into a piece of fine furniture.
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I concur. An interesting supporting cast, a villain who's not just a copy of Vader or Palpatine, and those wacky ysalamiri. (Fun to pronounce! Not as fun as 'noghri', but fun!)
But, alas, they include the original cast, and unfortunately, real actors age. Eh, it's good to wipe the SF-on-film slate clean. No more Star Wars, no more Star Trek. Wonder what's next.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Nah, I think it was funnier that Watto (the gigantic ugly blue flying rat with the huge, hooked nose) spoke with a bit of a Yiddish accent.
I, for one, welcome our new crypto-Jewish slavemasters.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I've started to think for a while now that maybe George's huge mistake was that he chose to make Ep1-3, rather than Episodes 7-9. I mean, we all know how it's going to end, and we all know the points the plot HAS to pass through, we all know who HAS to survive, etc, etc. There's no real freedom in there, except to fill in the minor details which don't advance the overall plot. The only "wow" factor he has up his sleeve is "wow the CG looks good".
If he had made 7-9 instead, the story could go and end where he wanted, where the movie took it, where a logically paced movie naturally ended.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
John Podhoretz [NY Post] hated it:
Jason Appuzo [Liberty Film Festival] objected to the needless insertion of politics:
You cannot seriously be talking about Darth Vader. The child prodigy? The "chosen one" who became the apprentice of the legendary Jedi? The character who then, in greed, loneliness, and rage for power, embraced evil -- slaughtering innocents, assualting his own child, and somehow, in the last seconds of his life, redeeming himself by turning against the very evil he had succumbed to -- that is difficult to make compelling? Jesus Christ, that is like the biggest fanboy apology I have ever heard in my fucking life. This is one of the greatest villians of our time. Not only that, he is a fucking complicated mess of psychology, if someone would just portray it right! This character should be disturbed, confused, hurt, lonely, seeking validation and acceptance. Instead, we got a mechanical arm and petulant whining. I think people complain and mock both Lucas and Christensen precisely because it should have been brain-dead easy to make this compelling. How the hell could he screw up something that left such an indelible impression for so many years? How could we get such dreck?
Personally, I think that Lucas's obsession with technology provides a disappointing counterpoint to Peter Jackson's focus on the human aspects of a story. But I'm going to see SW3 on Friday afternoon in an all-digital showing, because I'm just that much of a lost cause.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
This is one of the greatest villians of our time.
... [redemption]", then convince me it didn't take skill to make it credible.
Not really. That honor goes to Mr. Lecter...
In a way, you're right, there is some potentially interesting stuff there; never said otherwise. Looked at in the context of the whole series, the Dark Lord of Episode IV appears pretty pathetic.
But -- intensity is not equal to subtlety.
You're talking about Good and Evil; Destiny; you know -- Cosmic Stuff. We're talking about a character who was conceived through virgin birth -- like Jesus or Merlin. How does an actor turn up the amplitude to breath life into all that stuff without ranting like a fool or a amateur in a fan flick?
What he doesn't do is draw on his life experiences to show a hidden facet of his personality. Real life evil is banal. It leaves the house, pecking the wife on the cheek and tossling the kids' hair, then mechanically tortures a political prisoner bcause it was following orders. That's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about an evil person -- we're talking about Evil personified with a capital E.
And thats why fans hate Christensen's performance. If you set aside your dissatisfaction with Christensen for a minute, you see that he plays Anakin as shallow, weak and a bit narcissistic. Which is a completely psychologically naturalistic and plausible portrait of evil, but doesn't cut it as Evil. What fans want is more like what a Japanese Noh actor does: don the mask and speak through it with supernatural power.
Now, if you set aside your dissatisfaction with me for a minute, you'll see I'm actually agreeing with you for the most part. Christensen completely failed to squeeze the juice out of the part in Ep 2. But it's not because he's a bad actor. He's just not the right kind of actor for this kind of part. I enjoyed Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, but I doubt I'd enjoy him as Will Lohman.
I think people complain and mock both Lucas and Christensen precisely because it should have been brain-dead easy to make this compelling.
There you're wrong. Show me a performance that convincing combines "greed, loneliness, and rage for power, embraced evil -- slaughtering innocents, assualting his own child, and
Personally, I think that Lucas's obsession with technology provides a disappointing counterpoint to Peter Jackson's focus on the human aspects of a story.
Which makes my point. Vader is a demi-god -- that's very clear if you've read your Joseph Campbell. Christensen is the wrong kind of actor for this, and Lucas is the wrong director for fixing that. By contrast, McKellen is as close to a perfect actor to play Gandalf (another demi-god) as you could wish for, and Jackson is wonderfully gifted at shifting between cosmic battles and tiny, human scaled details. One of my favorite scenes in RotK wasn't even in the book. It's where Gandalf and Pippin are crouched behind a wall in Minas Tirith, and Gandalf explains to Pippin what it feels like to die. There's a wonderful human warmth to that scene, at the same time it has cosmic implications. It's a perfect combination of a superb actor, sensitive direction, and an uncommonly wonderful bit of screenwriting.
That's having material to work with.
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Have you SEEN Gigli?
Trust me, you want to go to "The Postman Special Edition DVD Release Party and All-Nite Marathon" AND volunteer to be in the test audience for the sequel (Postman 2, Electric Boogoloo) before you sit through Gigli.
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