Your Movie Sucks

A very moreish book - cause it's a collection of shortish reviews and they all make pretty easy reading, you just keep reading the next one. Only enjoyable if you like reading short reviews/summaries of bad films - it's exactly what it says on the tin - but great if you like that. The summaries are usually far more enjoyable than the film itself and although Ebert isn't a proper comedian, he's witty enough that I've laughed out loud quite a bit and smiled even more. Sometimes his moral and political judgements are very, very off (for example, his portrayal of a few films where women are constantly violent to men as men-hating... alas! he has no idea) and there are some reviews which aren't up to much - whether cause the film is so show more average or cause of Ebert's poor writing or hang-ups. It's definitely enjoyable if you like reading about bad movies but the quality is pretty variable. The great reviews are a lot of fun though. show less

This collection of movie reviews by film critic Roger Ebert concentrates on the turkeys, the stinkers, and the flops -- as one might expect from the title.

Best taken in small doses, the reviews take unerring aim at miscasting, plot failures, editing disasters, and atrocious performances. It might better have been organized along those lines, rather than simply set up in alphabetical order by title.

Ebert also has a tendency to wander off-topic, at least when reviewing movies he doesn't like. Occasionally he devotes more words to the director's last hit or a better film with a similar plot than he spends on the flick he's supposedly writing about.

Quibbles aside, movie fans will undoubtedly find opinions they agree with as well as those show more they disagree with. Less avid fans of the cinema will at least have a list of movies to avoid. And pretty well everyone will come away with a favorite quote about badness -- "This movie is eye candy for the blind", or "watching it is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time". My personal favorite was "the mystery is solved by stomping in thick-soled narrative boots through the squishy marsh of contrivance." show less

I have been a longtime fan of Mr. Ebert's reviews. He is funny, brutal and makes sure that we don't waste our money on drivel churned out by the Hollywood. And he did the same in this book. Read this book if you want to have a good laugh and meanwhile consider yourself lucky that you are not working in Hollywood or it could have been you getting your ass reviewed somewhere in this book.

Ebert certainly had a way with words and the movies he chose to review were extremely easy to mock...so in that sense it was very enjoyable. In another sense it was disappointing to find that Ebert not only brought relentlessly middle-American sensibilities, knowledge and taste to the judgement of these movies as though this was an objective measure he also indulged too frequently in mocking the film because it was not accessible or pleasing to people just like him.

Roger Ebert's scathing reviews are hilarious. Even if I liked the movie he's trashing, it's fun to read his views. Battlefield Earth was a hated movie but for some reason I liked it. I don't understand why Ebert kept going on about how nasty the Psychlos looked. They're aliens, and they are evil. I'm sure personal hygiene ranks low with them. Otherwise that review was funny.