I Hated, Hated, Hated, This Movie

By Roger Ebert

Have you ever really hated a movie?

I'm not talking about disliking a film. I'm not talking about the "It was pretty good" genre of moviemaking. I'm not even talking about those movies where if they'd just rewrote this scene, or cut that character, it would have been perfect.

I'm talking about hating a movie. You leave the theater enraged. You drive home too fast and nearly get into a few accidents. You snap at your friends for days, trapped in an endless bad mood. Your mind spins over and over through the abject awfulness of the celluloid terror you've just viewed, unable to look away but desperately wishing you could. You want to tear everyone involved with the movie a new one.

Those are the kind of films Roger Ebert writes about in his latest book, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. He also writes about a few simpering, mediocre movies, and he hits a few films that are simply reprehensible for reasons outside the filmmaking form--their attitudes, for example, or the opinions they espouse. But mostly, it's just page after page of the country's best film critic taking on the world's worst movies.

Ebert comments in one of the reviews in Hated that it's easiest to write reviews for films that you either passionately love, or passionately hate. In reading this book, that becomes immediately clear. It's enormous fun to watch such a great writer spin off into wild levels of absurdity in taking on a wretched film, as with his review of the Melanie Griffith/Ed Harris vehicle Milk Money, where he documents a fictional conversation between the executives who planned the film. He's also great when he delivers the kind of incisive one-liners that are as bitingly funny as they are true, such as this gem from his review of Lost in Space: "This is the kind of movie that, if it fell into a black hole, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference." And of course, the direct approach always works, as in his now-famous review of Rob Reiner's North: "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie."

For all the comedic value in Hated--you will be quoting one-liners from this book to your movie-geek friends--it's perhaps more remarkable that Ebert manages to cut to the heart of a bad film so expertly. These are great reviews not just because Ebert succumbs to the temptations of mocking bad filmmaking so often. They're great because even as he mocks, he critiques. Anyone who fancies themselves a junior film critic could gain a lot from noting Ebert's technique in this book, because it places the film squarely in the spotlight. For all the humor in these reviews, the writing never robs the stage from the commentary on the film itself. It enhances the commentary, makes the commentary damn funny and vicious and thrilling to read, but it never upstages it.

Hell, in that regard, maybe some of the directors, producers, actors and writers who made the movies savaged by Ebert in I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie could learn a few pointers from the man. They've certainly upstaged their own moviemaking abilities often enough over the past few decades.