other books by roger ebert
An Illini Century
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss
Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook
Behind the Phantom’s Mask
Roger Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary
Roger Ebert’s Movie Home Companion (annually 1986-1993)
Roger Ebert’s Video Companion (annually 1994-1998)
Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook (annually 1999-)
Questions for the Movie Answer Man
Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: An Anthology
Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
The Great Movies
The Great Movies II
Awake in the Dark
with daniel curley
The Perfect London Walk
with gene siskel
The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese,
Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas
dvd commentary tracks
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Citizen Kane
Crumb
Dark City
Casablanca
Floating Weeds
49 Up
Your Movie Sucks copyright © 2007 by Roger Ebert. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For permission information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, MO 64106.
E-ISBN: 978-0-7407-9215-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007923419
www.andrewsmcmeel.com
Cover photo © 2006 Jeff Sciortino
All the reviews in this book originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.
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acknowledgments
Thanks above all to my wife, Chaz, and my assistants Carol Iwata and Greg Isaac for their invaluable contributions to this book. I owe deep gratitude to my editor, Dorothy O’Brien, who kept this project on track while being patient, cheerful, encouraging, and understanding. She is assisted by the equally patient Lesa Reifschneider.
At the Chicago Sun-Times I have been blessed with the expert editing of Michael Cooke, John Barron, Laura Emerick, Miriam DiNunzio, Teresa Budasi, Jeff Wisser, Darel Jevins, Avis Weathersbee, Jeff Johnson, and Marlene Gelfond. At Universal Press Syndicate I am indebted to Sue Roush, and to Michelle Daniel at Andrews McMeel Publishing.
Many thanks are also due to the production staff at Ebert & Roeper: my partner, Richard Roeper, and Don Dupree, David Plummer, Janet LaMonica, David Kodeski, Amanda Kammes, and Nancy Stanley. Last, but certainly not least, my gratitude to Marsha Jordan at WLS-TV.
introduction
Some of these reviews were written in joyous zeal. Others with glee. Some in sorrow, some in anger, and a precious few with venom, of which I have a closely guarded supply. When I am asked, all too frequently, if I really sit all the way through those movies, my answer is inevitably: Yes, because I want to write the review.
I would guess that I have not mentioned my Pulitzer Prize in a review except once or twice since 1975, but at the moment I read Rob Schneider’s extremely unwise open letter to Patrick Goldstein, I knew I was receiving a home-run pitch, right over the plate. Other reviews were written in various spirits, some of them almost benevolently, but of Deuce Bigelow, European Gigolo, all I can say is that it is a movie made to inspire the title of a book like this.
On the other hand, I learned a thing or two. Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny struck me, when I saw it at Cannes, as definitively bad. I engaged in an exchange of views with the director. When I saw his considerably shorter final cut, I had to concede that I could now see what he was getting at. A critic must be honest.
If a film of yours is included in this volume, take heart and be of good cheer. You may yet rank among the Gallos and not the Schneiders.
Roger Ebert
setting the scene…
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
(DIRECTED BY MIKE BIGELOW; STARRING ROB SCHNEIDER, EDDIE GRIFFIN; 2005)
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges, I’m not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie. Deuce Bigalow is aggressively bad, as if it wants to cause suffering to the audience. The best thing about it is that it runs for only seventy-five minutes.
Rob Schneider is back, playing a male prostitute (or, as the movie reminds us dozens of times, a “man-whore”). He is not a gay hustler, but specializes in pleasuring women, although the movie’s closest thing to a sex scene is when he wears diapers on orders from a giantess. Oh, and he goes to dinner with a woman with a laryngectomy who sprays wine on him through her neck vent.
The plot: Deuce visits his friend T. J. Hicks (Eddie Griffin) in Amsterdam, where T. J. is a pimp specializing in man-whores. Business is bad because a serial killer is murdering male prostitutes, and so Deuce acts as a decoy to entrap the killer. In his investigation, he encounters a woman with a penis for a nose. You don’t want to know what happens when she sneezes.
Does this sound like a movie you want to see? It sounds to me like a movie that Columbia Pictures and the film’s producers (Jack Giarraputo, Adam Sandler, and John Schneider) should be discussing in long, sad conversations with their inner child.
The movie created a spot of controversy in February 2005. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year’s Best Picturenominees and wrote that they were “ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that … bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.”