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I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
Roger Ebert
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I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie
Roger Ebert
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About This Book
The Pulitzer Prize–winning film critics offers up more reviews of horrible films. Roger Ebert awards at least two out of four stars to most of the more than 150 movies he reviews each year. But when the noted film critic does pan a movie, the result is a humorous, scathing critique far more entertaining than the movie itself. I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie is a collection of more than 200 of Ebert's most biting and entertaining reviews of films receiving a mere star or less from the only film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. Ebert has no patience for these atrocious movies and minces no words in skewering the offenders. Witness: Armageddon * (1998)—The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out. The Beverly Hillbillies * (1993)—Imagine the dumbest half-hour sitcom you've ever seen, spin it out to ninety-three minutes by making it even more thin and shallow, and you have this movie. It's appalling. North no stars (1994)—I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it. Police Academy no stars (1984)—It's so bad, maybe you should pool your money and draw straws and send one of the guys off to rent it so that in the future, whenever you think you're sitting through a bad comedy, he could shake his head, chuckle tolerantly, and explain that you don't know what bad is. Dear God * (1996)— Dear God is the kind of movie where you walk out repeating the title, but not with a smile. The movies reviewed within I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie are motion pictures you'll want to distance yourself from, but Roger Ebert's creative and comical musings on those films make for a book no movie fan should miss.
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Salome’s Last Dance
(Directed by Ken Russell; starring Glenda Jackson; 1988)
Sex is the theater of the poor.—Oscar Wilde
Whether Wilde actually said that, I cannot be sure. The line is not found in any of the standard books of quotations, but it sure sounds like Wilde, and it gets Salome’s Last Dance off to a rousing start, from which it never recovers.
The Wilde character delivers the line as he enters a male bordello in Paris, where as a special treat the owner has planned a clandestine performance of his banned play Salome. The action takes place in 1892, three years before Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment, although in this freewheeling film by Ken Russell the period could be anytime in the past century. Russell’s approach is to stage a play-within-a-film, so that while Wilde languishes on a sofa and drinks champagne, the hardworking bordello staff perform his play on a proscenium stage that has been set up for the occasion.
What do we learn from this approach, and indeed from this film? Not much, except that Ken Russell is addicted, as always, to excesses of everything except purpose and structure. After his previous film, Gothic, which re-created a weekend idyll involving Shelley and Byron, Russell demonstrates again that he is most interested in literary figures when their trousers are unbuttoned. And even then, he isn’t interested in why, or how, they carry on their sex lives; like the defrockers of the scandal sheets, he wants only to breathlessly shock us with the news that his heroes possessed and employed genitals.
As Wilde (Nickolas Grace) reclines on his sofa, the performers in Salome perform his play with great energy. Their dialogue is more or less faithful to what Wilde wrote, but the bizarre excesses of the staging are all Russell. The plot retells Wilde’s version of the biblical story of Salome’s request to Herod that she be presented with the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. But the story is complicated mightily by the use of Douglas Hodge in a dual role, playing both John the Baptist and “Bosie”—Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover. While Bosie struggles to stay in character onstage, Wilde reclines in the arms of a young page from the brothel.
Russell is known for his cheerful willingness to involve his actors in embarrassing situations, at whatever cost to their dignity, and in Salome’s Last Dance such performers as Glenda Jackson and Stratford Johns show what good sports they are by grappling manfully with their lines while all about them disintegrates in Russellian excess. There is, for example, the matter of the three dwarfs dressed as Hassidic Jews and sent on stage to mimic their behavior. The presence of two busty British “Page Three” girls, who stand in the background of nearly every scene, with no visible purpose. The trickery by which Imogen Millais-Scott, as Salome, is replaced by a male dancer in one scene so that the character can be revealed as a transvestite.
There are, I am sometimes convinced, two Ken Russells: The disciplined and gifted director of such films as Women in Love, Altered States, and Tommy, and the orchestrator of wretched excess in films like The Music Lovers, Gothic, and this one. Despite the fact that Salome’s Last Dance encompasses almost the entire text of a play by Oscar Wilde, it seems shapeless and without purpose. Russell has devised a production without inventing a goal. At the end of the film, there are some shocks and surprises, some foreshadowing of Wilde’s long fall into despair, but they seemed tacked on as a favor to the history buffs. There’s never the feeling that this whole film was thought out from beginning to end with any particular structure in mind.
By looking at a film like this, however, you can possibly learn something about what does and doesn’t work on the screen. I would like to suggest the following postulate: When characters in a movie shock each other, it works a lot better than when they are intended to shock us. Everyone in Salome’s Last Dance—both within and outside the play—is unshockable. Russell frames their bizarre behavior by a stage and presents it to us, presumably so that we will be shocked. But we are not. The movies are a voyueristic medium, and to some degree we identify with the characters in a movie, so that if they aren’t shocked, we aren’t either. Thank God theater is not the sex of the poor.
Saturn 3
(Directed by Stanley Donen; starring Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas; 1980)
Given the fact that written science fiction encourages the greatest possible free play of ideas, why is it that filmed science fiction almost always seems required to be dumb, dumb, dumb? How, this late in the game, can we still get movies like Saturn 3? Who paid for it? The credits name Lord Lew Grade and Elliott Kastner. They’ve got a tidy little partnership over in England that’s well enough financed to chum out about a dozen international releases a year, some of them as good as The Muppet Movie, most of them as bad as Saturn 3.
How dumb is Saturn 3? I will give you an example. The movie’s about Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett, who are the only two crew members on Saturn 3, a space research station near Saturn. They have a visitor, who is supposed to be a Captain James, but is really the evil Benson (Harvey Keitel) who has killed James and replaced him for reasons of his own. Benson has brought along a robot named Hector. And, toward the end of the movie, Hector is chasing Kirk and Farrah. So what do they do? They remove the floor panels of the space station and cover the hole with a flimsy material, so that when Hector steps on it, it’ll collapse, and Hector will fall through to the bitterly cold cauldron beneath. Amazing! We haven’t seen this brilliant idea since Tarzan was putting stakes in the bottoms of holes to catch elephants. And Tarzan, at least, would have been bright enough to realize that if you make a hole in the floor of a space station, your atmosphere will rush out explosively. How can they still get away with disregarding all the elementary laws of physics in science fiction movies?
But this movie’s dumb in other ways, too. The love triangle between Douglas, Fawcett, and Keitel is so awkwardly and unbelievably handled that we are left in stunned indifference. The purpose of Keitel’s visit is left so unclear we can’t believe Douglas would accept it. The hostility of the robot is unexplained.
And then there are dubious details like (a) the spaceship whizzes through the rocks in the rings of Saturn without hitting any of them; (b) the space station is rambling and spacious despite the fact that every square inch of construction would be at an incredible premium millions of miles from Earth; (c) gravity is the same as on Earth; (d) . . . but never mind.
This movie is awesomely stupid, totally implausible from a scientific viewpoint, and a shameful waste of money. If Grade and Kastner intend to continue producing films with standards this low, I think they ought instead, in simple fairness, to simply give their money to filmmakers at random. The results couldn’t be worse.
The Scarlet Letter
(Directed by Roland Joffe; starring Demi Moore, Gary Oldman; 1995)
The great inconvenience of The Scarlet Letter, from a Hollywood point of view, is that the novel begins after the adultery has already taken place. This will not do. It is like taking up the story of Salome after she has put the veils back on. Another problem is that there is not much action in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, except inside the minds and souls of the characters. A third is that the Reverend Dimmesdale, who impregnates poor Hester, is the leader of the local hypocrites who persecute her. Channel surfing the other morning, I came across Demi Moore just as she was describing The Scarlet Letter as “a very dense, uncinematic book.”
And so it is; many of the best books are. That’s what rewrites are for. The film version imagines all of the events leading up to the adultery, photographed in the style of those Playboy’s Fantasies videos. It adds action: Indians, deadly fights, burning buildings, even the old trick where the condemned on the scaffold are saved by a violent interruption. And it converts the Reverend Dimmesdale from a scoundrel into a romantic and a weakling, perhaps because the times are not right for a movie about a fundamentalist hypocrite. It also gives us a red bird, which seems to represent the devil, and a shapely slave girl, who seems to represent the filmmakers’ desire to introduce voyeurism into the big sex scenes.
The story, you may recall, involves a Puritan woman named Hester Prynne (Demi Moore), who is found to be pregnant even though her husband has not arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and is feared dead. After refusing to name the father of her child, Hester is condemned to wear a scarlet letter on her bodice. Her daughter, Pearl, is born, and grows up as a willful little vixen. It is revealed that the father of the child is Arthur Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman), the leader of the local bluenoses denouncing Hester. And then her long-lost husband, Roger Prynne (Robert Duvall) turns up, assumes another identity, and tries to determine who was the thief of his wife’s affections. The novel ends with poor Dimmesdale confessing his sin, crying out “His will be done! Farewell!” and dying.
It is obviously not acceptable for Dimmesdale to believe he has sinned, and so the movie cleverly transforms his big speech into a stirring cry for sexual freedom and religious tolerance. Instead of dying of a guilty seizure, he snatches the noose from Hester’s neck and pulls it around his own, only to be saved when the Indians attack, driving a burning cart through the village. The roles of the puritanical local ministers are farmed out to supporting actors, and Dimmesdale is left to hang around sheepishly, keeping his guilty secret but regarding Hester with big wet eyes begging forgiveness and understanding.
Roland Joffe, who directed the film, says “the book is set in a time when the seeds were sown for the bigotry, sexism, and lack of tolerance we still battle today . . . yet it is often looked at merely as a tale of nine...