"YOU CAN'T TAKE IT, BILLY!": CRANKY COMICS AND CAUSTIC CRITICS

Life Itself, director Steve James' moving, insightful adaptation of the late Roger Ebert’s memoirs, takes its title from perhaps his most famous quote, “The only thing I love more than movies is life itself.” But falling afoul of his generosity was never pretty; the critic that cherishes the artistry of cinema is quick to deride those that fail to honour his lofty ideals. Just ask Rob Schneider…

Rob Schneider found fame as a cast member of Saturday Night Live before a stop/start bigscreen career that included Judge Dredd, Down Periscope, The Animal and a regular support bit in a lot of Adam Sandler films as the guy who yells out ‘You can do it!’ Despite a fratboy fanbase that made minor hits out of The Hot Chick and The Benchwarmers, his leading man cred ground to a halt after 2007’s dismal Big Stan.

Schneider’s biggest hits were the Deuce Bigalow films, in which he played a worthless schmo who finds himself an in-demand male whore. Critics tore them to shreds, of course, none more so than Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times, who stated that the 2005 sequel, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (pictured, right), was overlooked at the 2005 Oscars “because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third Rate Comic.”

The admittedly nasty review was the final straw for Schnieder, who took out full-page ads in the daily trade papers blasting Goldstein’s own lack of award silverware. The comic pointed out that the critic did not have a Pulitzer Prize because they didn’t have a category for “Best Third-Rate, Unfunny, Pompous Reporter, Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers”.

What has all this to do with the late, great Mr Ebert? Well, as the critic himself often pointed out, Roger Ebert does have a Pulitzer Prize, for Criticism, which he won in 1975; he was the first film critic to be so honoured. Deciding to weigh in on the very public slanging match, Roger Ebert penned one of his most deliciously caustic commentaries, elegantly stating, “As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize,” before concluding his review of the film with, “Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr Schneider, your movie sucks.”*

‘Your Movie Sucks’ would become the title of his follow-up book to ‘I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie’ (its title taken from Ebert’s lees-than-favourable take on Rob Reiner’s North), both bestselling collections of his most scathing reviews. As Life Itself continues to play to warm audience reception and critical acclaim, we are reminded of his witty but blistering rhetoric in these excerpts from the pages of his 2007 compendium…

Half Past Dead (2002; with Steven Seagal and Morris Chestnut; directed by Don Michael Paul).
Plot: A criminal mastermind sets in motion a plan to infiltrate a high tech prison to unearth a hidden $200million in gold, with an undercover FBI agent the only hope to stop the scheme before it is too late.
Said Ebert:  “Half Past Dead is like an alarm that goes off while nobody is in the room. It does its job and stops, and nobody cares.”; “Seagal’s great contribution to the movie is to look serious, even menacing, in close-ups carefully framed to hide his double-chin. I do not object to the fact that he’s put on weight. Look who’s talking. I object to the fact that he thinks he can conceal it from us with knee-length coats and tricky camera angles. I would rather see a movie about a pudgy karate fighter than a movie about a guy you never get a good look at.”

Fantastic Four (2005; with Ioan Gruffud, Jessica Alba and Chris Evans; directed by Tim Story).
Plot: A group of astronauts gain superpowers after a cosmic radiation exposure and must use their new powers to fight the rise of their enemy, Dr Doom.
Said Ebert: “Are these people complete idiots? The entire nature of their existence has radically changed, and they’re about as excited as if they got a makeover on Oprah.”; “(The) really good superhero movies, like Superman, Spiderman II, and Batman Begins, leave Fantastic Four so far behind that the movie should almost be ashamed to show itself in some of the same theatres.”

Be Cool (2005; with John Travolta and Uma Thurman; directed by F Gary Gray)
Plot: Disenchanted with the movie industry, Chilli Palmer re-invents himself in the music biz and woos the widow of a big-deal record executive.
Said Ebert: “Be Cool becomes a classic species of bore; a self-referential movie with no self to refer to. One character after another, one scene after another, one cute line of dialogue after another, refers to another movie, a similar character, a contrasting image or whatever. The movie is like a bureaucrat who keeps sending you to another office.”

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004; with Milla Jovovich; directed by Alexander Witt)
Plot: Our heroine awakes to find her surrounds infested with monsters and zombies and must escape before all is destroyed by a nuclear missile.
Said Ebert: “Parents: If you encounter teenagers who say they liked this movie, do not let them date your children.”

The Hills Have Eyes (2006; with Ted Levine an Kathleen Quinlan, directed by Alexandre Aja)
Plot: An all-American suburban family detour into a deserted desert landscape where mutants hunt them for their flesh.
Said Ebert: “It always begins with the Wrong Gas Station. In real life, as I pointed out in a previous Wrong Gas Station movie, most gas stations are clean, well-lighted places.”; “Nobody in this movie has ever seen a Dead Teenager Movie, and so they don’t know 1) you never go off alone, 2) you especially never go off alone at night, and 3) you never follow your dog when it races off barking insanely, because you have more sense than the dog. It is also possibly not a good idea to walk back to the Wrong Gas Station to get help from the degenerate who sent you on the detour in the first place.”

*The long feud that ensued between Schneider and Ebert was laid to rest in some thoughtful correspondence that the comedia shared with Roger Ebert's widow, Chaz, which she reproduced in full on her blog page at rogerebert.com in October 2013.