Roger Ebert quotes - page 13

I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste. (Roger Ebert)
Minority Report reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place. View quote
Roger Ebert
Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible. View quote
Roger Ebert
If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. View quote
Roger Ebert
In the twilight of the 20th century, here is a comedy to reassure us that there is hope - that the world we see around us represents progress, not decay. View quote
Roger Ebert
This process leads to the present moment, and to all of us. View quote
Roger Ebert
Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. View quote
Roger Ebert
I don't know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. View quote
Roger Ebert
Even his failures are spectacular. View quote
Roger Ebert
I don't want to provide a category that people can apply to me. Those who say that "believer” and "atheist” are concrete categories do violence to the mystery we must be humble enough to confess. I would not want my convictions reduced to a word. View quote
Roger Ebert
I prefer vertical prayer, directed up toward heaven, rather than horizontal prayer, directed sideways toward me. (Roger Ebert)
All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. View quote
Roger Ebert
Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. View quote
Roger Ebert
I am wary of zealotry; even as a child I was suspicious of those who, as I often heard, were "more Catholic than the pope.” If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, we must regard their beliefs with the same respect our own deserve. View quote
Roger Ebert
All we can learn from a film like this is that millions of people can be led, and millions more killed, by madness leashed to racism and the barbaric instincts of tribalism. View quote
Roger Ebert
Instead of using doubles, he himself doubled for his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own. View quote
Roger Ebert
Such a connection can be terrifying. View quote
Roger Ebert
It is not too soon for "United 93," because it is not a film that knows any time has passed since 9/11. View quote
Roger Ebert
The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. View quote
Roger Ebert
Jargon is the last refuge of the scoundrel. View quote
Roger Ebert
They're not talking about faster than the speed of light. Speed has nothing to do with it. The entangled objects somehow communicate instantaneously at a distance. If that is true, distance has no meaning. Light-years have no meaning. Space has no meaning. In a sense, the entangled objects are not even communicating. They are the same thing. At the "quantum level” (and I don't know what that means), everything may be actually or theoretically linked. All is one. Sun, moon, stars, rain, you, me, everything. All one. (Roger Ebert)
They say state-of-the-art special effects can create the illusion of anything on the screen, and now we have proof: It's possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light and Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects, and I am not forgetting the Chucky doll or the desert intestine from Star wars. View quote
Roger Ebert
Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way. The visuals are grubby and drab. The characters are unkempt and have rotten teeth. Breathing tubes hang from their noses like ropes of snot. The soundtrack sounds like the boom mike is being slammed against the inside of a 55-gallon drum. The plot. ... Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies. View quote
Roger Ebert
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that. View quote
Roger Ebert
It's the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy. View quote
Roger Ebert