This Week's Travel Reading

For a film critic, the flip side of seeing some great movies is seeing many, many movies that aren't so great. A sizable number of them will be merely mediocre and utterly forgettable, but there will be a few--perhaps, quite disturbingly, more than a few--that are bad.

Some will fall into the "so bad they're good" category--Plan 9 from Outer Space comes to mind--but many just keep falling well below that dubious watermark to the level of painful viewing experiences.

Comedies that aren't funny. Dramas that aren't dramatic. Horror films that horrify for all the wrong reasons.

Goodness knows that, in his 40-plus year career as a professional film critic, Roger Ebert has seen his share of stinkers, offenders and wastes of valuable time--enough, in fact, to fill three full volumes with reviews of the unwatchable that he, unfortunately, had to watch.

The first of these books, I Hated Hated Hated This Movie! (the title taken from Ebert's review of Rob Reiner's North,, though I'm pretty sure two or three "hateds" were omitted), contained many of his more infamous bad notices, including his one-star review of Blue Velvet (which he later said was too harsh) and his zero-star review of Caligula (which he did not later rescind--nor should he have). Unfortunately, Hated was padded out with a number of two-star reviews for films not good enough to recommend, but not bad enough to condemn--shoulder shrugs on film.

The second book in the series, Your Movie Sucks, remedied this problem nicely--it had no two-star reviews at all and was, therefore, much more enjoyable (even if it contains a rather churlish, condescending review of the original Gorjira which, at the time it was originally published, pissed me off, and seeing it again in Sucks did not make me feel any more warmly toward it).

Sadly, the newly released third book, pictured above, represents a huge step backward--it contains many, many two-star reviews.It seems like at least half the book is made up two-star reviews. Perhaps the subtitle of the book should have been something more like, "More Movies That Are Just Kinda Meh."

Credit must be given where due, however: The title of the book comes from Mr. Ebert's review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,; truer words have never been written.