Ebert on Cloverfield: Who Will Review the Reviewer?™

I don't get paid to blog. I do it for two reasons: 1) I have time on my hands because I'm unemployed, and 2) I love to write. Truth be told, I love to play with words the way Bryan Cranston loves appearing in his tighty-whities on TV.

If I did get paid to blog, however, the quality of my writing would improve to the point that none of my posts would have a "filler" tag. You don't turn in filler when someone's paying you damn good money to write something with content.*

So what's Roger Ebert's excuse with his review of Cloverfield?

If the point of a movie review is to inform readers with an accurate and fair summary of a film, then Mr. Ebert has failed spectacularly with this effort.

Sure, he devotes the requisite word count to pointing out the shakiness of the camerawork (*yawners*), and manages to work in an amusing colonoscopy joke, but then the review devolves quickly into the worst kind of pap. How bad is it? Imagine Ain't It Cool News posting an email from a twitchy ADHD sufferer with an ax to grind after a preview screening of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Some highlights:

• Ebert writes that "the statute has run out on the theory that after 9/11 it would be in bad taste to show Manhattan being destroyed"...an obvious point considering actual controversy linking 9/11 and bad taste erupted two years ago following the release of Paul Greengrass' United 93. Plus, scenes of mass destruction in New York have appeared in numerous movies in recent years. I guess Peter Jackson's King Kong didn't count because it took place pre-9/11? That's just lazy writing, dude.
  
• He takes issue with a female character walking for miles and then having "the energy to climb 49 flights of stairs...in her high heels" to rescue someone trapped on a building's 49th floor. Ebert apparently didn't hear the characters say they're trying to rescue someone on the 39th floor. And while the heroes actually climb over 57 flights (long story), Ebert failed to see a close-up of Lily's bare feet on the stairwell. I saw it, and I don't even have a Tarantino-like foot fetish. Then again, they were only 40-feet high and filling a movie screen.
• He points out "the incredible element" of the camcorder's battery lasting "on the evidence of the footage we see, more than six hours, maybe 12." Now, right at the beginning it's established that the "found footage" that makes up the entire movie is shown in real time (depicting exactly what was recorded on a memory card over a seven-hour time-frame). I don't know which hellish director's cut Ebert sat through, but the one I saw was 84 minutes in length.
• My biggest quibble with his review: he spends an entire paragraph (out of eight) explaining something about the nature of the monster...and then dismisses the entire point by including a parenthetical disclaimer that says, in effect, "I just checked online and I was mistaken about that." See, that's where a paid professional would rewrite and not include the reader in the fact-checking process.
  

If I were to rate Cloverfield using Ebert's four-star scale, I'd give it a three-and-a-half. He gave it a three. His unfounded complaints and poor writing make it sound like a two. Considering that Roger Ebert has won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and there's a bar set for his writing, I give his review a one.

By the way, I wasn't compensated in any way for this review of a review. (Hold on! I just checked on the Interweb and see that feedback from readers and high traffic always fills me with a sense of self-importance.)

* Or, if you turn in filler as a professional, you refuse compensation--or take the money but remove your name.