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The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.

Roger Ebert

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Roger Ebert
Age: 70 †
Born: 1942
Born: June 18
Died: 2013
Died: April 4
Film Critic
Journalist
Presenter
Reporter
Screenwriter
Writer
Urbana
Illinois
Roger Joseph Ebert
Characters
Buried
Like
Lived
Ethical
American
Code
Fonda
Lost
John
Stewart
Film
Traditional
Instinctive
Kill
Henry
Become
Films
Wayne
Character
Hollywood
James
Many

More quotes by Roger Ebert

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That's what fantasies are for, to help us imagine that things are better than they are.
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When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
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I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.
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Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line.
Roger Ebert
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A movie isn't good or bad based on its politics. It's usually good or bad for other reasons, though you might agree or disagree with its politics.
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Because we are human, because we are bound by gravity and the limitations of our bodies, because we live in a world where the news is often bad and the prospects disturbing, there is a need for another world somewhere, a world where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers live.
Roger Ebert
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Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert's Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.
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But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, Snow White and the Huntsman is a considerable experience.
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We must try to contribute joy to the world.
Roger Ebert
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I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.
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If Hollywood stars speak out, so do all sorts of other people. Now Hollywood stars can get a better hearing.
Roger Ebert
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Because I don't give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.
Roger Ebert
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The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [...] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling...and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old.
Roger Ebert
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Marlon Brando is the most influential movie actor of the century.
Roger Ebert
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We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.
Roger Ebert
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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.
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Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.
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It's the worst kind of bad film: the kind that gets you all worked up and then lets you down, instead of just being lousy from the first shot.
Roger Ebert
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The movie cheerfully offends all civilized notions of taste, decorum, manners and hygiene... The movie is vulgar? Vulgarity is when we don't laugh. When we laugh, it's merely human nature.
Roger Ebert
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Most people choose movies that provide exactly what they expect, and tell them things they already know. Others are more curious. We are put on this planet only once, and to limit ourselves to the familiar is a crime against our minds.
Roger Ebert