By Chris Ryall
March 14, 2005
In the Balcony: Chris Ryall talks with THE GREAT MOVIES II author and film critic Roger Ebert about writing reviews for the Internet, ecnonomizing your words and which online reviewers he likes to read.
A year ago, we had a contest where I gave away five copies of Roger Ebert's book, THE GREAT MOVIES. In it, I asked people to give me their own "Great Movie" review. But I had them do it in fifty words or less.
This wasn't done as a way to save time on judging entries. Rather, for some time now, I've been trying to adhere to a certain word count I get in my head for each column. The thing about writing on the Internet is, there are no word counts or page limits, for the most part. So at times, when all we want to do is read an opinion of a new movie, we have to first trudge through a reviewer's mindset and other distractions before we get to the review itself.
I'm guilty of it myself, I know, rambling on or not taking the time to go back and edit and polish and trim. That's one of the defenses for long essays on the 'Net, that the "immediacy of the Internet" makes that sort of verbal onanism acceptable, due to the fact that you're just shotgunning your immediate thoughts up there for people to see. It's undiluted, unedited... unmititgatedly tedious to read at times.
So the contest, holding people to fifty words--which is, let's be honest, way too few to really allow for a convincing argument about a movie, for the most part--is a nice challenge. It forces economy with words. And it proves that variation on the old theme, that just because you can use 5,000 words to describe what a failure BE COOL is, doesn't mean you should do it (although, after seeing it, I could spend twice that on just such a topic).
After holding a second contest this past January, for THE GREAT MOVIES II, I got a chance to discuss movies and reviewing with Roger Ebert a bit more in depth. To that end, I tried to only focus on writing online reviews, to get the master's take on writing effective movie reviews, and doing so in the barest number of words required to make a saleint point. Roger, as you can imagine, had quite a few thoughts on the topic (and yet didn't ramble on any more than he needed to effectively answer my questions, another lesson in itself).
Ryall: The Internet's lack of word counts seems to encourage reviews that ramble on and on. To prove that reviews can be effective without being verbose, for the two contests we've run for you're the GREAT MOVIES books, I've asked entrants to submit a movie review in 50 words or less, which has proven a good challenge. What sort of advice can you give 'Net reviewers about economizing their words and making their point as briefly as possible?
Roger Ebert: Jeez. This is like writing the haiku of film criticism! But you make a good point: Space is unlimited on the web, but users' time is limited, and the wise critic would follow the immortal advice of Strunk and White, in The Elements of Style (a book that should be at every writer's elbow):
"A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences."
If you can follow that, no matter how long your piece is, by definition it is not too long.
Ryall: A follow-up to that question would be, do you think reviews that discuss a reviewer's mind-set and details of their day leading up to a screening are effective or detract from the review of the film itself?
Ebert: Depends. I can do without some of Harry Knowles' reviews that begin with his breakfast. On the other hand, the fact that I first saw "The Third Man" as a college kid on my first visit to Paris, in a smoky Left Bank revival house, is absolutely bound to my feelings about that film.
Ryall: Internet reviews often cite the immediacy of the Internet and the ability to post a review almost as soon as a screening ends as proof that it's a more effective communication tool than print. You work in both-agree or disagree with this thinking? Do you feel a reviewer is more insightful by writing up a review as soon as possible while a film is still fresh in their heads, or do better movie reviews benefit from reflection for a time before writing the review?
Ebert: I don't like to let long periods of time elapse, because while factual memory is durable, emotional memory tends to fade. When I see a film at a festival and it opens months afterwards, I always ask for another screening. The fresher the film is in the mind, the better.
Ryall: Many new reviewers spend more time laying out a movie's plot points than they do critiquing what they've seen. What're some tips that would help reviewers focus more on the critique of a film than simply summarizing its story?
Ebert: When Mary Knoblauch was film critic of the late, lamented Chicago Today, she held herself to a rule of: One paragraph only for the plot summary. I would find that draconian. Sometimes my reviews may essentially be a description of the plot (tilted and opinionated and with asides and digs of the elbow), and that is all right, but other times I get bogged down in the plot, and try to be briefer. In my review of "Million Dollar Baby" I think I found a good balance between plot (less the surprise development) and specific comments on particular scenes. I was amused that John Simon's review of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" was the longest one in one of his collections, because he unwisely got into the plot.
Ryall: New movie reviewers typically have only their own film background as their film education and don't have film school backing their opinions. Is it important to know the difference between, say, film noir and film soleil, or to recognize echoes of John Ford in a movie to write an effective review?
Is the lack of a comprehensive movie education a problem for upcoming reviewers?
Ebert: You learn on the job. The movies teach you. There were no film classes at the University of Illinois when I was a student. But I read books, learned by visiting sets and interviewing film people, taught film classes, and taught myself. So did the film critics who inspired me like Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald. Stanley Kauffmann and Andrew Sarris.
For the basics, in plain English without theoretical hoop-jumping, I recommend David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's books "Film Art," "Film History" and, more advanced, the brilliant, "On the History of Film Style." Also Louis Gianetti's "Understanding Movies," now in its 10th edition. I bought the first edition the day I was named film critic.
Ryall: If so, how would you suggest they add to their knowledge? Reading THE GREAT MOVIES I and II is a perfect source, but are there other ways? Just watching as many movies from as many eras as possible?
Ebert: Yeah, go to the movies. Rent movies. Break out of the present and plunder the past. Taking one of the Great Movies books and working your way through it is one idea, since there will be some titles you're not familiar with and others you disagree with.
Ryall: Many reviewers write reviews as though they're only looking to provide quote-ready sound bites for newspapers. Is it more important to focus on the craft of writing a good review than it is getting a quote pulled and seen by a wide number of people?
Publicists have complained to me that some of my reviews contain NO blurb-like comments. On the other hand, when I wrote "One of the greatest performances in the history of the cinema" about Charlize Theron in "Monster," I knew it read like a blurb and that was fine with me. The movie came within a whisker of going straight to video. By reviewing it three weeks early on Ebert & Roeper, I think we were able to attract crucial attention to it.
Ryall: Are there any reviewers who write primarily for the Internet—that is, people who don't have their printed reviews run at a paper's Web site or some such—who you noticed who do a good job at covering movies? Or do you even read others' critiques of movies?
Ebert: Of the web-based critics, I like Charles Taylor, David Edelstein, James Berardinelli, Stephanie Zacharek, JoBlo, Emanuel Levy, Ray Pride, and several others (this is not a complete list). I like what Jim Emerson, the editor of rogerebert.com, is writing for our site. I do not usually read critics before writing my own review, because when I am writing they are also writing and the movie has not opened yet. My reviews appear on opening day, or from festivals before the movie opens. But I feel no particular fetish about keeping myself pure by reading no reviews before writing. As a graduate student of English, I was taught to survey the critical literature in preparation for my own writing. I think I probably mention other critics more frequently than most current critics, because I believe in credit where due.
Here is my favorite recent use of the Web in one of my own reviews. It is from my review of "Ong Bak":
