Roger Ebert Quotes

Fast Food Rule. Wanna know what the summer's blockbuster is going to be? See who McDonald's does the marketing tie-in with. Wanna know what blockbuster will do disappointing business? See who Burger King ties in with.

The movie has, above all, effortless charm. Once we catch on that nothing much is going to happen, we can relax and share the amusement of the actors, who are essentially being asked to share their playfulness.

Your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly retire you had a job but not an occupation.

Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists

Anyone who has the price of a newspaper should have a fair chance of understanding most of what’s written in it,

if you don’t flush out the pipes, they’ll run brown.

We have nothing to live but life itself.

Another of Keaton’s strategies was to avoid anticipation. Instead of showing you what was about to happen, he showed you what was happening; the surprise and the response are both unexpected, and funnier. He also gets laughs by the application of perfect logic.

The 1960s ended sadly, as did Bonnie and Clyde, as did Jules and Jim, as did Thelma & Louise, a film they influenced; the movement from comedy to tragedy was all the more powerful for audiences who expected one or the other.

How strange that a novel about such a desperate man could pull me back into living. I had no use for happy characters. What did they know?

Listening to Bailey, it occurred to me that the best commentary tracks are often by experts who did not work on the film but love it and have given it a lot of thought. They’re more useful than those rambling tracks where directors (notoriously shy about explaining their techniques or purposes) reminisce about the weather on the set that day.

He was an editor for seven years before directing his first film, and his career stands as an argument for the theory that editors make better directors than cine-matographers do; the cinematographer is seduced by the look of a film, while the editor is faced with the task of making it work as a story.

because an American can have a double-barreled last name but there is little practice for a triple-barreled one.

The movie teaches us how action is the enemy of suspense — how action releases tension instead of building it. Better to wait for a whole movie for something to happen (assuming we really care whether it happens) than to sit through a film where things we don’t care about are happening constantly.

As the man says in the play, for this relief, much thanks.