This is the second part of a two-part interview with Roger Ebert, one of my heroes.

The first part of this interview includes a small tribute that I wrote to Mr. Ebert. Here you'll find another tribute, this one written by Mr. Ebert himself, to the late great Studs Terkel, plus a piece Ebert wrote during his health recovery about Rob Schneider – of all people – acting like a gentleman.

As part of an effort to make this project an example of citizen journalism I solicited questions and received several that asked him to rank movies or list his favorites. I subsequently read, in the introduction to one of his excellent Great Movies books, this comment:

I do not believe in rankings and lists and refuse all invitations to reveal my ‘ten all-time favorite musicals,’ etc., on the grounds that such lists are meaningless and might well change between Tuesday and Thursday. I make only two exceptions to this policy: I compile an annual list of the year’s best films, because it is written in stone that movie critics must do so, and I participate every ten years in the Sight & Sound poll of the world’s directors and critics.

With that in mind, I cut all questions asking him to list or rank anything. Instead, since this interview is ostensibly to promote his latest book, This Movie Sucks, I decided to list my favorite comments from this book. The only movies I thought he was a little too hard on were Team America and Serendipity.

I completely agreed with his criticisms of The Village, which I also trashed.

In no particular order, my favorite passages from Your Movie Sucks: 

On The Village: The Village is a colossal miscalculation, a movie based on a premise that cannot support it, a premise so transparent it would be laughable were the movie not so deadly solemn. It's a flimsy excuse for a plot, with characters who move below the one-dimensional and enter Flatland. M. Night Shyamalan, the writer-director, has been successful in evoking horror from minimalist stories, as in Signs, which if you think about it rationally is absurd — but you get too involved to think rationally. He is a director of considerable skill who evokes stories out of moods, but this time, alas, he took the day off…

Critics were enjoined after the screening to avoid revealing the plot secrets. That is not because we would spoil the movie for you. It's because if you knew them, you wouldn't want to go.

Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

On Pearl Harbor: ... a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.

On Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic: ... a movie that filled me with an urgent desire to see Sarah Silverman in a different movie. I liked everything about it except the writing, the direction, the editing and the lack of a parent or adult guardian. There should have been somebody to stand up sadly after the first screening and say, "Sarah, honey, this isn't the movie you want people to see. Your material needs a lot of work, the musical scenes are deadly, except for the first one. And it looks like it was edited by someone fooling around with iMovie on a borrowed Macintosh.

On Jason X: "This sucks on so many levels” - dialogue from Jason X.

Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. Jason X sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness, and aptness of thought. Only its title works.

On John Q: Anne Heche is deep-sixed by her role, which makes her a penny-pinching shrew and then gives her a cigarette to smoke just in case we missed that she’s the villain. The Grim Reaper would flee from this woman.

On Undead: Undead is the kind of movie that would be so bad it’s good, except it’s not bad enough to be good enough.

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