- I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.
- I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
- No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough
- We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls.
- Old theatres are irreplaceable. They could never be duplicated at today's costs - but more importantly, their spirit could not be duplicated because they remind us of a day when going to the show was a more glorious and escapist experience. I think a town's old theatres are the sanctuary of its dreams.
- From his review of North (1994): I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every stupid simpering vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.
- When a movie character is really working, we become that character.
- Trân Châu Cảng (2001) is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on December 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.
- Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995) is about as close as you can get to absolute nothing and still have a product to project on the screen.
- [on the creature in Vùng Đất Quỷ Dữ (2002)] That creature is called The Licker because it has a nine-foot tongue. At one point it has its tongue nailed to the track and is dragged along the third rail; I hate it when that happens.
- [on Mannequin (1987)] This movie is a real curiosity. It's dead. I don't mean it's bad. A lot of bad movies are fairly throbbing with life. Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 90 minutes and then we can leave the theater. Halfway through, I was ready for someone to lead us in reciting the rosary.
- [on Bản Danh Sách Của Schindler (1993)] Of the thousands of movies that I've seen, none has touched me more deeply, spiritually, emotionally with just an outpouring of emotion.
- [on Hoop Dreams (1994)] A film like 'Hoop Dreams' is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.
- [on Những Thiên Tài Bé Bi (1999)] The movie involves a genius baby named Sly, who escapes from the lab and tries to organize fellow babies in revolt. The nauseating sight of little Sly on a disco floor, dressed in the white suit from 'Saturday Night Fever' and dancing to 'Stayin' Alive', had me pawing under my seat for the bag my Subway Gardenburger came in, in case I felt the sudden need to recycle it.
- [on New York Minute (2004)] This is a dumb movie about dumb people.
- [on Những Thiên Thần Của Charlie (2000)] This movie doesn't have a brain in its three pretty little heads.
- [on Swingers (1996)] I saw it, I enjoyed it. I probably wouldn't walk more than five blocks to see it again. And on a cold day I'd have to think about it.
- [on Ma Cây 2: Bình Minh Chết Chóc (1987)] "Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn" is a comedy disguised as a blood-soaked shock-a-rama. It looks superficially like a routine horror movie, a vomitorium designed to separate callow teenagers from their lunch. But look a little closer and you'll realize that the movie is a fairly sophisticated satire. Level One viewers will say it's in bad taste. Level Two folks like myself will perceive that it is about bad taste.
- [on Rời Khỏi Las Vegas (1995)] Oh, this movie is so sad! It is sad not because of the tragic lives of its characters, but because of their goodness and their charity.
- [on the re-release of Pink Flamingos (1972)] John Waters' 'Pink Flamingos' has been restored for its 25th anniversary revival and, with any luck at all, that means I won't have to see it again for another 25 years. If I haven't retired by then, I will. How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood. "He's the best geek in the business," this man assured me. "What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?" I asked. "You wanna examine the chickens?".
- [on Mùi Đu Đủ Xanh (1993)] Here is a film so placid and filled with sweetness that watching it is like listening to soothing music.
- [on Tình Anh Em (1980)} This is the sherman tank of movie musicals.
- Bạo Chúa Caligula (1979) is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. People learn fast. "This movie," said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, "is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen".
- [on The Fearless Vampire Killers: Vampires 101 (1967)] There's a girl dressed like a vampire standing in a window on Randolph Street, and if you can make her laugh, you get two free tickets to 'The Fearless Vampire Killers'...I've cooked up a whizzero of an indoor contest. It works this way. First, you buy two tickets to 'The Fearless Vampire Killers, etc.' Then, you go inside and - get this - if you don't laugh even once during the whole movie, you get your money back...The night I went to see 'The Fearless Vampire Killers', for example, the whole audience would have won because nobody laughed. One or two people cried, and a lady behind me dropped a bag of M&Ms which rolled under the seats, and a guy on the center aisle sneezed at 43 minutes past the hour.
- [on The Lonely Guy (1984)] I ordered a box of popcorn and went into the theater. "Good luck," an usher told me. "You're going to need it." He was right.
- [on Before Sunrise (1995)] The R rating for this film, based on a few four-letter words, is entirely unjustified. It is an ideal film for teenagers.
- [on Jack Frost (1998)] The snowman gave me the creeps. Never have I disliked a movie character more. They say state-of-the-art special effects can create the illusion of anything on the screen, and now we have proof: It's possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light and Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects... To see the snowman is to dislike the snowman.
- Films like Thị Trấn Fargo (1996) are why I love the movies.
- We Americans like to see evil in terms of guns and crime and terrorists and drug smuggling - big, broad immoral activities. We rarely make movies about how one person can be personally cruel to another, through their deep understanding of what might hurt the other person the most.
- People ask me sometimes if I ever change my mind about a review and I no longer agree with what I said in my review of Sinh Viên Tốt Nghiệp (1967), that the Simon & Garfunkel songs are instantly forgettable. I don't think that was right.
- [on Deep Throat (1972)] There are, I have been told, 17 scenes of explicit sex in the movie 'Deep Throat'. I did not count them myself, I saw the movie, but I forgot to start counting until too late. Harold, who is a bartender in the Old Town area, counted them on Friday afternoon, and we will have to take his word. Harold is not often mistaken in these matters. He has a keen eye and a good memory.
- [on Freddy Got Fingered (2001)] This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.
- [on God Told Me To (1976)] As I left the theater, dazed, I saw a crowd across the street. A young man in a strait jacket (try not to get ahead of the story, please) was preparing to be suspended in mid-air hundreds of inches above the ground, and to escape, Houdini-style. At the moment he was still standing on the sidewalk - but, believe me, it was still a better show.
- [on Deathmaster (1972)] [Robert] Quarry arrives at dawn in an old coffin that floats up on the beach at Santa Monica. If memory serves, it is the same beach used for the opening scene of Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Crab monsters would be a relief, in fact, but what with the price of crabmeat these days they have all gone into different lines of work or simply dropped out of circulation. The next time you eat a crabmeat cocktail, reflect that it could be eating you.
- [on Thế Mới Là Yêu (2005)] To call 'A Lot Like Love' dead in the water is an insult to water.
- [on Đội Bóng Nhà Tù (2005)] There is a sense in which attacking this movie is like kicking a dog for not being better at calculus.
- [on Un indien dans la ville (1994)] Through a stroke of good luck, the entire third reel of the film was missing the day I saw it. I went back to the screening room two days later to view the missing reel. It was as bad as the rest, but nothing could have saved this film. As my colleague Gene Siskel observed, "If the third reel had been the missing footage from Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) this movie still would have sucked.".
- [on Americathon (1979)] If you plan to miss this movie, better miss it quickly; I doubt if it'll be around to miss for long.
- [on Body of Evidence (1993)] It has to be seen to be believed - something I do not advise.
- [on Jeg - en kvinde (1965)] If you can miss only one movie this year, make it 'I, A Woman'. Here is a Swedish film which very nearly restores my faith in the cinema, demonstrating that all the other crummy movies I've had to sit through in this job weren't so bad. Not by comparison, anyway.
- I can report, however, why I didn't find The Jerk (1979) very funny. It began to grind on me right at the beginning because it was depending on whats rather than whys for its laughs. I'll explain. It seems to me that there are two basic approaches to any kind of comedy, and in a burst of oversimplification I'll call them the Funny Hat and the Funny Logic approaches. The difference is elementary: In the first, we're supposed to laugh because the comic is wearing the funny hat, and in the second it's funny because of his reasons for wearing the funny hat.
- [on why his movie ratings are relative, not concrete] It doesn't work that way because people should be smart enough to listen to what Richard Roeper and I say instead of looking at the dumb thumbs and the dumb stars because there are gradations and contexts that go on.
- A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.
- [on First Descent (2005)] "As the decade progressed, so did snowboarding," we learn at one point, leading me to reflect that as the decade progressed, so did time itself.
- The distribution system seems to be set up to turn every multiplex in this country into an idiot's convention.
- [To Gene Siskel, when he claimed that David Lynch, director of Nhung Xanh (1986), was playing him like a piano.] Well, the next time someone plays me, he better have some music that's worth listening to.
- I am against censorship and believe that no films or books should be burned or banned, but film school study is one thing and a general release is another. Any new Disney film immediately becomes part of the consciousness of almost every child in America, and I would not want to be a black child going to school in the weeks after Song of the South (1946) was first seen by my classmates.
- [on Người Dơi Xuất Hiện (2005)] To get straight to the point, 'Batman Begins' is the fifth Batman movie, but the first to get it right; to get it absolutely right!
- It's saying something about a director's work when the most well-rounded and socialized hero in any of [Tim Burton's] films is Pee-wee Herman.
- One thing I've discovered is that I love my job more than I thought I did, and I love my wife even more!
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