The Bottom Line: The Bottom Line was in a really, really, really bad horror flick and is slowly recovering from the embarrassment.
Why do I say "marred" above? Because mediocre movies just aren't that funny. This is a hilarious book because of a lot of the reviews it contains. Nobody can match Roger Ebert when he is tearing into a completely terrible movie. I always look at the Chicago Sun-Times web site every Friday, just to see if he has any particularly vicious ones (I also look to see what he thinks about particular movies, but it's only the 0-2 star reviews that I read no matter what the movie is). The best thing about this is, because he is so knowledgeable, even when he's being funny you still learn a lot about movie-making and what works.
I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie is a compilation of reviews of movies Ebert gave from zero to two stars. The movies are in alphabetical order, so you can easily see if a movie has been included. The low-ranking ones are usually laugh out loud funny. I read quite a few of them to my wife. I would start out reading a notable quote, and then realize that it needed context, until finally I just read the entire review. At times, I had to stop because I was laughing so hard. Try out Ebert's review of Turbulence for example. "Turbulence thrashes about like a formula action picture that has stepped on a live wire: It's dead, but doesn't stop moving. It looks like it cost a lot of money, but none of that money went into quality. It's schlock, hurled at the screen in expensive gobs."
Unfortunately for this book, it has too many two star reviews that just aren't that funny. Ebert does a good job of detailing why it's a mediocre movie, but that certainly can't be the point of this book. If all you want is a comment on movie-making, Ebert publishes all of his reviews every year. The point of this book has to be collecting a bunch of negative reviews in order to make the reader laugh. The reviews of mediocre movies just don't do that. The value of the book is in the humour, not in the reviews themselves. Some of the two-star reviews are funny, and I've read others that are hilarious as well. So why not include them instead? I'm not sure who chose the reviews, Ebert or the publisher, but wrong choices were definitely made, choices that completely missed the point of the book. Not only that, but a few zero-star movies were left out that really called for inclusion (such as Key Exchange, from 1985). Hopefully, they'll put out another book, fix the few problems, and include even more great reviews.
Others have said that this book was unnecessary because of Ebert's yearly guides, I think that misses the point as well. If you wanted to look at a bunch of reviews of bad movies, it would be a lot harder to do it in the yearbooks. You have to look movies up by title in those. Sure, you can look up movies by rating on Ebert's web site, but that only goes back to 1985, and many of the reviews in this book are before that. For that reason alone, this is a valuable compilation. Thus, it's very nice to have a compilation that you can just sit back and read without doing a lot of work. Ebert's yearly guides are for people who want to know what he thought of a particular movie. I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie is for those who just want to sit back and have a laugh.
Ultimately, you will laugh a lot reading this book, even more so if you've managed to sit through one of the movies Ebert's talking about. Just skim the two star reviews, though, because they take away from the humour factor.
******
This has been an entry in Sleeper54's Lean-n-Mean II write-off.
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