Roger Ebert: From My Cousin Vinnie to Bill O'Reilly

Roger Ebert is my favourite movie critic. He may even be the main reason I still go out to movies with my wife. When Mary Ann and I were first dating, she liked going to movies and so did I. Just not the same movies. It took a few years before we could find the very first movie we both liked, "My Cousin Vinnie". That was a real breakthrough because at least it proved we had some common ground in movies, other than movies that were so bad we both hated them, but for different reasons. But Cousin Vinnie was a fluke, we needed some way to predict which movies we could both enjoy.

I started reading reviews before going to the movies, as my usual rating system was not working well. Actually my old rating system went kind of like this: I looked through the known facts about the movie and added or subtracted points.

Has a motorcycle in it +100
Has Sandra Bullock in it +20
Rated R or better +5
Has Mickey Rourke in it -100
Science Fiction theme +50
Involves death by disease -50
Involved death by explosives +10
Psychological drama - 20
Comedy +50

This system was simply not working for both of us, as every thing I awarded points for, Mary Ann subtracted the exact same number of points. There are many movie reviewers out there, but soon I noticed that Roger Ebert seemed to be the one most in sync with my tastes. The cool thing was, that if he ever awarded 3 and a half stars or better to a movie, we would both enjoy seeing it. Maybe not enjoy it the same amount, maybe not the for the same reasons, but we both started to look forward to going to movies together.

Now I have found an interesting journal entry written by Roger Ebert, and not surprisingly, I consider his opinion spot on about the propaganda found on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News Channel opinion show, called "The O'Reilly Factor".

Here is a link to the Chicago Sun-Times web page with this article from June 14, 2009. "The O'Reilly Procedure"

(Yes, I know My Cousin Vinnie only got 2 1/2 stars from Roger Ebert, that's because it's the exception that proves the rule.)