Roger Ebert's Half-Star Reviews by DoyleE

Question 10

"This is the kind of movie that gives even its defenders fits of desperation.

"Consider my friend James Berardinelli, the best of the Web-based critics. No doubt ten days of oxygen deprivation at the Sundance Film Festival helped inspire his three-star review, in which he reports optimistically, '[The film] has its share of pratfalls and slapstick moments, but there's almost no flatulence.' Here's a critical rule of thumb: You know you're in trouble when you're reduced to praising a movie for its absence of fart jokes, and have to add 'almost.'

[…]

"Amanda Peet and Amanda Detmer do no harm, although Peet is too nice to play a woman this mean. [R.] Lee Ermey is on a planet of his own. As for Neil Diamond, [this] is his first appearance in a fiction film since The Jazz Singer (1980), and one can only marvel that he waited twenty years to appear in a second film, and found one even worse than his first one."

Saving Silverman

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