philosoraptor42

Roger Ebert has some seriously weird views on movies. I just discovered yesterday that he is one of only two reviewers who disliked "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert". On top of that, while he liked Submarine, he seems to have rather disturbingly decided that we are supposed to like the obnoxious main character. I was annoyed that a few reviewers disliked the movie because the main character was horrible, but I'm frankly disturbed that someone should like the movie because they think the main character is endearing and loveable.

Just to confim that I'm not off the mark with my description of the main character, here are some selections from the wikipedia article on the movie:

Oliver Tate (Roberts) is a 15 year-old Swansea boy who is convinced that he is an unrivaled genius who is widely loved by his classmates, when in fact he is pretentious and socially alienated.

And further down:

an example of his unintentionally cruel and incompetent social methods

Oliver Tate isn't evil. He's just weak-willed, selfish and generally pathetic. Now let's look at what Ebert had to say:

True, he rather mistreats Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), a girl in his school, but he immediately regrets that pushing incident, and besides, awkward boys sometimes mask tenderness with roughhouse.

The only excuse for his mistreatment of Jordana (and sucky one at that) is the horrible way she treats him beforehand. The two of them work together to bully a girl at their school.

[Edit: When Ebert refers to "the pushing incident" he is referring to something that happened to a completely different girl to Jordana. He is talking about Zoe, a girl that Oliver and Jordana bully together. Can Ebert not tell characters apart in the movies he watches, because that's a pretty major error he's made there?]

It turns out that Ebert has excuses for Jordana's actions too:

Jordana understands this, and a great many other things about adolescent boys. For example, she knows some of them need leadership. or they will stew forever in self-doubt.

So the way she sadistically burns the protagonist's leg hairs or the way she intentionally gets him beaten up as part of a plan to piss off her ex, should be interpreted as a reaction to our protagonist's need for leadership. Goodness knows he might be overcome by self-doubt if her ex didn't put him in a headlock and force him to call himself a "gaylord" in front of a mob of his peers.

She isn't a tart, nor is she any more experienced than Oliver, but she's more confident.

I think this is supposed to be a compliment, but it's a little worrying how "tart" in this context appears to translate to "someone who has already had sex". I need to highlight a few bits from this next quote in bold:

[The] purpose I think is to capture that delicate moment in some adolescent lives when idealism and trust lead to tentative experiments. Because Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige are enormously likable in their roles, they win our sympathy and make us realize that too many movies about younger teenagers are filtered through the sensibility of more weathered minds.

I cannot believe that we could possibly have watched the same movie.

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