You Blew It!, 1990
Blue Velvet, Field of Dreams, Scrooged, She-Devil, House of Games, Once Upon a Time in America
- Primary Colors, Love and Death on Long Island, The Man in the Iron Mask, Everest, The Leading Man, 1998
- Executive Decision, Ed, Two Much, The Star Maker, Land and Freedom, 1996
7 thoughts on “You Blew It!, 1990”
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I’m glad they got around to how the studio blew it on Once Upon a Time in America. It was a horrid miscalculation by the studio to chop up the film and release a messy version of it.
I’m with Roger on Field of Dreams. And I’m with Gene on Scrooged, although I do agree with Roger about the ending. I didn’t see Blue Velvet because the subject matter was a turnoff for me. But critical consensus heavily favored Gene on that movie and on She-Devil, which was a flop.
One thing you’ll learn about these two critics is how unshakable they are (at least outside of “Broken Arrow”)!
Don;t forget that Gene blames the reporting of the opening week’s grosses in their section of House of Games.
I never knew they did a show like this. This was great. They should’ve done these every year. Three of the four films picked to debate were good targets for each other. Except for Scrooged, the others had the dissenting critic going out on a limb against other critics and the public. But Scrooged was a box office hit with mixed reviews. It wasn’t a good one to use to make the other guy look undeniably bad.
They even did a similar version of this on At the Movies in 1983 or so. This was interesting because it was one critic asking the other if maybe they did miss the boat on it. Too bad they didn’t do more of these over the years, since there were other films they could’ve talked about.
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This was a great show, and what’s ironic is that time has shown both of them to be right: Blue Velvet, Field of Dreams, and (to a degree) Scrooged are all considered classics 30 years later. I think time (so far) has mostly forgotten Once Upon a Time In America and House of Games, both excellent films. One of the true joys of watching these shows is seeing Siskel & Ebert’s real-time reactions to films that would be cultural touchstones over the next quarter-century, really giving us the basic reason the movies have become giants over time—because they’re good movies! Sometimes we forget that a classic (anything, movie, book, piece of music, whatever) was at one time brand-new and had no cultural baggage to go with it. It has to sink or swim by itself. (P.S. – I think Blue Velvet was Roger Ebert’s single biggest mistake as a movie critic. It’s a brilliant, terrifying film that deserves comparison with the greatest movies ever made. Lynch did not “exploit” Isabella Rossellini; for one thing, she dated him after the movie was made, so she doesn’t seem to have felt exploited, and for another, let’s face it, Blue Velvet was just about the only good movie she was ever in. I think Roger, uh, blew it)
Roger, in his 1999 Movie Yearbook, talked about Blue Velvet and he mentioned Isabella’s autobiography, where she talked about the nude scenes in Blue Velvet. This was an interesting show because it was saying, “Hey, maybe you were wrong for once.” And I also like the ones where the audience was wrong on the last two films. I have seen House of Games and it is very good.