By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Thumbsucker: Longest Yard prompts Ebertian meditation
In a 3-star review, the co-host of “Ebert & Roeper” considers, to thumb or not to thumb? while giving away some trade secrets: “3 weeks ago I saw The Longest Yard, and before I left for [Cannes], I did an advance taping… on which I gave a muted thumbs-up to Richard Roeper’s scornful thumbs-down… Now 3 weeks have passed and I have seen 25 films at Cannes, most of them attempts at greatness, and I sit here staring at the computer screen and realizing with dread that the time has come for me to write a review justifying that vertical thumb… I said what I sincerely believed at the time. I believed it as one might believe in a good cup of coffee; welcome while you are drinking it, even completely absorbing, but not much discussed three weeks later. Indeed after my immersion in the films of Cannes, I can hardly bring myself to return to The Longest Yard at all, since it represents such a limited idea of what a movie can be and what movies are for… There is a sense in which attacking this movie is like kicking a dog for not being better at calculus… I often practice a generic approach to film criticism, in which the starting point for a review is the question of what a movie sets out to achieve. The Longest Yard more or less achieves what most of the people attending it will expect. [But] I have just come from 12 days at Cannes during which several times each day I was reminded that movies can enrich our lives, instead of just helping us get through them.”
