-----Original Message-----
FROM: Helga Mohammed el-Salami
SENT: Dec 30 2008 4:36PM
SUBJECT:The Wrestler: A Complaint
Dear Mr. Ebert,
I would like to lodge a formal complaint against you for your deceptive and totally inappropriate review of The Wrestler. It is my recommendation that you be disciplined for conduct unbecoming Roger Ebert and forced to paper-cut Mickey Rourke with a 30lb printout of your review.
As your regular readership can attest, you have, in your advancing age, given a slew of misguiding four-star reviews. Exhibits a-c this year alone are: In Burges, The Dark Knight and Taxi to the Dark Side. But The Wrestler is worse. ‘Tis a siren amongst songbirds. A grizzly amongst goldfish. And a fully-priced retail assault on Ebert integrity.
It is not permissible for an Ebert Review to segregate a brilliant “acting” performance from the underlying material especially if said material is an ocean of clichéd compost. You did not do so in Training Day or Hannibal even though peer pressure no doubt called for it. So how did it come to pass that you gave a perfect score to a horse-poopy film based on Mickey playing Rourke? Mr. Ebert, thou hadst erred. Let us count the ways.
How many of us can claim to never have wanted to punch our boss or assault a customer? We don't, not because it would make for poor drama in the tedium of our lives but because we do not have the luxury of walking out of an old job into a new with cheering fans along the way. Moral of the story is: boo-hoo, life sucks. Amount of "sucks" might be inversely proportional to the square of the W2 but not always. A case study in "life sucks" is as uninteresting to me as the opinions of The View Crew and should be to you as well. You have seen and reviewed far too many good films to be roped in by bad ones no matter how sympathetic you find the actor. Not that anyone was acting. Search for "wrestler" and replace with "actor" and we can dispense with the fiction altogether and call the spade an autobiography. Or something like that.
Mr. Ebert, you have dishonored the four-star rating and we, who have ingested every word you have ever written, must adjust to inflation of Ebert stars as we have to that of monetary values. Your crime is genocide on reviews still unborn. Great is your sin.
Sincerely,
Helga Mohammed el-Salami