Where for Art Thou Ebert?

While Roger Ebert is Sick in the hospital recovering from emergency surgery. (BTW he is in stable condition and recovering nicely.) Head on over to his editor's, Jim Emerson, blog.

He has a new article about a story that appeared on slate.com that says that John Ford's The Searchers is the best worst movie ever made. He doesn't understand why it has been canonized as a film classic. Emerson finds fault in Stephen Metcalfs article. Which he responds to here mainly critiquing the way Metcalf dismisses film studies.

In part two of this article he decides that Metcalf doesn't understand the first thing about the study of film and basically rips him in a new one. Metcalf has the right to his own opinion about the film, but he demeans anyone who likes The Searchers as a film geek. And claims they like the film for reasons that make no sense at all. He seems to think that film geeks enjoy films that are poorly made, which apparently he thinks The Searchers is a poorly made film.

For someone who obviously knows so little about the study of film he can't even begin to explain himself.

""The Searchers," John Ford's epic 1956 Western, is a film geek's
paradise: It is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing,
unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and
convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring. Impossible to enjoy,
and yet not as obviously medicinal as, say, "The Spirit of the
Beehive," "The Searchers" segregates the initiated from the
uninitiated; and so it is widely considered, by the initiated, at
least, to be among the four or five best movies of all time. At his
maiden screening, a young Cahiers du Cinema critic named
Jean-Luc Godard wept, later adding, "How can I hate John Wayne … and
yet love him tenderly … in the last reel of 'The Searchers'?" Martin
Scorsese and Paul Schrader routinely name "The Searchers" as one of
their favorite films..."

We all know that Godard and Scorsese are "film geeks", but apparently they know very little about film. I guess Metcalf would know what someone who doesn't know anything about film looks like. But he is wrong on this count as Godard and Scorsese are two of the most revered directors in Modern Cinema. Godard was also a revered film critic, and Scorsese is one of the top film historians working in Hollywood.

Here is Metcalf's article.

But don't take the article too seriously. Because it is written about a film, which as we all know thanks to Metcalf, aren't worth studying.