Gene Siskel: Self - Host
G.I. Jane/Event Horizon/Cop Land/Pooh's Grand Adventure
At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper
Gene Siskel credited as playing...
Self - Host
- Gene Siskel: Save for a "too neat" ending, I think "Cop Land" is one of the better films of the year.
- Roger Ebert: I was disappointed in it, Gene...
- Gene Siskel: Wow.
- Roger Ebert: ... And that's especially true because James Mangold did such a great first film when he made "Heat" a year and a half ago. This film, to me, has too many characters, too many backstories, too many threads that it's trying to tie together, and doesn't really tie them together. This is enough material for two movies, there should've been a clear line from beginning to end, something to absolutely follow. More clarity in the storytelling. And the Stallone character is very much on, on one note until he comes into his own as an action hero again at the end of the movie.
- Gene Siskel: The ending is not worthy of the characters'...
- Roger Ebert: No.
- Gene Siskel: ... Definition throughout the movie. But Roger, I would say, I would like to see more of it, a longer picture, which might've solved your problem, but that's because there's so much richness in it. Didn't you like the whole concept of the picture, that there's this town...
- Roger Ebert: Yes, but I'm thinking how it might've been handled by someone like Scorsese, who would've really zeroed in, instead of...
- Gene Siskel: That's a very high bar to put any director against. The highest bar.
- Roger Ebert: Yeah, well, I might as well, because the fact is, here we have all of these lumps of story background that are thrown in, and the stolen files, and the old newspaper clippings, and all of the lugubrious plot developments...
- Gene Siskel: I didn't think those were lugubrious, I thought that stuff, the stuff you just named, was exciting. I do recommend the picture.
- Roger Ebert: "Exciting"?
- Gene Siskel: Yes, I did.
- Gene Siskel: [reviewing "Event Horizon"] Again, this is the classic American movie, the bad American movie that we're getting made: Action, production design, better than the screenplay. There is basically no screenplay other than a scientific explanation of the premise.
- Roger Ebert: Yeah, which isn't really...
- Gene Siskel: There are no characters. At all.
- Roger Ebert: Yeah, I was reminded...
- Gene Siskel: You could cha- you could have the actors, I was thinking this during the picture, I had a lot of time to think about things other than the story, 'cause there wasn't any, uh, that the characters could've traded places. They were written so, the actors...
- Roger Ebert: Well let me give you an example of how thin this movie is. It's obviously inspired by "Solaris".
- Gene Siskel: Okay.
- Roger Ebert: Which is a great Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky about a space station around a planet, that allows them to, uh, imagine that they are seeing things that feel guilty about, or sentimental about from their own past lives.
- Gene Siskel: Panic attack.
- Roger Ebert: So that's the whole gimmick. So then you cross-fertilize it with something that attacks them, or doesn't attack them, and what you do is you take a great idea like in "Solaris", and you cheapen it down, dumb it down, and then you end up with something like "Event Horizon".
- Gene Siskel: The whole rhythm is "Everyone's gonna have a panic attack", at some point on the ship, and so you just count the characters down, 'cause then you know the movie's gonna be over.
