January 15, 2000

Archived update from Cigarettes & Coffee, run by Greg Mariotti & CJ Wallis from 1999-2005

Here's what Roger Ebert had to say recently when asked about critics who spoiled a major plot point in Magnolia:

Q: "Magnolia" has a completely unanticipated scene that David Denby revealed in the first paragraph of his review in the New Yorker. Was this fair? 

Ebert: Denby should be drawn and quartered, metaphorically, of course, for describing the film's astonishing and inspired surprise. The scene you refer to does not develop necessarily out of what goes before, and there is no way for a viewer to anticipate it; therefore a critic does not need to describe it in order to discuss its function. Denby's eagerness to blurt out Paul Thomas Anderson's gift to the audience was unseemly and ill-mannered, like a dinner guest shouting out the punch line to the host's best joke.