Emily Gordon writes:

While recovering from sickness recently, I watched some execrable movies on cable. I love movie-watching so much I rarely suffer in the process of seeing almost any movie, and I saw this one all the way through. But at about the halfway mark I started reading the Rotten Tomatoes reviews as I half-viewed the images and half-listened to the dialogue from my horizontal pillow-state. You can click on the link below to see what movie this was, but it’s not important, I think. What’s important is how grand Roger Ebert is to have written this:

Why? I wanted to ask the filmmakers. Why? You have a terrific cast and the wit to start out well. Why surrender and sell out? Isn’t it a better bet, and even better for your careers, to make a whole movie that’s smart and funny, instead of showing off for 15 minutes and then descending into cynicism and stupidity? Why not make a movie you can show to the friends you admire, instead of to a test audience scraped from the bottom of the IQ barrel?

Let every person sitting in a Hollywood meeting ask himself (or, less likely, herself) these questions, and then answer them!