Home alone 2 roger ebert

He was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and home alone 2 roger ebert wills of their own.

I have a feeling that "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" is going to be an enormous box office success, but include me out. I didn't much like the first film, and I don't much like this one, with its sadistic little hero who mercilessly hammers a couple of slow-learning crooks. Nor did I enjoy the shameless attempt to leaven the mayhem by including a preachy subplot about the Pigeon Lady of Central Park. Call me hardhearted, call me cynical, but please don't call me if they make " Home Alone 3. Some of the gags are lifted directly from old color cartoons, and in spirit what we're looking at here are Road Runner adventures, with the crooks playing the role of Wile E. As the two hapless mopes fall down ladders and get slammed by bricks and pound bags of cement, and covered with glue and paint and birdseed, you can hear the cackling of the old Looney Tunes heroes in the background. And just like in the cartoons, the crooks are never really hurt; they bounce back, dust themselves off, bend their bones back into shape and are ready for the next adventure.

Home alone 2 roger ebert

Being left home alone, when you were a kid, meant hearing strange noises and being afraid to look in the basement - but it also meant doing all the things that grownups would tell you to stop doing, if they were there. Things like staying up to watch Johnny Carson, eating all the ice cream, and sleeping in your parents' bed. And they're the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people. The movie's screenplay is by John Hughes , who sometimes shows a genius for remembering what it was like to be young. His best movies, such as " Sixteen Candles ," " The Breakfast Club ," " Ferris Bueller's Day Off " and " Planes, Trains and Automobiles ," find a way to be funny while still staying somewhere within the boundaries of remote plausibility. This time, he strays so far from his premise that the movie suffers. If "Home Alone" had limited itself to the things that might possibly happen to a forgotten 8-year-old, I think I would have liked it more. What I didn't enjoy was the subplot involving the burglars Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern , who are immediately spotted by little Kevin Macaulay Culkin , and made the targets of his cleverness. The movie opens in the Chicago suburbs with a houseful of people on the eve of a big family Christmas vacation in Paris. There are relatives and kids everywhere, and when the family oversleeps and has to race to the airport, Kevin is somehow overlooked in the shuffle. When he wakes up later that morning, the house is empty. So he makes the best of it.

Kevin is separated from his family and must fend for himself. A cinematic experiment in discovering the viewers' willingness to retread familiar ground and forgive blatantly repetitive tropes, the sequel revisits all the hallmarks of its predecessor and consistently ups the ante for entertainment's sake.

While a sequel typically strives to give audiences more of what they previously got with a little something extra, 's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is quite literally the same film all over again. Excluding a few key details, particularly the titular setting, Kevin McCallister's Macaulay Culkin second solo outing took the comedy franchise to exaggerated heights by dropping the precocious youngster smack dab in the middle of America's biggest city. High jinks and hilarity ensue with Kevin navigating his way through an intimidating world and yet again facing off against perhaps the most incompetent pair of burglars to ever hit the silver screen. Sound familiar? Hitting theaters just two years after its wildly popular predecessor, Home Alone 2 went on to some major box office success, but received mixed reviews. Regarding the latter, a common complaint among critics was how the film was simply a rehash of everything that made the first film so memorable and entertaining. But while this criticism of sequels is generally well-founded and understandable, especially in the decades since the film's release, which saw sequels and franchises become much more commonplace in filmmaking, this particular sequel relishes the opportunity to tell the same story, albeit in a way that traverses cartoonish and absurd territory.

Being left home alone, when you were a kid, meant hearing strange noises and being afraid to look in the basement - but it also meant doing all the things that grownups would tell you to stop doing, if they were there. Things like staying up to watch Johnny Carson, eating all the ice cream, and sleeping in your parents' bed. And they're the kinds of traps that any 8-year-old could devise, if he had a budget of tens of thousands of dollars and the assistance of a crew of movie special effects people. The movie's screenplay is by John Hughes , who sometimes shows a genius for remembering what it was like to be young. His best movies, such as " Sixteen Candles ," " The Breakfast Club ," " Ferris Bueller's Day Off " and " Planes, Trains and Automobiles ," find a way to be funny while still staying somewhere within the boundaries of remote plausibility. This time, he strays so far from his premise that the movie suffers. If "Home Alone" had limited itself to the things that might possibly happen to a forgotten 8-year-old, I think I would have liked it more. What I didn't enjoy was the subplot involving the burglars Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern , who are immediately spotted by little Kevin Macaulay Culkin , and made the targets of his cleverness. The movie opens in the Chicago suburbs with a houseful of people on the eve of a big family Christmas vacation in Paris. There are relatives and kids everywhere, and when the family oversleeps and has to race to the airport, Kevin is somehow overlooked in the shuffle.

Home alone 2 roger ebert

While a sequel typically strives to give audiences more of what they previously got with a little something extra, 's Home Alone 2: Lost in New York is quite literally the same film all over again. Excluding a few key details, particularly the titular setting, Kevin McCallister's Macaulay Culkin second solo outing took the comedy franchise to exaggerated heights by dropping the precocious youngster smack dab in the middle of America's biggest city. High jinks and hilarity ensue with Kevin navigating his way through an intimidating world and yet again facing off against perhaps the most incompetent pair of burglars to ever hit the silver screen. Sound familiar? Hitting theaters just two years after its wildly popular predecessor, Home Alone 2 went on to some major box office success, but received mixed reviews. Regarding the latter, a common complaint among critics was how the film was simply a rehash of everything that made the first film so memorable and entertaining. But while this criticism of sequels is generally well-founded and understandable, especially in the decades since the film's release, which saw sequels and franchises become much more commonplace in filmmaking, this particular sequel relishes the opportunity to tell the same story, albeit in a way that traverses cartoonish and absurd territory. Home Alone 2 is so indulgent in its gleeful insistence on repeating itself that one can't help but assume the repetition is the point. Instead of giving fans something new and fresh , writer John Hughes and director Chris Columbus employed a level of self-referential awareness with their constant callbacks to the first film.

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This film must not have seemed strange to them. He might also try calling someone, or asking a neighbor for help. This time, he strays so far from his premise that the movie suffers. What I didn't enjoy was the subplot involving the burglars Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern , who are immediately spotted by little Kevin Macaulay Culkin , and made the targets of his cleverness. But in the contrived world of this movie, the only neighbor is an old coot who is rumored to be the Snow Shovel Murderer, and the phone doesn't work. So he makes the best of it. Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Roger Ebert. Catherine O'Hara as Kate. He's such a confident and gifted little actor that I'd like to see him in a story I could care more about. I have a feeling that "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" is going to be an enormous box office success, but include me out. Here Sheila O'Malley.

This movie follows the exact formula of the first two, but is funnier and gentler, has a real charmer for a hero, and provides splendid wish fulfillment and escapism for kids in, say, the lower grades. There is even a better rationale for why the hero is left home alone.

As before, he seems to have a complete command of all handyman skills, including rigging ladders and wiring appliances for electrical shocks - and, of course, he finds all the props he needs, even for rigging the exploding toilet and setting that staple gun to fire through the keyhole. It's whether the adults will be able to peek between their fingers. Both men also take a fall from nearly three stories to unforgiving concrete below, but not before being crushed between a wall and a tool chest. In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Christmas is fast-approaching and, as one of many children in an extended family, Kevin McCallister is still the runt of the litter who gets the short end of the stick. When the burglars invade Kevin's home, they find themselves running a gamut of booby traps so elaborate they could have been concocted by Rube Goldberg - or by the berserk father in " Last House on the Left. The film embraces excess by taking everything that worked in the first film and amplifying it to absurd levels. Now streaming on:. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Moments like these heighten the film's comedic sensibilities in their playfulness, while not directly breaking the fourth wall but winking at the audience nonetheless.