A Brief History Of (Mostly) White Guys Talking Film On Television...

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• Matthias Galvin says:

  March 26, 2010 at 9:16 pm

  The Internet has prob­ably done the most to des­troy people’s inclin­a­tions towards tak­ing what they can get (which was, in your case Sneak Previews). As much as I hate to be anoth­er jerk say­ing it: when every­body has an opin­ion, nobody listens to any­one else. It indic­ates, to me, that a “game changer” prob­ably won’t happen.

• TNRLM says:

  March 26, 2010 at 9:29 pm

  About the only oth­er time I’ve seen that mod­el suc­ceed, it was in an entirely dif­fer­ent milieu: Kornheiser and Wilbon on “PTI.” Other cloned shows turn into “Sports Shouting,” as was so accur­ately por­trayed on “30 Rock.” No mat­ter the sub­ject at hand, when those types of pro­grams work, it’s just as much about the chem­istry as it is the know­ledge and expertise.
  Siskel and Ebert had it in spades.
  I watched a few eps of the abom­in­a­tion that was the Lyons/Mank ver­sion, just to wit­ness the train wreck. I have noth­ing against the older Ben, and under the cir­cum­stances, I thought he acquit­ted him­self well (and cer­tainly, by com­par­is­on to his star-fucking dim­wit of a cohost, came off like the Stephen Hawking of the film world). The new­est iter­a­tion was smart and com­pact, but the magic was­n’t there; least of all from a busi­ness sense. Sigh, anoth­er era gone.
  And I would prob­ably tune in for Reel Drunkz.

• TEPALEW says:

  March 27, 2010 at 6:20 pm

  Thanks for post­ing that pic of Michael Medved, Glenn. You just ruined my dinner.

• Lou Lumenick says:

  March 28, 2010 at 1:12 pm

  No his­tory of the genre is truly com­plete without the sar­don­ic Rex Reed’s 1986–1990 tour as co-host of “At the Movies” (after S&E left for Disney), first oppos­ite Bill Harris and then Dixie Whatley. (When it expired, Disney bought the title from Tribune for S & E). As someone who moved to neigh­bor­ing Bergenfield when he star­ted work­ing for the Bergen Record in 1976, I nev­er thought I’d live long enough to see “cul­ture” and “Dumont” in the same sen­tence. Thanks, Glenn!

• jasctt says:

  March 28, 2010 at 6:16 pm

  I can still remem­ber a time when the only source of real, hon­est film cri­ti­cism I could get was via Pauline Kael in the NEW YORKER at my small town lib­rary. I do agree that the inter­net as really killed the pro­fes­sion­al movie crit­ic for the most part. I mean, when any­body with a key­board can get in on the action, then why pay some guy a liv­ing wage to write about films?

• Aaron Aradillas says:

  March 28, 2010 at 8:22 pm

  I con­sider myself the un-ufficial Siskel & Ebert historian.
  It should be noted that the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down” schtick came about when the show went to the Tribune Co. The boys would use a simple Yes/No sys­tem back in the day. This detail always gets lost whenev­er people feel the need to blame S&E for The Death of Film Culture. The “Thumbs” was cor­por­ate man­date. They still prac­ticed thought­ful, intel­li­gent criticism.
  Like Glenn, I grew up in a “media mar­ket” that did­n’t traffic in major book­stores and reviv­al houses. S&E was like a peek into what was out there. You knew all about the “big” titles. You would hope that the smal­ler, more inde­pend­ent films would catch on and hope­fully make it to your neck of the world. I remem­ber both One False Move and Reservoir Dogs played in San Antonio for one week each. Soderbergh’s King of the Hill played for, I believe, three weeks. We did­n’t ever get John Duigan’s Flirting. Or, Wayne Wang’s The Music of Chance. (Both of those were VHS rentals.)
  Long after Kael decided the 1980s were shite simply because they wer­en’t the 1970s, Siskel & Ebert gave young aspir­ing film crit­ics reas­ons to go to the movies every week.