What they [Siskel and Ebert] were really doing was giving a giant boost to the movie hype business.
The further decline of the TV movie critic
It’s my favorite Web site ad: “TIRED OF AMATEUR REVIEWS?” it asks on the masthead of the appropriate movie info Web site — and then goes on to tell you about the newly available 2009 edition of “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide” (formerly “Movies on TV”), now 17,000 movies strong and 40 years in.
And of so many of us in this “cockeyed caravan” (as Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” refers to the world), Leonard Maltin knows the answer to that question: good lord, yes.
Relief — sort of — is on the way.
On Sept. 6, the long-running cultural misfortune that morphed finally into “Ebert and Roeper at the Movies” (after Roger Ebert’s original partner Gene Siskel died of a brain tumor) will be forced by Ebert’s thyroid and salivary gland cancer (he’s still writing these days and at the top of his game) to get an updated new format.
It will, no doubt, look like the snarky and entertaining movie promotional rubbish it always should have been, rather than a way of convincing America that movie critics were essentially Mutt and Jeff film nerds who coveted the kind of American celebrity conferred by late night talk shows. Just when the job of movie critic in America had evolved into something uncommonly interesting and hopeful, there were Siskel and Ebert, celebrating human-kind’s opposable digits as if they were members of the Roman mob while, at the same time, trashing real fame and intelligent movie commentary simultaneously. (Get this now: they trademarked thumbs up and thumbs down.)
Nor was that the worst of it.
What Siskel and Ebert not-so-secretly ushered into being was a new way to get movie clips on free TV. The boys and their natter were incidental to the promotion. They’d convinced themselves they were performing an evaluative function and were extending the film news and commentary business to a new medium. What they were really doing was giving a giant boost to the movie hype business, which rendered their own influence decidedly moot.
Let’s freely admit that over the decades, they did an awful lot of good for a lot of good movies. On the other side of the ledger, they trashed a profession’s image and elevated movie promotional hype into its current ascendance in the Babel of Web reviews (where very little that’s any good has any individual traction — a notable exception being the movie reviewers for Salon).
The next step in the process of corporate hype takeover was to eliminate actual free-thinking critics as much as possible and daily journalism, in its current nervous breakdown and identity crisis, decided to help, once all sorts of editors had permanently, in their minds, confused both the function and worth of movie critics and movie interviewers. (Much eloquent stuff has been written about the siege of movie critics in America— including a superb piece by former News staff critic Hal Crowther — but none quite understood that apart from its damage to journalism, even greater damage is being done to movie audiences and movies themselves, which can’t flourish without critical feedback.)
So now with the red carpet and showbiz promotional jibber jabber from the Entertainment Industrial Complex threatening to overrun the world, Siskel and Ebert extolling the virtues of Brian DePalma’s “Wise Guys” back in the day almost looks good.
Taking over for Ebert and Richard Roeper — the general columnist for the Chicago Sun Times (and chatty “amateur” as Maltin’s ad might have it) — will be smartguy movie talkers with great bloodlines if nothing else: Ben Lyons, son of TV movie jabberer Jeffrey Lyons and grandson of showbiz columnist Leonard Lyons; and Ben Mankiewicz, son of Bobby Kennedy media man Frank Mankiewicz, cousin of screenwriter Tom and, yes, grandson of Herman Mankiewicz, screenwriter of “Citizen Kane,” a little movie of which you may have heard a thing or two.
Lyons, said to be a childhood buddy of Ivanka Trump, does a lot of movie picking and hip-hop chatter for the E! channel. Mankiewicz introduces movies on TCM (rather well too) and has been, among other places, a gossip-monger on “TMZ,” a way of showing L. A. showbiz life to be so wasted and banal that the show is like a clever nightly travelogue of Mars.
Ah, the bliss of it all. No more pretense of substance, no more battering us over the head with Ebert’s Pulitzer, just Ben and Benny being cheeky, edgy (and, in Mankiewicz’s case, quite possibly good).
I’m there dude, I’m there (online at least) cheerfully devoid of all expectation.
By the way, if you’re looking for vestiges of actual enlightenment about movies in TV’s way of presenting Fame Follies and the Red Carpet Wilderness, watch AMC’s “Shootout” on Sundays at 11 a. m., David Edelstein’s chirpy but smart reviews on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” and look for Maltin’s “The Secret’s Out” on the Reelz Channel.
