Posted on 03/25/2010 6:48:06 AM PDT by Borges
The balcony is closed.
This is the last season of "At the Movies," the long-running syndicated review show made into a hit in the 1980s by dueling Chicago critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.
The show's roots go back to 1975's "Sneak Previews."
Here's a statement from distributor Disney-ABC Domestic TV:
After 24 seasons with us in national syndication, the highly regarded movie review show "At the Movies" (formerly known as "Siskel & Ebert" and "Ebert & Roeper") will air its last original broadcast the weekend of August 14, 2010. This was a very difficult decision, especially considering the program's rich history and iconic status within the entertainment industry, but from a business perspective it became clear this weekly, half-hour, broadcast syndication series was no longer sustainable. We gratefully acknowledge the outstanding work of the program's current co-hosts A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips and top-notch production staff, and it is with heartfelt appreciation that we extend very special thanks to the two brilliant, visionary and incomparable critics that started it all, Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel.
Online reviews and aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have made finding knowledgeable opinions movies easier than ever for fans, yet have also evolved the consumption of criticism in such a way that made the half-hour review show seem dated. "At the Movies" also never again found a critic pairing with the chemistry that matched the breakout pairing of Siskel and Ebert.
Tweeted Ebert: "RIP At the Movies."
2 thumbs down
nobody cares
If they cared, they’d have been watching.
Nope,
I don’t care.
Who cares what those two blowhards think?
I’ll make my own decisions.
No one was stopping you from making your own decicions. But a good critic teaches you something you didn’t see before.
He can’t talk.
Geeze...someone hand me a Kleenex,please.
I remember when they reviewed Raiders. 29 years ago.
Ebert is a jerk, so I’m glad it’s cancelled.
It is rather dated as well.
Ebert hadn’t been on it for years.
He had cancer. Not really something to be catty about.
I just put down 29 years ago. I know for sure this show was on prior than 86.
“It’s Spot the Wonder Dog with our ‘Dog of the Week!’”
ha! - I guess I haven’t watched it for years either...
It was on under various names since 1975. 1986 was when Disney bought it and syndicated it.
When someone has earned my contempt I can't feign sympathy for that person.I'm not that talented an actor.Sorry.
Agreed. While I often disagreed with Ebert, and detest his politics, I hold his movie reviews in esteem because they are built on well-informed history and insights of movies developed over many more viewings than I have. You don’t have to agree with someone to respect him.
The show was stupid. Almost everytime I went to see a “two thumbs up” film I walked away thinking “What the hell was that crap?”
Exactly. I only considered movies that they *didn’t* like.
How about Dinner and a Movie, is that still on?
The irony of movie criticism is that the most capable critics, who have seen thousands of movies, and know vast amounts of trivia about them, rarely agree with most of the public.
However, some teenager who knows very little about the movies, but knows what he likes, and what his peers like, will be a lot more popular.
As far as Ebert goes, the great big glob of tar that stuck to him was that he wrote the screenplay of the awful, dreck movie, called “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970). It guaranteed that if he truly panned a movie, those involved could point to Ebert’s failure as proof that anything they did couldn’t have been that bad.
They were too arty for ya?
You disliked the most acclaimed films of the last 30 years or so then?
Would you make the same argument with what medicine to take? Why ask a specialist...ask someone who knows what medicine their peers will like...
This is true. However, there are times when I go see a movie which the critics think unfavorably of and thoroughly enjoy it! It is all a matter of perspective. At any rate, will miss this show.
There is no monolithic opinion issued by ‘the critics’. You can always find someone who liked something. Most of the time.
Well Ebert just loooooved the motorcycle diaries which was a fond reminisce about the youthful experiences of that murderous bastard Che’ Guevera.
So did Michael Medved. You have to put beliefs not relevant to the film aside.
It was an interesting show when I first started watching it. The problem was I would go see the movies Siskel and Ebert were touting and found myself not liking a lot of them. Any European artsy-type flick would draw reams of praise from them. I remember them being enthusiastic about some dull French flick called “Diva” that almost had me comatose by the time it ended. But movies have always been mostly crap. Now the ratio of good to bad is worse than ever.
My experience too.
Name some of the "acclaimed" films please.
Id’ hardly call Diva the summitt of High Art. It’s shallow fun. Acclaimed films? There’s no shortage of them especially back in the 1980s and early 1990s when there was a more stable culture. Raging Bull, Once upon a Time in America, Schindler’s List...
Very true. From that man I learned to spot liberal bias, which is something I did not see before.
In films or in their reviews?
There has been obvious political bias in his reviews, but also in off the cuff comments made in informal settings. He is an extreme leftist who can’t just do his job without adding his own bias. That would explain maybe why foreign and other sucky films got thumbs ups when the viewing public disagreed vehemently.
And Foreign language films have never done well in the U.S. unless it's some schmaltzy piece of fluff like ‘Life is Beautiful’ or ‘The Postman’.
Not bad films. However I didn’t call “Diva” high art or even a good film, they did. There were worse films than “Diva”, but that’s the sleep-inducer I remember from the time.
I wasn’t crazy about it either. But in 1981 it was tre-chic.
What I’ve always liked about Ebert as a reviewer is that he likes both art movies and fun movies. There aren’t many big time movie critics out there that would even admit to having watched a Russ Meyer movie, much less WRITTEN one.
Up to the nineties I used to see about fifteen to twenty au courant flicks at the cinema. Around the mid-nineties, I noticed that the films didn’t seem nearly as interesting as they once were. In short, the movie experience had become very boring. I’ve gone to a movie theater now only once or twice in the last ten years. I do get a bunch of premium movie channels like HBO and Showtime. My opinion is that this is absolutely the worst period in the history of movie-making. With a few exceptions dull, utterly pc flicks for the most part.
Up to the nineties I used to see about fifteen to twenty au courant flicks at the cinema. Around the mid-nineties, I noticed that the films didn’t seem nearly as interesting as they once were. In short, the movie experience had become very boring. I’ve gone to a movie theater now only once or twice in the last ten years. I do get a bunch of premium movie channels like HBO and Showtime. My opinion is that this is absolutely the worst period in the history of movie-making. With a few exceptions dull, utterly pc flicks for the most part.
There is a distinction between art and fun. And there’s nothing wrong with having that distinction. Godfather isn’t really at the level of art film I’m thinking of. It’s really those oddball foreign movies and ones similar. Stuff that winds up on the second “page” at Rotten Tomatoes, Sundance favorites and such, critics tend to LOVE those movies while the majority of the general populace doesn’t even know where to find the theaters that show them. Meanwhile most critics, except Ebert, won’t even watch Russ Meyer or Roger Corman movies, movies that can be a hell of a lot of fun, but no one will ever mistake them for art.
To a lot of people something like Antonioni IS fun and the latest mass produced comic book sequel is difficult to sit though. Meyer and Corman have their defenders amonst serious critics. ‘The Immoral Mister Tease’ is something of a classic as are Corman’s best Poe adaptations.
Yes there are outliers among people, no statement applies to all, but they don’t change the simple truth of what I’m saying. There are arthouse movies, and there are fun popcorn flicks, and most critics love the former and hate the later and one of the things that set Ebert apart was willingness to love the later very publicly. He understood what made a good popcorn flick and was willing to stand up and say “yeah it’s kind of dumb, but I had a really good time”.
If something is truly enjoyable and fun then it has some de facto artistic merit.
No it doesn’t. As a guy that straddles a similar line as Ebert (though I’m not patient with the SERIOUS arthouse movies) I know that many of the great fun films simply have no artistic merit. I love me some Toxic Avenger but there is no art in those movies, there was no art within line of site while they were making those movies, they’re fun, but they’re retarded. And that’s how it is with a lot of the low budget silly movies, and truthfully that’s part of the fun, a lot of those movies are deliberately non-artful. They come from a time before VCRs, they were disposable movies, to be watched once at your local grindhouse and forgotten.
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