Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper have apparently walked away from their syndicated series At The Movies With Ebert And Roeper. Though cursed with a cumbersome and inaccurate name (Ebert hasn't been on the show for years due to ongoing health issues), the show represented the final gasp of anything even resembling intelligent film criticism on television.
Admittedly, that resemblance in recent years has been slight, since Roeper--himself not exactly the keenest cinephile--has been paired in recent years with a succession of fill-in Eberts, including the likes of Kevin Smith and The Artist Formerly Known As Johnny Cougar. So the show has been lame for quite some time, and even when Ebert was still there, the amount of time available to discuss individual films was nearly non-existent, thanks to commercial space eating up more and more of the show.
Oh, but there was a time, starting in the mid-seventies and stretching to the early eighties, when Ebert and his original co-host Gene Siskel cranked out a show that was an absolute must for a budding film fanatic stuck in the middle of nowhere. With no internet or cable or VCR, Siskel and Ebert's Sneak Previews was like a lifeline to another world, where I first heard the names Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Diane Kurys, a safe place for serious discussion of serious films. These guys devoted entire episodes to overlooked classics from the likes of Victor Nunez and Satyajit Ray. Best of all, since they were on commercial-free PBS, they were free to show lengthy, uninterrupted clips of the movies themselves, not the over-familiar thirty-seconds-or-less snippets to which we've grown accustomed, but whole scenes playing out from beginning to end, which truly gave you a sense of the film under review.
Not much of Siskel and Ebert's original run seems to have survived--PBS apparently has no sense of posterity--and the surviving clips to be found on YouTube tend to reveal less than scintillating critical acumen on the part of our hosts...but still. To think there was a time when pop culture made time for film to be seriously, even passionately discussed--well, it seems like a million years ago. True, the interweb gave birth to seemingly millions of cinema-based sites, many hosted by the esteemed likes of Dave Kehr and Glenn Kenny, most of them offering space for comments, so that discussion of film can became a world-wide conversation.
Yes, yes, but those discussion tend to be brief, the comments mostly pithy one-liners. Siskel and Ebert had the time to discuss movies for several minutes at a time. Their show hadn't yet turned into the tiresome Two Thumbs Up blurb-a-thon it would become. That came when they made the move to commercial TV, and commercial considerations meant fewer lengthy discussions of lesser-known films, and the clips shown were the same fragments you'd see everywhere else.
I'd long since stopped watching the show by the time Siskel died in 1999, and after that it officially vanished from my radar. Still, the fact that even its remnants may now be gone, to apparently be replaced by yet another Inside Hollywood gossip-fest, makes me remember many a pleasant half-hour from long ago, in the affable company of people who understood at least some of my crazy obsessions.
