Siskel & Ebert & the Movies

Why, Gene, why?!? You were the only critic with taste! You gotta love a guy who puts Kingpin on his top 10 list. Now, we have Roeper who makes this show funny because he hates just about everything. Then there's a hilariously funny argument between the two whenever there's a split decision. I make sure to tape it every week. Funny stuff.

This show has great information on every movie we go and see each year and day! The original movie critic team was Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert who were both really good friends as well as partners and they both grew up in Chicago! So Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert would review every movie that comes up and rates them either thumbs up or thumbs down. The new team now is Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper. Richard Roeper became Roger Ebert's new partner in 2000 after Gene Siskel died in 1999 because of complication from brain surgery. These two film critics also make suggestions as to excellent films they recommend for renting on VHS or DVD! Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert also made an unforgettable guest appearance on ABC/FOX's The Critic which was one of my favorite episodes of The Critic where Jay Sherman hears about the Siskel and Ebert break up and then tries to be one of their new partners and then decides to reunite them!

User Rating: 10/10

BOTTOM LINE: THUMBS UP!

Ever since I was 13 years old, and I tuned into "Sneak Previews" with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert back in 1982, I fell in love with these two guys overnight. Besides being the kings of film critics, they also had the makings of a comedy team in the Abbott and Costello vein (well, you figure out who was Abbott and who was Costello, and the answer is painfully obvious). They were so highly successful they were asked to go onto syndicated TV and do "At the Movies", which did wonders for their forever-famous thumbs and their careers, then another TV show bearing their name, which kept fans rolling in the aisles until Siskel's tragic death in 1999. By the way, replacements for "Sneak Previews" and "At the Movies" were copycats who shouldn't have been there because Siskel and Ebert were always number one. Those annoying copycats included New York's squeaky-voiced, touchy-feely Jeffrey Lyons, the nerdy Michael Medved, the mean-streaked Rex, Reed, and the bimbette Dixie Whatley who didn't really review movies, but her glamourous presence was only to lure unsuspecting viewers. Anyway, we all miss Siskel and no other critic in his chair, not even the new guy, Richard Roeper, could ever review movies the way Siskel did. Ebert does his best with Roeper, and it seems that the corpulent Ebert is now the straight man, which he always needed because he was a better spark plug with Siskel. Still, Roeper is nowhere near as bad as the four copycats in the above paragraph, and the show is still going on, as long as there is Ebert.

The best thing about Siskel and Ebert was that I knew both of them so well that it didn't even matter if they liked the movie or not, I could tell that I still should see it based on why they liked or disliked it. Likewise, Gene was always more discriminating than Roger, so if they both liked it, then the movie probably was very good.

Now with Roeper, we've lost that. He's still a good movie reviewer, but the system of checks and balanced that worked with Siskel and Ebert don't work with Ebert and Roeper. I can no longer tell how good a movie really is since Roeper's taste in movies can be erratic some times. He's liked some really weird movies and hated some that I thought were OK. For a young guy, he's really more jaded than he should be. Likewise, he has a bad tendency to expect too much from certain types of movies, but at the same time, be too forgiving of some real flaws. Everyone does that to a point, but he's very unpredictable and inconsistent.

That's not to say that Ebert is perfect. I think he lets his mood color his opinion too often. Some weeks he'll hate everything and others he'll just love even the worst movie. I'll be watching and be like "He gave thumbs down to the Godfather! He must have slept badly last night."

Gene Siskel's death is the death of a major movie advertising tradition. What will happen to the thumbs? I love the show and think the two guys are so intelligent and I hear another guy will take Siskel's place. It won't be the same.