Growing up, my Sunday night ritual was to watch At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert before The Simpsons so as to sound intelligible about movies to my friends at school. It was truly a sad day when Siskel passed away, leaving Ebert to carry the show on his shoulders with a long line of guest hosts.
Unlike many, I thought Richard Roeper, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, did a decent job becoming Ebert’s permanent partner. I didn’t always agree with his ‘everyman’ conclusions, but I did appreciate his explanations of why he liked or disliked a movie. After Ebert’s surgery and departure, Roeper held down the fort admirably with rotating guest critics.
Last year, following a dispute with Ebert over the thumbs-rating system and a breakdown in contract negotiations with Roeper, At the Movies was relaunched with two new critics. ABC replaced hosts Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips (critic of the Chicago Tribune) with baby-faced Ben Lyons from E! and bearded Ben Mankiewicz from Turner Classic Movies.
Who?
The two Bens proved to be out of their league and ratings dropped 23%. Lyons in particular lost my respect when he proclaimed I Am Legend one of the greatest movies of all time. Mankiewicz, the older of the duo, was less discursive but still agreed with the younger Ben far too often.
It got so bad, somebody created a blog specifically to denounce Ben Lyons’ credentials. The LA Times asked the question: Is Ben Lyons the most hated critic in America? Even Ebert wrote a scathing review of the new critics, laying into their lack of substance and questionable integrity as critics. In particular, he mocked Lyons’ habit of making childish or inappropriate comments, saying:
“Never make a statement such as, ‘I like women in real life, but I didn’t like The Women.’ Readers may write you sharing that they loved JFK, but they fly out of O’Hare.”
He also advised on some basic rules of journalistic integrity, advising:
“The critic should ideally never accept round-trip first-class air transportation, a luxury hotel room, a limo to a screening and a buffet of chilled shrimp and cute little hamburgers in preparation for viewing a movie. If you go, your employer should pay for the trip.”
After a few weeks of their rambling, I stopped watching entirely.
Perhaps sensing the show had become a joke, the two Bens were not asked to return. This season, ABC replaced them with experienced newspaper critics Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott, running a promo that essentially admitted they were going back to “serious reviews with serious journalists.” Ouch!
I can say that after watching Phillips and Scott, my faith in the show has been somewhat renewed. In just one episode, the new critics managed to coherently and succinctly put together an argument as to why I should watch a movie without resorting to buzz words like ‘cool’ or ‘awesome.’ So in just one episode, the new season surpassed the entirety of the last.
The period of the two Bens will likely go down in TV history as a terrible accident in an otherwise informative and iconic show. But I’m glad the wound has been bandaged. Now the healing process begins.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe were both very successful films at the box office this year. That’s good for the movie industry from a revenue standpoint. But since both were based on toy lines for boys, it wouldn’t be long before the other shoe dropped.
