Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Great appearance by Roger Ebert on Conan


As well as movies, Ebert also had his thumb on the pulse of politics. The first time I ever would have heard about Barack Obama was in 2004, when Roger was on The Howard Stern Show, and he told Howard "there's this young guy Barack Obama who's just been elected to the senate and I think he's going to be very important in the future to this country." (Of course, that was meaningless to me back then (as I'm sure it was to most people), I didn't notice it until hearing a replay ten years later).

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

To be fair, he was also in Illinois so Obama was a little more relevant than he was to the rest of us.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

This playlist is just amazing. So worth digging into.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Thanks for sharing that

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I've been watching that playlist (in order) for a while now...there's only a handful of episodes that seem to be missing. I'm all the way up to the films of 1982. It's great to see what films they thought deserved Oscars (as well as actors)...there's one episode where Gene was mad Christopher Reeve didn't get an Oscar nomination for Superman II. :thumbsup:

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I'll always remember Gene on their annual 'Memo To The Academy" show campaigning for James Woods to get a Best Actor nom for John Carpenter's Vampires :lol:

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Thanks for sharing. Stoked to see the episode with The Muppet Movie as that was the first time I ever saw or heard of Siskel and Ebert.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I have been as well. Unfortunately, the gaps get a little more frequent once they leave Sneak Previews in 1982.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

The way I remember the show, is that I lived in a very rural area. Did PBS play it? Or it played at like midnight on Saturdays. It was always hard to find. I didn’t really start obsessing over every until I got the internet and used his site.

I also loved catching Shootout on AMC. I was a kid who really wanted to work in the industry.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

It started out on PBS in Chicago, then went national on PBS and became very popular, so they took their talents to first-run syndication where there was big money to be made.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Yeah, Sneak Previews (with Siskel and Ebert) ran on PBS from some time in the 1970s to the early 1980s. Where I lived it aired on the weekends... I think it was on Sunday nights at 10:30 PM or so. I remember watching it religiously as a kid. God, what was I? Five? rotfl

Then Siskel and Ebert left the show and started their own syndicated series called At the Movies in the early 1980s, and a couple of different critics took over duties on Sneak Previews (I think it was Jeffrey Lyons and Michael Medved?), and it sucked but it kept running for a long time.

And a few years later, Siskel and Ebert left At the Moves (which was taken over by Rex Reed and someone else) to start Siskel & Ebert & The Movies.

Kind of weird to think that, in the late 1980s, there were three competing movie review shows with the same format running at the same time. And, really, would anyone want to watch one that didn't have Gene and Roger?

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I remember watching it on PBS but there's one thing I can't recall. When did the whole thumbs up/thumbs down routine begin? Were they doing it on their show from the start or did they add it later, perhaps when the show went into syndication?

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Yes, it was after they left PBS. Actually it was after they left their second show, At The Movies.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I always preferred both Evert & Siskel's newspaper reviews to the shortened versions on TV.

I was raised on their 4-star system... which really screws me up today with many places--including this forum's review threads--now using a 5-star scale.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

The nostalgia load from these old episodes is overwhelming. Almost too much.

Thank you for posting.

Also interesting how some movies have fully disappeared in time. Many end up as popular catalog titles. But for example I was watching an episode with a Bill Cosby and Richard Prior movie that I never heard of.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Yeah, there’s a lot of forgotten movies, even some that won awards aren’t really talked about today. I saw Reversal of Fortune a couple years ago since it was on Ebert’s top 10 for 1990. Nobody is talking about that one now.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I had a hard time to get that movie on DVD. The Jeremy Irons' performance is some of the best acting I ever seen.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I've been watching some of their old shows on YouTube, mostly "worst movies of the year" episodes, and while I agree that some of those movies are genuinely bad films, they give thumbs down to some pretty good films too. I get that the "worst films" released in a given year aren't necessarily terrible movies, and that they were speaking to an audience which had to invest a lot more into seeing a movie than I do now (making me much more forgiving of a "meh" movie than someone who had to drive to a theater across town to see it).

I watched them every week when I was younger, but watching them now, a lot of times, they just come off as a couple of humorless prigs.


Like in this show, focused on a trend toward "women in peril" movies. They both thought it was a reaction to "the Women's Movement," with Siskel stating that the killers in these films were typically men who were "sexually frustrated" by aggressive women - while the first two examples shown are films with female killers. And then,after showing a scene from Friday the 13th, Ebert starts complaining about newer horror films showing scenes from the killer's POV, completely forgetting how Halloween (which they both liked) starts. At least they admit to liking Halloween, which they try to defend near the end of the show by saying it was well made. In other words, what they just spent the entire show complaining about is actually okay as long as you're a really good film maker. -rolleyes-

And if Ebert actually did sit next to a guy who rooted for the killer in a movie, I'd say that says more about where he lived than about some trend in movie-making, or audiences in general.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

In the last few months, I've bought a couple of digital copies of some early 80s movies that I hadn't really heard of just because they were adamant about it. .

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

In a thread like this, I can't forget their championing of Hoop Dreams. Even Steven James said that Ebert had a huge influence on that movie being recognized. I only saw it for the first time a few years back, but have revisited it a couple times and with commentary.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

I’m watching the best and worst of 1978.

An Unmarried Woman and Straight Time were their picks. I love movies. But regardless of how they were received, those movies did not stay in the public conscious.

Days of Heaven is still around. Autumn Sonata is still around because of Ingmar Bergman.

They hated The While Geese and The Medusa Touch.

You could mail in a request to receive their top 10 list.

I really enjoy the perspective that comes with remembering the time span and films that are released side by side each week.

Look at popular stars. Arnold and Willis mostly made their perfect movies in a 10 year span, one after another. A lot of trends seem to happen rapid fire in a 10 year period and come and go.

Also, it seems to be the push from studios that keeps these movies alive. The movies I’ve seen have largely been put on DVD during a time when I was collecting. Or it would be on TV so much that I’d stop and watch eventually. Regardless of how much I would enjoy a movie, if it doesn’t have that push, I’ll never see or know about it.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

Ebert says:
They explain that what makes Halloween different is that the film is made so that the audience's sympathy is always with the female character, not the killer, which they claim is the case in the wave of slasher films that started being dumped in the market at the time of this show.

You might disagree with their sociological analysis that analysis that this trend at the turn of the decade was a reaction to the women's movement earlier in the 70s. However, let's remember that these were two intelligent people, who were not just watching movies, but were living their adult lives during that time. So, they might be more perceptive to changing attitudes, and the reflection of those attitudes in film, than someone can be 40 years later when the slasher genre is considered quaint.

This is the kind of show that really set Siskel and Ebert apart, and made young people (like me) excited about film. They are talking to a mass audience (well, a PBS audience) about how movies are not disposable culture.

Nowadays, the entire discussion of movies on TV is (1) hype for the release, (2) coverage of the box office, and (3) exultation of a movie's "hit" status. You need to go see a movie because it's a hit, and a movie is worth talking about because it's a hit.

There was a film criticism community back in the day, but is was not a mass media community. Most "film criticism" was just movie recommendation. This is what a movie is about. And if that kind of thing interests you, then here's my recommendation for whether you should go to the theater and pay money to see it (I noticed Gene mentioned the $4 ticket price in the clip).

Siskel and Ebert did a lot of that; thus, the thumbs. But they also engaged in discussions about the meaning and importance of movies, as art and as sociology.

Here in Austin, there's a weekly movie "review" show, but all they do is show trailers and canned promo interviews. Being reminded by this thread of Siskel and Ebert, and their weekly presence in my life for so many years, makes me sad for the lack of something like them on TV today.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

45 years later, I'd say the two most enduring and best remembered movies of 1978 are still the two most popular: Grease and Superman.

The most obviously influential on genres were Halloween and Animal House.

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

When exactly was the audience's sympathy with the killer in Friday the 13th, or Silent Scream, or even The Boogeyman? Sorry, but it just sounds like empty rhetoric to me (especially when they leave out any discussion of the male victims in the movies, because they don't fit their thesis). It's okay to not like slasher movies because they aren't well made, or they're derivative cash grabs, etc. Why pretend you have some higher reason, which your past recommendation of a similar film negates?

It's like Ebert's repeated dismissals of sexploitation films and sex comedies (at least in some of the episodes I've watched recently). He seems to have "conveniently" forgotten he ever knew Russ Meyer (or he's hoping the audience has).
Yeah, that's sort of what I was talking about when I said that "they were speaking to an audience which had to invest a lot more into seeing a movie than I do now (making me much more forgiving of a 'meh' movie than someone who had to drive to a theater across town to see it)."

Re: Roger Ebert – Discussion & Appreciation (1942-2013)
 

IDK, and I'm not going to watch any of those movies just to see if I agree with their opinion. That was their take, and they aren't dummies. Ebert was clearly influenced by how the person he heard in the theater, who was urging the killer on, was reacting to the movie.

No, that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about seeing movies as more than disposable entertainment. You went to the movies because that was what people did to go out and be entertained. If you liked the movie, then fine. If you didn't, then also fine. You just forgot about it and saw another one soon enough. The idea that they held some kind of importance as artistic endeavors was reserved for eggheads and "important" FILMS. Popular movies that appealed to the masses were not worthy of serious consideration.