Featured Photo Credit (edited): Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash
For as long as I can remember, I’ve liked movies. I grew up in a home that watched them, and it’s something I’ve carried on since becoming a parent, myself. I also remember, early on, when I began learning to like movies – that was around age six, when I started watching Siskel and Ebert.
For those who don’t know, of course… that would be Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune and Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times.
Originally paired on public television in November 1975, these two critics offered complementary movie reviews in an aisle-side format that was by turns conversant and quarrelsome, and never outright formal although always somehow compelling. For being TV-brief, their reviews were fluent and well-informed – notably so.
But what people really got a kick out of was the keen and perceptive banter and bickering that quickly came to define their relationship, underscored all the more by Siskel and Ebert’s shared zeal for movies and obvious respect for each other’s discernment. Here were two who knew how to disagree, vociferously, by way of some hold upon human foible and dignity that was surely also what sowed their critiques.
Conversely, their uncomplicated rating meme, two-thumbs up or down, condensed these erudite opinions into a succinct Gold Standard for the box office: a trustworthy symbol of substance for movie-goers that also inspired a whole school of empty mimicry, not unlike today’s movie industry, which – rather like today’s movie industry – seems to have missed the point that Siskel and Ebert were making week after week, year upon year, about the kinds of movies worth watching, and why.
For the record, that would be ‘thumbs down’ from me for the culture of sequels, reboots, and non-original risk-averse CGI crap that infests the big screen today.
Siskel and Ebert were iconic, a face-to-face template entertaining enough to earn national stardom and informative enough to sustain an audience across four broadcast moves over a nine-year span. I was at pains, sometimes, tracking down each new program in an era when Chicago newspapers were only to be found at Chicago newsstands.
By the time they reached a sadly abrupt end, in February 1999, Siskel and Ebert had become a media archetype, one lasting nearly twenty-four years. Ebert carried on for twelve more years, as good as ever, but that irreplaceable partnership was always greatly missed.
Today, I still find Siskel and Ebert’s reviews enjoyable, informative, accessible, and relatively timeless. That’s a remarkable thing, when something offered confirms itself as something lasting.
Although… I suppose they haven’t exactly lasted since someone out there today will have likely never heard of ‘Siskel and Ebert’. On the other hand, whatever is familiar probably reflects a culture’s values, whether directly or inversely, just as whatever gets remembered probably reflects what that culture more prefers. Case in point: I sure do miss Siskel and Ebert, these days. And, evidently, I’m not the only one although that isn’t why I posted this. What’s more, it’s no small irony that culture today is rife with critique, the kind of published informal opinions that target every thing imaginable under the sun.
One might even imagine Someone with Plenty to Say posting their YouTube reaction while watching a ‘Siskel and Ebert’ review… and, just so we’re clear, that would be an audience watching a review by a reviewer watching two reviewers offering reviews to an audience of viewers about the value of something to watch. OK, that’s larger irony than I first let on, and I can only guess what Siskel and Ebert might have said about it.
Still, I suspect it might have been one of those times when they found reason enough between them to agree.
Check out this 50th Anniversary retrospective from CBS News, which features an equally entertaining montage of Gene Siskel as the critic for Channel 2 News with CBS Chicago.
The Rhetorical WHY 