Jul
22
Roger Ebert gives star ratings in his Chicago Sun-Times movie reviews. He’s famous for the “thumbs-up”/”thumbs-down” shorthand he developed with the late Gene Siskel back in 1975 when their “Sneak Previews” PBS series first launched. So how do his star ratings translate to the up or down positioning of his thumb, you ask? Well, out of a possible four stars, two or fewer is a “thumbs down;” two and a half or more is a “thumbs up.” This is the most I’ve ever used the word “thumb” in a paragraph.
I used to watch Siskel and Ebert fairly often as a kid. They were a couple of curmudgeons whose taste in films was drastically different from my own at the time. I remember Siskel saying once that “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze” was “just as boring and violent as the first one” — blasphemy! But it was always fun to see them vehemently disagree with each other or hail a movie like “Under Siege” as one of the top ten films of 1991.
After Gene Siskel died in 1999, Ebert invited several different critics to sit opposite him on the show and see what they could do with their thumbs. He ultimately settled on the tasteless whelp Richard Roeper — a doofus who once said that Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” was better than the original — and “Siskel & Ebert At the Movies” was retitled “At the Movies With Ebert and Roeper;” by this time, Disney had long since acquired the program and done away with the “Sneak Previews” moniker.
I never liked Roeper as you may have guessed. When he was alive, Siskel had bought John Travolta’s white suit from “Saturday Night Fever.” There’s something equally creepy and awesome about that. I liked to imagine him dancing around his house in it. Roeper never had that same mystique. He was just a goofball with middling taste in movies.
But both he and Roger Ebert have announced they’re splitting from the Disney-owned ABC network and taking their thumbs with them, according to the Associated Press. Ebert co-owns the copyright (with Siskel’s widow) to thumbs-as-a-mode-of-film-critique, so whenever you give a movie a thumbs up or down, you’re violating copyright law!
I’m sure ABC will take the show’s existing format — gutted as it is — and simply fill the two aisle seats with a pair of younger, hipper twerps that make Roeper look like Pauline Kael. Instead of thumbs signifying a movie is good or bad, they’ll have a more of-the-moment criteria. I’m guess it’ll be shorthand culled from text messaging, IMs and emails. For example, if a comedy’s funny, it’ll get an “LMAO” or if it’s really funny, a “ROTFLMAO.” Average movies will get a “meh.” Bad movies will get a frowny-face. Good movies will be vaguely described as “entertaining.” Excellent movies will have the word “so” overly-emphasized in a manner I’ve come to hate: “It was so entertaining.”
I give this new format zero stars.
-Brad Lohan
Comments
2 Responses to “Ebert & Roeper Thumb Their Noses at Disney”
Leave a Reply
You must be psychic… http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chicago-at-the-movies-ebert-roepert-jul22,0,3620997.story
And I’m guessing “OMG” for good movies, and “WTF” for bad ones.
Seriously, the idea of being nostalgic for Richard Roeper makes me want to punch myself in the balls.
Imagine how Gene Siskel’s corpse feels. Anyone being nostalgic for Roeper must make him want to punch his own ball-less corpse. No thumbs!