Thinking about what I wanted to write, I came to the realization that I’ve already written much of what I wanted to say: he was a huge influence on how I think about movies (for which I am grateful), his views on what is and is not art were questionable, and many of the political views he expressed later in his life were appalling. (Roger should have spent more time reading Mencken.)
A/V Club. Onion. There are several posts at Jimbo’s site, but this one in particular seems to be worth highlighting.
This whole thing is kind of odd, taken in the light of Roger’s April 2nd blog post, where he talks about launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring back “At the Movies”, relaunching RogerEbert.com, and various other projects. I wonder how things went downhill that fast.
And I also wonder what’s going to happen to RogerEbert.com. My understanding is that Ebert et al planned to move the site to their own servers, and off the Sun-Times site. That’s fine. But I went to the site for the first time in weeks yesterday and realized that I wasn’t all that interested any longer; only one of the current reviews was written by Ebert. Many of the others were written by Richard Roper (who I only tolerated because he was on the same show as Ebert), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and other reviewers who I don’t find interesting. I’m hoping the site stays up as an archive of Ebert’s writing (and it’d be nice if it also archived “At the Movies”), but it isn’t a place I’m going to go for movie criticism any longer.
That’s a little mean, but it is also the truth. Let’s end on an upbeat note. Or two.
They don’t make them like that any more. (Actually, they do, but only for the SyFy channel.)
I couldn’t find their “Worst Movies of 1992” show online, but here’s their original review of “Shining Through”, which was their pick for worst movie that year (this clip does include the strudel scene):
Someone’s done an IMDB list of all of Siskel and Ebert’s worst movies of the year, just in case you’re interested. A Google search will turn up clips from some, but not all, of those episodes.