We’re trying to figure out what all the fuss is about with the news that “Ebert & Roeper” are being replaced on their show because of contract disputes for two lesser nobody hacks. It’s a bit sad that yes, they’re having to leave their own show, but let’s look a tiny bit closer.
For one, Roger Ebert has been missing from the show for two years and he was never going to return due to his various cancer-related ailments (which are terrible and we feel extremely bad for the guy).
But Roeper never charted and we’re sorry, but Ebert lost it a long time ago, got soft and started endorsing all kinds of garbage he would have never given a second look to during his heyday. We loved the original “Siskel & Ebert” as much as the next guy, in fact, probably more. We grew up on it and in the pre-internet, information-readily-available everywhere days, it was a formative source in our movie-going experience as kids and totally essentially watching. Our friends would actually call each other after episodes to discuss what the two of them had said, argue intensely over their thoughts or compliment when they brought down the hammer on someone we felt deserved it. Those guys ripped could be brutal, they weren’t afraid to rip people new assholes and some of the candid talk that came out of their mouth was so damn refreshing, incisive and sharp. The duo were cranky and cantkerous in the best of ways. They didn’t tolerate a mediocre film and we adored them for it. The way the two would dismiss one another and give it sly cheap shots before moving to the next segment? GOD, that show was so good!
Roger Ebert: [during a review of the 1998 version of “Godzilla”] “Now that I’ve inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones.”
But no amount of nostalgia is going to change how much that show became more and more irrelevant in the last decade (that’s being conservative and nice). Ebert is still a fierce writer to be sure and a man to be respected, but his taste has gone to shit. Roeper was a guy we never observed. As for the changing of the guard? Out with the old and in with the new is nothing shocking these days, but it would be pause for concern had the show still had a pulse and had been relevant in the last 10-15 years. Frankly, we’re shocked people even care and we assume the reason people are making such a stink about it all is cause of the affection everyone has for Ebert, which we have to, but you’ve got to call a spade a spade…
This “Siskel & Ebert” outtake via Hollywood Elsewhere that shows the two boys arguing about McDonald’s is rather awesome and illustrates the kind of genuinely heated banter and rapport they had both on and off screen.
Getting into this a bit more. Do you remember when Gene Siskel left the show for brain surgery in 1998 and then returned to the show a few weeks later? Siskel passed away less than a year later (RIP), but when he did return to the show he was a shell of a man and looked and talked like he had been lobotamized. It was so damn sad and we stopped watching the show shortly thereafter (it didn’t help that the sickly Siskel started endorsing films that only a man recovering from brain surgery would enjoy). Poor guy. Well, this is the end of the balcony we guess, but when it was good, it was great.