Roger Ebert, who passed away April 4, pioneered a film-rating system that boiled down to one movement: thumbs up or thumbs down.
PRO: At the Movies’s simplistic rating system appealed to the common man
It’s hard for me to look at the late Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s At the Movies objectively.
I grew up in a rather utilitarian household and, for us, movies were a diversion, a mere distraction. I credit Ebert and Siskel with turning me into a cinephile. Their show was akin to hanging out weekly with two well-spoken and generous friends. To me, At the Movies was less of a narrated take on TV Guide and more of the movie equivalent of Reading Rainbow or Between the Lions. Ebert and Siskel showed me that movies were a living, breathing thing — capable of great beauty and transcendence. They taught me how to appreciate an art form.
So, when people start tearing apart the show and labeling it the Antichrist of film criticism, it’s hard for me not to fire back with a barrage of profanity.
I do agree with some of these critics’ analyses. At the Movies’ simplistic rating system — thumbs up versus thumbs down — has made movie criticism a far more metric-oriented affair. It may be a stretch to call it the progenitor for Rotten Tomatoes, but current movie review aggregators probably were inspired in some form by how Ebert and Siskel ran their show.
I disagree, however, with the Armond Whites of the world in that I don’t think this is a wholly bad thing. Certain aspects of modern criticism are annoying — mostly a weird, common assumption that a Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic score actually means something — but the overall shift toward the more readable and more appealing is a good thing.
To say At the Movies degraded the standards of mainstream criticism would be to suggest that academic criticism was truly mainstream prior to the show. The truth is, the vast majority of normal people don’t engage in cinema with that kind of depth — they’re too busy being doctors, engineers or other workers.
The genius of At the Movies was that it packaged discussion and genuine appreciation of cinema in a way that appealed to almost everyone. The show suggested that talking about a movie with a bro could be interesting and not necessarily require encyclopedic knowledge of film. The show raised general awareness and understanding of film with its snappy, easy-to-follow banter and prolific coverage.
The notion that criticism, particularly mainstream criticism, should be much more rigorous and much more esoteric reeks terribly of elitism. Ebert and Siskel were never supposed to replace Sight & Sound or Cahiers du Cinéma. Instead, as writers and as ardent patrons of cinema, they sought to improve the general level of discourse and champion beloved, lesser-known films.
Despite all the subsequent groupthink and abuse of sound bites At the Movies may or may not have caused, I can’t begrudge these two men and the legacy their show has left behind.
–Warren Zhang
CON: The thumbs up-thumbs down rating method is lazy and one-dimensional
Now that we’re done eulogizing Roger Ebert, it’s time to deconstruct the reasons behind his importance.
Sure, he seemed like a warm, honest figure in a mud pit of curmudgeon critics that relish the panning process more than they actively seek to reward great cinema. I’d even argue that on a good day, Ebert was the bridge that linked together the cinephiles and the casual filmgoers, a writer willing to embrace both his medium’s archaic past and groundbreaking present.
Yet, he also, at the same time, trivialized the art form of movie criticism in two swift finger motions: thumbs up and thumbs down.
At The Movies, which premiered in 1982, is the most obvious perpetrator. The show, starring the portly Ebert alongside the lanky Gene Siskel, took whatever movies were premiering on a given a weekend and told you, on a highly simplistic scale, whether they were worth your time or not. It’s a fascinating exercise in restraint and summation, to boil down a two-hour film into a mere flick of the wrist and shift of the thumb. Ninety degrees up means it’s good. Ninety degrees down means it’s bad. There’s no in between, no middle ground evaluation. You can laud the dialogue, trash the cinematography, go into depth about which characters were well-constructed and which ones weren’t. But when push comes to shove, it’s all about the thumb.
While one could argue this system speaks to the average individual who normally dismisses movie criticism as superfluous crap, it, at the same time, strips everything wonderful about criticism down to its most basic form.
I’d also argue it incites laziness. It gives us a free pass as critics to refrain from unpacking certain parts of a film in our writing because we’re led to believe that it is the score at the bottom of each review that the eyes will gravitate toward first. Gone may be our attempts at fleshing out theories behind ambiguities and tasking the reader with contextualizing on his or her own. The Diamondback itself changed its policy on movie reviews, eliminating verdicts and star ratings in order to enter more of a gray area in film criticism.
It’s now only about ranking and rating, which inadvertently furthers the movie industry’s slow descent into full-on corporatism. You can’t advertise a snippet of a review that praises, in detail, a character arc or sequence of dialogue. But, in gleaming lights, you can advertise that something got four stars or two thumbs up.
So, in essence, Ebert may have had good intentions in trying to simplify a time-honored process. I wouldn’t condemn his entire body of work or refuse to acknowledge the fact that he may have had a positive impact on getting people to immerse themselves in the artistry of film. Critics make things seem knotty and unapproachable. Ebert reduced high-concept reviewing into a twist of the hand. The common man says thanks. Now, we must rebuild.
