I’ve spent the morning playing around with AtTheMovies.com, a new site which serves up every existent episode of Siskel & Ebert and Ebert & Roeper online, for free. Just from a QA standpoint, it looks like there are a few bugs to work out: the above image is a screenshot of Siskel’s head from their Slacker review; the entire clip has that big black rectangle taking up half its frame. I also had a bit of trouble navigating from clip to clip; something about the way the site uses flash makes it difficult to get to a clip you’ve previously watched without searching for it all over again.

But tech issues aside, watching the clips can be a lot of fun. It’s amazing to see Ebert casually parceling out historical context in a review of something like The Lost Boys, which he actually seriously considers on its own merits before ultimately giving it a thumbs down for being “too ambitious.” Can you imagine a contemporary TV critic praising the star of a teen vampire flick for his “good, tough performance”? Somebody should really watch representative sample from each of the 20 years worth of shows, to try to pinpoint the exact moment when televised film criticism began to devolve from actual, semi-intellectual criticism to sheer consumer advocacy. Anybody up to the challenge?