Advertisement
NBC has canceled Reel Talk, the Saturday morning movie chat show starring Jeffrey Lyons and Alison Bailes (formerly of IFC’s “At the Angelica”). Never exactly a stoker of the flames of the zeitgeist, Reel Talk is probably most familiar to New Yorkers, who have for the past year or so been exposed to a repurposed form of the show screening as part of the loop of noise blaring out of flat screens in the back of taxis. Because this show was useful as a repository for fluffy pull quotes for indistinguishable studio films with the consistency of oatmeal, but was otherwise considered by most people who actually care about movies to be generally unwatchable, the sort of indignation (righteous or otherwise) that accompanies the firing of most name film critics will probably not surround this story. Though Bailes and Lyons have at least temporarily lost their livelihoods as well as a platform from which to influence moviegoers, it seems unlikely that anyone will bemoan the cancellation of Reel Talk as yet another blow to the already crippled culture of film criticism, because Reel Talk’s contribution to film criticism mostly sucked.
But still … what are the chances that the network would replace the bad move critics show with a good movie critics show, or any critics show at all? To say that they’re slim would seem to be overly optimistic. This leaves Lyons’ son Ben as the default prince of TV film criticism, by virtue of the fact that he and his partner Smart Ben are the only TV film critics who still have a show. How long do we give At the Movies before it too falls in the face of total consumer disinterest, thus rendering the post-Ebert era of advert slush branded as criticism mercifully dead? Or will the zombie corpse of At the Movies continue on indefinitely, feasting on brains already softened like ripe bananas, each needlessly hyperbolic, context-oblivious pullquote hammering another nail into the coffin of public film debate?
Happy weekend!
Kevin Buist
FLAME + CITRON Review
Christopher Campbell
Happy Halloween Links. Today in Film...
Brandon Harris
5 80s Literary Adaptations Worse Than...
Kevin Kelly
John Krasinski, Brief Interviews With...
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog, Now Available in Book Form
Paul Moore
October 31, Karina’s Last Day
Lauren Wissot
Sasha Grey Interview
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Who’s the old putz now?… http://defamer.gawker.com/5098345/what-loudmouth-movie-critic-bashed-the-old-putz-his-son-was-hired-to-replace
I first met Lyons in the mid-80s when I was a lowly associate editor at Video Review, where he freelanced. Not only was the copy he turned in uniformly sub-literate (worse, in fact, than the work of certain individuals whose scribblings I’ve railed against in Spout’s comment threads), but he was a rude, high-handed prick in person as well. So mazel tov to the guy. “Old putz” indeed.
I just feel sorry for Alison Bailes. I enjoyed watching her on IFC’s At the Angelika a few years ago and then it became At the IFC for a while.
At Reel Talk, she was OK though it was kind of excruciating to watch her with that putz.
Now there’s the Bens to watch. Jeez.
Jeffrey Lyons always struck me as being a pretty useless critic, and I’m glad he’s finally gotten the axe.
But given WNBC’s recent high profile firings (ie Len Berman), I can’t help but think this is less about trying to improve the quality of film criticism and more about trying to shrink the budget by replacing senior faces at the network with cheap, disposable “talent”. If history is any indicator he will probably just end up on Ch. 2 anyway.
Who’s next ,or more directly, when will the $$$ coming in not justify this site and Ms. Longworth will have to set up her own site? (again)
Jerry
Who’s next ,or more directly, when will the $$$ coming in not justify this site and Ms. Longworth has to set up her own site? (again)
Jerry
Dear Karina,
“At the Movies” will not fall in the face of total consumer “disinterest.” It might fail if the public shows a “lack of intererst.” “Disinterested” means impartial. Put that in your zeitgast.
Alison and smart Ben need to team up and do a show.
Maybe the word film critic is a term as dead as the practice itself. A film analyst might be more appropriate for the thinking person’s reflection on what a film is about and why it does or doesn’t resonate. But as far as film criticism goes–that thing that is supposed to tell me whether to pay to see the movie or not–it has proved so unreliable, vexing and unimportant these days that I simply refer to the Comments sections of various blogs to see what viewers think. Again, I don’t expect the masses to give me what a film theorist or analyst could give me. But when I’m trying to determine whether to see Terminator Salvation, I don’t need that. I just need to know if it sucks or not. (Oh, and yes it does.)
I remember sitting two rows in from of Lyons senior at a screening in NYC a few years back and before it started he was having a (very loud) conversation with someone, running down certain other nationally known critics. Very classless.
Admittedly the only reason I would tune in was to see what rockin’ legwear Bailes was sporting that week. As I’m no fan fan of formulaic McMovies there was absolutely nothing in actual content for me to glean. Though it was awfully funny to catch the one time when Lyons remarked “and evvvrrry boooody siiiings liiiike thiiiiiis” when High School Musical was up for review.
The funny part is that the last episode gave Transformers 2 a bad review.
[...] As mentioned a few days ago, our network was treated to a private screening of Food, Inc. at local Moxie Cinema. We thought it’d be interesting to post a few reactions from our unwashed masses. It’s like our own version of that Rotten Tomatoes critics feed thing. Except ours eliminates any chance of you accidentally reading something written by Jeffrey Lyons. [...]
OK, so it’s been months since someone pulled the plug on this idiot, but I just heard his rantings about “Where the Wild Things Are” on the BBC (could someone please inform them that Lyons is a washed-up douche bage over here?).
Even if I could have agreed with him about anything he said, he was so loud (seemed as though he were yelling at the interviewer/host), and so over the top in his criticism, that I wanted to throttle him. And the icing on the cake was when he pointed out that his son was a movie critic, but had liked the movie. The host suggested that was a “shameless plug.”
I think I’m going to make a donation to NBC for their humanitarian action in booting this guy…