Robert Lloyd’s review of the new At the Movies, which debuted on TV this past weekend, hits on a good point that often gets lost in the, “Wow, The Two Bens were bad” pile-on. It’s not just that neither was very good, but that even in their badness, they were poorly matched:
Mankiewicz (grandson of “Citizen Kane” writer Herman and the great-nephew of “All About Eve” writer and director Joseph) was clearly better versed than Lyons (son of “Sneak Previews” host Jeffrey) in the literature of film, but that tended to make the show seem unbalanced. The original hosts could be spiky toward each other, but they always came off as equals; when they disagreed, Mankiewicz tended to make Lyons look wrong.
Lloyd is correct that the new version, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, “restores the balance” between critics that made the old Siskel and Ebert battles so entertaining. But the show is not as humorless as those shiny table promo shots might have you believe. Witness my favorite moment of the first episode above, in which Scott approaches his review of Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain as a dry, conceptual joke.
Above: the nearly five minute trailer for the new incarnation of At the Movies, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips. Of note for the strenuous attempt to imprint the notion that this pair is all that those young, recently fired guys named Ben were not. Actual titles used on screen within the first minute of the trailer: “Two accomplished critics”; “Serious reviews”; “Serious journalists.” The trailer also allows Philips and Scott to casually run down their list of professional credentials, and then goes behind the scenes of a photo shoot producing a very serious promotional shot of the two critics sitting at a big shiny table. It’s all very, very serious. Which is awesome.
Regarding the news that Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott have been hired to replace The Two Bens as hosts/dueling critics of At the Movies, at first there didn’t seem to be much to say other than what everyone else was saying — basically, “Yay! A rare victory for intelligence/maturity/old-fashioned film criticism values!” I like Anne Thompson’s headline on her post on her new indieWIRE blog: Disney/ABC Replaces Lyons and Mankiewicz with Adult Critics Scott and Phillips. That about sums it up, no?
And yet, it’s undeniably of note that, here in on the margins of pop culture where we have conversations about things like film criticism, a return to something like the old way of doing things is met with such relief. This morning I read several blog posts and whatnot about the changes going on at the New York Times. The paper’s culture editor, Sam Sifton, is replacing Frank Bruni as their lead restaurant critic. At one point Sharon Waxman was reporting that Trish Hall, an editor of a few NYT food and lifestyle sections, had been tapped to take Sifton’s old job, but Sharon is now backtracking on that. Still, the swap of Sifton for Bruni is enough to open up a dialog about the idea that arts reporting and food criticism exist on enough of a parallel that the same person could qualify for both jobs, and thus the issues plaguing one kind of criticism would be spoken of in the same breath as the issues of the other.
Reading food blogger Josh Ozersky’s take on the NYT swap, I was struck by how easily his language could apply to our sphere, at least up to a point. A lengthy excerpt:
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?
After reading Anne Thompson’s post on the dismal reception given to the youth-baiting rethink of At The Movies starring Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz, I decided I had better watch The Two Bens’ first episode online to see what all the griping is about. It actually starts off rather well: Mankiewicz is totally qualified for this job, although it’s a bit of a wonder he was even hired, what with his TCM-honed, “I am going to explain this very slowly because my viewers may be aged” manner of speaking. But then he tosses it to Lyons, who says something completely incoherent about Burn After Reading being “almost like an exercise in drama,” and then they cut back Mankiewicz, who struggles to croak out, “Yeah, that’s an interesting point,” whilst swallowing his own testicles. At that point, I stopped.
Interestingly, another thing that I wasn’t able to force myself to watch all the way through this week also had to do with the sorry contemporary incarnation of the former gold standard for televised movie reviews.
It’s not a total surprise, given his health problems and that to-do last year about his iconic thumbs, but Roger Ebert has just sent out a statement announcing his definitive split from his long-running TV show, most recently called Ebert and Roeper. Ebert still co-owns the thumbs and says he’s “discussing possibilities” to keep that brand alive. The full statement is pasted after the jump.
Thoughts?
UPDATE: This CNN story says Richard Roeper will not be part of Disney/ABC’s “new direction,” and in fact plans to “proceed elsewhere … as the co-host of a movie review show that honors the standards established by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert more than 30 years ago. I will be free to share the details on that program in the near future.” We’ll be waiting with bated breath.
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.
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It’s not a total surprise, given his health problems and that 
