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.

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Karina is going to be on G4’s Attack of the Show tonight, talking about the SXSW Film Festival. The show airs live at 7pm EST, and reruns at 10pm. Watch it!

• The New York Film Critics Circle chose No Country For Old Men as their film of the year yesterday. The small body of mostly print critics also awarded prizes to Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie, and No End in Sight.
• The Hollywood Reporter has a long think piece on the impact of awards blogging on half-lives of award hopefuls. As usual, the blogosphere proves to be a convenient whipping boy for all manner of industry fluctuations and existential crises. There’s even a frantic quote from an unnamed publicist, who actually wonders, “What does it all mean?” Classic.
• “They lie. And then they lie again. And then they lie some more.” So begins a WGA statement, directed at the AMPTP, released yesterday in the wake of the weekend’s disastrous strike talk flameout, indicating that it’s going to be a cold day in January or February at the earliest before the two camps have cooled down enough to meet again. In related news: there will be no TV press tour this spring, because there will be (almost) no TV this spring.
• Chris Moore from Project Greenlight–you know, that reality show that had something to do with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?–will produce a feature-length doc based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States–you know, that book Matt Damon namedropped in Good Will Hunting?

• From the Is That Even Legal? file: With the writers strike seemingly neverending, CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler is asking film producers “to dust off any unproduced scripts that could be turned into TV series.” The part of the story I really love? Shoddy pastiche is encouraged: “Because most movies tend to run around two hours in length, Tassler isn’t looking to produce the full scripts. Instead, she’s asking producers to identify key scenes or passages that could be filmed and cobbled together into a pilot or shorter pilot presentation.”
• China has banned the import and release of American films for at least three months. This will effectively eliminate the Chinese release of at least five major studio films, including Beowulf and Enchanted.  The Chinese government probaby, in part, is looking to lessen competition for locally-produced films; there’s also a wee chance this might have something to do with the fact that it’s kind of a crap time for U.S./China relations.
• Morgan Spurlock, Alex Gibney, and Jesus Camp directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing are among a host of documentary stars that have signed on to direct a segment of a doc based on Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics. The film is being co-produced by Seth Gordon of King of Kong fame.

Indie video blog superstar Ze Frank has issued a clip in which he weighs in on the Writers Strike. Through this, we learn that Ze watches The Hills to pick up slang terms for female genitalia, has several deeply held opinions about Grey’s Anatomy, and has apparently been spending a lot of time in the offices of studio executives, “kissing ass.” Watch it here.

There’s gotta be a whole panoply of emotions swirling through Hollywood in advance of the strike–anger, frustration, exhilaration–but here on the internet (ironically, one of the contested spaces from which the writers want a larger cut), we’re pretty much all looking from the outside in. So that means it’s business as usual…which means snark and opportunism. Here’s some of the best:

• There were no blogs in 1988, during the last WGA strike–there was only Moonlighting.
• AMC’s Future of Classic blog has a post about strike movies. There’s a poll where you can vote for your favorite, but seems to be busted, because my vote didn’t register. For the record, I chose Matewan.
• Also from FoC: A warning that the longer this goes on, the higher the probability of a Jackass 3.
• “I’m Brian Williams, and I’ll be hosting Saturday Night Live this week. And if the threatened writers’ strike takes place, I’ll be hosting My Name is Earl.” [Lost Remote]
• The masters of non-scripted content at World of Wonder use their latest podcast to, um, wonder if a strike could actually happen. But then Fenton Bailey remembers, “I was like, ‘War in Iraq? What war? There isn’t gonna be one!’ Don’t take my word for it!”

Note: Variety.com appears to be down as of this writing, so we’re introducing a new “trade” today: The Guardian.

• George Lucas says he’s finally begun work on his long-rumored live-action Star Wars TV series. Lucas is adamant that the series will go beyond the tortured Skywalker clan to focus on peripheral characters from the film series, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem with the fans: at 6:30 on my local news this morning, this story was punctuated with a shot of the sun triumphantly rising over Manhattan set, to Darth Vader’s theme song. Production assistants at WNBC will apparently take whatever Star Wars extension they can get.
• From the “Yes, The Hollywood Executive Actually Said That” File: Steven Zeitchik of The Hollywood Reporter says Tyler Perry’s box office victory last weekend (his third in three years, after 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion) has “heartened the growing number of studios looking to crack the market for black films.” He quotes Sony Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper:”There’s probably not one new story to tell that hasn’t been told about white people. But there are so many stories that haven’t been told yet about people with brown and black faces.”
• Warner Brothers will tack a seven-minute Batman short in front of IMAX prints of the Will Smith vampire film I Am Legend. The short will cover the origin story of the Joker, to be played in Christopher Nolan’s next Batman flick by Heath Ledger.

Yesterday, TMZ breathlessly announced that they’d landed the tightly-guarded list of the cast and alternates for the upcoming season of ABC’s reality competition, Dancing With the Stars. Then the page view whores made us click through a maddening gallery to confirm earlier rumors that one of those alleged dancing stars is indeed Mark Cuban, the brash billionaire who owns the Dallas Mavericks and who, as owner of Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures, is also at the forefront of the movement to close the theatrical/DVD distribution window.

I’m willing to bet that Mark Cuban is not on the final list, which is set to be announced on ABC’s Good Morning America tomorrow. My reasoning is three-fold: First, according to an interview that appeared late last week in Portfolio, Cuban is currently recovering from hip replacement surgery. Second, he already did the reality TV thing once, and it didn’t go so well. Third (and probably most compelling), today TMZ published a blurb covering their collective asses if the official cast list fails to match their gallery: “Well placed on-set sources tell us that execs, fearing someone would leak the cast to TMZ, gave the show’s staff and crew names that may or may not be 100% accurate.” Looking at TMZ’s list, Cuban and one of the two former Beverly Hills 90210 babes seem like the easiest names to scratch off.

So here’s the deal: If Mark Cuban is *not* on Dancing With the Stars, I win the satisfaction of being correct in my assumptions. If it turns out that the part-time movie mogul *is* on the show’s official cast list, as punishment for being wrong about this I promise to live-blog Cuban’s Dancing performance for as long as he manages to stay on the show. I’ve convinced myself that either way, I win on this — I mean, if Louis B. Mayer had entered a dance marathon, we would have wanted a document of it, right?

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?