Unlike most other film critics, they understood how American viewers took in the movies.
Roger Ebert left us more than 10 years ago. How is it possible that he and Gene Siskel, his television sparring partner who died in 1999, remain the most famous movie critics in America?
In a new book, “Opposable Thumbs,” Matt Singer explains how the duo democratized film criticism and turned it into mass entertainment in the 1980s and ’90s. “Siskel and Ebert took the movies seriously, but they didn’t take themselves seriously,” Mr. Singer writes, “which became another huge reason for their popularity.” Just as people who had little interest in auto repair regularly tuned in to “Car Talk” on National Public Radio, people who didn’t care for film commentary became part of Siskel and Ebert’s fan base.
“Most of Washington punditry,” Christopher Hitchens once told an interviewer, is “private letters, written to other pundits, appearing in public space.” Before Siskel and Ebert, something similar could be said about film critics. In 1980 Renata Adler wrote an essay in the New York Review of Books that eviscerated a recently published collection of film reviews by the New Yorker magazine’s Pauline Kael. Ms. Adler concluded that Kael’s reviews were “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless” and elaborated on what she considered “serious” film criticism. The piece runs to 8,000 words.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
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