No Respect (Patreon)

Today, while hunting around the Interwebs for recent episodes of the best talk show on TV, I stumbled upon something. A (relatively) new British panel show called There's Something About Movies. What a delightful surprise! I'd thought for ages that this would be a great idea -- a show that looked at the world of cinema with the irreverence and offbeat-geeky perspective that Mock the Week brings to politics, Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me! brings to current events, and that Never Mind the Buzzcocks brought to music. Or it could dispense with any game-playing element altogether and just be a raucous but insightful group gab: Siskel & Ebert meets The McLaughlin Group.

But of course, that's not what it turned out to be. Instead, comic / "chatty man" Alan Carr hosts another conventional panel show in which movie trivia, almost all involving Hollywood, is the name of the game. The twist? Actors such as Matthew Broderick, Miranda Richardson, Jason Isaacs, and Lily Collins are added into the mix, along with the usual roster of over-employed U.K.-based stand-ups. (You can probably Mad-Libs their names as easily as I could type them. Jimmy Carr, Katherine Ryan, Lolly Adefope, Roisin Conaty, Nish Kumar, Robs Delaney and Beckett, etc.)

The bottom line: there is nary a film critic in sight. Why do we get no respect, even on our home turf?

I've thought about this, and I suspect there are at least two aspects to the problem. One, you can probably guess. It's 2019, and in the age of Trump and Wikipedia, there is a broad cultural hatred (even in the U.K., it seems, although they'd never admit it) of experts and paid arbiters of taste. We are the enemy, because after all, what the fuck do we know? We only went to college to study the stuff, spent years thinking analytically about the artform, and honing our rhetorical skills to figure out how to employ language to communicate the complex relationships between image, sound, and movement. Seriously, we're no better that an IMDb score from real people who know how to have a good time, without being so critical!

The second aspect, I think, is trickier. If the film business if risk-averse, we know that the TV trade is even more so. And sadly, I think that film critics wanting to break onto the small screen are a victim of Siskel & Ebert's phenomenal success. As time goes on, I think it strikes both TV producers and critics as something unrepeatable. This has to do with their uncanny chemistry, the unique way that both men had insights into film that came from different sensibilities (Ebert the perfect cinephile / encyclopedic historian, Siskel the ultimate watercooler expert, knowledgeable but not obsessed). 

Their ascendance had something to do, sure, with the "monoculture" of the time, but it also had to do with them, and the fact that they were able to perform vast expertise while at the same time exposing one another's idiosyncrasies, to the extent that a viewer could understand how to disagree with them productively, not just take the "thumbs up / thumbs down" as a Roman-era Tomatometer and be done with it. In other words, they taught viewers what film critics are for: analysis, insight, someone with a certain set of priorities that you might not share but that you got to know and gauge. And they were also funny.

Sadly, the continuation of At the Movies after Siskel's and later Ebert's passing ultimately served, I think, as an argument for the experiment's singularity, at least in that form. Richard Roeper was a harbinger of things to come: a smug TV-ready talking head whose primary stock-in-trade was the confidence with which he proclaimed his opinions, whether or not he had any information to back them up. Later on, the "rotating hosts" idea was just confusing, because truthfully, if the producers had settled on two permanent replacements, the show might have evolved into a new, original venture, a 2.0 with its own rhythms and identity, outside the shadow of the Great Men. (Who wouldn't like to be watching At the Movies with Morris & Scott right now?)

Which brings me back to the panel-show dilemma. It's true, a lot of the critics I know (and several of the folks who tried out for the rotating At the Movies gig) don't have a great deal of charisma, aren't naturally funny, and are not necessarily TV-ready. And that's not a slam against anyone. That's not a requirement for the profession, and it never should be. But I do think that, as film critics, we should never forget that we are public intellectuals, and we should try to take every opportunity to get out there and take back the conversation from the Marvel bootlickers and the Oscar bloggers (who do tend to be TV-ready, which does tend to be a job requirement).

If movies are the name of the game, we should be out there. The Canadians are doing a great job getting on the CBC -- Tina Hassannia, John Semley, Adam Nayman, Willow Maclay, and others. Good job! And I know that my friends who graduated from the AV Club -- Noel Murray, Scott Tobias, Sam Adams -- are on the radio quite a bit. So the situation is certainly not bleak.

But here's the bottom line. Film critics are smart, funny, opinionated, and should be everywhere. I won't be satisfied until Victor Morton is on 8 Out of 10 Cats, Miriam Bale is Mocking the Week, and Mike D'Angelo is hosting QI. As God intended.