Monday, July 21, 2008

The balcony is closed

A great TV show, "At the Movies," is coming to a quiet end after 33 years. The name may live on, but current co-host Richard Roeper and long-time co-host Roger Ebert say they're leaving the Disney-ABC program as the syndicator looks to transform the movie review product into an "Entertainment Tonight"-style Hollywood tabloid show.

Oh, despair. The format of two critics seated in a balcony talking about movies may be more revolutionary in its simplicity now than in the 1970s when it was begun by Ebert and fellow Chicago film critic Gene Siskel, and the program is about to be transformed into the very last thing this country needs.

Ebert called the program "a wonderful experience" and said it "was a great loss to me when surgery in July 2006 made it impossible" for him to continue in an on-air capacity. Roeper, who took over Siskel's seat when the elder critic died in 1999, said in a statement that he plans to "proceed elsewhere with my ninth year as the co-host of a movie review show that honors the standards established by Siskel and Ebert." Ebert vowed, "The thumbs will return."

Even if that means going back to Chicago public television.

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The University of Iowa is going to have to explain why they encouraged a student-athlete not to report a sexual assault.

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Our nation's finest political writer, Matt Taibbi, predicted on Saturday that... "The phony blue-red divide, which has been buoyed for years by some largely incidental geographical disagreements over religion and other social issues, is going to give way eventually to a real debate grounded in a brutal economic reality increasingly common to all states, red and blue."

His is a must-read.

1 Comments:

At 6:51 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gary Barta should make an appointment to see one the very fine dentists at the U of I. His teeth are an embarrassment.

 

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