Gene Siskel 1946-1999

I always felt I had to justify why I liked watching "Siskel and Ebert" each week. It was easy when they were on at 11PM Sunday night--I could just qualify it as a lazy day ritual, whiling away my last hours of pre-workweek freedom by lounging on the couch relaxing my brain. It got a little trickier when they started airing at 12:30AM . . . now I had to make a conscious effort to stay up long past when I ordinarily would, and race to finish launching LeisureSuit.net so I could plop in front of the TV. Not to mention that 2 times out of 5 there would be some sporting event earlier on Fox, and everything would be bumped up a half hour, or an hour . . . but still I'd watch.

It was a little embarrassing for me, who considered himself a movie aficionado, and an appreciator of true criticism, to have people know that I religiously watched a show where a couple of Midwestern critics rated every movie as simply worth seeing (thumbs up) or not worth seeing (thumbs down), as if every movie is that reducible.

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, also known as The Bald Guy and The Fat Guy, had been working together since the mid-seventies, first as "Sneak Previews", then "At the Movies", and finally "Siskel and Ebert and the Movies". It would be comforting to describe theirs as a friendly rivalry, but I was never too sure that the two liked each other. Roger thought that he was a serious scholar, and looked down on Gene as a mere populist. Roger taught at Universities--Gene wrote for TV Guide. Roger wrote books--Gene expanded his media empire to radio and daytime television. And it was true, Roger knew a lot more about movies than Gene did--he has studied movies longer, and more deeply. Gene was often on the defensive. Gene always seemed like the underdog.

Well I like underdogs, and when Gene Siskel died Saturday of complications from a brain surgery he had nearly a year ago, I felt the kind of sadness you can only feel for a nice guy who's spent a lot of time hanging around your house.

Roger may have condescended to Gene, but Gene was no fool. A one-time math prodigy, he graduated from Yale with a degree in philosophy. He was a journalist, a writer, an interviewer of Presidents, a quick wit, and was active in his synagogue. After his surgery last May, he jumped right back into the fray, giving reviews over the phone from his hospital bed. He took his work seriously. And if he was the less scholarly of the two, is that really so bad?

Gene didn't make the lofty pronouncements that Roger made, but nor did he have the penchant for being so spectacularly inconsistent about things (which is not to say he couldn't be very wrong . . . just check out his positive review of the vile Seven for one example). One of Roger Ebert's most famous blunders was when he wrote a scathing, vicious review for the original release of Night of the Living Dead, then within a few years changed his tune and became one of the film's biggest boosters. Lesser known is his scattered history with the Die Hard films. First he gave the original Die Hard thumbs down. Then he gave Die Hard 2 thumbs up. Then when Gene, quite properly, disliked Die Hard 3, Roger argued that, while it wasn't as good as the original Die Hard, it was at least as good as Die Hard 2. See the flip-flop there? Another classic recognized too late.

Let's face it: the both of them were just critics. They could be wrong, they could be right. They had a certain Midwestern naïveté that gave an immediate extra boost to anything with subtitles or a low budget. But what's the alternative? One of the other populist critics? The clueless Joel Siegel? The freakish Gene Shalit? New York's village idiot Neil Rosen? How about a "serious" critic like The New Republic's 114-year-old Stanley Kauffmann, whose every review sends me and my buddies to our phones so we can guffaw over his latest plot misinterpretation or pointless anecdote (like the one about the time he shook Jimmy Stewart's hand in a bar that he managed to milk for 4 long paragraphs)? Compare them to the competition, and Siskel and Ebert start shining bright.

The fact is, the world needs populists who know what they're talking about. I'm a serious movie-lover, but sometimes I don't want to read a 5,000-word review and come away wondering whether or not the critic liked the film. Of course not every movie is reducible to see it or don't see it, but at least with Siskel and Ebert, you got a real piece of advice which you could feel free to heed or ignore.

So Gene is dead now, at 53, younger than my father, and leaves behind a wife and 3 children. They will mourn him like I never could, but I'll miss him, damn it. Roger has his place, don't get me wrong, but Gene was the critic you cared about. Unlike Roger, he had no scholarly pretenses, nor any pretense at all. He knew who he was. He loved movies. He fought the good fight against the fat guy.

He will be missed.

Editors note: you may be tempted, in light of recent events, to visit Siskel and Ebert's Web site. Do not go there unless you're on a T1 connection or close to it. It is one of the most poorly designed sites on the Web, and one click can hang your computer for a good 10 minutes.