Fall Movie Season 2008 kicked off unexpectedly with last week’s premiere episode of HBO’s Entourage series. The episode began with a pretend segment of At the Movies to go along with the show’s pretend-glamorization of Hollywood hustlers. Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips, At the Movies’ critics/hosts, blasted the new film by Entourage’s star by using typically snide barbs, the kind that currently pass for journalistic wit.
Naive viewers might have been perplexed by the mix of real and fake. It blurred the line between journalism and fiction: actors playing roles and journalists playing themselves on TV. It was perfect synergy. The entertainment industry that flatters itself with a fatuous “insiders” show like Entourage also produces the Disney-owned At the Movies. And nobody questions the absurdity. This cooperative interaction among parties with vested-interests—converging different parts of corporate America—is accepted as funny, enlightening, natural.
Yet here’s the up-to-date reality: Roeper and Phillips are no longer on At the Movies. Disney dropped those Chicago newspaper guys and brought in a slightly younger team, the Bens. Ben Manckiewicz from Turner Classic Movies and Ben Lyons from the E! Entertainment channel are not film critics but were selected to play critics on TV. The Bens also represent perfect synergy. Both these glibmeisters, wearing tasteful dark suits and a casual but opinionated air are to the manner born. Mankiewicz is the grandson of legendary director-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) and Lyons is son of New York media veteran Jeffrey Lyons. If experience doesn’t qualify them, nepotism surely does. That’s the kind of inside industry truth Entourage doesn’t dare expose.
But the surprise is that the Bens are truly refreshing, in ways Entourage never is. They began their tenure by individually blasting Towelhead and The Women—a significant difference from the logrolling Hollywood lovefest Roger Ebert had instituted on the show. Both movies were easy to scoff at (the big test comes with fall’s prestige Oscar bait), but that the Bens did it at all slightly resuscitated the idea of film criticism as independent thought—an idea which At the Movies had deflated. After a full year of running the show with Ebert’s name but without Ebert’s presence, Disney needed to reinvent its brand. It is the obviousness of this re-branding that aerates the Bens’ appearance.
By changing the format—or at least the hosts and the set—Disney virtually fesses up that the show has nothing to do with actual criticism. The set is no longer a fake movie loge that anyone can imagine themselves occupying; now it resembles an office, then a news-anchor desk—territory of the only profession people respect. The Bens seem cut from the same mold as Today’s Matt Lauer. This yuppie revision reveals what Ebert and his various, teleprompter-reading replacements had hidden—that At the Movies was always an infomercial. It not only sells movies and DVDs but it sells the idea of being Smart About Movies. In this way, it is now a more honest and insightful comedy than Entourage—which is greedier and more profane than Tropic Thunder (but has far less bite).
I applaud the Bens for having fun with this format and not holding up the Know-It-All mantle that weighed so heavily on Roeper and Phillips. That carefree facility that Adrian Grenier projects as Entourage’s hot young property misrepresents the actual desperation, desire and cravenness of Hollywood professionals. (Even his bad-mannered agent, Ari, is an improbably charming portrait of industry venality—at first outrageous, it’s now an insufferable exoneration.) Better than that, the Bens have an ease that spares us Ebert’s shrewd, long-practiced bloviating. Ebert made film “erudition” marketable by not pushing it too far into philosophy, analysis or cathexis. He brazenly told the New York Times, “When writing you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.”
This new At The Movies allows us to better understand the critical clichés that hold movie culture hostage. They emerged when Entourage’s characters cussed at Roeper and Phillips: “Fuck the critics! What do they know?” a trophy girlfriend whined. And she was consoled, “Nothin’, baby, nothin’.” This exchange fosters the long-standing anti-intellectual antagonism between makers and critics. It has worsened since All About Eve made critic Addison DeWitt its villain. Today, criticism has become just another aspect of show business, which reflects a major change in both 21st-century thinking and our commercial-culture infrastructure. By appearing on Entourage, Roeper and Phillips lowered the critical profession every bit as much as those D.C. pundits who appear in political comedies as clownish, untrustworthy copies of themselves. It’s the puppet show we’ve come to expect in all aspects of media.
There was little uproar over the Bens’ hiring. The mainstream press accepted it with business-as-usual custom while Gawker’s “Herogram” on July 22, 2008, dropped the site’s usual snide attitude to salaam the corporate baloney. The main problem with Defamer calling out the Ben-Ben controversy as “a bold new era in hackery” is that it only now notices nepotism as “bold” and “new.” The snarkosphere has always gone along with the brazen conflict-of-interest in a studio-financed, completely commercialized soft-soap criticism show. That was apparent when Ain’t It Cool recently slammed the Bens for lacking Ebert’s “depth.” Bloggers even complained that one of the two hirelings wasn’t female (“You missed it Disney”), pardoning Disney’s co-optation of criticism yet presuming that gender-diversity would bring fairness. Then bring on Ivanka Trump.
When Disney was unable to wrest control of Ebert’s trademarked “thumbs” rating system, a new system was installed: “Three to See.” Apparently just because it rhymes. But why not, “Two to Do?” “One for Fun?” They also rhyme, yet they delimit sales possibilities. At least now the Bens share that weekly chosen triad. (Roeper and Phillips were proprietary; they alternated weekly choices.) Breaking criticism down to a system negates subtlety and argument and persuasion. That’s the infomercial cliché—reducing art appreciation to a consumer guide. It is based on the industry-controlled idea that movies are merely product; it trains filmgoers to be consumers, not thinkers.
Today, most reviewers (and most filmgoers) think in such Hollywood terms—praising movies as just entertainment. TV shows like Entourage and AMC’s Sunday Morning Shootout, with producer Peter Guber and Variety editor Peter Bart, fetishize show business. This insider view circles around Hollywood economics but never comes to grips with the ideology behind it. On a recent Shootout, British director Joe Wright broke the fourth wall and wondered aloud “Why is the [in-studio] audience applauding the grosses?”
Thus far, the Bens have not been that gross. Like most critics, the Bens may not realize what socio-economic ideology they subscribe to; so they innocently sign on to searching for the “good movie” grail. Problem is, this “good movie” theory covers a range of casually accepted conventions and unexamined aesthetic and political standards. Not de gustibus; it usually comes down to rubber-stamping Hollywood formula (and denigrating what is truly new or challenging). That this habit stymies real discussion about movies and perverts the idea of cinephilia was proven by the many tryouts appearing on At the Movies after Gene Siskel’s death. They all talked about movies the same way. Innumerable movie reviewers on local TV stations do it too, only proving it’s what TV producers mandate. It is almost a cosmic joke that this conformist thinking and writing gets repeated in mainstream print and in the cyberspace free-for-all. (Did Roeper and Phillips write their own dialogue for Entourage? Does it matter?)
Before the Bens, the At the Movie auditions presented a carefully skewed sampling of critic types—girly, studly, smart-ass, nerdy—implying that all Americans echo the same cant about movies. It took the show’s revamping to turn up the volume on this monotonous cacophony for all to hear—and see. In a new segment titled “Critics Round-Up,” the Bens throw the discussion to a trio of guest pundits from Hollywood (Tory Schulman), Boston (Wesley Morris) and New York (Matt Singer), all squeezed together in Max Headroom–style projections. The chaos was wonderful as each tried to talk over then out-quip each other, jockeying for snark king or queen. Shulman trashed The Women by saying, “There’s a depth to Sex and the City.” Morris tried sophistication, seriously appreciating Annette Bening’s performance “because she has lines in her face,” he lobbed. To which Mankiewicz slammed back: “Yes, I give her credit for having lines in her face.” The intellectual tennis match also resembled a movie-themed episode of Hollywood Squares.
This brilliantly distilled the insanity that infects our current de-centered film culture. Surely Disney didn’t intend to reveal so much about how reviewers and the film industry have colluded: The Round-Up’s scramble for attention—each talking head’s groveling for industry approval—exposed the pipsqueak nature of contemporary film discussion. Internet naifs refer to this as “democratization” of criticism, but the Round-Up proves otherwise. It is simply commercialism—the result of diminished critical standards, a devious way of ensuring that film discourse continues to be vacuous. It’s been an arduous road from Charles Champlin’s early 1970s PBS series Film Odyssey, which introduced art films and substantive discussion into America’s national television curriculum.
At the Movies’ Know-nothing/Say-nothing format ruled for so long that superficiality seemed intrinsic to the genre and playacting became the essence of critical practice. And that’s the ultimate bummer of Entourage’s season-opening assault. We’re witnessing synergy that shouldn’t happen.
The world has changed since Pauline Kael’s 1964 essay “Movies on TV” that described the then-new phenomenon of old Hollywood studios shifting their theatrical catalogs onto national television broadcasts. Today that would be called “re-branding”, but back then it was recognized as a cultural shift: Movies were no longer the foremost national cultural uniting force that brought ethnic groups and economic classes together to dream the same dream. Movies had become readily available and easily—thus tritely—accessible. Our unifying dreams were deferred—physically diminished to the size of a cathode ray tube, losing their spatial glory as well as the theatrical context of wonderment and mystery. Today that’s also called “re-branding,” culminating in the oxymoron of a TV show called At the Movies.
Don’t blame the Bens. They’re doing their best. The most surprising comment was Lyons’ self-deprecating review of the movie Hecklers. He told Mankiewicz: “It’s what you and I do for a living, critiquing and examining art.” I wish he knew the difference, but TV doesn’t distinguish between heckling and critiquing. Here’s what remains: TV and the Internet have so degraded the idea of populism that film culture has devolved into art cliques, fanboy cliques and entourages of countless Hollywood swingers.
Naive viewers might have been perplexed by the mix of real and fake. It blurred the line between journalism and fiction: actors playing roles and journalists playing themselves on TV. It was perfect synergy. The entertainment industry that flatters itself with a fatuous “insiders” show like Entourage also produces the Disney-owned At the Movies. And nobody questions the absurdity. This cooperative interaction among parties with vested-interests—converging different parts of corporate America—is accepted as funny, enlightening, natural.
Yet here’s the up-to-date reality: Roeper and Phillips are no longer on At the Movies. Disney dropped those Chicago newspaper guys and brought in a slightly younger team, the Bens. Ben Manckiewicz from Turner Classic Movies and Ben Lyons from the E! Entertainment channel are not film critics but were selected to play critics on TV. The Bens also represent perfect synergy. Both these glibmeisters, wearing tasteful dark suits and a casual but opinionated air are to the manner born. Mankiewicz is the grandson of legendary director-writer Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) and Lyons is son of New York media veteran Jeffrey Lyons. If experience doesn’t qualify them, nepotism surely does. That’s the kind of inside industry truth Entourage doesn’t dare expose.
But the surprise is that the Bens are truly refreshing, in ways Entourage never is. They began their tenure by individually blasting Towelhead and The Women—a significant difference from the logrolling Hollywood lovefest Roger Ebert had instituted on the show. Both movies were easy to scoff at (the big test comes with fall’s prestige Oscar bait), but that the Bens did it at all slightly resuscitated the idea of film criticism as independent thought—an idea which At the Movies had deflated. After a full year of running the show with Ebert’s name but without Ebert’s presence, Disney needed to reinvent its brand. It is the obviousness of this re-branding that aerates the Bens’ appearance.
By changing the format—or at least the hosts and the set—Disney virtually fesses up that the show has nothing to do with actual criticism. The set is no longer a fake movie loge that anyone can imagine themselves occupying; now it resembles an office, then a news-anchor desk—territory of the only profession people respect. The Bens seem cut from the same mold as Today’s Matt Lauer. This yuppie revision reveals what Ebert and his various, teleprompter-reading replacements had hidden—that At the Movies was always an infomercial. It not only sells movies and DVDs but it sells the idea of being Smart About Movies. In this way, it is now a more honest and insightful comedy than Entourage—which is greedier and more profane than Tropic Thunder (but has far less bite).
I applaud the Bens for having fun with this format and not holding up the Know-It-All mantle that weighed so heavily on Roeper and Phillips. That carefree facility that Adrian Grenier projects as Entourage’s hot young property misrepresents the actual desperation, desire and cravenness of Hollywood professionals. (Even his bad-mannered agent, Ari, is an improbably charming portrait of industry venality—at first outrageous, it’s now an insufferable exoneration.) Better than that, the Bens have an ease that spares us Ebert’s shrewd, long-practiced bloviating. Ebert made film “erudition” marketable by not pushing it too far into philosophy, analysis or cathexis. He brazenly told the New York Times, “When writing you should avoid cliché, but on television you should embrace it.”
This new At The Movies allows us to better understand the critical clichés that hold movie culture hostage. They emerged when Entourage’s characters cussed at Roeper and Phillips: “Fuck the critics! What do they know?” a trophy girlfriend whined. And she was consoled, “Nothin’, baby, nothin’.” This exchange fosters the long-standing anti-intellectual antagonism between makers and critics. It has worsened since All About Eve made critic Addison DeWitt its villain. Today, criticism has become just another aspect of show business, which reflects a major change in both 21st-century thinking and our commercial-culture infrastructure. By appearing on Entourage, Roeper and Phillips lowered the critical profession every bit as much as those D.C. pundits who appear in political comedies as clownish, untrustworthy copies of themselves. It’s the puppet show we’ve come to expect in all aspects of media.
There was little uproar over the Bens’ hiring. The mainstream press accepted it with business-as-usual custom while Gawker’s “Herogram” on July 22, 2008, dropped the site’s usual snide attitude to salaam the corporate baloney. The main problem with Defamer calling out the Ben-Ben controversy as “a bold new era in hackery” is that it only now notices nepotism as “bold” and “new.” The snarkosphere has always gone along with the brazen conflict-of-interest in a studio-financed, completely commercialized soft-soap criticism show. That was apparent when Ain’t It Cool recently slammed the Bens for lacking Ebert’s “depth.” Bloggers even complained that one of the two hirelings wasn’t female (“You missed it Disney”), pardoning Disney’s co-optation of criticism yet presuming that gender-diversity would bring fairness. Then bring on Ivanka Trump.
When Disney was unable to wrest control of Ebert’s trademarked “thumbs” rating system, a new system was installed: “Three to See.” Apparently just because it rhymes. But why not, “Two to Do?” “One for Fun?” They also rhyme, yet they delimit sales possibilities. At least now the Bens share that weekly chosen triad. (Roeper and Phillips were proprietary; they alternated weekly choices.) Breaking criticism down to a system negates subtlety and argument and persuasion. That’s the infomercial cliché—reducing art appreciation to a consumer guide. It is based on the industry-controlled idea that movies are merely product; it trains filmgoers to be consumers, not thinkers.
Today, most reviewers (and most filmgoers) think in such Hollywood terms—praising movies as just entertainment. TV shows like Entourage and AMC’s Sunday Morning Shootout, with producer Peter Guber and Variety editor Peter Bart, fetishize show business. This insider view circles around Hollywood economics but never comes to grips with the ideology behind it. On a recent Shootout, British director Joe Wright broke the fourth wall and wondered aloud “Why is the [in-studio] audience applauding the grosses?”
Thus far, the Bens have not been that gross. Like most critics, the Bens may not realize what socio-economic ideology they subscribe to; so they innocently sign on to searching for the “good movie” grail. Problem is, this “good movie” theory covers a range of casually accepted conventions and unexamined aesthetic and political standards. Not de gustibus; it usually comes down to rubber-stamping Hollywood formula (and denigrating what is truly new or challenging). That this habit stymies real discussion about movies and perverts the idea of cinephilia was proven by the many tryouts appearing on At the Movies after Gene Siskel’s death. They all talked about movies the same way. Innumerable movie reviewers on local TV stations do it too, only proving it’s what TV producers mandate. It is almost a cosmic joke that this conformist thinking and writing gets repeated in mainstream print and in the cyberspace free-for-all. (Did Roeper and Phillips write their own dialogue for Entourage? Does it matter?)
Before the Bens, the At the Movie auditions presented a carefully skewed sampling of critic types—girly, studly, smart-ass, nerdy—implying that all Americans echo the same cant about movies. It took the show’s revamping to turn up the volume on this monotonous cacophony for all to hear—and see. In a new segment titled “Critics Round-Up,” the Bens throw the discussion to a trio of guest pundits from Hollywood (Tory Schulman), Boston (Wesley Morris) and New York (Matt Singer), all squeezed together in Max Headroom–style projections. The chaos was wonderful as each tried to talk over then out-quip each other, jockeying for snark king or queen. Shulman trashed The Women by saying, “There’s a depth to Sex and the City.” Morris tried sophistication, seriously appreciating Annette Bening’s performance “because she has lines in her face,” he lobbed. To which Mankiewicz slammed back: “Yes, I give her credit for having lines in her face.” The intellectual tennis match also resembled a movie-themed episode of Hollywood Squares.
This brilliantly distilled the insanity that infects our current de-centered film culture. Surely Disney didn’t intend to reveal so much about how reviewers and the film industry have colluded: The Round-Up’s scramble for attention—each talking head’s groveling for industry approval—exposed the pipsqueak nature of contemporary film discussion. Internet naifs refer to this as “democratization” of criticism, but the Round-Up proves otherwise. It is simply commercialism—the result of diminished critical standards, a devious way of ensuring that film discourse continues to be vacuous. It’s been an arduous road from Charles Champlin’s early 1970s PBS series Film Odyssey, which introduced art films and substantive discussion into America’s national television curriculum.
At the Movies’ Know-nothing/Say-nothing format ruled for so long that superficiality seemed intrinsic to the genre and playacting became the essence of critical practice. And that’s the ultimate bummer of Entourage’s season-opening assault. We’re witnessing synergy that shouldn’t happen.
The world has changed since Pauline Kael’s 1964 essay “Movies on TV” that described the then-new phenomenon of old Hollywood studios shifting their theatrical catalogs onto national television broadcasts. Today that would be called “re-branding”, but back then it was recognized as a cultural shift: Movies were no longer the foremost national cultural uniting force that brought ethnic groups and economic classes together to dream the same dream. Movies had become readily available and easily—thus tritely—accessible. Our unifying dreams were deferred—physically diminished to the size of a cathode ray tube, losing their spatial glory as well as the theatrical context of wonderment and mystery. Today that’s also called “re-branding,” culminating in the oxymoron of a TV show called At the Movies.
Don’t blame the Bens. They’re doing their best. The most surprising comment was Lyons’ self-deprecating review of the movie Hecklers. He told Mankiewicz: “It’s what you and I do for a living, critiquing and examining art.” I wish he knew the difference, but TV doesn’t distinguish between heckling and critiquing. Here’s what remains: TV and the Internet have so degraded the idea of populism that film culture has devolved into art cliques, fanboy cliques and entourages of countless Hollywood swingers.
