These were very distinct realms, often harboring mutual hostility. The daily and weekly reviewers gibed at the professors, while academics looked down their noses at nearly all mass-market critics. Andrew Sarris got a pass, chiefly because he had influenced so many film teachers, but I remember being embarrassed at faculty parties when people outside film asked me what I thought of Pauline Kael’s latest review. I never read her, and nobody I respected did either.

The burst of TV review shows in the late 1970s, launched by the success of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s Sneak Previews, only intensified things. Siskel and Ebert realized that audiences had a keen appetite for clips—not the glimpses we get in trailers, but somewhat longer bits that would give us the flavor of a new release. But the film professoriat deplored the three-minute reviews, the shorthand judgments (thumbs up, thumbs down), and the plethora of clips. It seemed to us that the skinny guy and the fat guy, regardless of whether they recommended the movie or not, were functioning as part of the publicity for the film. The rise of movie review programs seemed to be in sync with 1970s strategies of saturation booking, shock-and-awe TV ads, and a general sense that each weekend’s releases were obligatory pop-culture events. Movie criticism was becoming an extension of the industry. The drift toward reviewing as infotainment was even clearer when Premiere emerged in the 1980s and Entertainment Weekly in the 1990s.

Roger Ebert was a regional critic who wrote occasionally for slick magazines; his Esquire profiles of Lee Marvin and Robert Mitchum have become classics of fly-on-the-wall New Journalism. The TV show made him a national figure, but I think it only reaffirmed academic indifference to him and to journalistic criticism generally.

We were too smug. Even if the show did promote Hollywood for 90% or so of its running time, it created an occasion for Siskel and Ebert to point out worthy smaller films. Now that Roger’s death has opened a flood of reminiscence from across the country, it’s obvious that the show helped cultivate a variety of tastes. For thousands of children and teenagers, Siskel and Ebert opened a door to kinds of cinema that was not part of their ordinary life. And as VHS and cable television expanded, viewers in Dayton or Fond du Lac could catch up with what the pair had talked about. Siskel and Ebert made cinephilia of all kinds respectable.

For me, Ebert was the man to watch. He was the designated film geek, while Siskel was a stand-in for the divorced dad looking for a movie to take his kid or his date to. Ebert could praise studio tentpole items and self-consciously serious art movies but he didn’t stint genre films, offbeat items, and independent fare. He practiced what Matt Zoller Seitz has called “silver linings” criticism: If something was good of its kind, give it the benefit of the doubt. He was closer than most mass-market critics to Cahiers du cinema’s “criticism of enthusiasm,” the idea that one should write only about the films one admires. It’s significant that just before his death, his blog posted the news that he’d still be writing, but “I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.”

As I came to know Roger in the early 2000s, I realized that the TV Ebert showed only one side of him. He did have the newspaperman’s love of the punchy lede and the rapid retort, skills on display in his banter with Siskel. But he was also an all-around intellectual in a way that few film critics have ever been.

He read widely in politics and science. An English literature major, he knew Dickens and Shaw intimately. The appreciative essays collected in the Great Movies volumes show a wide and deep knowledge of the arts. In public forums, he defended evolutionary theory and the prospect of living without a god to worship. Ever refusing the demarcation between high culture and low, he loved Simenon as well as Shakespeare, and he was proud of having written the script for Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He had a wicked sense of humor too, as can be confirmed by his submissions to the New Yorker cartoon caption contest.

Roger was a journalist through and through, but he could have been quite comfortable in university teaching. He taught a famous night class at the University of Chicago, while maintaining a breathless schedule of writing and travel. For decades he conducted sessions of close analysis at festivals and conferences, even on cruise ships. “Democracy in the Dark,” he called these encounters. He would screen a film once all the way through, and then replay it on laserdisc, inviting anyone in the audience to call out, “Stop!” and then let everyone discuss what was happening. Sometimes the audience would spend days with a movie. People loved the chance to share a communal experience of coming to know a film intimately.

That sense of communal participation was magnified by his online activities. Ever eager to communicate with anybody, he embraced the Internet faster than any other critic, and his zeal for Facebook and Twitter became legendary. He got thousands of comments, and he replied to an astonishing number of them.

Roger visited Madison twice for our local festival, and I saw his teaching abilities at full stretch. In 2003 we screened A Hard Day’s Night at the Orpheum Theatre. The vast picture palace was packed, and Roger’s introduction was greeted with nearly as many whoops and claps as the movie itself. In 2006 he returned to do Q & A on Laura, another of the nominees in his Great Movies pantheon. During the same visit he sat down with our graduate students and discussed cinema with them. I saw then that Roger was an educator, but one without a theory to peddle. He was a straightforward, kindly person with an unbiased intelligence. He was as interested in people as in ideas.

Contrary to what you might have expected, I’m not going to suggest that Roger bridged the gaps among the different film cultures. Those gaps remain, even in the age of the Web. But without being an academic, or an industry insider, or a specialized cinephile, he made a great many people think seriously about film as an art.

Roger showed that popular film criticism could be an intellectually honorable enterprise—more than that, a calling. We have, I think he would have said, enough missionaries for this or that divinity. We need more missionaries for movies.

2. The Government Accountability Office acknowledged that media piracy is a problem, but says there isn’t good enough data available yet to determine how much of a problem it really is. Geekologie helps out with an infographic about music piracy. Meanwhile, Paramount has turned to distributing movies on pre-loaded hard drives, and those drives will be heavily laden with DRM protection. Finally, Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent site, might be holed up in a nuclear bunker (no kidding), and the major studios are developing smart bomb capabilities to penetrate it (kidding…I think).

3. Investment in digital music is on the rise, but songwriters complain that they’re not getting the revenue they’re due from services like Spotify; for instance, Lady Gaga earned only $167 from one million plays of “Poker Face.” If that factoid doesn’t strike you, perhaps this graphic visualization of what music artists earn from online distribution will. Leor Galil considers the possible upsides of offering free music online. In a different post, Galil writes about the dreadful state of radio formatting and playlists. The band Pomplamoose has fostered a strong following almost solely from their YouTube videos (which I highly recommend), though since the group mainly plays covers, which thus turn up in searches for the mainstream originals, it may not be a strategy that most indie bands can capitalize on. Another strategy most other musicians won’t be able to capitalize on: being Kevin Costner.

4. Facebook’s recent privacy (or lack thereof) changes are worrisome to many. Plenty of others don’t seem to mind, though, as Facebook (and YouTube, which just turned five) continue to dominate social media traffic; one study says that Facebook is by far the most popular internet site in the workplace; and Gerd Leonhard, in his discussion of how to build an entertainment brand with social media, points out that “it took TV 13 years to reach 50 million people, but it took Facebook just two years.” Maybe Facebook can even help to save newspapers.

5. Twitter also had a big change during this fortnight, launching promoted tweets. Josh Bernoff says this is great for marketers, but user opinion is mixed, and there are challenges to its potential for success. Anil Dash says this is nothing truly new for Twitter, while B.L. Ochman says it changes the game. Ads and all, the Library of Congress will have every single tweet archived for future reference. Christopher Beam provides suggestions for how historians could best capitalize on this archive; short version: hashtag it, folks. Things are quite complicated for Twitter in Mexico.

6. Right on the heels of being at the center of one taste culture debate (over Kick-Ass), Roger Ebert quickly stirred up another with a post saying that video games can never be an art. His comments section exploded (3300+ at last check), and video game defenses appeared all over Twitter and the blogosphere (here’s just one from Olivia Collette). If there’s a museum in Paris devoted to video games, does that make them art? Video games are at least doing better as commerce, as sales were finally up last month, and Sony’s Playstation format enjoyed some rare victories. Other good video game news links: Eduaro Baraf provides a lengthy discussion of the game development process; Call of Duty’s creators have launched their own company; Nielsen looks at video game playing measurements; the Wikileaks Iraq video raises questions about the convergence of war and video games; and Tanner Higgin raises questions about the convergence of violence and laughter in videogames.

7. DVD sales and rentals dropped sharply in the first quarter, and such struggles for home video could usher in new models. But Blockbuster’s CEO is still optimistic about rentals, anyone who’s got a piece of Avatar’s DVD sales is thrilled, and Netflix’s CEO is also very happy, though more due to streaming than DVD. Speaking of streaming, Redbox has some new studio agreements for DVD rental delays, but is looking more into streaming, and YouTube is getting into streaming movie rental now. Telco 2.0 considers how the studios can best leverage their position in regard to online distribution.

8. A company called Kickstarter could help boost independent film distribution with an innovative DVD funding model. Successful Kickstarter-funded indie releases include an online comedy and an acclaimed documentary. Video-on-demand is also heating up as a viable indie distribution outlet, with Comcast making available via VOD a set of Tribeca Film Festival entries. Tired of having to capitulate to funding and marketing needs, a group of indie filmmakers generated a manifesto (rant?) that says filmmakers should just focus on making films, and that generated a voluminous and varied response on Twitter.

9. Random film links worth a look: a short history of short films; how theaters decide on trailers; theaters are once again trying live events; there was a crazy development process behind Cruise and Diaz’s Knight and Day; a study says people are more emotionally attached to movies than other media (source: Cinema Advertising Council, so…); Tyler Perry got a lot of analysis (here, here, and here); Hollywood appears to be terrified of I Love Phillip Morris, which has been delayed yet again; Scorsese’s going 3D; porn’s going 3D with a Caligula remake; porn parodies are proliferating; actresses can’t seem to win no matter their weight; and Andrew O’Hehir tells film critics to quit moaning about criticism being dead and just go back to writing about movies.

10. Links to the best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: BBC Budget Allocation; Transmedia Presentations; Madness Changes; $9.95 for Hulu; Economic Value of Networks; Conan, TBS, Syndication; Sitcoms Are Back; What Directors Do; Tina Fey Backlash; 3Dizzy; SyFy Gets Wrestling; DVD Extras Online.

At the Movies

The few, which include Scott and Phillips, are a dying breed, a group of often academically trained critics who tend to place film within histories, industrial traditions, aesthetic structures, and broad social and political concerns. They are being replaced by a new generation of young technocrats whose sole expertise seems to be to summarize, to decide whether they liked the film or not, and to put together websites. I think I know where these young technocrats come from.

Some of us suspect, and Scott let’s on that much, that Siskel and Ebert, the creators of At the Movies, were the beginning of the end. With their attempts at creating criticism for the masses who apparently needed the final dictum to be a binary sign, the “thumbs up” or the “thumbs down,” Siskel and Ebert redefined criticism. Who could imagine that a film critic, a master of words and images, would resort to the crudest form of communication to do final praise or condemnation? Siskel and Ebert, who perhaps mistook their task to popularize as a task for diluting the intellectual and affective power of criticism, benefited from this and their thumbs became the brand of their intellect.

Why did they allow it? Who would want her/his intellect to be represented by thumbs up or down? For years, these thumbs affected box office success and were reproduced in other media to signify film curatorial arbitration. These thumbs made careers and broke them, but their power went beyond; these thumbs came to be equated to film criticism.

For roughly ten years I have taught film classes in three fine institutions of higher learning (University of Texas at Austin, Southwestern University, and University of Virginia) and in all of these institutions I thumb-wrestled with Siskel and Ebert and, too often, they won. My students have regularly reduced the task of criticism to making flipping remarks on taste and writing petulant evaluations of film quality based on gut-feelings, a la Romanesque. My job doubles, for I not only have to teach to understand criticism as the intellectual practice of locating a film text into historical and contemporary contexts, but I also have to help my students unlearn the vices and schemas about criticism that they have grown up with, thanks to popular film criticism.

I am sorry Scott. I also thumb-wrestle with you and I do not feel particularly sorry for having your show cancelled. But of course, I did not win. The technocrats won.

Metacritic.com is one of the most popular places for people to go and make sense of movies. I cannot call it criticism; not even the creators of metacritic.com can. But it performs this role just the same; with simple signs and colors, metacritic.com scouts a world of signs and evaluates them using algorithms and mathematical formulas that end up signifying taste. From 0 to 100, they have 50 times more subtlety than Siskel and Ebert.