In how-can-we-miss-you-if-you-won'-go-away news, At the Movies co-host Richard Roeper has announced that this month will be his last on the popular movie review program. Unfortunately for those who have been wishing he would stop reviewing movies since he first started doing it in 2000, he will not be quitting film criticism altogether, but rather starting his own show as parent company Disney turns At the Movies into a new magazine-format entertainment-based talk show. "Over the last two seasons," Roeper said, "as (co-host) Roger (Ebert) has bravely coped with his medical issues, I've continued the show with a number of guest co-hosts, such as Jay Leno, Harold Ramis and John Mellencamp," all of whom share with Roeper the fact that they are not actually movie critics.
Although it's a classy way to go out -- giving his legendary senior partner props and making it look like he just wants to stay true to his calling rather than that Disney just wouldn't give him the money he thought he was worth -- Roeper's departure only highlights his widely criticized role in the ever-crumbling world of film criticism. Brought in to replace the beloved critic Gene Siskel after his death, the lean, jocular Roeper -- who owes his entire career as a movie writer to the fact that he happened to sit near Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times offices -- has often been excoriated for his hard-to-defend choices, aversion to anything but standard Hollywood fare, and genuine lack of knowledge about the movie industry in general, which could generously be interpreted as populism but which often came across as plain old ignorance. While there's many reasons to defend him -- he's genuinely enthusiastic about his job, he's an able and engaging political and cultural critic, and best of all, he's a White Sox fan -- as a movie critic, he's entirely too wrapped up in the polite and popular, and his reign on At the Movies has coincided with a general decline in the business of film criticism. He may just be a symbol of what's wrong with the vocation, but as symbols go, he'll do until the real thing gets here.
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