Sunday, November 30, 2008

Ben Lyons go far far away from my TV.

I just turned the channel to Chicago's ABC7, which (I had briefly forgotten) shows At the Movies, now with TCM's Ben Mankiewicz and Jeffrey Lyons spawn Ben Lyons. Now, at a brief glimpse, Ben looks and sounds like a 18 year old idiot, so I went to his Wiki to do some hard research and was met with this gem:
Unlike Roger Ebert, a former PHD candidate in English, published author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist of 40 years and screenwriter, Ben never went to college, never wrote for a half-serious newspaper, never produced or wrote a film and, indeed, was only a "film critic" for E!. Yeah, that makes him perfectly qualified to replace Roger Ebert.
It's pretty sad, really. As much as I hated hated hated Roeper and as much as poppa Roger is going kinda loopy, Ebert and Roeper's show was, at its worst, never as terrible as this.

Speaking of Roger, he wrote a wonderfully meandering, entertaining, and on point review of Transporter 3 this week. I would've totally added on at least half a star, but the text I'm pretty much down with. Bring on Crank 2 god I can't wait.

2 comments:

Alex said...

see. that's why roger is still relevant. you know that's the best review of the transporter 3 that anyone's going to write.

and as long as we're on the subject, i think his extremely near death experience is to account for much of his loopiness these days. and i can't really fault him for that. it's kinda like a free pass to be loopy.

Maciej said...

Yeah, I'm actually enjoying his writing a lot these days. Whether it's near-death experience, or just the fact that he's been around so long, he's definitely realized he has carte blanche to write in any way he wants to, whether that produces a straight ahead, old-fashioned film review or, as it often does, something more entertaining.