Watching the Balcony: Working Girl, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Rain Man & More
We all have our weird rabbit holes, and one of mine is getting stoned and watching old Siskel & Ebert episodes on YouTube. These are my reactions after I get done Watching the Balcony…
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — So much more than two guys with thumbs
Since this is the first one, I’ll give a little more background on top of the italicized column description above. Yeah, so I have predilections toward certain YouTube rabbit holes I find myself going down, and that’s nothing out of the ordinary. One of my faves are the videos by people who clean up old-timey footage of folks walking around New York or Paris a century ago and change up the frame rate so it appears more contemporary. Fun stuff, especially on grass. And my good buddy, Eric Szyszka often finds himself late at night doing some deep-dives into the broadcast history of David Letterman, another person whose television catalog is uploaded to the platform. I guess people at NBC don’t really care about episodes of Late Night from 40 years ago sitting on YouTube? Same goes for shows hosted by long-deceased film critics, apparently.
One of my favorite YouTube channels to hit up when I’m high and it’s too late to start a movie is That Old T.V. For whatever reason, the only “old T.V.” the uploader seems to care about are episodes of At the Movies and the even older Sneak Previews with Siskel and Ebert. It does also feature a bunch of Ebert & Roeper and beyond, but I don’t really fuck with that era.
They make for fun watches because A) these guys were so totally watchable as odd TV personalities, with their square outfits, big personas, and their, sometimes, totally outrageous takes on films. Which leads me to B) it’s great to go back in time and see how certain films were received upon release. Sure, you can do this by reading archived reviews, but there’s something about watching these guys have at on video that’s so priceless.
I recently caught this episode from December, 1988 that’s a perfect example of your average outing with the guys in The Balcony. The first film up was Mike Nichols’ Working Girl, a film I still haven’t seen, but of course have heard about. Ebert, in his brown/gray suit jacket and sweater vest combo that’s hiding a mostly crumpled, creme-colored, collared shirt; big, boxy glasses; and floppy haircut that was most certainly gray by ‘88, loved the film, calling it the, “most entertaining film of the year.” He’s incredibly effusive toward Melanie Griffith’s performance as Tess McGill, the secretary who has a work idea stolen by her boss and seeks revenge. Siskel, dressed almost exactly the same as Rog, minus the glasses and gray hair, also loved it, calling it a, “terrific picture,” and claiming it is “old fashioned, quality movie-making.” Two thumbs up!
Of course, it was always more fun when they disagreed, and the big split in this episode comes when they’re discussing Keenen Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, the now-classic parody comedy of Blaxploitation films. Right off the bat you’re reminded that in 1988, the Wayans Comedy Dynasty was so far from the household name they are today, Siskel mispronounces the family name as “WHY-ANNES.” Gene was all about the film, getting exactly what writer/director, Mr. Why-Annes was up to. Ebert, on the other hand, absolutely hated the film—so much so, it’s kind of hard to tell whether or not he understood it was a parody? Siskel repeatedly says that it’s a comedy film “like Airplane!,” but Ebert isn’t having it, even going so far as to insinuate Siskel was being racist for laughing at the movie. Split decision!
They go on to cover Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, a film that of course doesn’t play the same in 2023 as it did in 1988 (for a bevy of reasons), but it’s interesting just watching how much language around things like autism have changed over the years. In fact, you can see the two of them almost struggle to even talk about autism. Siskel hints at one point that he suspected Hoffman’s character was “faking it” for some reason. They loved both Hoffman and Cruise’s performances equally. Two thumbs up!
It’s funny when you start to notice that the less they had to say about a film, the longer the string of clips would play. This is the case for the last two films they cover on this episode. The first being Paul Bogart’s adaptation of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy. Ebert absolutely loved Fierstein’s performance in the film, but Siskel, like me, had trouble with plays adapted into films that still feel too stagey, and this one was no exception for him. Split decision!
They close out the episode by having a super-pretentious conversation around Ivan Passer’s Haunted Summer, the bio-drama about the authors Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley, sitting around waxing philosophic for a summer season. Congratulations to both Rog and Gene for being so super-familiar with the works of all three writers—it’s really all I took away from their discussion about the film, which both of them really did not like! Two thumbs down!
The end of the episode is fascinating because Ebert gives this big speech about how the prior few weeks they covered a bunch of great films, this week they did too, and in the coming weeks they had even more great films to chat about/argue over. He’s bumming about how the film companies save the biggest and best films on their slate for the end of the year. “Why can’t they just spread these films out throughout the whole year,” he asks Gene. To which Siskel replies:
“Why can’t they just make good movies all year long, Roger?”
Indeed, Gene.
