TV Review: 'Ebert & Roeper and the Movies' (2012)

The format is the same. Ebert says he finds, say, the cheerleader comedy Bring It On to be mere pom-pom fluff, and Roeper says huffily, ''Well, I liked [it]!'' His huffs aren't as tough as Siskel's were — Roeper's slender thumb doesn't carry the authority of a man who, at the very least, had sat through more movies in one year, good and bad, than most of us will see in a lifetime. There's a lot to be said for having a basis for comparison, and Roeper's judgments so far — ''There's nobody else like Danny DeVito,'' he enthused recently — don't fill me with confidence even as consumer guidance. When Richard Roeper tells me that the foreign film Sunshine is ''a movie for grown-ups,'' this grown-up doesn't start scanning the paper for the local art house, if only because I've heard that hackneyed phrase used by a thousand hacks about a thousand movies. That's something that also counts: a varied vocabulary.

Roeper can't help what he looks like, but I also can't help thinking that one reason he got this job is that he fits a type that TV producers currently have a hankering for: the hunk with a facility for rattling off chunks of verbiage — a post-boomer who recites his devotion to art but who looks like he spends more time in the gym than in theaters. (The most emblematic example of this is the sweater burster who's been taking work away from George Clooney's dad introducing movies on the American Movie Classics channel. I'm sorry, but whenever this guy John Burke starts telling me how crucial John Ford was to cinema history, I snort, ''Ahh, you couldn't pick out Walter Brennan from Ward Bond in a lineup, ya punk!'' Or sometimes I just snort.)

I can understand Ebert's desire to keep the franchise alive, and — to give Roeper the benefit of the doubt — I'm aware it takes a while to settle into one's on-screen persona. But let's get this Roeper lad into movie shape: less knee-jerk positivity and more Negative Space (Manny Farber's collected movie criticism)! Fewer barbells and more buttered popcorn! C