Gene Siskel Movie Reviews
While fans can no longer enjoy new Gene Siskel movie reviews, we can still look back fondly on a career filled with astute observations, humorous bickering, and a true passion for cinema. Alongside fellow critic Roger Ebert, Siskel hosted At the Movies from 1982 until his death in 1999. During that time, the duo became famous for their passionate on-air debates, and many fans simply referred to them as “the fat guy” and “the bald guy.” But there was so much more to Gene Siskel.
Born on January 26th, 1946, Eugene “Gene” Kal Siskel would experience a love for the movies while watching Dumbo as a child. Years later, he would cite this Disney classic as the first film to make a real impression on his.
Years later, he would go on to graduate with a degree in Philosophy from Yale in 1967. During that time, he studied with Pulitzer-winning writer John Hersey, and landed a job with the Chicago Tribune in 1969.
But Siskel’s life was in for a dramatic change in 1975, as that’s when he teamed up with Roger Ebert, a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Their first show was known as Sneak Previews, and it aired on a Chicago-based PBS station. Their recognizable “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” rating system caught on, and the duo had gained a sizable following by 1978.
In 1982, they departed PBS for syndication, launching their trademark show Siskel & Ebert At the Movies. By 1986, the program was being produced by Walt Disney , and the title was eventually shortened to just Siskel & Ebert. Throughout the years, the pair appeared on everything from The Tonight with Johnny Carson to The Howard Stern Show, always ready to defend their reviews and cheerfully discuss their sometimes heated arguments.
During all his years as a critic, Siskel only walked out of a film on three occasions. The first came in 1971, with the Dean Jones comedy The Million Dollar Duck. Next was the 1980 film Maniac, and the third was for Penelope Spheeris’ 1996 film Black Sheep. With the latter, he admitted to pretending to go to the bathroom, only to never come back.
His two favorite films were Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Saturday Night Fever. Siskel was such a big fan of the latter that he purchased Tony Manero’s white disco suit at a charity auction. Here’s a portion of what he said about the film in his written review, “My fever for ‘Fever’ goes beyond its music, even beyond its spectacular dancing sequences. I have come to love the film’s characters–all of them. And the only explanation that comes close to describing my visceral attachment to the film is that it is a 119-minute compression of most everyone’s teenage years. It’s all there: the clothes, dancing, cars, booze, fellowship, sexual thrills, sexual frustration, parental affection, parental hatred, unrequited love, the first job, doubting religion, and seeing oneself slowly becoming an adult.”
Sadly, Gene Siskel was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor in 1998. He continued to work for as long as he could, but then took a leave of absence in February of 1999, stating with good humor, “I’m in a hurry to get well, because I don’t want Roger to get more screen time than me.”
After undergoing surgery to remove the tumor, Gene Siskel died from complications at the age of 53 on February 20th, 1999. He is survived by his wife, Marlene, and their children, Will, Callie, and Kate. The final Gene Siskel movie review was for Simply Irresistible with Sarah Michelle Gellar, which received a “thumbs-down” rating.
In 2009, 10 years after Siskel’s death, on-air partner Roger Ebert delivered this touching tribute. Despite the fact that the duo hasn’t been together in over a decade, many film fans still think of them as being synonymous.
Gene Siskel Top 10 Films
Each year, in addition to his usual Gene Siskel movie reviews, the critic would also put together a top 10 list for his column in the Chicago Tribune. He would also do the same thing for the television, and slight differences would sometimes exist between the two. Below, I’ve collected an assortment of these lists for your enjoyment.
1998
01. Babe: Pig in the City (George Miller)
02. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
03. Pleasantville (Gary Ross)
04. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg)
05. The Truman Show (Peter Weir)
06. Antz (Eric Darnell/Tim Johnson)
07. Simon Birch (Mark Steven Johnson)
08. There’s Something About Mary (Bobby Farrelly/Peter Farrelly)
09. Waking Ned Devine (Kirk Jones)
10. Madadayo (Akira Kurosawa)
11. Beloved (Jonathan Demme)
1995
01. Crumb (Terry Zwigoff)
02. Toy Story (John Lasseter)
03. Nixon (Oliver Stone)
04. Babe (Chris Noonan)
05. Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins)
06. Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis)
07. The American President (Rob Reiner)
08. Exotica (Atom Egoyan)
09. Apollo 13 (Ron Howard)
10. Les Miserables (Claude Lelouch)
Best Films of the 1980s
01. Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese)
02. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann)
03. The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman)
04. My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle)
05. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis)
06. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
07. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone)
08. Moonlighting (Jerzy Skolimowski)
09. Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox)
10. Kagemusha (Akira Kurosawa)
1979
01. Hair (Milos Forman)
02. Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton)
03. The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino)
04. Breaking Away (Peter Yates)
05. Manhattan (Woody Allen)
06. The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
07. Nosferatu, the Vampyre (Werner Herzog)
08. The Onion Field (Harold Becker)
09. Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer)
10. The China Syndrome (James Bridges)
1969
01. Z (Costa-Gravas)
02. Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)
03. Alice’s Restaurant (Arthur Penn)
04. Simon of the Desert (Luis Bunuel)
05. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Robert Ellis Miller)
06. Oh! What a Lovely War (Richard Attenborough)
07. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
08. if…. (Lindsay Anderson)
09. Pretty Poison (Noel Black)
10. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky)
Oh, and here’s a list of 10 movies he absolutely never wanted to see again (compiled in 1985):
Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th, Part 2 (1981)
Friday the 13th, Part 3 (1982)
Friday the 13th – The Final Chapter (1984)
Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985)
The Cannonball Run (1981)
Cannonball Run II (1984)
Porky’s (1981)
Porky’s II (1983)
Porky’s Revenge (1985)
Gene Siskel Quotes
As we wrap up this article on Gene Siskel movie reviews, I’d like to leave you with a few quotes from one of the greatest critical minds of modern cinema.
- “We’d rather see a picture that we liked then dump on one we didn’t.”
- “We don’t pretend to disagree.”
- “I always ask myself, ‘Is the movie that I am watching as interesting as a documentary of the same actors having lunch together’”
- (from his review of North) “Well, I think you’ve got to hold Rob Reiner’s feet to the fire here: he’s the guy in charge, he’s saying this is entertainment – it’s deplorable. There isn’t a gag that works. You couldn’t write worse jokes if I told you to write worse jokes. The ethnic stereotyping is appalling, it’s embarrassing, you feel unclean as you’re sitting there; it’s junk–first-class junk.”
- (discussing Ebert) “Roger is the only guy in history to ever answer ‘Yes’ to every question he’s asked at McDonald’s.”
- (from his review of Return to Oz) “You know you’re in trouble when your favorite character in a movie is a hen that only has a bit part.”
And here are a few links to other A1 Movie Reviews blog posts you might be interested in:
- Best Movies of 2009
- Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
- Roger Ebert Movie Reviews
- Christian Movie Reviews
- Free Movie Reviews
Related posts:
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] Gene Siskel Movie Reviews [...]
[...] Gene Siskel Movie Reviews [...]
[...] Gene Siskel Movie Reviews [...]
[...] Gene Siskel Movie Reviews [...]
[...] Gene Siskel Movie Reviews [...]
[...] was among critic Gene Siskel’s favorite film, and I would have to agree with the bald-headed movie savant. Strangelove works on [...]