Well, it’s been awhile since I have written a Thought attacking someone who gets on my nerves. Therefore, we here at the “Harris Random Hatred Department” have set our sights on a new target for everone’s amusement. Rather than writing a scathing piece on Tony Patisno, the owner of a deli on my street who doesn’t seem to know the difference between regular and spicy mustard, I decided to broaden the scope of my article so that more than 40 people in New Jersey might get my poorly worded references. Hence, we at HRHD have decided to attack, you guessed it, a celebrity.
This time we have set our sights on Ebert and Roeper, those crazy “thumbs up/thumbs down” movie reviewers. I’m sure there’s already some built up hostility for these two gents, most likely focused in Los Angeles, California. However, crappy directors and screenwriters aside, we have taken to grabbing our head-bashin’ mallets when we see these two characters pop up on the ol’ boob tube.
However, our frustration is not with both of them. On the contrary, we actually love and respect Roger Ebert and his opinions on movies. We really enjoyed when the show was “Siskel and Ebert”, watching those two duke it out over the societal impact of Mystic Pizza vs Short Circuit. They were always happy doing what they were doing.
Then there comes this guy Roeper, who is the exact polar opposite of the happy, informative movie reviewer. Every time Roeper speaks we get the impression that someone charged him $75 to watch the movie, and he’s really pissed and out for blood. He is never happy about anything and generally hates everyone and everything to do with Hollywood, which is not exactly what you are looking for in a movie reviewer. Sure, rip into Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t that good, but Jurassic Park III? C’mon man, it had dinosaurs! I mean, dinosaurs!
We are not fanatic viewers of their program, but every time we glance by it, there is Roeper going off on a tangent about how every movie should be burned, and the director should be drawn and quartered. We can’t remember him ever giving a good review to anything, except one of those movies with a monkey as a main character. We like to think that he was paired with Roger Ebert as part of the Richard Hatch method of casting. Roeper is someone you grow to hate so much that you can’t not watch the show. Well, if that was the idea, job well done. You win TV people. Yet again.