Thumb for all the family ... Roger Ebert. Photograph: Frederick M. Brown/Getty
It seems the end of an era is beckoning - one perhaps best described as the age of the thumbs. Various film blogs have been reflecting this week on the future of Roger Ebert, the veteran critic whose presence on US TV screens has grown as familiar in American homes as an excess of prescription medication. Sadly, he may shortly become just a memory.
Ebert's famous thumbs are right at the centre of this sorry turn of events - the intelligence of his on-screen reviews having always been garnished with the epically reductive device of a thumbs up/thumbs down conclusion. Now, however, the (legally trademarked) thumbs have been withdrawn from broadcast, with competing explanations from Ebert and his bosses at Disney/ABC. Perhaps this is the final chapter in a story that began last summer when Ebert's treatment for thyroid cancer required him to take an extended leave of absence from his show, Ebert and Roeper At The Movies, and co-host Richard Roeper (himself the replacement for Ebert's late on-screen partner Gene Siskel) was left wagging his thumbs alongside a ragbag of guest presenters.
Yet whether the recovering Ebert will ever re-appear on the show that bears his name now seems moot, with the tenor of the accusation and counter-accusation between him and Disney leaving observers like David Poland of The Hot Blog wondering if a rapprochement is possible - or whether the network even wants one. "Maybe this is their way of cancelling the show without cancelling it," Poland muses - and as Spout Blog points out, that cancellation would say nothing good about the state of halfway serious film criticism.
Personally, I've often found myself in heated disagreement with Ebert (this is, after all, the man who gave Blue Velvet a one star review) - but for American audiences, he's always performed a valuable function as a conduit between ordinary film-goers and the kind of cinema that might otherwise be completely marginalised. As such, it's easy to see why movie lovers would be freaked out at the thought of a thumbless future.
Here in Britain, of course, it's difficult to see a similar crisis arising, so lacklustre is our TV coverage of film anyway - de-evolved for the most part into a morass of list nights and cheapo preview packages from channels on the outer fringes of the Freeview menu which appear to have been wholly spliced together from electronic press kits.
The exception, of course, is Film 2007, and yet it's here that the lack of an Ebert bites hardest. You'd have to be a dolt to call into question Jonathan Ross's passion for cinema, but for me the problem is that he's also an all-purpose (maybe the all-purpose) BBC face. As such, having him present British TV's most substantial engagement with film often makes the entire medium look like the hobby of one mountainous personality.
Anyway, veering off wildly before I'm ushered back into my box, it was cheering as always to see a couple of mentions this week of Abel Ferrara, around which a small buzz of activity was rounded up by David Hudson of Green Cine Daily.
Personally, having made at least three of the best films of the 90s, I'm always dismayed Ferrara doesn't often get the credit he's due in cinephile circles. Maybe it's his own outsize persona; perhaps a residual snobbery over early work like Driller Killer - either way, while it might be too much to hope that his new project Go Go Tales gets him the acclaim he deserves, I'm still desperate to see it. On a less ardent note, though - Bad Lieutenant 08? Really? Are we sure about this?
