Ebert and Roeper replaced by...

[JadedRaverLA]

Two people with essentially no experience critiquing films?

Nikki Finke from LA Weekly's take:

Ugh. The retooled Ebert & Roeper show premiering September 6th will be co-hosted by Ben & Ben -- a Generation Why duo who only got the gig due to nepotism. Ben Lyons is the nobody son of Jeffrey Lyons, the film critic world's biggest hack and quote ***** with zero credibility, while Ben Mankiewicz is the slacker host on Turner Classic Movies, whose only claim to fame is that he's a watered-down member of the famous film family. Now, there's a working definition of the death of film criticism for you.

The closest thing to film criticism Mankiewicz has done is host a show on TCM (aka reading cue cards about movies) and mocking and stalking celebrities for TMZ. Meanwhile Lyons has been a film "critic" (or propagandist) for the bastion of journalistic credibility that is E!, pretty much ensuring that Nikki's wrong and he's by now supplanted his father as "the film critic world's biggest hack."

Way to go Disney! At least Roeper is supposedly in talks to start another show that, you know, actually contains film criticism. Maybe I'll get really lucky and Roeper's show will go back to the old format of actually discussing films, rather than trying to cram a review into 10 seconds following a promo of the film and nearly 15 minutes of commercials and promo-bumpers per half hour.