Siskel and Ebert review 'Leave It to Beaver'

I'm not sure if your link still works, but I watched the same review here:

http://siskelandebert.org/video/NS1746RNWS4G/Leave-It-To-Beaver--Money-Talks--Mimic--Gabbeh-1997

I don't agree with what Ebert said at all. This film absolutely does not "play it straight" and Ebert's claim that this film "does not try to make a parody out of the classic TV series" is dead wrong. On the contrary: this film spends at least 80% of it's screen-time crapping all over the original material by trying to "parody" it. And that is the #1 reason why this film is horrible.

In fact, Ebert even directly cites a "parody" scene a few seconds after he said that the film plays it straight (the disgusting living room sex scene, which is something that the original would never do). Was he an idiot or what?

IMO he was...by the way this is the same Ebert guy who gave Conan the Barbarian '82 a bad review, but Conan the Destroyer a good review. And he also gave Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a good review and claimed it was the "same old same old," meaning just like and every bit as good as the all the previous Indy films. Ebert was clearly one of the worst film critics who ever lived. I think he gets acclaim from liberals solely because he was a liberal like them and therefore he praised films that push the liberal crazy agenda.

Also, Ebert admits he "came to the film fresh" without having seen the TV series. No wonder he has no idea what he is talking about in this review! But even so, he still should have recognized it as a bad film on its own utter lack of merits.

I agree 100% with Siskel's comment about how the Ward actor looks unhappy & sinister. That actor was a horrible choice. Ebert's rebuttal is idiotic: "No he didn't. He looks like a completely normal, nice dad!" No, Ebert, he doesn't!

Siskel is also right about the film being all over the map. IMO that's the byproduct of them being conflicted about whether they wanted to crap all over or respect the original material, and so they tried to do both at the same time, resulting in an incongruent mess (like Siskel says).

Oh, and here is a quotation from Maitland McDonagh of TV Guide that excellently describes how this film tries contradictorily both to respect and to crap all over the original material:

this movie is an infelicitous mix of bland nostalgia and smarmy, pseudo-sophisticated contempt for the conventions of a more innocent time.