While Roger Ebert's written reviews are pretty easily accessible (albeit often in butchered form, with first paragraphs missing & star ratings in error), Gene Siskel's pre-1985 reviews are not.
Using the archive at newspapers.com, I've been compiling a database for the latter, including his four star-reviews, films that made his end-of-year lists, films that made Ebert's end-of-year lists, and anything else notable (both positive and negative); I'm up to almost 1600 at the moment. I've also been compiling all of his end-of-year columns (both best and worst, as well as other comments on the state of movies).
Unfortunately, the first page of his Network review that's on the newspapers.com archive has a big chunk of text that's very blurry to the point that I can't read it. As that's a film that received four stars and placed very highly on his best-of-1976 list, it's a bit of a hole not to have the full review. Does anyone have a better copy of it (or maybe they could actually decipher the text that's on the site)?
A second query is his best-of-1984 list. While it's not illegible at all, the page on that same site has a little bit of text cut off from the first five entries. While I'm pretty sure I extrapolated most of what was missing, I could not do so for some of the text from his Purple Rain entry (#5 on the list). Again, does anyone have a full copy of that list, or were they at least able to figure out the missing text better than I?
by Remarkable_Stay_5909
2 Comments
When I was finally old enough to pick movies to go to with friends, siskel and ebert were my go-to to get an honest review. The loss of siskel was truly an end of an era.
The dedication to archival work here is incredible