WESTERLY — Although he preferred comic books to movies as a kid growing up in central New Jersey, it’s the movies that have played a starring role in the life of Matt Singer, the award-winning film critic and author of the newly released “Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever.”
Singer, a film critic at ScreenCrush.com and member of the New York Film Critics Circle who won a Webby Award for his work on the Independent Film Channel’s website, IFC.com, will talk about movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — the legendary critics, whom he lovingly chronicles in his new book — and about his connection to Westerly when he gives a talk on Saturday at the United.
Siskel and Ebert, “two ink-stained critics” who turned their debates over movies into must-see television, did something that seems remarkable in retrospect, Singer writes.
Both were established newspaper critics in Chicago — Ebert a Pulitzer Prize-winner at The Sun-Times, Siskel his hard-charging rival at The Tribune — when programmers at the local PBS station came up with the idea of pairing them on TV to review the latest movies.
In his book, Singer writes about eavesdropping on Siskel and Ebert’s iconic balcony set, and details their rise from making a few hundred dollars a week on local Chicago PBS to securing multimillion-dollar contracts for a syndicated series and forever influencing the way we talk about (and think about) movies.
His book, according to one critic, is a welcome reminder of an era when film criticism actually mattered, from the theoretical debates between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris to pioneering print-to-TV critics like Judith Crist.
But it was Siskel and Ebert who, in Singer’s words, “democratized criticism, turned it into mass entertainment.”
Around the time Singer first started watching Siskel & Ebert, he said, he fell in love with “The Sting,” the famous caper film starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
“That remains a very sentimental favorite,” said Singer. “But I have probably seen ‘Ghostbusters’ more than any other movie.”
“I recently watched it for the first time with my oldest daughter Riley, who loved it too, and that made me fall in love with it all over again,” he said.
But back to that childhood in the central New Jersey town of Marlboro and the boy who loved comic books.
“If I had any artistic ability, I would have definitely at least tried to become a cartoonist or comic book illustrator,” said Singer in an email one day last week. “And I would have loved to be a comic book critic or historian, but growing up in the 1990s, that seemed like an impossibility; my college didn’t even teach classes on comics books.
“I loved movies too, and so I decided to pursue that instead,” continued Singer, who is also the author of “Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular.”
“Then, as luck would have it,” he said, “movies became giant comic books anyway, so I wound up writing about both simultaneously.”
When he was an undergraduate at Syracuse University in the early 2000s, watching movies in his free time and quoting Austin Powers, a friend introduced him to another Austin Powers-quoter, Westerly native Melissa Anne Vacca, the daughter of Dorothy and Rocco Vacca.
Singer and Vacca — who now live in Brooklyn and are the parents of two daughters — celebrated their 15th wedding anniversary on Nov. 22.
“Ironically,” he said, “while I love quoting movies and shows, Mel almost never does to this day; the Austin Powers thing was a total fluke.”
“But we did connect right away anyway,” Singer said. “I’ve been visiting her and my wonderful in-laws in Westerly ever since.
“So maybe that should make ‘Austin Powers’ one of my favorite movies, too,” he said.
