Who Is EBERT PRESENTS AT THE MOVIES’ New Co-Host, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky?

Via moviecitynews, yesterday Roger Ebert chose film critic/movie blogger Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (that name is pain in the butt to both spell out and pronounce!) to accompany Christy Lemire of the Associated Press as co-host of EBERT PRESENTS AT THE MOVIES which will debut on January 21st, 2011. Correct me if I’m wrong, is this the 2nd or 3rd attempt to get this show runnin’ again?! I lost count.
Seems like this time, Ebert wants to reach out to today’s audience who get their reviews from online journalists and bloggers instead of his show and Chicago-based Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Ig.nah.tee Vish.na.vet.ski) is the man to save the day. Those of you Ebert fans will still get to see your hero host a special segment each week..

So what’s so great about Vishnevetsky? He moved from Russia when he was a kid, Vishnevetsky is a critic and essayist for Mubi.com, a new multinational streaming online cinematheque. He is also a co-founder of Cine-File.info and a contributor to the Chicago Reader, he is multilingual and once worked as a translator for Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, Russia’s premier literary journal.
Ebert was “struck by the depth and detail of his film knowledge, and by how articulate he was.” after he read Vishnevetsky’s work online.

24 Frames recent article managed to find out what type of movies Vishnevetsky liked. From this past year, he enjoyed Vincere, Ghost Writer, White Material. But he also enjoyed Survival of the Dead which wasn’t George A. Romero‘s best work in my book. He said there were things about The Expendables that he liked and he thought The A-Team was ‘underrated’.
He didn’t think 2010 was as awesome as 2009 which produced two of his favorite, Two Lovers and Public Enemies.
As far as filmmakers goes, he’s a fan of Neveldine-Taylor, the boys behind Crank movies and Gamer. Because in his opinion, those two represented the idea of “fitting a lot of ideas into one movie.” He also mentioned John Ford and Allan Dwan.

Here’s his take on writing reviews and film criticism..

“For every movie, you can write 2,000 or 3,000 pages of text. It’s very different to sit in that seat and have a discussion in three minutes. You have have to avoid certain ideas and tangents because they’d take the whole length of the segment,”
“At the same time, I feel like it’s possible to get at all the important issues without needing all the reference points.”

“There’s so much criticism on the Internet. It’s huge. And the bigger the group, the more greatness could possibly be found in it,” he said, adding that he believes more people in their late teens and 20s read reviews than those in their 30s.
“Criticism will survive even if no one’s paying for it. Obviously it’s better if people are paying for it. But the fact that artists weren’t able to make a living from their work hasn’t detracted from the quality of that work. Charles Ives was the second greatest composer in American history and he worked in insurance his whole life.”

And this is excerpt from his review of The Social Network..

An immaculate realization of clichés, a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit transmuted into a low-stakes male weepie, a bunch of college-movie stereotypes at play in a world of cruelly precise images—that is, hokum presented with such unerring belief in its profundity that the conviction itself becomes profound.

Or, just as accurately, a dead serious, quixotic, funny work of popular art with little to say about modern business or the Internet (except, that is, for the final scene), with overt ambitions, a punny title (it’s the characters, not the website, yagetit?) and pat ironies (the CEO of Facebook is friendless!) that has absolutely no reason to redeem itself because its shortcomings form the bases for its strengths. Mark Zuckerberg started a PR campaign a while ago to try and deflect all of the flak he thinks he’ll get from this movie’s portrayal of him as a manipulative, needy douchebag—but since David Fincher once outlined the four ideal personality traits of a director as belligerence, paranoia, fear of failure and an overwhelming urge to be liked, and since those four traits pretty much sum up The Social Network’s take on Zuckerberg, it can be intuited (not just through that statement, but through the film itself) that Fincher’s loyalties / sympathies lie not with all of the wronged characters Zuckerberg leaves in his wake, but with the hyperarticulate social monster himself. To put it bluntly: The Social Network, obsessive, so utterly convinced of the brilliance and originality of its corniest ideas (narrative, dramatic, aesthetic) that they become brilliant originals, is the film its main character would make if he didn’t know it was about himself. When, in the last scene, Zuckerberg is finally alone with his invention, which is a direct product of his anxieties and flaws, his facial expression is hard to register. Bemusement? Frustration? Boredom? The answer is ambiguous and possibly irrelevant. What matters is, however tenuous the reality of the relationships in the film (everybody’s got their facade), he is faced with the petty truth of his life’s work.

What do you think?