Success Quote by Sarah Vowell

What Sarah Vowell is praising here isn’t just two critics with strong opinions; it’s a lost style of public seriousness. The key phrase is “as if movies actually mattered” - a line that’s half nostalgia, half quiet indictment. Siskel and Ebert are remembered less as gatekeepers than as grown-ups modeling a kind of argument that assumed culture was worth fighting over, not because it was sacred, but because it was consequential: it shaped taste, values, even the way people learned to feel.

Vowell’s subtext is personal and generational. “Nobody I knew talked about movies that way” sketches a pre-internet world where the living room didn’t automatically come with a running commentary track. Their show offered a vocabulary for judgment at a time when most viewers had only vibes and peer approval. She’s also resisting the flattening effect of fandom culture, where liking becomes identity and disagreement reads as betrayal. Siskel and Ebert “argued” without treating the other person as an enemy, and they treated each film as an object to be evaluated, not a token in a culture war.

The sharpest idea sits in “a success on its own terms.” That’s a defense of criticism as fairness, not snobbery: a rom-com shouldn’t be graded like Bergman, and a dumb action movie can still be well-made. Vowell’s intent is to reclaim criticism as a democratic art - passionate, specific, and rigorous - rather than the modern default of algorithmic consensus or ironic detachment.