Check out the film critic for National Review back in the day.
They hate the newer ones a whole lot more.
This goes way back before conservatives realized they had to lie and pretend that they liked good things. Their ultimate goal of taking all the joy out of life and making everybody as miserable and frightened by their own shadow as they are.
Simon was wrong, it’s a great movie (well, the first two are) but let me play devil’s apologist, if not advocate, juuuuust a little.
The world in 1977 and 1980 wasn’t like it is today, and at the time “Star Wars” was not much like other movies. I have said this before and will again; Star Wars is the most important movie ever made, in terms of the size of its impact on the movie industry. It didn’t CREATE the concepts of the summer blockbuster, merchandising tie-ins, cinematic universes and sequels sequels sequels, but it sure popularized them. And another thing it largely jump started was the notion of the children’s movie for grownups.
Today we just take it for granted that adults can watch movies about Spider-Man or Batman, or watch actual damn cartoons, and expect to take them seriously. That has not, to say the least, always been the case, and Star Wars was way ahead of the curve. In the 1970s the idea of silly films like that being taken seriously and dominating the box office, the way they totally do today, was ludicrous.
The year before Star Wars came out, the top grossing movies in the USA were: Rocky, A Star Is Born, King Kong, Silver Streak, All The President’s Men, The Omen, The Enforcer, Midway, and the Bad News Bears. Only two comedies and one silly movie; I don’t even know if they had superhero movies then. Last year the top ten were five superhero movies (one animated), an animated dinosaur movie, another cartoon, a Star Wars movie, a Mission Impossible sequel, and a movie about people trapped in a video game. The highest ranking drama was, coincidentally, A Star IS Born; it’s effectively impossible now for a movie that isn’t a superhero movie or cartoon to win the year, but back in the day serious dramas and witty comedies won all the time.
John Simon was wrong, but it’s not that he didn’t want people to have fun; he was expressing an opinion that a LOT of adults at that time had, which was that kid stuff was for kids, and grownup stuff was for grownups. The idea that one day we would think nothing of adults dressing up in costume to go to ComiCon would have been thought quite insane. Simon could still remember, not that long before he gave this interview, when a grown man would not leave the house on any sort of business without wearing a suit.
So Star Wars is the reason movies suck now?
So you’re saying that conservatives hate progress?
Well…yeah!
“They make children dumber than they need to be.”
How dumb does he think children need to be?
No, Star Wars is the reason movies sucked then. 
Look at the list RickJay posted: stupid, bad remake, even worse remake, funny, good, stupid, sequel, unbelievably (pre-Bay) stupid, funny. All of last year’s list were pretty to really good except the last three.
Siskel and Ebert won’t be saving him a balcony seat.
I sometimes feel this is an unappreciated cultural shift. I remember my father( born in the early 1940’s )somehow getting obsessed with the original Legend of Zelda we late teens had acquired for our Nintendo and playing it for hours. But he would only do it on the sly, in the literal middle of the night. He would laugh about it if caught, but he nonetheless found it a bit embarrassing to be discovered playing a “child’s game.” This was a guy that listened only to classical music and though he didn’t wear a suit every day he still was of the tail end of that generation. I still know some folks my approximate age that look askance at adults playing computer games and the like.
The adult/child spheres of entertainment used to be far more distinct and I find it kinda fascinating. I always assumed as a kid I’d be a very different person at 45 with very different interests than I when I was fifteen. Oddly, I’m not - hell, I’m over 50 and I still can’t stand golf :p.
The late 1960s and 1970s movie houses were filled with grownup movies made by grownups for people with grownup brains.
In the late 1970s movies like Jaws and Star Wars appeared to rock ‘em and shock ‘em and rake in the cash, and the Big Hollywood Producers concluded that American audiences were cretins. U.S. cinema has sucked ever since.
that’s pretty much religion, isn’t it? We must all make sure our existence on Earth is as miserable as possible, because of the empty promise of eternal happiness.
A priest once said to Groucho Marx, “I want to thank you for bringing so much joy into the world”.
Groucho replied, “And I want to thank you for taking so much out”.
FWIW, I remember some lefty magazine criticizing the first “Star Wars” in 1977 for ‘glorifying war’.
I see that link doesnt work. Here is the relevant Buckley quote:
“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
Got to give NR a pass on this one. Simon was being an idiot not because he was a conservative (I don’t even know if he was) or because he was writing in a conservative magazine, but because he was a putz. Hated by all sides. (New York magazine was not a conservative magazine) he was noted by criticizing actresses based on their looks, not their talent.
Not that NR couldn’t be clueless. When I was getting it they went on an editorial rant about Dylan’s Mozambique, and how dare he say it was fun when it was a dictatorship blah, blah, blah. A bunch of conservative readers wrote in saying "you idiot, it isn’t a political song, it was a light-hearted song about a place easy to rhyme.
If Simon brought a kid to Tender Mercies the kid would probably kick him in the shin - after the kid woke up, of course.
I kinda feel like I should’ve added 
to my question. But that’s a good quote I didn’t know before, even if I already knew the conservative stance.
Simon didn’t just merely criticize actresses for their appearances, he ripped them to shreds with a ferocity that even the most misogynistic internet troll would tell him to dial it back a bit. And his standards for feminine beauty was near-impossible for any mortal woman to meet. This is a guy who found Diana Rigg in her prime physically repellant and spent a good part of his review explaining why. You get the impression that whenever Simon looked at who was on the cover of Vogue, he’d shudder and wonder why the woman wasn’t dressed as Joseph Merrick.