thePULSESo You Want to Be a Film Critic…
A job where you love the good, the bad and the ugly.
February 2004 – When people find out what I do for a living, they usually react one of three ways:
- “I wish I had your job — I’d love to go to the movies all day.”
- “You movie critics are a bunch of snobs.”
- “Can I be your friend?”
While watching movies all day is not always a Sunday in the park — as you must take the bad and the ugly with the good — I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It has been said that a person who finds something he loves and he is good at is a fortunate person, in which case, I am, as we say here in New England, a “wicked lucky guy.” I do what I love and I love what I do. Suffering the slings and arrows of a thousand movies with car chases, talking monkeys and teenage pie-lovers will never change my unbridled love of this thing.
In 1977, nearly everything this eight-year-old, towheaded overachiever knew about movies was from watching The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory every year on TV. My grandmother was the town librarian — something playground bullies didn’t find as cool as I did — and my life was primarily public television and the bookmobile.
But with the May release that year of a little space opera called Star Wars, my life forever changed. The unprecedented marketing maelstrom captured my heart, mind and paper route money, and I lived in that galaxy far, far away for the next six years. Soon, I began shooting movies in my backyard, and eventually, started using actual film in the camera.
Taking an after-school job in the first video store that opened in my sleepy Boston suburb seemed a natural next step. By the time I was old enough to work without a permit in 1985, I had become a fixture at the local “mom-and-pop” video store, demonstrating a savant-like knack for the ephemeral details of all the movies to come out since Hollywood began producing them, which, to me, was 1977.
My tenth grade English teacher, Mr. Jones, took my raw knack for arranging words on a page and allowed me to run with it, helping me to find my voice. I had my first paying writing gig before I finished high school, pairing my love for movies with what he termed “a gift for prose” by taking a job writing movie reviews for a local arts weekly. The rest, as they say, is history.
There is no school for movie critics. A college education isn’t even necessary — just the ability to grab and keep the interest of the reader, who, more often than not, will never see the film he or she is reviewing. Of course, as with anything, a broad knowledge base is key, but in this Information Age, that knowledge is just a mouse click away.
For most, like me, the vocation is a natural match. While critics approach their craft and their audience in many different ways, most all do it for the pure, selfish love of the thing, and not for the paycheck, because in all honesty, the money isn’t that good. Just like in pro sports, one’s chances of becoming the next Michael Jordan or Sammy Sosa of movie critics are laughably slim.
Again, we do it because we love it, and perhaps in small part because we are not cut out to do much else, as writing, even when done in an office with a hundred other people, is a solitary art, learned by doing, not endlessly theorizing.
Sure, some movie critics are snobs, but this kind of thinking is not exclusive to this trade. Just as some so-called experts will judge you by the kind of car you drive or the kind of computer you prefer, so too will certain people think you are beneath them for not looking at a film the same way they do. Such people — and this is the 8-year-old in me talking now — are not to be taken too seriously, as they are big doo-doo heads.
Yes, there are some basic criteria for what forms the foundation of a quote “good movie”, but appreciation of anything is entirely subjective. The elements of a good story need to be present in some form or another, and its characters must go through some sort of believable transformation, but there is no real blueprint for greatness. Either a writer knows how to tell a story well, or he doesn’t. A hundred million studio dollars won’t change the fact that a script reads like it was written in crayon, just as a budget of $10,000 won’t prevent The Ultimate Film from coming to be.
I know I’m probably contributing to my own obsolescence, but I hope you don’t stop listening to film critics. They really do provide a valuable service in letting you know what is available, but don’t treat our words as gospel. A critic is but a single, often self-serving voice in a crowd of many. The most important voice in that crowd is your own. Your opinion is the only one that matters.
Too often, people take comfort in critics’ opinions, as they are to-the-point and easy to regurgitate in a public forum, sparing one the difficulty of arriving at one’s own point-of-view, however unconventional that point-of-view might be. I say stop, and stop now, not just because it is lazy and insincere, but because the world will be a more interesting place with your ideas flavoring the broth. If you like that car chase or talking monkey, speak up, without shame.
You learned everything you need to know about film criticism in grade school. Make a point, back it up three times and presto — you’re your own movie critic. Adding significant details and perfecting the ability to connect a film to other films are two additional skills that will never fail you, as well, and a sense of humor never hurts, either. Even if you never get published conventionally, the soapbox known as the Internet is yours to exploit, which, by the way, is the place where you will find a lot of very interesting — and terrible – dissertation on films of many kinds.
So get out there and watch with at least one critical eye, keeping in mind that not all Hollywood movies are to be dreaded, just as all independent and foreign films are not gold, and remembering that you’re the only critic whose opinion matters to you.
