There are two utterances I suspect all movie reviewers dread. Certainly I do. The first is when people say, admiringly and enviously, ‘You have a fantastic job!” (I’ll come back to that). The second is when they ask, in all innocence, ‘What’s good that’s on? What should we see?” I am tempted to reply, and sometimes do, ‘I don’t know. What did I write in the paper?”
For this query presumes that I have an instant hit parade in my head — even just a hit parade of one. This is very flattering to my mental capacities, but unfortunately at this point in the conversation I go blank. Suddenly I cannot remember what I reviewed last, whether I liked it or despised it, or even recall the last movie I truly felt I could recommend.
There is also the danger that an outright recommendation leads to later recrimination: ‘What on earth did you like in that ghastly mess you encouraged me to go and see?” This goes for casual comments (often much blunter than reviews) as well as for reviews, and nowadays the internet provides space for anyone to tell me I’m blind, stupid or plain dilly. Which they do. (Though thanks for the compliments, too, folks.)
My reviews are not about a simple yes/no response, the kind you might produce as you scan the list of what’s on at the Cinema Nouveau.
An interesting review, at any rate, is more than that. I often say that my purpose in writing a review is not to get the presumptive reader to see a movie or to stay away; my primary job is to write something interesting. Hence, in this volume, I have selected reproducible reviews on the basis of the writing rather than the movie. If there are important movies that came out on my watch but are omitted from this book, it is probably because I didn’t think my reviews of them among my best.
Fitting it all in
Which raises another issue in the life of a film critic, beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of putting a newspaper together on a weekly basis, negotiating the practicalities of pages (it’s too long, it’s too short —). That is, what you review and what you don’t. It’s useful that the Mail & Guardian‘s publication date coincides with the usual Friday release date for movies, but that’s not to say there is a perfect exactitude in all selections.
Staying on top of the ever-changing schedules of screenings and then release dates can be hard: one doesn’t always end up with a reviewable movie in hand in any given week. If I was a full-time film critic, like some lucky Londoners, I’d be willing to go to everything — or so I tell my bosses. But movie-reviewing has always been a part-job for me, and I have not always been able to schedule myself as efficiently as I might.
Anyway, who wants to see everything? It’s hard enough to catch up with the many, many good movies one hasn’t seen.
And that’s another small cross a critic bears — I suppose it might really be a film-buff thing, or a kind of film-buff oneupmanship. Perhaps people just like to try it out on film critics. That’s when they mentally find some great movie you haven’t seen, and can then exclaim with gleeful mock-wonder: ‘What d’you mean you haven’t seen The Spirit of the Beehive? How can you be a movie critic if you haven’t seen The Spirit of the Beehive?” — pick any appropriate title. I smile, grit my teeth, and promise that one day, some day, I will see that great masterpiece and become a proper critic.
My list of movies I really must see before I die, or go blind, or lose my marbles, whichever comes first, is lengthy and getting longer by the day. In this era of wide availability on DVD and internet purchases, they just keep coming at you.
Take it or leave it
At the same time, there are many movies I’m proud or at least happy not to have seen, and that stretches from Schindler’s List to The Sound of Music. Maybe I’ve seen too many already, and there are certainly many that I don’t particularly want to see at all by the time the scheduled screening arrives. It can require a stern effort of critical detachment to watch a screeching, banging actioner towards the end of a long day’s work, or for that matter an earnest ‘based on a true story” picture on an early Friday afternoon when you’re anxious to be getting on with the rest of your life.
All in all, I’d say, at least two thirds of the movies I see for review are barely worth the trip to the theatre. This is a weird paradox, perhaps exemplary of the age: I feel like I’ve seen too many movies and at the same time too few.
I’ve been this paper’s chief film critic since 1998, and Not the Movie of the Week is a sampler of the fruits of that tenure. I leave it to the reader to work out whether any particular review in the book was published as a ‘Movie of the Week” or a ‘Not”; the designation is, after all, just a quick pointer.
More interesting than whether a movie is good or bad is the discussion to be had about what it means, about how its aesthetic values mesh or fail to mesh with its moral assumptions, and so on. This is the kind of thing I try to explore in reviewing any given film.
Bonus features
In answer to the first utterance noted at the start, being a film critic is, if not a ‘fantastic” job, at least a good one — it’s a great writing job, at least. It enables me to talk about all sort of things that go beyond the movie itself. For this book I have grouped the selected reviews in categories that seem suggestive to me of broad themes and tendencies (sex, God …), and I have added a little value, I hope, in the ‘Extra features”, with some commentary on actors, writers, directors or other things that seem to me interesting, as sparked by the original review.
There the reader will also find a list or two (lists, so beloved of movie geeks!), and a few notes on my favourite directors — those who have shaped my aesthetic views, in some way, in watching movies and wondering what they might be trying to tell us.
This is an edited extract from the introduction to Not the Movie of the Week: Frightening Flops and Fabulous Flicks, published by Tafelberg and due in bookshops in the last week of June