My film criticism career thus far

Watching Movies

I’ve been reviewing films since at least 2010. One of the first things I wrote was this piece on John Carpenter’s The Thing from the now defunct Electric Sheep Magazine. A little under fifteen years. Not much considering I’ve been stomping around the planet since 1972. But you see I was brought up a catholic and so had internalized the idea that stuff I enjoyed couldn’t be worthwhile. If I liked something, it was wrong; and if not wrong certainly not serious. I loved science fiction and fantasy and as a teenager moved on to horror, but all of these genres mostly contradicted and clashed with Catholicism. Where was the story of Jesus and Mary in the wider universe? Doesn’t it all look a bit parochial in the view of interstellar space and astronomical distances? Mum got angry about White Dwarf magazine. Dungeons and Dragons was a bit Satan-y, she felt. And she wasn’t necessarily wrong. It was ironic that the thing that terrified me most about The Exorcist is that it posited the soul-shrivelling idea that the Catholics might have a point.

Weirdly I shucked off - albeit temporarily - my taste for those genres just as I lost my faith in God and my attached career plan of becoming a karate kicking priest (brown belt, wado ryu). Karate was kyboshed by a hamstring strain doing the 44 mile Keswick to Barrow walk and my faith in the Holy Trinity by my optician’s daughter Liz Tunn, who told me that God, Jesus and all that was ‘a load of bollocks’. She had Jean Seberg hair and I loved her deeply and so my reverse Damascus - road from Damascus I guess - took a matter of seconds. (All major decisions in my life come from girls I liked and wished to impress. It’s why I was a vegetarian, smoked, gave up smoking, started eating meat again, became a revolutionary communist, stopped being a revolutionary communist and moved to Italy.)

My academic career was entirely based on literature. Reading it and writing about it and hopefully one day writing it. When I got to Liverpool University, Geoff Ward and Linda Williams ran a film module ‘Visions of Excess’ and I used to go and sit in the lessons, even though I never took the course much to Geoff’s bemusement. The way I saw it was Geoff’s course was too much fun to be properly speaking academic. I was committed to reading stuff I’d never read of my own volition. Like Chaucer. And not the best-selling page-turners like Canterbury Tales but the urrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr of Troilus and Criseyde. Such was my masochism, that I did a PhD on Percy Bysshe Shelley, the most earnest, unfunny, frankly annoying Romantic poet, and to add salt to the wound I titled the PhD Shelley and Laughter. It was the kind of project David Lodge would give a character he wanted everyone to smirk at.

So when I started writing about film the loophole I found was the notion that I could write about books on film. I reviewed these books for a site that has since become a very respected academic journal called film-philosophy.com. From there, I gradually began to realize that it was not an insane thing nor sinful to do something you actually liked, hence my career as a film critic got off to a belated start in my late thirties, first by covering festivals and now more generally. In that time my work has appeared in a whole bunch of different places from newspapers like The Guardian, The Times and The Financial Times to magazines like Sight and Sound and The Economist. I still write for Cine-Vue.com which was one of my earliest supporters (thanks, Dan Green!) I’m working on my first book on a film-related subject - a biography of Terrence Malick - which hopefully will be published sometime in 2024. The Catholic in me still doesn’t think of myself as a proper writer, for that I’d have to write and publish a novel (which I did, but it was with a tiny internet press and that doesn’t count [see how much energy I put in to moving those goal posts? and they’re in the carpark now]).

Here are some things I have learned from this experience.

• Respect the wordcount and the deadline. Always read what you’ve written five times. Check your spelling. Anything that means an editor doesn’t have much to do. Editors like great writing and sharp criticism, but they love not having to correct copy and spend an hour cutting it down to the correct wordcount. Wendy Ide told me that.

• Always pass on information. Some writers hoard email addresses. It’s understandable. There is competition out there for paid gigs. But being open and generous is the best long term strategy. And most importantly, you’re not being a dick - which since giving up on religion has become something like a commandment. One I fail at, I hasten to add. Kaleem Aftab told me that.

• Try to appreciate that bad cinema is as interesting and revealing as good cinema, perhaps more so. What needs to be said about 2001 a Space Odyssey except WATCH IT!? Whereas we really need to talk about [fill in name of shit film here]. Remember to be grateful to the filmmakers who produce those shit films that forward our ‘discourse’. They get up very early in the morning to make bad films. They take a year, two - three years, to bring it to the screen. It takes us two hours to watch it and forty minutes to eviscerate it in a review. Even when they give someone a lethal injection, they’re kind enough to use an antiseptic swab first to make sure the needle doesn’t cause an infection. You should do the same.

• Don’t call anyone a ‘hack’. Or denigrate a film as commercial. If a film makes money, people get paid. If a film doesn’t make money, studios fail and people lose their jobs. Art - historically - has been the preserve of the aristocracy so has folded in its pages, like dried wild flowers - all these contemptuous attitudes towards people who work for a living or would sully the Elysian dreams with commerce. This isn’t some kind of radical attack on capitalism, it is the easy prejudice born of unearned income. Also: Never be ashamed of asking for money, and more money. If they have the budget, it should be spent on you. Embarrassment about money was invented by the rich so they could keep it.

• ‘Not liking stuff’ is not a qualification. You remember that teacher at school that would never give a top mark because nothing is perfect? Even though the aim of school is not to produce work that can exist in the platonic realm of ideals but just do the thing you were supposed to do with a tolerable level of error. Any critic who protects their five-star ratings like they’re the crown jewels ought to be punched in the throat and then dragged by their heels down a flight of stairs. What are they compensating for? Who hurt them? which leads on to …

• Don’t write about films if you don’t love cinema. And I don’t mean Cinema, I mean cinema. Going to the cinema. Eating Maltesers and turning up early to make sure you catch the trailers. If you are someone who will go to the cinema even when you know you’re not going to particularly like the film just because you have to go to the cinema that night and it really doesn’t matter what the fuck is on: then you should be a critic. If you think of it as something that needs protecting from people, a shrine of personal expression and revelation that has high priests - Bergman, Godard, choose your fighter - and the sneaking suspicion you missed the best, then don’t be. Neil Young (not that one) loves slow cinema, a genre which to my mind has a silent ball-achingly prefixed to it. But he also goes to see all the Fast and Furious films and loved Chappie. What you like doesn’t prove your acumen or expertise; how you express that enthusiasm does.

• Try not to be nasty (unless it’s funny).

• Don’t worry about consistency. Change your mind by all means.

• Don’t worry about being wrong. As long as your honest about it.