Notes on a Critic — Going Nuts, Not Falling Over

by Gabriel Valdez

I’ve had a number of people over the last several months ask me about writing or criticism – how to, advice, that sort of thing. I don’t want to pretend I’m any sort of guru in a field that’s becoming increasingly freelance, but I suppose I’ve assembled a team of writers and developed a reputation for being very critical of mainstream criticism. I also write more than most, and that’s what a lot of the questions are about – how to stay fresh without burning out.

So after some pushing, I thought it wouldn’t hurt (probably) to compile some notes – not on “how to be a critic” or “how to write” but just on what’s important to me as a critic and a writer, how I go about things.

MASSIVE DISCLAIMER (REALLY MORE OF A CLAIMER)

I don’t want this to come off as self-help, because: bleughch! Maybe I’ve just had unlucky experiences, but all the people I’ve seen regularly push self-help have turned out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, sociopaths. It’s not bad to read self-help, not at all, but if you base your entire worldview on it…oh dear. Do not base your worldview on me. Please. That’s more burden than I want. A little altar in the corner of your room is fine. You don’t even have to pray to it every day.

The point of advice is to only take around half of it. Take too little, and you’re probably ignoring some important voices. Take too much and you’re not trusting your own ability to take risks.

So please, don’t treat this as self-help or how to. If I write something you connect with – AMAZING! If I write something you think is stupid and doesn’t fit you – SPECTACULAR! The best advice I’ve ever gotten is the kind I can tear down, retrofit, stick some afterburners on, spin it upside down, and go, “Thanks, that really helped.”

The most important thing to have as a writer is your own opinion, so treat these notes as something far more innocuous: my manifesto. Nobody evil ever wrote a manifesto, right? All kidding aside, it’s a set of theories – my set of theories – on the direction I’d like to see criticism take. They’re the rules I write by, which means it’s important for me to sometimes break them, too.

Who am I to say film (and music, and art, and theatre) criticism needs to change? I’m a critic. If you love what you do, you have opinions on it. You have a way that you want to do it that’s important to you personally. (And if you don’t love what you do, why are you doing it?)

So let’s start with the piece of advice every critic will give you:

WATCH EVERYTHING

The things you like, the things other critics recommend, crazy shitty 80s movies, your friends’ experimental mumblecore, even that weird-ass movie where Charles Bronson is a pissed off watermelon farmer out for revenge because gangsters shot his watermelons (seriously, it exists and it’s not half bad). You never know what you’re going to like for what reasons, or where you’re going to get that article no one else ever thought to write.

You also don’t know what you’re going to fall in love with until it’s staring you in the face. Everyone can write about how they love Jurassic Park or Star Wars, but you might be the only critic that connects with that crazy SubReddit audience that LOVES watermelon-based vengeance flicks.

It does two things – 1) it builds your taste and it makes your specific stable of knowledge more particular to you; 2) it makes your writing stand out to audiences as something different. Believe me, if you write regularly, it won’t be hard to find yourself being thirtieth in line to repeat a specific opinion. Embrace the times you’re the one crazy person in the crowd babbling about something unique.

When do I break this? Like in any other job, you can burn out. If you’re watching 15 movies a week, you’ve probably lost perspective. Go feed some ducks in the park or yell at neocons on Facebook. Shoot some watermelons even, whatever shakes you loose.

FIND THE ARTICLES NO ONE ELSE IS WRITING

This is essentially a compulsion for me. I’m wary of writing articles that already exist. If I find someone else has already made the point I want to make, I’ll ask myself a question: did they do it better than I will?

Sometimes the answer is no, so I’ll cite them and write my own take.

Sometimes the answer is yes, so I’ll cite them, and take it as a challenge to extrapolate even further and find a place in the writing they didn’t.

And sometimes the answer is yes and I’ll just share what they wrote. I never want to waste my time writing something that’s already been written when I can simply tell others, “Go read this other person!”

When do I break this? Pretty much never. I’m a little OCD about it and I really, honestly believe echoing someone else’s opinion when I can just feature and link them is a waste of my time as a writer. Which brings me to my next point:

SHARE (BUT DON’T FALL OVER)

If you love something, share it. Don’t steal someone else’s opinion as your own original thought. If you need to steal opinions, you won’t last long anyway. You can stand on other writers’ opinions, reference them and use them as the basis for further arguments, but if they’re not yours, they’re not yours.

Similarly, don’t hide someone else’s good work away because you’re afraid of sending your audience elsewhere. You may feel bad you didn’t write that article yourself, but the conversations that grow around what you share will be the ones that lead you to your best articles.

You also never know who you’ll get to talk to because you share. I enjoyed conversations with Vivian Kubrick and Anand Ghandi this last year because I shared others’ work, and one of the articles I shared sparked a back and forth series between Indiewire‘s Sam Adams, An Historian Goes to the Movies‘ A.E. Larsen, Threat Quality Press‘s Chris Braak, and myself. It even broadened my perspective as a critic.

When do I break this? All the time. There are only so many hours in a day and I always want to write my own articles first. This means I’ve got dozens upon dozens of articles and videos bookmarked to share, but by the time I write my own pieces and share one or two of someone else’s, it’s dinnertime, and dinner has food in it and I probably missed lunch, so it’s either that or fall over. So share as much as you can, but make sure you don’t fall over. It never hurts to have a backlog, and keep those bookmarks so that you can cite others when you need to. Never steal an opinion, though. You can make your argument just as well (even better, actually) with a citation as you can without it.

EMPATHIZE

Ha, you were going to skip this part but then I put up a picture of a monkey and a pigeon or whatever the hell’s going on there. You’re stuck in now.

If you read me, you know I love collaborative criticism. I believe a critic never has “the right opinion,” they just have “an opinion.” I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here: what I say as a critic will never be as important as what your friend sitting next to you in the theater says, and that holds true for every critic.

In an age of social networking, where we can have friends sitting in the theater next to us half the world away, a critic’s responsibility isn’t to tell you what opinion to hold, it’s to open you up to more opinions, to ask you to consider perspectives you wouldn’t have before. On my best day, I haven’t convinced someone I’m right, I’ve convinced someone to be more empathetic or to look at a movie in a way they hadn’t considered. To do that, a critic has to practice it, too. A critic has to break down some of the things they’re sure of and rebuild their perspective further out, and they ought to do this regularly. To me, that’s often synonymous with the act of watching a movie. You have to be willing to let art break you down, or you’re not a critic, you’re a cynic.

Criticism has an opportunity to be a constantly evolving reflection on art, not just an obsolete rating system. Critics need to begin looking at themselves as artists of empathy, not as expert judges.

When do I break this? It’s OK to have opinions. It’s OK to fully believe in and fight for them. It’s OK to debate and argue. Just don’t end the day thinking you have sole ownership of being right, because you don’t, and learn to value what’s worth having the fight over and what isn’t.

Don’t worry whether your own voice will always be the most important one to you or whether it will come through enough. You’re kind of stuck with it. Trust that and go nuts.

There’ll be more entries in this feature down the road, especially if people are into it.

Why Audiences Don’t Care if a Movie’s Good or Bad (and Why That’s Great)

by Gabriel Valdez

For a long time, the purpose of a movie critic was to tell you if a movie was good or bad, and to let audiences know if they should spend their time and money on it.

Yet marketing has surpassed the critic and figured out how to gets butts in the seats on opening weekend, while sites like Metacritic and IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes (when it’s not spamming viruses) can tell you in a number what a critic says in hundreds of words.

So what the hell are we here for anymore? We can’t simply be an industry of vestigial navel-gazers, can we?

Here’s my thought – audiences do not care if a movie is good or bad anymore. I’m not sure if they ever did, but especially now, they’re more concerned with having certain types of experiences. We don’t just buy a ticket for a story, we buy a ticket for an emotional reaction. For decades, critics have reviewed the story and its technical delivery. As an industry, we’re still not very good at reviewing the emotional experience.

After all, you can’t just say an emotional experience is good or bad. It will be good or bad in different ways for different viewers – that’s how emotion works. You have to do your best to translate what that experience is like, to be a conduit for what sitting in the theater and looking up at that screen for two hours feels like. Different readers have to feel good and bad in different ways about your review. That means you have to be an open book, and that’s hard.

When I worked as a critic 2006-2009, my biggest concern was whether a film was good or not. Since I came back to doing this just last year, I threw that out the window. Quality of a film is still a core component in my reviews, obviously, but I’ll often get the “it’s good” or “it’s bad” and why out of the way pretty quickly. Why spend extra words on what Metacritic could tell you?

What Metacritic can’t tell you is what the experience of watching that movie is like. That’s the half of our job that movie critics have brushed into the corner for the greater part of our existence.

Let me give you an example: one of the most impactful scenes of the year involves the police shooting a black man wearing a hoodie because he seems threatening…in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) successfully calms the confused Electro (Jamie Foxx) down. Then those Times Square mega-screens kick on like CNN fumbling all over an ongoing tragedy. They redefine a successfully defused situation into a media popularity contest, which leads to a shootout.

Mainstream criticism focused on how messy the narrative was, and reviewing the film essentially became a pile-on of who could insult it the best. That’s fine, insult away. I have just one question – How is that useful to an audience?

To me, it’s criticism’s equivalent of reality television.

I can tell you The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is messy in one sentence: “It’s messy.” In my own review, I spent a few more sentences than that because different viewers will tolerate different kinds of narrative messiness, and it’s important for them to understand what they’re walking into.

I did not spend a thousand words saying this, however. Fine, it’s messy. What else is the movie trying to do? That’s more important to me because those are the things communicating to audiences week after week, and honestly, that has as much to do with an audience’s experience as simple good or bad does.

Criticism is falling woefully behind the curve by not translating the emotional experience of watching movies, especially at a time when mainstream filmmaking is trading in technical perfection for more aggressive social commentary. Critics are only focused on good or bad, or worse yet, lifestyle reporting, as in how a film effects our interpretation of an actor’s celebrity. Many critics treated Fury as a film about redeeming Shia LaBeouf’s career instead of the inherent ugliness of patriarchy. What good does that do our readers?

Only focusing on good or bad misses half the film. Film review as lifestyle reporting misses the whole film. Each makes you blind to the big sea change in modern filmmaking that’s happening all around us. Many critics like to think that our job is using superior knowledge and superior analytical skills to tell others what to think. That’s ridiculous and insulting, and that mentality automatically means audiences are utilizing something those critics don’t have – superior emotional maturity.

When we decide if a movie’s good or bad, we come from a place of judgment. When we understand something despite that judgment, and look at the world from that movie’s perspective, we empathize. The challenge of modern criticism is to figure out how to judge a film and empathize with it all at once.

Otherwise, we’re just a wordier version of Metacritic teaching readers to be cynical about film. That sells criticism short at a time when it has the opportunity to communicate so much more.