Siskel, Ebert...me?
(PG-13, 1997, ★★★☆)
My buddy Brian Church was doing some cleaning and found a bunch of college newspapers he hung onto. He was nice enough to send them to me.
He sent a LOT, about what he sent was only a little of what I wrote over 4 years.
For this first week, some movie reviews I wrote way back when. I was very much at home at the newspaper, and if I saw a new movie that week and no one had written it up, I’d write it up
!
CITY OF ANGELS (1997 grade: A-)
I remembered seeing this on a date. (My companion for the evening may not recall it as a date, just two friends hanging out. Maybe it was.) Remembered a few words of the review: don’t really recall the movie much, Meg Ryan was a surgeon? Andre Braugher was in this?
What shocked me reading this review is how TRYING I was. In my head, clips like these were going to land me a reviewing job at a small daily someplace like Fort Wayne, Indiana. Or a twice-weekly in Pierre, South Dakota.
That’s what my four years of J-school taught me: the ladder. Start off small, doing all the scut-work jobs and zoning-commission meetings a tiny paper needs to cover. Do their cop-shop blotter, report on any fires, make connections in local government and keep your eye out for scoops.
Stay there a few years, built up your clips, and one day a bigger daily will run with your local story. Not necessarily because you did such a great job covering it for the Dubuque Register or the Greater Akron Area Shopper, but because it was a real news story.
After a few times the bigger daily picks up your story, you may get a call to come work for them, and cover just one beat instead of every beat in a small town.
Turns out the ladder was being dismantled. Those local papers existed to sell ads: the “news hole” was just whatever space didn’t have ads. And the Internet first created a better place to get convenient (and free) news coverage, and then created a better (and free) way to show ads.
That local-paper dream has never really died with me. There simply aren’t too many weekly papers who pay for coverage of most events. It’s up to citizen journalists on blogs and newsletters and Patch.com articles.
All those dreams came back reading the City of Angels review. The review of someone who thinks “if you like this, wait until you see me cover high school wrestling or the yearly Turkey Trot! Gimme a chance, Western Arkansas Gazette!”
BIG LEBOWSKI (1998 Grade A-)
Look at the big brain on Brad Jeff! In a world where everyone loved Fargo and it swept all the awards, Lebowski was considered a juvenile follow-up. Nothing against Fargo, but I was one of the few who got Lebowski right from the start. The cult of Lebowski agrees with me!
DEEP RISING (1998 grade; B- or maybe F, I forget)
Still conflicted over this one. Also conflicted if I saw it on a date or just with a friend. Turns out I don’t have a clip of this one: go watch it for yourself and make your own decision. (Please note: the urban legend of how this movie got made was someone wanted to one-up Titanic, by having a cruise ship attacked by a tentacle monster instead of an iceberg.)
STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997 grade: B-)
I still like that Generation 90210 line. I’m very close to getting the point of the movie, but I’m not quite there. The entire movie is propaganda, hence the young beautiful people fighting the ugliest aliens imaginable. Still holds up, as do most Paul Verhoven movies.
STAR WARS (1997 grade; A+, shocking no one)
Boy did I use every opportunity I could to write about Star Wars.
I was not the only one who was dying to review movies. Two thirds of the movies I saw ended up covered by other reviewers: no need for me to write it up. Sometimes we’d review “new-on VHS” films, which seemed quite unnecessary: do we really need to devote 300 words to you renting Tommy Lee Jones’s Volcano?
It did lead to one of the funniest stories from my Signal years. Someone saw a VHS review and asked if we would run one of his: we said yes. He handed in a review for David Cronenberg’s The Brood, a Canadian horror movie from 1979. it wasn’t exactly a stop-the-presses occasion. But if someone wrote an article we’d run it.
A week later, another new writer stopped by: hey, The Brood review worked in that it got another fledgling writer to stop by! He asked if he could do something like that as well.
We said yes.
Reader, the next day he gave us A SECOND REVIEW of David Cronenberg’s 1979 Canadian hoor movie The Brood.
How did he not understand that, of all the movies in the world, the ONE we dind’t need a review for was The Brood?
We were like that lady in the office who collects elephants, except it was reviews of The Brood.
We ran two reviews of The Brood in two weeks.
Reviewing films did start a parallel-track mind I still have: if I’m going to write about something, my mind is actively taking notes, looking for things to write about, and specifics phrases to use. Once I have a review’s worth of mental notes, I take a breath and relax, knowing the reviews’ the better part of half-written.
Am I enjoying the experience? Honestly, that’s irrelevant. My job is to take notes, and convey what I think it’d be like if you were here instead of me. The hardest to review are the so-so experience, the C+ films. Not bad enough to trash, not great enough to praise. You’ve got to explain your lukewarm review, and not just say “meh” 300 times in a row.
My opinion about opinions has changed. I’ve just met too many people with too many opinions. Strong opinions aren’t necessarily right, and weak ones aren’t wrong, and just people someone’s eloquent does make them right, nor does being friends and family.
My biggest change is that opinions aren’t all you’ve got, folks. How you feel about the Fast and the Furious franchise or those Diet Cokes that tasted like poetry doesn’t define who you are as a person. Who you are is better defined by what you do.
PRINCESS LEIA OF THE WEEK
New Orleans Mardi Gras float week!
SPIDER-MAN OF THE WEEK
MICKEY MOUSE OF THE WEEK
SUPER MARIO OF THE WEEK
(This is a clip of a Mario cartoon where he visits New Orleans; I have no idea why no one has made a krewe float with Nintendo characters. Get on that, New Orleans!)
