Interviewed by Tom Mangan
MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher & Girl Movie Reviewer.
Her Web site is here.
AUTHORS
Michael Fuchs
Elizabeth Hilts
Paul Riddell
Gary Rivlin
Jim Motavalli
Barbara Shafferman
Jules Siegel
Keith Snyder
ARTISTS/POETS/
PHILOSOPHERS
Jon C. Allen
Will Baker
Mike Leung
Jon Sarkin
COOL SITE KEEPERS
Mike Cash
Scott O'Neal Colf
Godfrey Daniels
Cliff Davis, DDS
Tammy Hocking
Wes Modes
Frank Rogan
DIARISTS
Ralph Becker
J. D. Bruns
Linda DeVault
Mike Reed
Moira Richardson
Jessamyn West
FILMMAKERS
JOURNALISTS
Bernie
Mary Cooley-Jones
Lindsay Crysler
Jamie Dupree
M.O.A.T.M.A.I.
David Moll
Robert Niles
John Orr
Steven Ovadia
Pierce Presley
Mack Reed
Rip Rense
Curtis Ross
Neal Ross
John Scalzi
Catherine Seipp
David Sheets
Dwight Silverman
Matt Welch
MOVIE MAVENS
HUMORISTS
Debbie Farmer
Mike Jasper
Madeleine Begun Kane
Patrick Keller
Bob Sassone
Valerie Sprague
Ken Swarmer
Ian Wolff
SOLDIERS
TEACHERS
TECHIES
Chris Adamson
Mike Gunderloy
Michael Ivey
Greg Knauss
Floyd Maxwell
Ellen McDonough
Mike Pingleton
Wayne Thume
John Worth
TEENS
UNDECLARED
WEBLOGGERS
You make a point of being a "girl reviewer" so I might as well get this one out of the way: How does womanhood color your perception of the movies you watch?
Well, the "girl movie critic" thing, as well as the logo of the woman in the fedora, is meant to evoke the kind of tough-as-nails, no-bullshit girl reporter from old ’30s and ’40s movies. I'm definitely not a girly girl, and I think that comes through in my writing: I'm emphatically not a fan of so-called "chick flicks," and I am a big fan of science fiction and action movies, which are typically assumed to be a male domain. I like the idea of someone coming to my site expecting me to gush over Sandra Bullock movies and finding instead glowing reviews of movies like “The Hunt for Red October.” I like defying expectations.
Of course, being a woman commenting on the product of an industry still dominated by men, behind the scenes as well as onscreen, it's inevitable that my gender is going to sometimes influence how I react to movies. It pisses me off to see misogynistic crap like “Con Air” become such a huge hit as much as it delights me to see a character like Ripley in “Alien” kick some ass, and I say so in no uncertain terms. That usually gets me accused by some angry male reader of being a "feminist," which seems to have become a slur lately.
That said, I don't look at films primarily from a female point of view any more than men look at films from some distinct male point of view. The whole idea that there is one "female" viewpoint is ridiculous -- men don't all think alike, and neither do women. I watch films from a movie lover's point of view: Does this film entertain me? Does it make me think? Does it make me laugh? My gender will color what qualifies as "entertainment" to me, but probably not as much as will my age, my race, my politics, or my education.
But also, hey, I'm a girl. I like men, and I have no shame in admitting in a review that I think the leading man is pretty darn cute. Just a disclaimer to let readers know they might want to take my comments with a grain of salt. You won't find any male reviewers admitting they gave “Runaway Bride” good reviews because they think Julia Roberts is hot.
Movies are a pretty well-trodden path on the Web. For those who haven't been to your site yet, what sets its apart from all the other movie sites out there?
I try to avoid the kind of thumbs-up/thumbs-down criticism most other reviewers, online and off, offer. That's not to impugn that kind of criticism -- it's perfectly valid. But it's not really the way I look at movies, either as a critic or just a moviegoer, so looking at films from a different perspective wasn't particularly a mercenary tactic on my part, to make my site stand apart from all the many, many others online -- it was just the natural way to go.
So, newcomers to my site can expect to find "reviews" that are more like the kind of conversation intelligent film fans have while the credits roll or the video rewinds. What is it about a particular actor, like Kevin Spacey, that makes him so mesmerizing? (I talk about actors and acting a lot -- actors fascinate me.) How cool is the female-power subtext of “Sleepy Hollow”? What is it, really, about “The Matrix” that had moviegoers so enthralled? Readers will have no doubt, 99% of the time, whether I myself loved or hated a movie, but I think -- I hope -- that my reviews will be entertaining and thought-provoking no matter how good or bad the film I'm discussing is. I can always find stuff to hash over.
That's probably why I don't use star ratings in my reviews -- like, awarding films from one to four stars. I'm mystified as to how other critics decide such things, and again I don't mean that as a criticism. Two of the most "entertaining" (I use that word loosely) films I saw last year were “The Mummy” and “The End of the Affair.” Now, these are radically different films with completely different agendas, and to which I apply very different shades of meaning to "entertaining." If I were to give star ratings, they'd both be four-star films... and yet that doesn't seem quite fair. So do I lop a star off “The Mummy” because it's "just" a summer popcorn flick? That doesn't seem fair either. So I just sidestep the issue altogether.
And, finally -- and now I am saying this to criticize -- there are a lot of other reviewers who leave me wondering whether they actually enjoy going to the movies at all. I think -- again, I hope -- that my deep and abiding love of movies -- just the whole idea of movies, whether they're good, bad, or somewhere in the middle -- comes through even when I'm giving a well-deserved lashing to some piece of cinematic junk food.
Share an example of a film many critics loved but you couldn't stand.
“Eyes Wide Shut.” God, I hated that film, and almost every other critic fell over themselves to praise it. It might have been shocking and provocative in the ’70s, but today it just feels preposterous and misogynist. I also hated its cold, clinical depiction of sex, love and lust. The film is horribly dated -- it made me wonder just how sheltered Kubrick was in his self-imposed seclusion. Did he miss how much the world has changed in the last 30 years?
I got a lot of mail -- mostly from women -- thanking me for calling the movie on its objectification of women. But I also got a lot of mail -- mostly from men -- accusing me of having a "nearsighted gyno-centric viewpoint" and of being an "egotistical feminist... or an out and out idiot." Boy o boy, I love my readers.
What keeps you motivated to keep updating your site with fresh content?
Positive feedback, mostly, in many forms. My traffic keeps growing, which is an incentive to keep posting more and more reviews. I get a lot of reader mail, which is very encouraging -- even the angry tirades from very upset people tell me I must be doing something right, even if it's just hitting a raw nerve. But my reason for starting the site in the first place was to give me an excuse to write something at least once a week (the site gets updated more than that now), and really hone my writing. Seeing how much my writing has improved in the two-plus years since I started the site -- and knowing that it will keep improving -- is probably the greatest motivation any writer could want. Well, huge sums of money would be a great motivator, too, but that doesn't enter into it in my case!
I see you've reviewed every Best Picture since the Academy Awards began, but you've also got a list of the American Film Institute top 100 films and I count far fewer reviews of these "best" pictures. Question comes to mind: Why do you think so many great movies don't win the Oscar for Best Picture?
First of all, I will get around to reviewing all the AFI 100 films eventually. With the Oscar section on my site, I gave myself a deadline. Last year I did a sort of countdown to the Oscar ceremony in March, starting in January and posting a review a day of Best Picture winners, ending on Oscar night. With the AFI section, the idea was just that I'd post reviews when I got around to it... so of course I rarely get around to it! One of the original reasons I started my site was to force me to have some more discipline as a writer, force me to write something on a regular basis. My discipline has improved, but I've still got some work to do on it, I guess!
So: Why don't more "great" films win Best Picture? I think a lot of it has to do with perspective across time: Films that we now think of as classic simply were not seen that way when they were new. “Citizen Kane” did not win an Oscar for Best Picture -- neither did “The Wizard of Oz.” Then again, “Oz” was up against some tough competition that year, 1939: “Gone With the Wind” won Best Picture that year. Some years are crowded with films we still acknowledge as "great," and 1939 was one of those years -- only one film a year can be crowned Best Picture. On the other hand, in a weak year, one film is still going to be chosen as the best, even if it wouldn't have stood a chance in a stronger year for film.
Also, it should be remembered that the people who chose Oscar winners are industry insiders: actors, directors, and so on. The AFI 100 were chosen by people from all walks of life. The priorities of each group are going to be different.
What's the story on your partnership with The Film Geek?
It's no big secret -- in fact, I explain at my site what we're up to and why. To quote myself:
"I am just as happy as George Lucas's accountant to have found another critic with the same movie-loving sensibilities as my own. The Film Geek -- aka Cincinnati-based critic Rick Ferguson -- loves movies as much as I do. He has no shame in cheering on a huge popcorn blockbuster -- and none in trashing a piece of crap Hollywood tries to pass off as same. He sees movies primarily as entertainment -- as I do -- and he sets the entertainment bar as high as I do. He knows that all the artistic pretensions in the world mean nothing if you're looking at your watch every five minutes. And his acerbic wit is just his way of refusing to let Hollywood's inanity quash his eternal optimism in the fantasyland of the movies, an optimism I share."
It was mainly pretty mercenary logic behind the partnership: Rick and I thought we could develop some synergy and build traffic by crosslinking our reviews. I don't know that it's worked all that well as far as boosting traffic, but I do like being able to offer my readers a second look at movies.
What would your three wishes for the future of the movie industry be?
I had to think about this for a while, and I'm still finding it hard to separate what I wish for the movie industry from what I wish from movie audiences: audiences are mostly pretty undemanding and uncritical, which is why we get so much junk thrown at us. But, with that in mind, three wishes:
- More women in positions of power. Few women, today, are in positions to greenlight pictures, which is why the multiplexes are full of action movies and juvenile comedies aimed at boys and men, and sappy, melodramatic junk that the men in power think female audiences want. Until many more women have final say over what gets produced and have corporate money to back it up, we won't see many films about interesting female characters, or indeed any films about women that don't revolve around them chasing men or being mothers. That's not to denigrate either of those activities, which can make for compelling stories, but to look at film today, you'd think those were just about the only things women get up to. I say it's high time we had the female equivalents of James Bond and Indiana Jones, Arnold Schwarzennegger and Mel Gibson, up on the screen. I don't see that happening until women call the shots.
- A place of greater importance in the scheme of things for the writer. Screenwriters are just about on the bottom of Hollywood's totem pole, which is exactly the wrong place for them to be. So many movies are so atrociously written, usually because they end up being written by committee. Hollywood needs to learn to trust in the vision of a single writer per film the way it trusts (usually) in the vision of a single director per film. Contempt for the written word is why scripts get revised and rewritten by hired-gun hotshot writers with no stake in the work except a fat paycheck.
- An end to the myth of the blockbuster. For every “Titanic” and “Phantom Menace,” which cost hundreds of millions but bring in billions, there are dozens of $100 million movies that are lucky to recoup their production and marketing costs. I love summer popcorn movies as much as the next fan, but when the need for "event" films results in insults like “Wild Wild West” and “The Haunting,” things have gone too far. For all the money that went into those two movies -- which didn't even attempt things like coherent stories or believable characters -- we could have had twenty or thirty character dramas or comedies, little films in which clever, insightful writing and acting takes the place of special effects and Happy Meal promotions. You don't even need to take an artistic stand to see the sense of it: $150 million on a sloppy effects movie is bound to be lost money -- that same money spent on fifteen $10 million movies is much more likely to spawn a new actor or director who'll go on to bring in pots of money to whomever is smart enough to sign them to a multi-film contract.
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