Disagreeing Vehemently With Myself
For my next book, The Fractured Mirror, I initially set out to write about EVERY American movie about the film industry. That proved impossible because there are so many films that fit the criteria for the book that are unavailable in any form. Silent films in particular are notorious for being lost forever to the ages.
So instead of writing about EVERY American movie about the film industry I’m not setting out to write a book that does not cover everything because by definition it cannot cover everything but that is exhaustive and definitive and seems to cover damn near everything.
I did not make my job any easier by including documentaries and movies about adult films in The Fractured Mirror as well, although I have to be judicious in how I cover documentaries about the film industry because there are a lot of egregiously unnecessary non-fiction films about the movie business that are little more than glorified DVD extras.
In my bid to write about damn near everything I’m writing about a fair amount of obscure direct-to-video movies about the film industry.
After I’m done watching and writing about a movie for The Fractured Mirror I go to Wikipedia or the Internet Movie DataBase to see what critics thought of it and am amused but not particularly surprised to discover that the movie in question has one official review and it’s from Nathan Rabin from The A.V. Club.
When I started writing for The A.V. Club in 1997 I reviewed movies that nobody else wanted to cover and Hip Hop but my primary beat was direct-to-video movies. I was working in a video store at the time and gravitated to DTV cheapies because they were failures by virtue of not being theatrically released.
From the very start of my once-promising career, failure was my muse. I felt comfortable writing about movies no one seemingly liked or even knew existed because the pressure was off.
It wasn’t like reviewing the big new movie of the day, where people definitely gave a fuck and might be mad if you screw up.
Sometimes when I go back and look at a review of some direct-to-video nonsense I wrote a lifetime ago, when the world still radiated promise, and agree with what I wrote decades earlier.
Some movies just fucking suck but it is not at all unusual for me to watch and write about a movie, Google it, discover that I am the source of its only review and disagree passionately with my younger self.
This happened, for example, with a movie I recently covered for The Fractured Mirror. It was a 1998 comedy-drama called With Friends Like These about a quartet of comfortable but creatively unfulfilled character actors feverishly competing for the potentially star-making and life-changing role of Al Capone in a Martin Scorsese movie.
It’s no masterpiece but it is a film that I connected with on an emotional as well as creative level because I know what it’s like to struggle. I know what it’s like to want something more than what you have and to be terrified that you will never come close to realizing your dreams.
In the twenty-five years since I first saw and reviewed With Friends Like These for The A.V. Club I’ve lived and that informs how I see the world and the art and entertainment that I write about.
When I was just starting out as a critic I thought that my primary job was to find things to criticize. As someone who has been doing this for longer than some of you have been alive, I think my primary job is to find things that I love and connect with and that speak to me as a writer and a man.
I found a lot to love about With Friends Like These as a middle-aged survivor but the review I wrote while I was still in college was snarky, dismissive and glib.
Re-reading my With Friends Like These, I found myself getting annoyed with the younger me. He was so snide and snarky and negative.
Yet I also have compassion for my twenty-two year old self because he was trying the best that he could and didn’t yet know what he was doing.
It could be argued that I STILL don’t know what I’m doing but at the very least I’m getting closer!
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