By CHARLIE SAVAGE
March 3, 2016
Soon after becoming a second-string movie critic at The Boston Phoenix early in his career, Owen Gleiberman drew a rebuke from a friend and former college professor, who chided him for being too negative about a certain film. "You looked at the glass and fixated on the part that was empty," the professor said. "The way you wrote that review, it's as if you were punishing the film for not being a masterpiece. It's a good movie. And that's all it has to be."
No one will mistake this memoir by Gleiberman, who spent most of his career at Entertainment Weekly and now writes for BBC.com, as a masterpiece. But parts of "Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies" are good. Late boomers who came of age in the 1970s may appreciate his reconstruction of waves of popular culture they remember experiencing. His explanations of why he enjoyed some films, like "Nashville," "Manhunter" and "Natural Born Killers," and disliked others, like "Pretty Woman" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," offer a chance to relive or rethink them. He tells several lively firsthand stories about celebrities like the director Oliver Stone, whom he befriended, and the legendary New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who helped him land his Phoenix job before the two fell out. And he has worthy things to say about critics' ethical imperative to state their opinions honestly and forces that seek to corrupt that authenticity, like worries by magazine bosses about irritating certain movie stars or fans of blockbusters, and groupthink among critics who fear disagreement with the herd.
But other parts — the memoir sections — are often off-putting. With inconsistent self-awareness, Gleiberman writes about himself like a patient talking to his therapist, but readers are not being paid $200 an hour to empathize as he tells story after story showing, for example, how his "very being . . . had been formed to a degree by pornography," how he spent "as much time as possible hitting on women in the office" and how he is "something of a crybaby." He casually relates anecdotes like one about the time he took his mother, visiting from Michigan, to a "swanky" New York restaurant and she groused at the bill, "which I guess I expected her to pay." She chastised him for a wasteful lifestyle, and the argument reminded him that he believed his parents had never shown him sufficient affection. He decided to cut them off, "to create a new karma"; it was seven years before he saw them again (although he later borrowed money f rom them to buy an apartment). After recounting this, Gleiberman moves on to what he liked about "Dazed and Confused," but the reader is still agape.
It can be rewarding to spend hours communing with an unappealing person who is nevertheless significant and interesting enough — like reading a biography of Steve Jobs. Assessing whether Gleiberman is such a person turns not just on his relative status among movie critics, but also on the value individual readers place on film criticism as a whole. That question also consumes him. Noting that newspapers are laying off critics and that the Internet has made commentary about movies plentiful and cheap, Gleiberman makes the case for his profession's survival.
"In the franchise era, the consumer-guide aspect of criticism may, in fact, be less crucial than ever," he writes. "And that leaves the real heart of the matter: What criticism offers, when it's great, is an alchemy of enlightenment and delight — a heady space where each of those things can become the other."
MOVIE FREAK
My Life Watching Movies
By Owen Gleiberman
338 pp. Hachette Books. $28.
