Guido Venitucci Owen Gleiberman was the chief film critic for Entertainment Weekly for 15 years.
Film criticism is "the cushiest job that Western Civilization ever coughed up," Owen Gleiberman writes on the second page of his new memoir, "Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies." Film obsession, though, has its side effects. Gleiberman's book is about the joys — and the pains — that come with a life spent in the dark, living for film.
Gleiberman fell for film as a lonely Midwestern kid and started working as a professional critic for the now-defunct Boston Phoenix right after graduating from the University of Michigan. In 1990, he jumped aboard a new venture called Entertainment Weekly — and stayed there as its chief film critic until the magazine laid him off in a 2014 downsizing.
When that happened, the magazine lost its most distinct critical voice. Gleiberman stood out as a provocative film guide, often championing challenging films that clashed with the magazine's glossy surface. His urgent writing style openly craved a visceral reaction to whatever was on screen. In "Movie Freak," he calls this his "appetite for depravity."
The book, released last month, takes a brutally blunt look at how he formed and fed that appetite. Half of the book is pure, uncut film love, with Gleiberman recalling at length how films like "Carrie," "Manhunter," "Blue Velvet" and "Natural Born Killers" changed his life.
But Gleiberman is every bit as fanatical in recounting his cold relationship with an unloving father, his college obsession with pornography, his sexual liaisons, his weeks-long cocaine binge. Even for its niche audience, many parts of "Movie Freak" will be tough going.
Gleiberman, though, didn't want to make it easy.
"I wasn't worried about pissing anyone off," he recently told Page Views, with a shrug, in a cafe near his West Village apartment. The married father of two still writes reviews, for BBC.com, but said the idea of releasing a book of criticism never compelled him. He wanted to cast his critical eye on his own life — and, true to form, tell the truth about what worked and what didn't.
JASMIN SINGER ON HER MEMOIR 'ALWAYS TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH'[1]
"I wanted to be honest about the individual I am," he said, "and I wanted to say, this is why I'm a critic and this is why I am a unique voice — including things that aren't necessarily attractive."
We sat down to talk about "Movie Freak" and the movies — and somehow ended up discussing Donald Trump.
Would "Movie Freak" have happened if you were still at Entertainment Weekly?
Probably not, because I don't think I would've had time for it.
Is that the only reason?
I don't know. I had an idea to do a memoir a few years ago and then I just kind of put in on the back of the shelf because I thought, there's no way I'd have time to do this.
But the main reason was, yeah, I was looking for something to do and the idea really came to me and possessed me within a couple of weeks after I left the magazine. I felt like it was time to really take an inside look at what the life of a critic is like, and the life of an obsessive movie maniac. I feel like there are so many of us out there, and yet the story of our inner lives had not been written. In terms of writing about EW, I think I could've done that while I was there, but it probably helped to have it in the past. Because that's what a memoir is about, it's taking the stock of the past. So because I had left EW I could look at it and say, what was that all about?
The book hasn't been reviewed in the magazine. Have you heard any response from the people who are still there?
There are people there who've read it and liked it. But there has been no official response at all. I didn't know what they would do with it, because they were dealing, really for the first time in their history, with a book that was about the magazine itself — mostly in a laudatory way. I really loved my years at EW and I hope that comes through in the book. It would've been so much fun to see Entertainment Weekly review a book that was about Entertainment Weekly, and was about one of the people who helped create what the magazine was. I didn't necessarily expect them to review it, and if they did I didn't necessarily expect it to be a positive review. But I was really curious to see what they'd say. So I was disappointed.
Your love for the magazine really comes through in the book. At the same time, I was surprised at how upfront you were about the compromises you made — watching space shrink, watching all these restructurings. Did you start to feel differently about your time there?
Absolutely not. The reason I talked about all the little skirmishes I went through, the fights for space, the battles to do this movie as a lead review, is because that was the drama of the job. And I wanted to capture that, I wanted to bring that onto the page. It certainly wasn't to diss the magazine. Every writer has battles on the job.
PRINCE ANNOUNCES 'UNCONVENTIONAL' MEMOIR[2]
I just wanted to give a sense of the flavor of what a critic has to go through at a mainstream magazine if that critic is trying to hold onto his independence. I won a lot more battles than I lost, and that's part of the reason I ended with a very good feeling about the magazine. It was a place that allowed criticism to thrive. The nature of a critic, as I see it, is he or she stands outside the system a little bit. He's outside the system of marketing and publicity and even of entertainment journalism. A critic has to be detached from the publicity loop, and the reality is that media and newspapers and website increasingly are not, so that poses problems for a critic.
So it was sort of like Owen's Heroic Battle For Independence.
Well, I never saw it as a heroic battle.
You use the word "courage" several times when describing choices you made with how honest you were going to be with something.
Well, what I say is that I lacked the courage to do certain things. But basically, I do not think that the role of the critic is to be any kind of hero. If you are independent and you are fearless about voicing your own, true opinion, you're not being heroic. You're just doing the job. And there's plenty of jobs that require a lot more bravery. If you are not living up to that standard of the job, if you're compromising, I do think you're a bit like a postman who's opening someone's mail. Why bother? These are great jobs and in a way the only thing that justifies someone doing it is that they do it honestly.
Talking about honesty, the book is about much more than film criticism. Which parts were the hardest to be honest about?
Telling the truth comes pretty easy to me. I guess that's how I became a critic. So the decision to do that about my own life came fairly easily, but I don't think it could have done it 15 or 20 years ago. I had to be more settled in my life, in talking about some of the demons of my personal life. I'm not sure I could have done that, or would have wanted to, if I hadn't come out through the other side of things. But having done that, it was fun to go back and look at the kind of person I've been and look at how the obsessions that drive movie mania can drive other parts of your life as well.
I almost wanted to treat my own life as if it was a movie. The idea that possessed me from the beginning was turning my life into a story.
Hachette Books "Movie Freak" is the new memoir by film critic Owen Gleiberman.
I love this concept you talk about of "Media Mike" (a name Gleiberman gives to a fictional man dictating the cycle of critical hype). What is Media Mike liking in 2016?
I thought "The Big Short" was a Media Mike movie, because it seemed to me that it was clearly medicore. The acting was over the top, especially on the part of Christian Bale, and it didn't really have anything to say about the financial crisis. It played off the irony that these guys are gonna profit over the doom of the country and used that up after about half an hour and then it had nowhere to go. That doesn't mean there wasn't room for a rave review of it, but I was a little suspect at the uniformity of opinion there. I felt like there was almost a compulsion to like that movie, because of the combination of its topicality, the fact that it came from a Michael Lewis book — it just all added together into something that seemed like the hip movie of the moment.
When do you feel is lost now in film criticism, even when you're sharing the enthusiasm for something?
More individuality, more people bringing their ididoscyncies, to be willing to like something for the wrong reasons. Or to be willing to really stake your claim when you feel that a movie has been unjustly celebrated. I think "Room" was another example. It seemed there was not much room for points of debate on that movie. It felt like a movie you weren't allowed to trash. It's almost like the subject matter was so sensitive that if you were to say the film was trash, it's as if you were insulting the Brie Larson character and everything she went through. There was a kind of PC, victim aura that clung to that movie, and I think the reviews all came through that lens. They were very unvarying.
Something I see a lot now about something like "Room" — or like the Kendrick Lamar album last year — is a belief that you're not the "right person" to critique something, or that something wasn't "made for you." I'm sure you hear that a lot.
That's an example of the way editors are now thinking like marketers. They're looking for the right critic for the right demo. There's something undemocratic about that. Critics should be generalists, they should be open to anything, so why can't they be open to anything? The more that you have certain kind of critics assigned to certain movies or certain albums, the more you have criticism just functioning as a kind of marketing. And that takes the soul and power out of it.
You use this analogy in the book that if there was a film you really loved, you would play over and over like an album. Did you have a "playlist" of films while you were working on this?
I went back and looked at all the movies I was writing about — as I would come upon each one I would say, 'Yeah, I gotta watch that.' And it wasn't always movies I liked, it was just movies that took me back. One of the great pleasures about seeing movies from decades ago is it really is like going back in a time machine — you recapture who you were then, what the culture was and how all those things have changed. So in many ways, movies were like my diary. I went back and watched a bunch of movies mentioned in the book and it was like leafing through pages of a diary. The whole point was that those movies, at any given point in time, defined my existence, defined who I was as I was walking around. They become as real as reality. I was never writing about myself more than when I was writing about those films.
You quote a lot from your old reviews. Do you have those all archived somewhere?
I have some of the Boston Phoenix ones in boxes, I don't have them all in some master microfilm film. The Entertainment Weekly ones are all available online. There was one amusing weekend I spent in the archives of my college newspaper, literally going through every edition for the four and a half years I was there — and discovering that my college writing was awful beyond my wildest dreams. That was really a shock. And then I discovered that a lot of the stuff I did in the first few years at the Boston Phoenix was not so good either. I really saw myself in hindsight struggling to become a writer, probably because I started so young.
Everyone has to get a few years of bad writing out of the way.
Yeah, but I had to do them when I was a professional. And when you become a film critic as young as I was — I started the week I became 22 — a real disadvantage is that you don't really know anything about life. And movies are about so many things that you don't know about, that you're really talking out your ass a lot of the time.
Do you feel that you know enough now?
Well, I feel like...I feel like being a good critic is like being a good bottle of wine. You get better with age. Experience only enhances your criticism, and I feel like as I've gotten older I've become a better critic, a more perceptive critic. I see through more of the tricks that movies do. And I have kids now, and — I don't think that that has radically changed how I see movies, but in certain ways it does, and ultimately for the better. I don't think I'm suddenly a better reviewer of any movie that has a parent in it — but I do think that having children enhances your empathy. And empathy is what movies are all about.
You say in the last few pages that you feel like a movie can't change your life at this point. And you say that the last film that gave you that "holy s---" feeling was "Munich," which is over a decade ago. So what are you chasing after in still reviewing films?
You're still chasing after art that can stir your soul and thrill you and haunt you and lift you up and keep you happy. I still have a thirst for art and it still lifts me up. It's still my religion. But that feeling I had when I was younger, that a movie could change your life, become your drug of choice for the next six months, that was an extreme feeling and in some ways an immature one. And maybe even a little unhealthy. All of that is tied up with the glory of being a movie freak. You can't separate the religious devotion from the pathology.
I cherish the idea that a movie could once mean that much to me, that I wanted to see it 20, 30 times, sitting in my apartment, rewatching "Boogie Nights" or "Breaking the Waves" or "Manhunter." But I guess I am somewhat relieved that I'm not that way now.
Relieved because…?
Because in a way it was compensating for something. I was depending a little too much on movies to fuel my inner life.
Having done your full examination of the life of a movie freak, do you still recommend that lifestyle?
Millions of people live that lifestyle today. We really live in a movie freak culture.
A very different kind, though.
That's right. For me, the balancing point was that I was able to make a living off it. That pulled me back from the abyss of movie freakdom a little bit. I always knew that I was a professional, I always knew that I was trying to place these movies within the real world and seeing how they fit in there. So I never lost my perspective entirely.
I think there's a danger now of pop culture taking over people's lives in a way that arrests them, in a way that keeps them chained to childish passions. The problem with our popcorn culture is -- I love a great popcorn movie, but if all you eat is popcorn, you should probably go see a doctor. And our all-popcorn, all-comic book-franchise-culture is not providing the nourishment that true movie culture does. When I see young people addicted to franchise movies, a part of me wants to go: "Stop. It's not good for you and it's not good for the country." Maybe somehow all of that is connected to the fact that we have a full-fledged fascist running for president.
It's funny you mention that. Earlier today I was looking at this interview you did with Rock Critics[3] where you spoke very positively of Donald Trump on "The Apprentice" and how he's a great persona.
I still stand by that. I don't think Trump would running for president today if it wasn't for "The Apprentice." What too many liberals deny is that he's not just a blowhard. He has a powerful persona that has been lifted off through the bully pulpit of pop culture in the exact way predicted by "A Face in the Crowd" and "Network." The rise of Donald Trump isn't just about politics. It tells us something about the way that pop culture fantasy has taken over our lives. In a way, the election is a contest between two radically different ideologies, but it's not right wing and left wing, Democrat or Republican. It's reality and unreality. Donald Trump represents the rise of unreality in America, and I don't think we can separate that from the rise of unreality in our movie culture. It's gotten all of us addicted to fantasy and escapism, as if those things were real.
jsilverstein@nydailynews.com[4]
References
- ^ JASMIN SINGER ON HER MEMOIR 'ALWAYS TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH' (www.nydailynews.com)
- ^ PRINCE ANNOUNCES 'UNCONVENTIONAL' MEMOIR (www.nydailynews.com)
- ^ this interview you did with Rock Critics (rockcriticsarchives.com)
- ^ jsilverstein@nydailynews.com (www.nydailynews.com)
