Herald Sun film critic Leigh Paatsch has been writing about television, music and film for over 20 years. News Hit talks to Paatsch about The Hurt Locker, his career and how fellow critic Jim Schembri is still a model of integrity.
In March, the lowest grossing film of the ten nominated films at the Academy Awards won Best Picture against the largest grossing film of all time? Is this significant in our understanding of the changing structure of film production and distribution- where major studios are attempting to make incredibly expensive and inexpensive films- and little in between?
Basically, I don’t think the Academy Awards are any kind of hard-stick as to what is really happening in the world of cinema. It is basically a seasonal thing, like Moomba, Valentine’s Day, whatever. Films are released within a certain window, traditionally, films of a certain “worthy” nature and they are marketed to be very successful within this very small season in the entire calendar. And I know that The Hurt Locker is an exception- released much, much earlier than traditional Oscar winners- but I think that the company releasing that film definitely saw the potential for that film to be very, very successful on DVD. And a lot of winners in the previous years have been films that traditionally did not do too well at the box office, but were a certain level of quality, had a certain subject matter and the DVD release date happened to come out during the Oscar award season so I do not think that the Oscars are any kind of window for where the world is at. I honestly think that film- mainstream, commercial film- has not changed one iota since I have been writing about it, really.
Did you think that the ten-picture field gave a better snapshot of the broad range of best films of its year or not?
Absolutely not. When you think about American TV ratings of the live telecast has been going down the toilet ever since Titanic- which was probably the last high rating telecast in America. They have done everything they can to try and freshen up and attract people and try and watch the telecast. In America, in some years, middle America had not seen any of the nominees that were there for Best Picture, so- by broadening it out to ten- you can get maybe a sci-fi film, maybe a big comedy, maybe an action film, maybe a(nother) sci-fi film to broaden the telecast.
Or The Blind Side, which was very popular in middle America. Let’s talk about The Hurt Locker. What qualities does Bigelow’s film have that make it a great war film and a great film?
I think the thing I like about The Hurt Locker is that it is a film about an Army bomb-disposal unit- and- if you can’t make that film work on a tension level, on a manipulation level manipulating the audience- then you have blown it. But I was really impressed by how restrained the film was. It had parts to play, but it did not play them in an obvious manner. The more restraint it showed, the more you leaned from your seat to see what it was going to do next. For all its unprecedented success as a film and (the fact) it was directed by a woman- you know, it still is a pretty conventional war-time film. But for me- after seeing as many dud films from the beginning of the year- it came along at the right time and knocked me over like a feather. But, you know, I have probably overrated The Hurt Locker looking back, the way I have written about it, but it is still a pretty good film.
On the other hand, Nine, which you did not like and a lot of people did not like. But it was directed by a Tony-winning director, it was written by Anthony Minghella, who made The English Patient and Michael Tolkin, who wrote Robert Altman’s The Player. And it has a fantastic cast- and Nicole Kidman. Why does something like that not work?
I only have a working knowledge of film musicals. But, in the particular case of Nine, the songs just absolutely sucked. The song that the Marion Cotillard-character sings I can vaguely remember, but the songs aren’t memorable. It is a terrible songbook. It just did not work for me whatsoever. That’s all I can say about Nine. It just did not work for me whatsoever. And I think that- for the movie musical to work these days- you can do the Broadway model and blow it up with cinema images, (but) I think that model is completely broken now. For the musical to work, you have to head off in a different type of direction or blend music and narrative in a way that we have not seen before.
Earlier this year, News Hit featured a story detailing a writer’s favourite films of the last decade, naming The Lives of Others as the best film- also including Capturing the Friedman’s, There Will Be Blood and Eternal Sunshine. Who is the best director working today and what films would you point to as the best from the last decade?
That’s a tough one. Who is the best director of the last decade? I have one. Although not all of his films (he is wildly inconsistent), but I really admire Steven Soderbergh as a director. When his films work for me, they just really command my attention. Love Wong Kar Wai, the… China or Hong Kong?
I think Hong Kong.
But I think I am a sucker for him more for Christopher Doyle’s cinematography than anything else. Directors? Oh, I really love Jason Reitman- Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air- I think he has a really brilliant film in him coming up in the next four to five years. And best film of the decade? For me, it did not get much better than Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s film, which just landed in the year 2000, which just qualified for the best films of the decade. I loved The Lives of Others, which you just mentioned. I am also a sucker for anything that Quentin Tarantino does. The two Kill Bills which is just one film is probably one of my favourite experiences of the decade. And the Australian film Lantana I can watch that at the drop of a hat and it always engrosses me. So that pretty much covers the decade for me as such.
Have you seen Animal Kingdom yet?
In the case of Australian films, I am really strategic in choosing when I go and see them. And it is the same thing as comedies really, I try and see them with an audience, a typical theatre environment. I don’t go to the premieres. I don’t go to the movie previews, the media previews or anything like that. I am led to believe that Animal Kingdom will have sneak previews for the public the weekend before it is released. in something like Doncaster Shoppingtown or Melbourne Central, I will try and sneak in on an Monday afternoon and see how it will play for the paying punter and we will go from there.
I wanted to ask about your style. How would you describe your style?
As in what kind of movies I like?
Your writing style.
Look, I would say in my defence and my own damnation I am not a trained journalist. I did not study journalism and I have been learning as I have being going along. I have probably been writing actively for 20, 25 years now, but I am still just discovering it everyday. I also write in an untrained and also peculiar way. I will kind of write all the week’s copy in one spurt with no regard for house style, word length-required, things like that. And then, given my mandate these days is to write for the Herald Sun and its equivalents in other states, I just take this copy and I bash away at it and turn it into something tabloid-esque that vaguely falls within the house style of newspapers. It is very, for me, long and very freeform process for something that appears in a very streamlined product.
I also wanted to ask about who you read prior to being a reviewer in terms of film criticism. Did you read Sarris and Kael or was your reading more localised- like Evan Williams and Stratton.
I would say that I did not really read anyone from Australia, per se. Pauline Kael, I was probably more on her side than an Andrew Sarris-kind-of-guy. Look, when I was started out as a writer, I wanted to write more about music. The biggest influences on me has probably been the famous music journalist who worked for the English music press in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Probably starting with someone like Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons, probably chuck in a little bit of Nick Kemp when he was not on the smack. Yeah, NME and The Plague in particular created two really huge impressions as an impressionable reader in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s growing up. I took even more so from the writing style from the first time I just took their writer’s kind of supreme confidence in their attitude, their willingness to be thrown outside the bus and their willingness to be either right or wrong is something g that I really took with me and got me interested in writing as a way of expressing myself. And, you know, it turned out to be expressing myself about film and I still find myself reacting quite violently or unpredictably about films that you thought weren’t really possible while I am still prone to those kind of mood swings I will definitely still keep on writing about film.
You have mentioned writing about music. You wrote about music in The Big Issue. Can you talk about developing yourself as a writer in terms of how you have changed since you have gone from not being paid for your work to being paid. Has your writing changed? Have you changed? Are you conscious of those thoughts?
(Pause) I am trying to think of the year I started writing. The year I started writing was 1988 until last year I was technically a freelance writer for all of those years. Writing as a way of sustaining yourself invariably forces a form of compromise, without sounding like too much of a tosser. Probably the biggest flashpoint in my career was deciding, after writing, you know, cool or worthy with people I liked to be connected with, was crossing the drawbridge and writing for Fairfax publications to writing for Murdoch publications. I really did have to think long and hard about how I was going to keep writing in the way that I have.
Since I have started with the Murdoch papers, I have still found a way within. You know, they have a very tight house style with a lot of their papers and I still found a way to interest myself as a writer and keep my skills up. I have learnt a lot about self-editing within the Murdoch papers that I would not have learnt by writing for longer-form papers. And that can be a very valuable skill. But, in terms of style, it really comes and goes with me and I am not a really good judge of my own writing. Some of the stuff that I think is not absolute pulp, but not much better, is a lot of the stuff people really talk about or what people try and remember whilst something I am really proud of, the stuff that I really get past the system, no one really notices.
Can you cite a piece that you get asked about and you think, “well, I don’t know…”
I can’t think of any particular examples at the moment but, over time, as a writer you just… Any writer has an ego and they are trying to listen to what people are reacting to and what they’re noticing. So, as a general rule of thumb, the stuff that I do not really rate or the stuff that I did not spend much time on, did quite unconsciously, these are kind of things that have generally been quoted back at me over time. I cannot remember a lot of what I have written, to be honest.
I am also interested in the kinds of television that a film critic watches and admires. For instance, the likes of Mark Kermode and David Stratton have both said that they do not watch television whilst Richard Corliss used his review for State of Play to comment that he prefers television over film now. What television do you watch?
I watch a lot of TV and I generally a big buyer of DVDs from overseas. Stuff that I really like? I really like a lot of hogwash, English comedy. I kind of worked my way back- Look Around You, the work of Peter Serafinowicz I like a lot, the work of Steve Coogan, Chris Morris is someone who I cannot get enough of. He has also got a new film coming out later this year, which I cannot wait to see. I am also a bit of a sucker with the American HBO badge on it. I have just started watching a series called How to Make It in America which is a half-hour junkie-type show about going out in New York. And it is from the same production team as Entourage. But, as junk, it can’t be beaten.
But, yeah, I also like a British Show called Harry Hill’s TV Burp. There was an Australian version of that which came out earlier this year, but the English version of that is just a masterpiece of mainstream, commercial TV. And it is one of those shows that you can just imagine the whole of the audience watching it whenever it goes to air on 7:30 or 8:00 at night and it is just incredibly surreal, really funny and acceptable humour going on there. In terms of long-form TV drama. I have drunk the Mad Men-Kool-Aid. Come and go with that. I have started watching recently a show called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It was the show that Aaron Sorkin did as a writer after The West Wing.
Yeah, one season. It is one of those shows that I absolutely hate with a passion. But I coming to the end of the series and I cannot believe it is coming out of my life. It’s terrible. Absolutely terrible. But I like TV as much as I like film and I think that TV serves a purpose in your downtime at home. You can get just as much out of it as the best films really.
A couple of TV shows have recently been adapted to films, like State of Play and Edge of Darkness. Would you ever watch those shows before seeing the film? When a book is adapted for the screen do you try to read the book before seeing the movie? What about reading screenplays?
No. Part of my Modus Agendi is that I try and go to a film as cold as possible. I don’t look at the trailers. I don’t go to the film website. I don’t read the press releases. I try and keep myself as blank as absolutely possible. Hype in this day and age is completely unavoidable, but if you can try and close down as many unwanted sources as you can it gives you the opportunity to experience a film. If you have heard much about it before hand, or if you have heard the best jokes, it is just coded in the trailer, which is 2:33 minutes these days. If you can look at a film with a blank canvass and if the film really blows you away, those are the films that really stay with you for a long time.
What about the time that are unavoidable: when you have walked into a film after reading the book and think, “oh…”
I would say, again, I am not and have never been a great reader of books. I read a lot of magazines. I am still a great fan of the British music press and I still read a Word, also Uncut. I love The New Yorker. And, I’d say between those three, four magazines that constitutes the bulk of my reading. The rest of the time I really just cherry-pick books that have no chance of being made into a film. I am reading a lot of books now that deal with the making of a film. I am reading Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, about the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities, and I have really enjoyed that. And I have recently read a book about M Night Shyamalan while he was making Lady in the Water. I like reading non-fiction and a lot of magazines. The whole book-into-movie thing has really passed me by. Every one in a while I will have actually read. I have read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because I was stuck on a plain trip and somebody gave me a copy. But those are happy accidents for me. I am not a great book reader.
One thing I wanted to ask- you mentioned The New Yorker- do you read critic David Dendby. Are there any critics you seek out right now, or do you prefer not reading them?
Ala not watching trailers or going to websites or stuff like that, I do not go to any reviews for films until I have written my own. So- say usually my reviews go to print on a Thursday- it’s usually late on a Friday afternoon I will do a lap of critics that I like reading and don’t like reading. And, you know, it will be like a wet thumb in the breeze, and see if I were in the ballpark or completely out of hand. Newspaper critics that I like reading? I like Manohla Dargis, A.O. Scott, all those dudes that write for The New York Times. The LA Times, I always go there. Roger Ebert I always check in, even if he gets it wrong, he writes it in such a beautiful way that you have to tip your hat to him. Very few English film writers get me, I must admit. Most of the film writers I read are American. I don’t read any Australian film writers at all. I might poke my head in The Age EG and see what’s going on in there, but there is no one really yanking my chain since Adrian Martin has been out of the picture. We were talking about that before. Yeah, it is fairly sad out there. But I am feeling fairly sad myself.
You mentioned A.O. Scott and earlier this year, Disney announced that the latest version of America’s At the Movies- formerly Siskel and Ebert At the Movies and co-hosted by Scott- would be ending. This has obvious comparisons to SBS’s attempts to replicate the success of Pomeranz and Stratton from 2004-2006. Why did you think viewers did not necessarily respond to the four new critics- Megan Spencer, Fenella Kernebone, Jaimie Leonarder and Marc Fennell in that second incarnation?
The American show that you were talking about was always going to be a soft-target for programmers who did not want it on air because it was a syndicated program which means it was reliant on the mercy of ABC-affiliates to try and pick it up on air and put it in a decent time slot. I understand that it works well in urban areas, but Joe Public in the American Midwest could not give a rat’s ass about it. So it was always a big shot. I will say on a more general level pertaining to that program that any film review show on a commercial TV network is always going to be under pressure to compromise and maintain still the true nature of what’s it’s about because the commercial obligations of American TV networks are more important than they ever had been before.
I have had vague experiences with the three commercial networks in Australia and they have always been kind of gun shy about putting incredibly negative reviews of comedies or films from there because they may be showing that as a Sunday movie of the week in two, three years time or they might have another advertising campaign pushing that film in another timeslot. They might have a cross-promotional deal to give away tickets. The only rightful place for a decent film review show on TV is a public broadcaster ala what David and Margaret are doing on the ABC. What they are doing, they do quite well. They seem to put bums on seats with certain films or scare the cattle away with others.
But SBS tried to do that themselves. Why did that not work or people did not respond to that?
I would say- as a viewer- SBS was too quick to dance on the grave that they had dug for David and Margaret, anyway. And they went too far in the opposite direction. And if I were SBS I would have left the slate blank for a full year. I think they waited for four or five months.
Two months.
Two months, did they? Look, as a non-New South Wales person, I see there are certain types of Australian TV as being way too Sydney. And the all-new Movie Show, whatever year that was, it was too Sydney and God knows what a movie fan in Bendigo or Freo or Kalgoorlie would not have a clue about a lot of the reference points that the new critics were talking about and where they were positioning themselves. It was too much of the wrong thing, too soon.
Some TV reviewers and audience members felt they were a little too precious, citing one of the reviewers commenting that The Cinderella Man (a film that you said was good, not great) made their skin “crawl”. In this regard, what do you think a film reviewer has to be to an audience? What is an audience looking out of that?
I don’t know. I have no problem with that particular review of The Cinderella Man. If the guy or the girl in that case is being honest, by all means say it. In terms of the responsibility to the viewer or reader or listener or whatever, if they can get the vibe from you that you are being honest and expressing your opinion- and being as justifiable and honest about your opinion as possible- that is about as much as you can do. And if they like it, they like it and if they don’t, they don’t. I will say myself, as a reader, I like reading reviews that I do not understand or do not relate to, but if it is written with a purity or a tainted honesty or whatever- if they can put themselves in the charcoal- I will tip my head to them every time. I will always tip my head to Jim Schembri, The Age’s Jim Schembri, because Jim Schembri is a master of throwing himself under a bus for no apparent reason, dusting himself off and then doing it again the next week. And, when I say I don’t read Australian critics, I always read Jim Schembri.
Last question. When a lot of students start to write reviews, they try and take a more formalist approach- trying to intellectualise their feelings and give these broad, sweeping statements about the film, as if it is some kind of essay. Gene Siskel said much the same here. What advice do you give students in writing criticism?
The beauty about writing about films is that you do not need a formalist, structured approach. You can use a wide array of writing skills. You don’t have to do a kind of call-and-response of the plot, who directed it, who is starring in it. You can make all kinds of bizarre analogies. To use an example: the guy from Time when he was writing about TV when he should have been writing about film. What was that film again?
It was State of Play.
State of Play. Because of the myriad of elements that it takes to make a film, you should mirror that with your writing and checkerboard it and quilt it any way that you see fit. As long as it is legible, readable and your voice comes through, I think that is 90% of the work right there.
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