Movies into Film
A Note to my Readers
on the site’s one-year anniversary
Street
on the Schöneberg Stadtpark, Kirchner, 
1912-1913 (Image courtesy of Milwaukee Art Museum)
“While your clips are clear and forefully [sic] written,” began the managing editor of an alt-weekly in Minneapolis, by way of explaining why yours truly would most definitely not join their roster of freelance book reviewers, “the tone doesn't seem like an ideal match for the paper.”
Oh?
“We tend to be a bit more descriptive,” he continued, “whereas the reviews you've attached seem to center on delivering a certain verdict.”
After three days of questioning why and how I write (could I be a bit over the top? Does the lame son-of-a-bitch in Minnesota have a point?), I wrote back: “Criticism, by the way, which I take reviewing to be, always delivers a certain verdict. That’s what sets it apart from unbiased reportage or from a press kit.”
And then I pointed out to him an online example—a review-essay of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, written by one of his own frequent contributors—that aimed for and achieved precisely such a “certain verdict.”
I decided also, in my rebuttal, to include a couple of “upbeat” clips, nothing too coruscating or condemnatory. I chose rave reviews the second time around, and gleefully clicked “send,” not perhaps taking into account the implications of my singing endorsement for Monster, a brilliantly acted and directed film about someone who turns to serial murder, only after a series of stinging rejections from “legitimate” culture. “Ah, well,” as my old friend Barbara Rosenblat used to say in the era (long ago) when I engineered her audio book recordings, “what can ya do?”
And all of this is just by way of saying—“Happy Birthday, MoviesIntoFilm.com.” The site is a year old as of this month, April 2005.
A Group of Artists: Otto Mueller, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, 1926-27
(Image courtesy of Museum Ludwig)
Oh, but one more thing about the innocently begun debacle. “We're living in a timid time,” a friend of mine said, “and your reviews aren't timid. Maybe one has to become known for being descriptive before one's ‘verdicts’ are appreciated?”
Maybe. Leaving aside my ability and willingness to describe—a separate entity from my disdain for summarizing plots and the writers who summarize them—I have become known to a reader or two in the year that my reviews have been online. The earliest of these pieces, from 2002 and 2003, originally appeared in print only, at a paper barely on the radar outside Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, and thus were limited to a small segment of geographically isolated readers. In looking at the statistical breakdowns on my site’s admin pages, there are lists of IP addresses for every visitor, be it for one-page wonders who never return or for those of you who return repeatedly, and what never ceases to amaze me is where some of you are.
It’s fitting, in a sense, that I have more readers in Europe than here in Seattle. (I do have at least one obsessively devoted local reader, and more on whom that could be in a moment.) Although I’d toyed with the idea of a site, I wasn’t inspired to make it happen until a Monday afternoon in late March 2004, when, on a trip to New York, I roamed through Neue Galerie, the Museum of German and Austrian art. Maybe it was the hours I spent absorbed by the paintings of Ernst Kirchner and his contemporaries. I sat on a bench to rest. The unrealized website crossed my mind again. What was I going to call it? I’d been collecting some of John Simon’s out of print books of criticism. There are works of his that I prefer to 1971’s Movies into Film. Private Screenings: Views of the Cinema of the Sixties and Something to Declare-Twelve Years of Films From Abroad are both better reads, still the sound of vowels and consonants eliding in Movies into Film fit perfectly as a theme, as homage, and…would such a domain name be available? It was. I bought it. I built it. And then…
Readers found it. From Budapest, from London, Heidelburg, Salzburg, Nuernberg, Madrid, from Espoo, Finland, from Stockholm. From two cities (at least) in Bolivia: La Paz and Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Eventually, Asia and Canada caught on, with frequent visitors from Tokyo, from China’s Shanxi Province, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto.
In the States, New York and San Francisco pop up the most often in my web page stats, although with so many readers returning via Comcast and AOL, you could be anywhere. What fascinates me is when some of you read my reviews while you’re at work, when you’re rather obviously supposed to be doing something more productive. What a privilege, then, to be read from the Tate Gallery in London, from Microsoft, from the Virginia Department of Social Services, from Connaught Laboratories, from New York Life Insurance Company, and last but certainly not least from the State of Texas Attorney General’s office. As a former Austin resident, that one really got to me.
However, none of these provides me with quite as much furtive joy as the two or three times a week (for a while, daily) visits from 216.254.2.66. This IP address first cropped up last fall and has recurred steadily ever since. To whom could it belong? Imagine my surprise to discover that (in the best B-movie tradition of “The calls are coming from inside the house,” a la 1974’s Black Christmas) an employee of The Stranger, Seattle’s—indeed the nation’s—most august newspaper, was checking up on my verdicts with first alarming, then delightful reliability.
Self-Portrait with a Cat,
Kirchner, 1919-20 (Image courtesy of The Busch-Reisinger Harvard University Art Museums)
In 2003, I had approached three different editors at The Stranger on three separate occasions, with clips, and heard nothing. Ah, what a difference a website makes! Regrettably, such close attention to my work hasn’t yet resulted in a commission from The Stranger to write something for them. For all they would have to do is ask, and I would have no choice in the matter, no choice whatsoever, except to say, “Yes.”
While we’re waiting for that to happen, please know that, through the miracle of Pay Pal, it is now eminently possible to:
to help keep this site going for another year and beyond. Unlike James Berardinelli of Reel Views, I don’t have a day job as an engineer, nor do I go from screening to screening in an SUV. I’m a freelancer with no stock options, no all-purpose sugar person to bankroll my every move, and no defenses against the Godard-worshipping Socialists who dominate indie film coverage (i.e., those earnest critics hell-bent on finding a prince within the toad of Notre Musique). So, if you’re able to $upport the site, please do. End of sales pitch.
I’ve received some interesting feedback over the past year. When I included the dreadful Sideways on my 10-worst list for 2004, Mark Moskowitz, the director of a very fine film called Stone Reader, emailed me to say, “What you wrote is as dead-on as it gets these days in film writing. Your objection…is a justifiable reaction against the applause given irony.”
And from John Simon, whose title I stole for my domain name, came this response in a letter dated July 7, 2004, after I’d written to let him know of my thievery: “By all means use my title any way you wish; far from taking umbrage, I consider it an honor. And I am particularly pleased that the idea came to you at the Neue Galerie, which I like, but not, I hope, at their cafeteria, which is overpriced and sells inauthentic Viennese pastries.” — NPT
April 17, 2005
Movies into Film
© 2005, N.P. Thompson
npt (at) moviesintofilm (dot) com