By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
How do I, too, become a cricket? A pro replies
Lisa Nesselson, an established, Paris-based freelancer for Variety, helps answer the question, “How do I, too, become a film cricket?” on Roger Ebert’s website after having coffee with “a very nice 29-year-old” who freelances for the Village Voice. “People his age and younger who envy my position… want to know whether they’ll ever be able to make a living as film critics… [L]ately, like clockwork, I’ve been approached by bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Americans who claim they want to be me when they grow up. Some of them can write and some of them can merely hustle. In my experience, those who hustle make headway…. My definition of a good critic is somebody who communicates their enthusiasm for work they find of merit, without ruining the option of you, the reader, also discovering the film’s merits. … What I’ve never been able to reconcile is that when a movie is about some topics it’s “only a movie” but if it has a character or line of dialogue that some group objects to, then it allegedly becomes an incredibly powerful medium freighted with deeper and possibly harmful meaning… I’d say the privilege of being a critic really kicks in when I get to write “the Variety review” of an important film and I feel like I really, truly, am the “right” person for the job. I’m enormously proud of my reviews of Bowling for Columbine and Irreversible (both written on tight deadlines in the pressure cooker of Cannes) and I’ve been told that my review of Memento has helped other people understand the film. But I have colleagues who just crank out copy, figure one word is as good as another and everything they write will be glanced at at best and then discarded, so why knock yourself out?”