I
was raised in a college town in the 1970s and early '80s. This means
that I was made aware of alternative movies at a very young age; I remember
clearly the strange feelings of revulsion and attraction while staring
at the movie poster for A Clockwork Orange, or wondering what The King
of Hearts was about, or looking in the paper and seeing that Tommy was
showing again. The Minor Theater was the local alternative theater,
the rep house, and, along with the Arcata Theater (owned by the same people
who owned the Minor), my main source of knowledge for movies other than
whatever Hollywood was churning out. (I grew up during the years when Burt
Reynolds was the top box office star. It was a bad time to be alive.)
Growing up out in the country as well as cowardice
on my part, and typically an "R" rating on the movie's 
parts,
kept me from seeing a lot of these enigmatic films. Since they were
second run movies, there was never any reviews of them in the paper or
ads on TV. It was like a secret river, an underground current, that
flowed through the heart of town and no one ever talked about it.
At least nobody that I knew.
Then, for one of my birthdays, I got "The Golden Turkey Awards" a book about terrible movies by Michael and Harry Medved. This book actually had pictures and reviews about a lot of the movies that played at the Minor, and I read repeatedly. By the time I hit college, one out of every five books i checked out must have been books about the movies; reviews, criticism, "making of" junk books, and overview books that were really just quick and easy coffee table books with lots of movie stills and posters padded with brainless summarizing.
Oddly,
it didn't and still doesn't bother me that I hadn't seen most of the movies
I was reading about. As a bored kid, I grew up reading the TV Guide
cover to cover despite getting only three channels, and seeing almost none
of the shows. I created shows in my head based on the plots. Likewise,
the descriptions of the movies I read about, along with the occasional
picture, helped me create the movie in my head. Often, I wouldn't
get even that far, I would just read the reviews and savor the feelings
brought up by the ideas of the movie; it seemed a darker, more grown up
world, the world of movies that people wrote about in books, and although
I feared actually seeing these films would somehow be the end of childhood
for me, I kept reading about them.
Eventually, I found Pauline Kael's books.
Sharp, witty and concise, her reviews were persuasive and 
informative.
Kael was, and still is, a perplexing critic; she openly played favorites,
she generally mocked pretension, she loved genuine wit and camp.
She was a hedonist of the cinema, as shown by the sexually flavored titles
of her books (I Lost it At the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When The Lights
Go Down, Taking It All In) and she was willing to forgive any numbers of
indignities for an image of beauty and freshness. While frustrating
to watch her twist her aesthetic reasoning around in order to give one
of her favorites the benefit of the doubt (Brian De Palma got off any number
of hooks that Kael should have caught him on), there was tremendous liberation
seeing someone of such intelligence make their arguments for movies that
caught her fancy like Stop Making Sense or Reanimator. And her easy,
witty dismissals of movies (a lot of them not deserving of the Kael shaft)
always made for a good read.
The movie reviews on my site are flavored by all this. I'm distressed when I hear from people that they don't read the reviews of movies that they haven't seen, just as I'm sure that people who read my reviews are distressed that sometimes I don't bother with such niceties as summarizing the plot. Or as my brother succinctly put it once, "You either review movies that no one has ever seen so no one can argue with your reviews, or you review movies about some little nuance or idea that is so obscure and then go on and on about it until no one can watch the fucking movie the same way again."
It's
not really an escape from culpability or judgment that guides my hand in
these matters. In the end, a movie review for me is a surreal art
piece. Hopefully, it entertains or amuses, but I mainly want it to
inspire, to fire images in the brain. If I can cause someone to try
to imagine what a Mexican Wrestler vs. The Supernatural movie is like,
or a decent Hong Kong Chicks Who Kick Butt movie can do, or if the person
walks away thinking that there's a secret current that flows through the
world, a dark stream of shirtless masked avengers, dour unwashed gunfighters,
violent cops, sentimental gunmen, karaoke parlors, flowers blooming in
pools of blood, snarling apemen, apocalyptic sunsets, and the movement
of water trapped between sun and stones, then it's a good movie review
for me. And if the person reads the review ends up seeing how those
things, or the things in average movies that we take for granted reflect
on the world in a real and direct way, all the better. Sometimes,
though, I find it's easier to conjure that world without describing the
plot.
All written material on this site ©1999 by Jeff Lester. All photos and images are © their respective owners.