Norman Wilner InterviewIf they’ve filmed it, he’s seen it. Norman Wilner, lead critic for Canada's "Metro" newspapers and writer for Sympatico/MSN sits down with WILDsound’s Jules Ross, to give the readers some insight into his critiquing process. If you’re a filmmaker, you’ll want to read this one! How many movies to you review each week? It depends on the week. This week, I’m doing 6 or 7. I’m the lead film writer for Metro. There’s me and two other guys. But they review movies that are available on video or DVD. Often there are two screenings that overlap and I can’t make it and sometimes they’ll sub in for me. How did you get into to critiquing? There’s a Jonathan Demme quote, “Once you find out a way to make a movie for free you’ll do anything to keep doing it.” I think I’m paraphrasing it a bit. But essentially, that’s how it happened. I worked in my Grandfather’s theatre and reviewed films for Newtonbrook Newspaper in high school. That transitioned to reviewing for the York University paper, Excalibur. The next year I heard that Rob Salem was editor of the Video Entertainment Magazine. I went down to drop my resume and cards and they threw two tapes at me. My first professional review was of, ‘The Return of the Killer Tomatoes’. George Clooney was in it. [Laughs] Have you always known that you wanted to review movies for a living? I’ve been lucky to have a vocation not a job. For me, even when the movie is bad I get something out of it. What? [laughs] I never have to see it again! What’s your favourite guilty pleasure? I don’t know. There are films I return to, such as ‘Die Hard’ and ‘Galaxy Quest’. There’s a perfect movie!!! [Galaxy Quest] I wouldn’t call those guilty pleasures. They are good movies. Sometimes my poor wife is victimized by my choices. We’ll see a movie and she’ll look at me with a confused stare and ask, “You thought this was good?!” Did you take her to see ‘The Shape of Things’? No. It came out just before we met. How do you feel about Neil Labute films? His first two films are great, but then in ‘The Wicker Man’ he clearly lost his way. There’s a streak of misogynism that drives his work. In his work, it’s applied; instead of characters having a problem with women the movie does. The film was screamingly funny and it was not supposed to be. That’s not good. Do you like comedies? A good, stupid comedy made by smart people can be a work of beauty. Just look at ‘Anchorman’. What about smart comedies, such as ‘Home for the Holidays’ or ‘Flirting with Disaster’? In those movies, the jokes are so perfectly set up they’re almost invisible when they hit. They load up the jokes like smart bombs and it pays off beautifully! Some people recoiled from ‘Napoleon Dynamite’, but I really liked it. It was smart-dumb comedy. What is your favourite genre? I get inspired every time I see a Zombie movie. Things like ‘Shawn of the Dead’, ‘The Remake of Shawn of the Dead’, ‘28 Days Later’ and ‘28 Weeks later’; you know the director of 28 days later never made a movie before! They marketed it intelligently. Fox included a DVD of his first movie. They distinguished it from their other products. It was as if they stood behind the director and said that he was legitimate. Usually, movies get pumped out and no one cares. For example the new Bruce Willis and Halle Berry thing, no one cares and it’s exactly what people expect to see from Hollywood. Do you have one favourite gig or do you enjoy doing all of them? I worked as a Toronto Star video columnist for 15 years. That ended last May and the Sympatico job is nice. I can take another look at films six months later. That’s a huge perk. I like to revisit the film after everyone has had their say. I’m able to review the film in a new light to see if things have changed. For example, ‘Swordfish’ with John Travolta, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry was released in 2001. It plays up terrorism for comedy. Well, I’m sure September 11th changed the meaning of the film, making it more offensive. Suddenly there was a new context. How do you feel about the trend towards documentaries? When digital video hit the market, the indie world took off. It changed the way of filmmaking. Then you have films like ‘My Date with Drew’, about a quasi stalker buying a camera at Best Buy and returning later so he wouldn’t pay for it. All of the sudden there were no obstacles to making a movie cheaply. Before, no one thought of celebrating them as films. But now, you can attract a theatrical audience because the line between what people watch at home and at a theatre has blurred. Now if you don’t see a movie in the first week, you’ll wait to rent it. Documentaries never make number 1 at the box office, but they do play for 6-8 weeks and then kill it in DVD sales, like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. In your blog, you talk about the trend towards 1980s resurgence, specifically mentioning a remake of ‘Adventures in Babysitting’. Do you think it should be done? I’m scared… I don’t know if they can update it and I don’t think they should. The film is so inherently 1980s. I don’t think it will work. But that’s the business; every property gets revisited because it’s cheaper than creating new stories. It’s gotten to the point where movies are one line synopses. A studio will green light the line or poster and not care about the film. Take ‘Disterbia’, which is a good film and being sold really badly. And you don’t need movie stars; the right movie can create them. That’s what happened for Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’. It’s a double edge sword though. I think that the movie hurt him more than helped him, because before that he was a character actor and now he’s an action star. No one remembers him in ‘Pulp Fiction’, but they do remember him in ‘Die Hard’. Which movie is screaming out for an update? ‘The Breakfast Club’. [Thinks for a moment] That’s a good example of a movie that wouldn’t be made now, at least not by a big studio. It would be small budget. Universal did Sixteen Candles, Weird Science and The Breakfast Club back-to-back. The movie had almost no action. It’s actually shocking that a major studio would do it. I guess Universal could gamble back then, in the ‘Back to the Future’ era. But it wouldn’t work. No one would believe that they were wrestling with those issues at 15. The way to do it now would be to make them 12 years old instead of 15. The amazing thing about it is that the movie hasn’t changed, it’s us. It’s a societal issue. Another film to remake would be ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. What’s on the horizon for you? Being a freelancer has taught me not to plan more than three weeks in advance. I’d love to live in New York and do more work on television. Having said that, I’m pretty happy with the way things are right now. I’d like to maintain it. You can learn more about Jules Ross at her website www.julessite.com.
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