It shoUldn’t happen to a Film joUrnalist
Editor-at-large Jamie graham lifts the lid on film journalism.
Jamie on the perils of falling asleep during movies.
Way back in 1997, when I’d been a film journalist for about a year, I attended the first screening of Martin Scorsese’s Kundun. Then, as now, I was a huge admirer of Scorsese’s cinema. You might say I was obsessed
– I’d seen The Color Of Money, my gateway drug, more than 30 times, and had since inhaled Scorsese’s entire canon and read every book I could find on the motormouthed moviemaker.
Anyway, the two years since Casino had seemed like a painfully long time. I was excited. So much so that I literally could not sleep the night before. I promptly dozed off just 20 minutes into Kundun, cajoled into unconsciousness by Roger Deakins’ velvet camerawork and Philip Glass’ shimmering score. Next thing I knew, the lights were up and everyone was filing out. Luckily for me, there was another screening in time for my review deadline, and that time, I stayed awake.
TIME ZZZONE
It should at this point be said, trusty TF reader, that I’ve never fallen asleep during any film I’ve reviewed, and do not know of a film journo who has.
I have, however, twice kipped in screenings put on at US junkets before the next day interviewing the talent. It’s hard not to given you fly in that day, usually getting up at 5am to make it to the airport in time, and the film starts at 8pm – or 4am, UK-time. Plus, one of the films was The Good Shepherd.
The solution would be to catch 40 winks on the plane, but I’m too busy fretting that the tin tube catapulting through the sky is about to explode. Still, on both occasions I nodded off, I saw enough of the film to get the gist, and there’s often not a screening at these junkets at all because the movie’s not yet locked, so it’s hardly make or break. Besides, snores were reverberating around the screening room like the grunts of wounded bears long before my baby-warthog snuffling (or so I’ve been told) joined the medley.
Film festivals are the biggest challenge to the sleepy-eyed viewer, with the mix of long, hectic days, short nights, hastily gobbled fast food and three, four or even five back-to-back viewings leading to heavy eyelids.
SNOOZE FESTS
Once, at FrightFest, I conked out halfway through the deafening and relentlessly intense zombie movie The Horde, my eyes snapping open in the sharply inclined cinema to find my head thrown back and hundreds of people staring down into my wide-open gob. Another time, at Sundance, I watched Maggie Gyllenhaal give a fearless performance in addiction-and-rehabilitation drama Sherrybaby, only for the guy next to me to provide a polyphonic soundtrack of hacksaw snores and wet mutters during one especially harrowing sequence designed to play out in pin-drop silence. And this year, at Cannes, I was seated next to a renowned international critic as he missed at least an hour of Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. His tweet after, adding most heartily to the chorus of acclaim, was both amusing and bemusing.
And that’s the thing about dozing in movies: no one likes to admit to it, even if they’re not reviewing the film in question. My favourite thing is seeing someone pass out and then, on the way out, straight-facedly asking them what they thought. “I need to let it settle,” was one critic’s evasive response, while another proclaimed the mid-section to be “muddled” – hardly a surprise given that was the chunk he’d missed. And then there was my old publisher who conked out for all of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water and later labelled it, quite correctly, “forgettable.”
Jamie will return next issue… For more misadventures, follow: @jamie_graham9 on Twitter.
‘my eyes snapped open To find The audience staring into my Wide-open gob’