Critics brave wrath of, well, the critics
Writers go behind lens at this year’s TIFF
Critics — food critics, art critics, book critics, music critics but mostly, for the sake of this article, film critics — are often criticized for passing judgment without creating something of their own.
What have you ever cooked/ painted/written/composed, says the wounded artist.
At the Toronto International Film Festival this year are several critics who have jumped over the velvet ropes and into the filmmaking fray with their own shorts or features.
The most visible is Brian D. Johnson, until recently a critic for Maclean’s magazine and still president of the Toronto Film Critics Association.
His feature documentary, Al Purdy Was Here, looks at the life of an under-appreciated Canadian poet.
Purdy died in 2000 and is commemorated by a bronze statue in Toronto.
“He’s a great poet, but he’s also a great character with a great story,” says Johnson.
The film started to take shape when Johnson’s wife, Marni Jackson, participated in a benefit to save the poet’s dilapidated A-frame home on Roblin Lake in Ontario.
The restoration was originally meant to be the thrust of the doc, but “Al kind of gradually took over the film.”
Johnson previously directed two short films, and his montages of nominees for the annual Toronto critics’ awards are legendary.
But a feature was a different beast.
“This is the most difficult and rewarding project that I’ve ever undertaken,” says the man who has published five books, including a 2001 history of TIFF.
As film editor at the nowdefunct Montreal Mirror weekly from 2005 to 2011, Mark Slutsky says the hundreds of films he watched provided an education in the medium.
“Most critics really do want to enjoy the film they’re seeing,” he says. “I walked in optimistic [and] hopeful, even with a movie that I thought I was going to hate. And I had wonderful surprises.”
Case in point: MacGruber! “One of the funniest movies of the last 15 years,” he says, a blurb worthy of putting on the poster. “I was so happy and surprised; that was a lesson for me.”
Slutsky is at TIFF with Never Happened, an eight-minute short with a science-fiction edge and the structure of a perfectly timed joke.
It’s the second time he’s been to TIFF with a short film — the last was 2011’s Sorry, Rabbi — but he’s always found a way to come back every year since his critic days, whether by participating in a panel discussion or a Pitch This session for new filmmakers.
“I never quite broke that habit of sitting down a week in advance and planning out my schedule like it was a game of Tetris, and trying to fit everything in,” he says.
“It’s good for critics to know what goes into making a film,” he allows. “The more you understand, the better a critic you are. But I don’t think anyone gets a pass, and I certainly wouldn’t expect one.”
Slutsky is working to turn one of his earlier shorts, The Decelerators, into a feature.
He’s also co-writing a screenplay with a friend, about growing up a Jehovah’s Witness in smalltown Alberta.
Katherine Monk may be familiar to readers as a longtime critic in Postmedia newspapers.
The Vancouver-based journalist has turned her talents to Rock the Box, a 10-minute short about DJ Rhiannon Rozier and her unorthodox methods of getting noticed in the overwhelmingly male club scene.
“Originally it was going to be a larger survey piece,” she says of the NFB-funded project, and although she’s happy with the result, she admits: “I would love to turn this into a longer piece.”
Monk has been a professional critic for almost 20 years, a vocation she continues on the website Ex-Press.ca, which she founded with fellow former Postmedia critic Jay Stone.
She started in the business with a film degree, “so I kind of started, as a critic, looking at [films] more like a filmmaker. I thought that helped me have a slightly different take.”
But she notes: “Somewhere in the middle of that life as a critic, I lost the immediacy of the process. I lost my empathy for the craft at some level. I don’t know if I gave every film the deepest consideration.”
Making her own film pulled her back to her earlier style. “I’m being far more benevolent now than I would have before,” she says, adding quickly: “I don’t feel that anyone’s getting a free ride. There’s always this fear that you’re going to be a soft critic. [But] my focus now is feeling the film again, feeling it the way a filmmaker feels a film.”