MALTIN HAS STRONG OPINION ON MODERN FILM CRITICISM
Veteran reviewer welcomes new ideas and voices, but believes knowledge may be lacking
It shouldn’t be too surprising that Jessie Maltin, daughter of iconic film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, would get into the family business.
If she is anything like her father, a passion for cinema would have come fairly early on. After all, Leonard Maltin was in his teens when he first turned his nascent love of film into a career by producing a fanzine out of his New Jersey home.
He now runs a podcast with his daughter called Maltin on Film, which describes them both as “ultimate movie fans.” Both are scheduled to come to the Calgary International Film Festival Sept. 29 as part of its Behind the Screen series.
So when did Maltin first realize his daughter shared his passion?
“What’s funny about it is — I’m going to try and phrase this properly — she does not consider herself a film buff and certainly not a film critic,” says Maltin, in an interview with Postmedia from his home in Los Angeles. “But she has grown up around it and she has kind of soaked it in by osmosis, you might say. She’s very knowledgeable. She’s very opinionated. I always say, ‘You want to meet the real critic in the family, talk to my daughter.’ And we have a wonderful time engaging in conversations
with interesting people on my podcast.”
This fits nicely into the “everyone’s a critic” theme the Maltins are scheduled to address in Calgary. They will be discussing how the role of a film critic has changed thanks to the internet and ubiquitous nature of social media.
Who is a film critic? Who isn’t a film critic? Who gets to decide? Does every opinion have equal weight?
It’s clearly something Maltin, one of the world’s highest-profile authorities on film — thanks to his long stint on Entertainment Tonight and 45-year run publishing the influential Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide — has given much thought to.
“The crux of it is that now everybody is a critic,” he says. “‘Read my blog, read my Facebook post, read my Twitter.’ Everybody is a critic. There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s some people who are very savvy and some of them (are) good writers as well. But how do we know that? Well, you have to actually dive in and read a bunch of these people before you get an opinion of whether they are worth reading on a regular basis, or listening to, or watching.
“On the one hand, I applaud the democratization of communications online and it should be a celebratory moment. But, it’s not so much for a working professional like myself.”
Of course, describing Maltin as a “working professional” hardly does justice to his profile and contributions to film criticism. Alongside Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel and only a handful of others, he reached celebrity status as a critic. Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of classic Hollywood and enthusiastic interviewing style, he became a 30-year favourite on Entertainment Tonight. He’s been namechecked in everything from The Simpsons to South Park and The Sopranos. His movie guides, which began life in 1969, became mustread favourites for film buffs and industry insiders alike.
But Maltin announced in 2014 that his movie guide would cease publication, citing dwindling sales. He told Deadline Hollywood that “an entire generation has been raised to acquire all their information online from their mobile devices or computers. These are not the likely customers for a physical paperback reference book.”
He began Maltin on Film as a podcast with his daughter back in 2014, which sees them interviewing movie stars and directors and offering film reviews. The two Maltins are certainly not above having fun with a new generation of film buffs. At Comic-Con in San Diego, they hosted a panel playfully called “You’re Wrong, Leonard Maltin!” that invited the assembled popculture geeks to challenge his reviews of favourites such as 2008’s the Dark Knight and this summer’s Deadpool 2.
“The passion is absolutely there,” says Maltin about the Comic-Con crowd and modern film buffs. “What I’m not sure is there to the same degree is the knowledge of what has come before. I think without a knowledge of film history you have no business writing about current film. There’s no context.”
While Maltin’s formidable expertise and love of film history can certainly give him a reputation for being overly nostalgic for Hollywood’s golden years, he continues to review and admire new films. As for recent favourites, he points to John Krasinski’s chilling apocalyptic thriller A Quiet Place, Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, the Marvel sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp and, in particular, Armando Iannucci’s very funny 2017 political satire The Death of Stalin.
“What a great film,” Maltin says. “Of course, comedy doesn’t get much respect come awards time. So I fear it may be overlooked. But it’s awfully good. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to do that as opposed to a drama, let them try and see how far they get.”
He also continues to read film reviews from peers, naming veteran Variety and Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy and current critics for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan and Justin Chang, as among those he admires. “I don’t always agree with either of them, but I enjoy reading them,” he says. “If I am reading a review, I’m not reading it for the opinion. I’m not using it as a consumer guide. I’m usually reading it after I’ve seen the movie and I’m looking for something that will enhance my understanding of the film or illuminate something.”
I think without a knowledge of film history you have no business writing about current film. There’s no context.