The School Of Mom
May 12, 2005

On occasion, I've been invited to corrupt the minds of our youth by speaking to college film classes or at grade school assemblies about my job. Invariably at these functions one question arises. (Well, two questions actually, the runner-up being: Why don't movie critics like any movies? There's no answer to this one, kids, it's just the curmudgeon factor.)

But the primary question at these events is: How do you become a movie critic? Everybody wants to know how they can get paid to go to the movies. Or maybe it's the fantasy of free popcorn or eBay-worthy press kits and T-shirts (although those have pretty much gone the way of the Dodo, now that everything's digital, and the economy is heading for Tierra del Fuego).

Everyone also assumes there's some Higher Authority that confers the right to review movies on a person, some graduate level MMC program (Master of Movie Criticism). For all I know, there may be such programs somewhere, maybe UCLA. (Hey, I have a degree in Aesthetic Studies from UCSC—a program so long discontinued, I keep expecting them to recall my diploma like a bad Pinto—so you can get a degree in anything.) I've even been asked how one becomes "certified" to review films. Nobody I know is "certified" for this job. Certifiable, maybe.

Becoming a film critic was never a career plan of mine; I loved to write, and a stringer job opened up writing film reviews for this paper. Learning the craft of movie criticism has been strictly on-the-job training for me. But I would never have lasted this long if not for the one component essential for anyone in this line of work: I love movies. And in this discipline I've had the best teacher possible—my mother.

Television was a big deal in the '60s when I was growing up. My family absorbed its share of sitcoms, dramas, and commercial jingles, especially when my dad worked nights and my mom and brothers and I would gather round the great flickering orb. But in those pre-video/DVD days, TV was also the primary source for old movies. And my mom has loved movies since the tender age of 11, when she first saw an incandescent Katharine Hepburn onscreen in her first film, A Bill Of Divorcement. That was it for Mom, not only becoming a lifelong Hepburn devotee, but a lifelong movie fan as well.

When I was growing up, my happiest memories are the times I spent watching movies on TV with my mom. On Saturday mornings, when most mothers were supposed to be off waxing their kitchen linoleum, Mom and I were plotzed on the couch together watching horror movies. We devoured anything with Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi, but our favorite was The Brain That Wouldn't Die (a movie so cheap, it misidentifies itself as The Head That Wouldn't Die on the end credits, and nobody noticed). We laughed ourselves silly over the preposterous plot and portentous dialogue—most of it delivered by a character pausing dramatically on the laboratory steps. "They're coming to the steps," my mom would chortle. "They're going to say some deathless line!"

Saturday nights, my mom made popcorn (the old-fashioned way— sizzling in oil), and we watched The Fabulous 52, a weekly series of movie classics beginning at 11:15, right after the late news. The offerings were eclectic, and we watched them all. Over the years, we tuned in any televised movie package we could find. The Million Dollar Movie came on five evenings a week in syndication. MGM Classics aired on Sunday afternoons, where we absorbed not only the oeuvre of Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Clark Gable, but by then less fashionable stars like Greer Garson, Robert Donat, and Mom's personal favorite, Howard Keel. "A foine broth of a boy!" she called him, reverting to the idiom of one of her McAfee ancestors.

For a while, there was a weekly series of subtitled foreign film classics, where I discovered a world beyond Hollywood, powerfully moving films like Three Women and Grand Illusion. On the other hand, we were suckers for cheesy Italian gladiator movies on a Saturday night program hosted by a bicep-rippling beach boy called David the Gladiator. The quality of the films mattered less than the conviviality of watching them together. If they were on celluloid, and popcorn was involved, we were so there.

When Mom could still travel to Santa Cruz every summer, I would take her to whatever movies I was reviewing. Some choices were more felicitous than others: she loved a revival of Vertigo, and we both adored the cartoon The Iron Giant, but she didn't think much of the '70s glam-rock musical Velvet Goldmine. These days she does her movie-viewing back on the couch, from her substantial collection of videos. (Art Boy spent years taping obscure Hepburn films off cable TV to complete her collection.) She can't get out to the movie any more (especially since all the old neighborhood movie houses of my youth have been replaced by distant mall multiplexes), but we still gossip about the Oscars every year.

How did I get to be a movie critic? With the best education possible, a lifelong tutorial at the School of Mom.