Filmspotting, the Chicago-born podcast and public radio show, celebrating its 20th year this weekend with its own Filmspotting Fest at the Music Box and Siskel Film Center, is doing the Lord’s work. It’s been trying to make film criticism relatable again.
This, of course, is at a moment when Hollywood is desperate to make the theatrical moviegoing experience itself relatable again to a distracted public. The Filmspotting approach, polite, at times self-consciously thoughtful, amenable to Top Five lists and categorizing of all sorts, eager (gasp) to admit gaps in knowledge, makes literal that old saying, used by Roger Ebert and Don Draper alike: When a man walks into a room, he brings his whole life with him.
Take their weekly Movie Marathon segment. Filmspotting hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen pick a genre or filmmaker (or a filmmaking sub-subgenre) and, rather than assume you’ve already seen everything that’s been worth seeing since the 1910s, rather than passing along a filmgoing canon as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, they select a handful of movies they haven’t seen, they watch them, they report back on what they thought, then present their Oscar-like awards: 1970s sci-fi films get “Damn Dirty Apes,” Westerns get “Dukes,” et cetera.
In its own modest way, it’s a radical approach to criticism: Curiosity, paired with a healthy humility, as the path to a fresh conversation.
“We like to think the entire format (of the show) was built somewhat on how we deal with our inadequacies and blind spots,” said producer Sam Van Hallgren, who created Filmspotting with Kempenaar, the former vice president of marketing and content for the Chicago Blackhawks. “We didn’t want things to get too defensive — or defensive at all.”
“This show was always going to be about our discoveries, hoping that opened up new ideas,” said Kempenaar. “Really, we started doing this, first and foremost, to learn.”
If you know a film critic — or just have an amateur critic in your life who sucks the air out of the room — you know they are loath to not know something. Or, worse, sound unsure of how they feel. If I sound a little defensive myself, it’s because I am a survivor of film criticism. Yes, I, too, was a film critic. For about eight years. It was an invigorating job, demanding creativity, but as a lifestyle, it was also suffocating, grueling and thick with conformity. It was like a profession made up of 100 full-time writers who share four original ideas and a single spine. One of the problems with being a film critic was being among film critics, and trust me, as cushy as the job might sound, you do not want that.
Starting Filmspotting Fest with filmmaker Rian Johnson then is inspired.
Van Hallgren said he was a natural choice: Johnson’s debut, “Brick,” made a splash just as Filmspotting was taking off and Johnson became a friend of the show, “a fan of film criticism itself and conversation and open to having those talks in what was then a new medium.” The thing is, as Van Hallgren added, “Rian also came of age as a filmmaker during the rise of fan domination, then navigated it with as much charm as anyone.”
Johnson joins the festival on Friday night for a post-screening discussion of “Brick,” but really, Johnson, who is best known for his breezy “Knives Out” series, also made “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” easily the most original and provocative “Star Wars” film since “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980. At least that’s my opinion. Reaction among “Star Wars” fans split so violently (and toxically, and ideologically) over the movie, the controversy seemed to embody everything exhausting, ignorant and empty about online film criticism. Social media meant the critic population exploded tenfold, and every one of those amateur critics seemed to have an air-tight, definitive opinion about Johnson.
The rest of Filmspotting Fest is more moderately provocative, focused on films that generated the best conversations on the podcast: Saturday at Siskel, there’s the 1955 Indian classic “Pather Panchali” (with post-film chat from Slate’s Dana Stevens); Sean Baker’s “Tangerine” (with discussion led by Alison Willmore of Vulture); the Michael Shannon breakthrough “Take Shelter” (with ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer); the underrated “Columbus” (featuring a talk with South Korean filmmaker Kogonada). The festival concludes Sunday morning with Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” at the Music Box (with critic Scott Tobias).
Filmspotting began somewhat traditionally, as words in a movie blog. When Kempenaar and Van Hallgren ditched that for podcasting, “the technology was so new that we had only heard about it like two weeks before recorded that first show,” Kempenaar said.
The medium, of course, became the message.
“Film criticism was always fundamentally subjective,” Kempenaar said. “It was about unpacking a personal reaction, but when that means going right into iPods and people’s heads, it seems natural to deconstruct the barrier and go for something more intimate.”
Larsen, who began his life as a film critic at Sun-Times Media, joined the show after he was first a fan. “Having come from traditional print media as a critic, my interaction was largely limited to the occasional letter to the editor. Social media certainly began to change that for me, but even that’s nothing like the personal connections that are part of Filmspotting.” He described what they’ve created as closer to a “communal project.”
Besides, Larsen asked, “Who knows what film criticism is now? I guess good criticism is still essentially the same — informed, nuanced, insightful wrestling with a work of art through a particular personal lens — but it’s splintered into endless forms.” YouTube critics who chop film history into social commentary; TikTok critics who speak directly to viewers, their lips inches from their camera lens. The bar for inclusion is certainly lower.
“But I am hesitant to criticize others who bypass gatekeepers,” Kempenaar said. “Since that’s what we did, too. At the end of the day, week after week, you earn your credibility.”
Filmspotting Fest will screen a series of films at the Music Box (3733 N. Southport Ave.) and the Siskel Film Center (164 N. State St.), Friday through Sunday. Schedule of times and movies at filmspotting.net
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
