This week’s Meet a Critic brings you a chat with Lisa Kennedy — vintage film reader, self-deprecating movie aficionado, and film critic for the Denver Post.
RT met Lisa Kennedy at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, where she was covering films like Into the Wild and Persepolis. The homegrown sports fan — a Broncos supporter, naturally — spent 25 years outside of Denver before returning four years ago to take up her…post…at the Post. Returning to the Mile-High city “felt like one of those soap opera characters that has amnesia and then comes back, much older, strange as it seems,” but Kennedy has carved out a place in the newspaper’s movie section with her well-read, thoughtful musings on film.
Not one for self-importance, Kennedy approaches movies with the same warmth that she shares in conversation — a fondness for the goodhearted, and an affinity for Golden Age Hollywood classics like The Wizard of Oz, which remains her favorite film. Read on for more discussion with Lisa Kennedy on topics including the remarkable irreverence of outlets like the Village Voice, expanding readers’ movie-watching horizons, and the accounting for personal taste (or lack thereof).
How long have you been a critic?
Lisa Kennedy: Four years. Before that I was freelancing in Phoenix, but before that I was at US Magazine, and was at Out Magazine, and was at the Village Voice where I edited the film section for a few years…which is probably how I got my gig. Those writers thought highly enough of me; people thought I knew something about film!
I see you’re also very self-deprecating…
LK: I can be, about this thing in particular at some times. [Smiles] Because it’s so overwhelming, what people know and what you can catch up with in terms of the history of films. It’s ok to be modest about what you know and what you don’t. I know my tastes, a little bit more every day, and I know that I am smart about some things…I know that I don’t have a tremendous amount of film studies history, and that’s just one of those things. It’s not deprecating, it’s like going, it’s ok. That’s one of my gaps. And I think it’s an ok gap.
I think that’s a valuable thing to understand; there’s no way one critic or one person can know everything about film.
LK: Well at Rotten Tomatoes, you absolutely know there are people who just know scads about movies that disagree radically about the quality of a movie. And I love that! I loved having a section when I was an editor (of the film section at the Village Voice) where there were four people that I admired tremendously, that I enjoyed reading, and often they didn’t agree. And that says something about what movies are for us.
I like the Village Voice because their writers seem freer to be more irreverent than many others. Why do you think that is?
LK: I think they put the “alternative” in alternative newspapers. There was a sense that you could celebrate transgressive cinema, you could celebrate underground cinema, you could celebrate indies before we started to talk about them in relation to Sundance, and to mid-level [studios].
Probably the reason they’re irreverent is because they’re not trying to guess what their readers’ tastes are. I think it’s a dangerous thing to do that, and it’s a sort of normal thing to do that with magazines and newspapers. But I think it’s kind of dangerous, and it does a disservice to their readers as well; to assume that you understand, you almost know what they are, and what their tastes are, so they can’t be surprised, and they can’t have discovery. They can’t feel those things that we get to feel.
You mean some publications might try to predict their readers’ preference instead of just giving a critic’s own personal take on a movie?
LK: Well, it’s such a trick, because your own personal taste has to be involved. It has to sort of encompass more than whatever your wacky taste is. Though I always say I don’t really have taste, it’s very broad. [Laughing] Some people have taste; I have something else.
So what are your favorite movies?
LK: Well, I don’t think this is embarrassing, but it probably sounds less interesting than I feel it is…The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie. It just is, and it has always been. Whenever I see it I’m still delighted, I still think it’s an interesting story, I think that I can read in all kinds of different modern, contemporary parables in it. I just love it. And what are those damn monkeys? Those monkeys still freak me out!
Have you seen Return to Oz? The monkeys are even freakier — they’re on roller skates, on all fours.
LK: That’s not right. That’s not right! It’s enough that they were stomping on Scarecrow…
Probably because I saw them when I was young on television so much, because there wasn’t cable, and there weren’t DVDs and all this stuff — I love ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s movies. I know that I really dig that sort of studio system movie, and I think they’re kind of amazing and I’m always touched by them. I have a partner, she looks at them…she was watching the Maltese Falcon, and she’s just like, “I can’t watch this, this is ridiculous!” And — besides being sacrilege! — there’s something so fascinating about the language you grew up with, or the language that you took to at a young age, so it doesn’t shock you. “What do you mean? I find great emotion in this! This is really great cinema!” It looks like bad theater to her, it’s so stilted, the acting, and the clutches, and all those things that we love about it.
I know what you mean — I grew up watching AMC all the time, but all my friends are afraid of watching…
LK: A black and white movie! They’re scared! They think they’re going to be bored, I think it’s fascinating. They’re so terrified they’re going to be bored — you know how that is sometimes, ’cause you’ve seen movies at a festival, going, “I don’t want to see it! I have to see it, but I don’t want to see it because I don’t want to be bored!” And then it surprises you. But people are terrified of black and white movies. It’s like, that and subtitles — “Don’t make me read!”
But half of the time, when you actually make your friends watch something, they’re like…”That was good!”
LK: I know, you’ve got to start them off on the easy stuff, like screwball comedies or something. Because they’re fun, they’re snappy and goofy. Hopefully they take to it. And we have to push them.
