Name: Ella Taylor
Publication: LA Weekly and Village Voice
Age: That would be telling.
Hometown: Los Angeles
Years reviewing film: 19
Like her fellow alt-weekly brethren, LA Weekly scribe Ella Taylor infuses prose with a touch of sass, delivering the well-read skinny on films great and small with dexterity and, oftentimes, the patience of a saint. Patience, because how else would a working critic for one of the largest metropolitan weeklies find herself reviewing the latest from French New Wave auteur Jacques Rivette and the Hannah Montana concert movie in the span of a month? But Taylor does it, and does it with style — and with the most extensive vocabulary of any working critic around (“One hundred and fifty years of British state education will do that,” she quips).
To wit, the Israel-born, London-bred scribe, who graciously tells us she writes for the “informed general reader,” puts as much stock in her audience’s intelligence as they have in her. In a milieu of increasingly cookie cutter film reviews, hers stand out as much for their observations on cinematic value as the language in which she drolly shares them; if one were to try to fill the culture void left by the late Pauline Kael, it might not be a stretch to glimpse in Taylor’s direction.
And to think, for this we owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Simmons, of all people. A one-time mass media professor at the University of Washington, Taylor embarked on her writing career as a television critic by penning a column on the poofy-haired fitness guru’s talk show; after subsequent gigs at the Boston Phoenix and Seattle Weekly, she now finds herself a staff writer for the LA Weekly and its sister publication, The Village Voice. Read on for more with Ella Taylor.
Why and how did you become a critic?
Ella Taylor: I was an uncomfortable academic sociologist who preferred journalistic to academic writing. I began writing television criticism for the Boston Phoenix and the Village Voice, then came to LA Weekly as film editor and film critic, which I much preferred to television.
Fill in the blank: “If I wasn’t a professional film critic, I’d be…:”
ET: In a perfect world, I’d sit in a bay window wearing white muslin and write piercing apercus about the street below. The literary world would fall at my feet.
What is your favorite film?
ET: Among many, Renoir’s Rules of the Game.
Who is your favorite director?
ET: Don’t have one.
What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen?
ET: Many candidates, but in recent memory — The Cat in the Hat, Sin City.
What kind of reader do you write for?
ET: The informed general reader.
What other film critics/bloggers/entertainment journalists do you read regularly?
ET: Mostly critics who began in the alternative press and either stayed there or went mainstream. Among them J. Hoberman, Jim Ridley, Manohla Dargis, and my colleague Scott Foundas. Also A.0. Scott and the New Yorker guys, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly, John Patterson in the Guardian. Blogs: Greencine Daily, the IFC blog, Movie City News.
What does a film need to achieve to earn a perfect rating from Ella Taylor?
ET: The only way I can answer this is to say that I have never yet loved a film purely for its formal wizardry. It has also to expand my vision of the world.
What is the state of current film criticism?
ET: The same as the state of print journalism: going, going, not quite gone.
What are the implications of the continuing consolidation of the print medium?
ET: See above, but I think there are great (and terrible) bloggers out there, just as there are great (and terrible) print critics.
What’s been the most memorable moment of your career?
ET: When a male colleague backed me up against a wall and threatened me after I waxed less than rapturous about a Theo Angelopoulos film.
What is the best thing about being a critic?
ET: Free movies, and the regular opportunity to carp.
What word or phrase do you over-use?
ET: Every adjective known to man.
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
ET: A shoe saleswoman. I love the smell of leather.
What is your most common concession stand purchase?
ET: Never buy from those outrageously overpriced scam artists, if I can help it. They also make me eat too much.
What has been your most bizarre movie-going experience?
ET: Watching West Side Story in a London movie theater when it first came out. Every time Richard Beymer came onscreen, the teenagers in the row in front of me threw their hair upwards and shrieked. I had to come back and see it again.
Read more of Ella Taylor’s film critiques at the LA Weekly website.
