Posted on July 16, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Local movie critic Arch Campbell did a television spot about Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in this week’s “The Dark Knight” and he asked three local critics what we thought. You can see me here (briefly) with my friends Tim Gordon and Jay Carr. Click where it says “Arch at the Movies” and don’t blink! 
Posted on July 5, 2008 at 6:00 pm
The members of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists speak out on superhero movies. Are they just for boys?
MaryAnn Johanson, who’s carved her critic’s niche by taking superhero movies seriously, provides an introduction:
“Comic books and comic book movies ain’t just for boys anymore-if they ever were. The latest slew of superhero flicks, which began to come of age with 2000’s “X-Men,” have gotten increasingly sophisticated and now focus equally on the existential dramas of their heroes and the mythic arcs of their typically tragic stories as they do on slam-bang action…Today we’re seeing fantasy drama with an accent on the drama. Superhero movies are not longer lighthearted comedies dressed up in capes-as in 1978’s “Superman”-or expressions of over-the-top outrageousness-as in Jack Nicholson’s Joker in 1989’s “Batman,” for example. Even “Hancock,” which was marketed as a comedy, turns out to be more intensely dramatic than it is funny.
Lexi Feinberg comments, “I’d say they’re mythic. Adam Sandler movies represent the dumbing down of audiences much more than “Spider-Man” or “Batman”.”
The critics overwhelmingly chose “Iron Man” as the best recent superhero movie and hope for better superhero movies featuring women. The survey quotes my comment about Elektra and Catwoman: “they were made by people who don’t understand women, comics or movies.”
Posted on June 6, 2008 at 11:24 pm
My brief podcast review of “Sex and the City” appears on The Takeaway, a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, in collaboration with The BBC World Service, New York Times Radio and WGBH Boston.
Posted on April 30, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Work part-time
Nell Minow, co-founder of The Corporate Library, says sticking to an unconventional schedule made her successful.
NEW YORK (Fortune) — The single best piece of advice I ever got about my job was to work part-time.
It was 1983 and I was pregnant with my first child and getting ready to go on maternity leave from my job at the Office of Management and Budget, where I was a lawyer. I was talking with one of my law school classmates, Deborah Baughman, about going back to work and I was thinking maybe I could work mornings. She said, “No, don’t do that because the baby will be sleeping in the afternoons and people will be saying, ‘Can’t you just stay one more hour?'”
She said, ‘You’ll never get out of there. You’ll be much better off working Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s very doable, and you’ll never be away from either one for more than a day at a time.” And she was absolutely right.
It turned out to be a perfect arrangement for me and for the way that I work. Not only was it great for my family and for me because I could spend so much time with my children, but I could alternate right brain/left brain days. I had to be very productive because I could never say “I’ll do it tomorrow.” I had to get it done before I left on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then I really had a day to think out of another part of my brain and come back with a different perspective.
I’m fortunate that I have a husband who works full time at a big DC law firm, where he specializes in intellectual property law. That made it possible not just for me to work part time, it made it possible for me to be an entrepreneur. You have to have some kind of safety net if you¹re going to do that.
I assumed that I would be in career escrow for a while at what Gloria Steinem referred to as a “jobette,” something to keep my career on simmer until I was ready to go back to work full time. But the point I want to make is that I became much more successful in every possible way you can think about career success – in terms of visibility, getting a chance to write books, having an impact on the world, and even financially – because I was working three days a week. I am just not good at working five days a week. Whether it’s because I have ADD or something, I’m hugely more productive three days a week than I am five days a week.
My colleague, Bob Monks, and I have been in three businesses together. First there was ISS, where I was the fourth person hired and is now a multinational global behemoth. Then we spun off Lens Investment Management, a money management firm. We sold that in 2000, at the height of the market, which was great. And we spun off what had been our in-house research office in 2000, which became The Corporate Library.
The tough part is the internal adjustment. It’s up to you to be disciplined. It’s like the sirens in “The Odyssey.” The sirens are always going to be out there on the shores, saying, “Please come crash your boat against our rocks.” And it’s always going to be very, very seductive. I lost a client once because of the three days a week thing. I could tell at the time it was bad. I was competing against someone who was going to stay as long as it took. And I was very mindful that that was the tradeoff I was making.
Also, I ultimately became the president of Institutional Shareholder Services. And you can be the president of an unsuccessful company three days a week. But you can’t be the president of a successful company three days a week. And as ISS became more successful I knew I was either going to have to work five days a week or I was going to have to leave. And I did.
Fortunately I would always rather be on the early stages of an entrepreneurial venture. I get bored with it when it gets successful because then you’re an administrator, not a visionary anymore. So it was fine for me to leave. I like start-ups because they give you more flexibility.
I should mention that now that my children are grown up, I’m still working only three days a week at The Corporate Library. But I like working part-time so much that I have taken a second part-time job as a movie critic. I like writing a lot and I really like going to movies, so it was either be a movie critic or be an usher. You can read my reviews on Beliefnet.com under “Movie Mom.”
The number one qualification for being a movie critic is you have to have an endless tolerance for bad movies because most of them are terrible. Fortunately it doesn’t bother me. I go to a lot of bad movies. I’ve been to five Pokemon movies and more buddy cop movies than anyone should have to see.
More seriously, I will say that there’s a through line in my jobs. I’m really, really interested in why things don’t work. And that just endlessly fascinates me. If I’m seeing a bad movie I want to figure out why it’s bad. Or if I see a corporation that falls apart, I want to know why it fell apart. You could sort of say it’s systems analysis. — Interviewed by David Stires
Posted on March 31, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Cheryl Sherry’s column in the Appleton Post-Crescent discusses a new survey showing that PG movies with strong language sell fewer tickets than those with other kinds of parental concerns like violence or sex.
“The reality is that profanity, within PG, is the big demarcation between box office winner and box office loser,” research and marketing director Dan O’Toole told attendees at ShoWest, a conference where studios unveil upcoming movie lineups. “Parents are choosing PG films for their kids that have very, very low levels of profanity. We’re talking one-third the level of the average PG film,” he said.
Sherry called me for comment, and her column describes my background and approach and some of my thoughts on the rating system:
Minow, who has testified before the Federal Trade Commission on the MPAA’s rating system, said “overwhelmingly its biggest failing is they will give material a pass in a comedy they’d give a much higher rating to in a drama. So you have these movies like the Austin Powers movies getting a PG-13 rating, which have really, really raunchy humor. … Just because the MPAA is ratcheting down it’s system, doesn’t mean I have to follow suit.”
PG-13 has become the no-man’s land of the rating system, added. “Many parents will shrug their shoulders and say, my 10-year-old is bright and can handle a PG-13. … But you do not know what you are getting. There can be PG-13s that are almost PG and there can be PG-13s that should be Rs.”
