Interview With Film Blogger James Story, Creator Of The Popular Academy Award VS Rotten Tomatoes Infographic
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THE BEST STORY YOU'LL READ TODAY:
TALKING MOVIES WITH FILM BLOGGER JAMES STORY
TALKING MOVIES WITH FILM BLOGGER JAMES STORY
Deep Focus Film Studies editor Bryn V. Young-Roberts talks with Everyone Loves Movies blogger James Story about keeping a blog, developing a great podcast format, challenges in the year ahead, films he values, gripes with current attitudes toward CGI and advice for film students. Along the way we discuss the Halloween franchise, Courtroom Dramas, 1970s Hollywood, Frost/Nixon, (500) Days of Summer, Martin and John Michael McDonagh, Sergio Leone, Edgar Wright and how even bad movies have their place in film history. "I wanted my reviews to have a scrapbook quality to them"
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Who Should Have Won Best Picture? The Academy VS Rotten Tomatoes
Those of you with an interest in the Academy Awards are likely to have recently seen this fascinating infographic listing every year’s Best Picture winner since the very dawn of the Oscars next to the ratings of movies from the same era on Rotten Tomatoes. Seeing how they compare, the conclusions show that the Academy only gets it right about a quarter of the time. The visual gained a lot of online traction and has been shared by the likes of Kermode & Mayo, The Escapist, Inverse, BGR, and even Yahoo News.
A former Leeds University film student, the piece was composed by film enthusiast James Story of cine website Everyone Loves Movies. We tracked him down and got to know a little more about the man who’s creation took the internet by storm. |
The content on your site ELM (aka Everyone Loves Movies) is not your average film opinion column. How did it all come about?
My main motivation for starting the blog was to get myself writing more often. I had stopped writing unpaid work for entertainment websites when I began a job in digital marketing and noticed that I was developing my writing skills at work, but not doing any writing in my spare time. I saw a blog as an opportunity to get back into the swing of things. Writing for other people’s websites gave me some valuable skills, but I couldn’t always write exactly what I wanted. In terms of goals for the site, it was primarily to encourage me to watch a wider variety of films. I wanted to have fun with the movies I watched, so started thinking about them in terms of features I could write or podcasts I could make about certain topics. Once I found something that interested me, I’d watch a range of films that could be used in the content, and found myself finally watching movies I’d always told myself I’d ‘eventually get around to’. From the start I didn’t want to do standard reviews. I always wanted to try and keep reviews as short as possible and so this turned into one of the hard rules for the blog - Reviews can only be up to 100 words long. It’s challenging, but I find you can still say a lot about the successes and failures of a movie in that space. I like to talk about what a movie tries to do, or what makes it worthwhile or interesting. In addition to this I also wanted my reviews to have a scrapbook quality to them, with everything coming together to create a screenshot of its place in cinema as a whole. "My reviews can only be 100 words long"
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A big part of your site’s appeal is the podcast. The show always manages to deliver well-informed opinions but has such a relaxed tone, was that always its intended direction?
Absolutely. I’m a massive fan of film, but I’m certainly no expert so I thought it would be great to reflect this in the style of my podcasts. They’re there for real discussion, rather than an essay-like dictation about a certain topic. In planning an episode I decide on a subject and note down a few areas I definitely want to hit on, but I don’t tell my co-host Ben anything prior to pressing record. I have a few opinions worked out ready for when I discuss a topic, but Ben’s reaction to each question is completely natural, which helps make all of our episodes feel really genuine. |
Those of us regularly following your blog will have seen you finish off your DVD collection and marathon through several genres of movies all in the name of film writing. What challenges can we expect to see you try to complete in the future?
I’d love to try and watch, in close succession, some franchises I haven’t even started yet. Big ones, like Halloween or Friday the 13th. It would be great to watch all of their instalments so close together so that I can see how I feel about each franchise’s changes and different styles. With many of them, the first film has a very low-budget, ‘making the best movie we can’ feel to them, and they end up with modern day reboots that have very different styles. And of course along the way a franchise’s tropes are deployed differently by its various directors. There are 10 Halloween movies spanning over 30 years. That’s a lot of room to experiment with! |
"The column on the left is the list of every film the Academy awarded a Best Picture Oscar to in the 1970s. The right column shows the most popular movie of each year according to website Rotten Tomatoes. According to this data the Academy 'got it right' only 4 of the 10 years in this decade" |
Is there any particular genre you favour?
Courtroom dramas and crime movies have become firm favourites thanks to their tendency for really strong dialogue. There’s always more information about a case, or a suspect, or the legality of a situation to be discussed while the characters on screen are reacting or exploring the space of a scene. Interrogation scenes can seem limiting due to their small space, lack of background detail and focus limited to pretty much just two or three characters talking around a table, but they’re always essential to the movie. Someone’s story is being tested and they’re trying to hide their reaction, or a cop is outsmarted when a suspect wriggles away on a technicality. So little dialogue is wasted in these kind of movies, and I’m a sucker for the ‘big important speech’ courtroom dramas beg close to their final moments. In terms of an era that stands out for me, it definitely has to be Hollywood of the 1970s. It’s where blockbusters were born, but also where the American movie industry really started tackling and showcasing the more difficult subject matters. The 1960s were dominated by historical epics and musicals, these big, sweeping productions meant to blow audiences away with their scale. I still love learning how Hollywood, in their big budget films, basically started doing everything it used to shy away from. Heroes became troubled and their victories were often hollow, or tarnished. Everything had something just a little unsettling about it, and it’s fantastic. |
Are there any films you believe are worthy of more recognition than they have received?
I don’t have many ‘undiscovered gems’ in my viewing history, but I certainly think Frost/Nixon is a powerhouse of a movie. I don’t often hear people bring it up in conversation but I think it’s bloody terrific. Sometimes by the sharpness of the dialogue and the chemistry of the characters you can tell which films have been adapted from the stage and Michael Sheen with Frank Langella is just a mesmerising combination. I also think (500) Days of Summer is a movie everyone should see at some point in their life. It tries out a lot of different techniques (animation, varied aspect ratio, non-linear storytelling etc.) and they work together brilliantly. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s watched it who doesn’t have a strong opinion about one of the main characters. That tells me it’s engaging to just about everyone, so that’s a film I try to push on people a little more than others.
I don’t have many ‘undiscovered gems’ in my viewing history, but I certainly think Frost/Nixon is a powerhouse of a movie. I don’t often hear people bring it up in conversation but I think it’s bloody terrific. Sometimes by the sharpness of the dialogue and the chemistry of the characters you can tell which films have been adapted from the stage and Michael Sheen with Frank Langella is just a mesmerising combination. I also think (500) Days of Summer is a movie everyone should see at some point in their life. It tries out a lot of different techniques (animation, varied aspect ratio, non-linear storytelling etc.) and they work together brilliantly. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s watched it who doesn’t have a strong opinion about one of the main characters. That tells me it’s engaging to just about everyone, so that’s a film I try to push on people a little more than others.
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Do you have any favourite film-makers?
Martin and John Michael McDonagh are two directors that I’m sold on straight away when I hear their names. Seven Psychopaths and Calvary are extremely high on my personal ranks and I can’t wait to see what they both create next. The same goes for Edgar Wright, because he executes visual comedy brilliantly and his fight scenes have a great energy to them with respect to how the camera moves. Historically, I love that Sergio Leone was able to leave such a great mark in the Western genre with only a few films. The Dollars Trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West all have naturally similar visual styles, yet tonally they’re all so different. I’ve also recently been delving more into Frank Capra’s filmography, I think he might have done the ‘feel good’ story better than just about anyone. |
"The backlash people seem to have ramped up against CGI really bothers me"
Is there anything about the current state of cinema that bothers you?
Honestly, the backlash people seem to have ramped up against CGI really bothers me. I have read a lot online about how practical effects are supposedly so much better, and how the Star Wars prequels lack any real physicality to them or how the remake of The Thing got butchered by the studio and it honestly just tires me out. Some of the complaints are valid, but people don’t really hate CGI, they just hate bad CGI. And so they should, it’s just that they forget about the CGI effects when they actually work because when they’re good you don’t notice them.
Also, people who complain about a lack of originality in Hollywood are missing the fact that Hollywood has always, always, always adapted other material for its movies. I honestly don’t care how many movies I watch a year that are sequels, I just care if they’re any good.
Honestly, the backlash people seem to have ramped up against CGI really bothers me. I have read a lot online about how practical effects are supposedly so much better, and how the Star Wars prequels lack any real physicality to them or how the remake of The Thing got butchered by the studio and it honestly just tires me out. Some of the complaints are valid, but people don’t really hate CGI, they just hate bad CGI. And so they should, it’s just that they forget about the CGI effects when they actually work because when they’re good you don’t notice them.
Also, people who complain about a lack of originality in Hollywood are missing the fact that Hollywood has always, always, always adapted other material for its movies. I honestly don’t care how many movies I watch a year that are sequels, I just care if they’re any good.
What has been one of your favourite aspects of keeping the blog?
I think I keep everything I post on the site very personal. ‘One man’s quest to enjoy movies as much as possible’ is the aim, and I think that my posts always have a great deal of care in them. I try not to think too hard about my website in terms of delivering posts on a set schedule, or hitting current topics because I know that I’m very bad at making personal deadlines. You can hear me on early podcasts for the site talking about how I’d have a new episode every fortnight. That was completely unrealistic! Sometimes I couldn’t think of a good topic, or I was too busy to record, or sometimes I flat out didn’t think what I had to say was very interesting. I write what I can when the mood strikes me and I try to think of ELM as a whole, rather than ‘I haven’t posted something in a while, better think of something fast’. It means I post less frequently, but I definitely think that it means the quality of my posts is consistently high. Do you have any advice for students currently studying film? Here’s one tip for how you approach movies in general and one for the work you have to do: |
1. Don’t forget the most important aspect of a film, and that’s simply if you enjoy it. You can enjoy it stylistically, or appreciate it historically, or love the story it tells. Whatever it takes, try to enjoy everything as much as you can because otherwise films start to feel hollow. Never feel the need to like certain films and look down on others because of someone else’s opinion of them. Because let me tell you, you’re going to watch A LOT of movies, and you aren't going to like all of them. 2. Never, ever think that a movie you don’t enjoy is not worth using in an essay. Almost any film can be used in one essay or another. Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is garbage, I have no qualms about saying that, but like it or not it is still an example of apocalyptic cinema. It’s an example of computer generated effects and artificial camera movement. Even if you don’t like the genre, if you look at it from a purely visual point of view disaster movies as a whole are closer to the films that made film technology popular in the early 1900s than Goodfellas or The Godfather have ever done for the medium. Sadly, James has put film blogging on hold for the time being and so his reviews, articles and podcasts are not currently available. You can however follow his adventures on Twitter via Story@story24 |
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