One of my goals with this new website is to emphasize my interests in a clearer, fuller vision. That’s why the first week has been all over the place, covering everything from my typical film and TV to the wide world of sports, advertising, music, and writing. As an English major, it has felt disingenuous how little time I have taken to embrace the written word. Sure I’ve done plenty simply by throwing these paragraphs into the ozone, but I don’t know that I’ve been nearly as encouraging towards other authors as I should be.
This is also going to be my attempt to actually expand the writers I consume, on a constant quest to point out writing that holds a significant impact on me. Despite the fact that I’m starting with Nathan Rabin, who is a prime example of a successful independent writer, I am not going to be exclusively doing one type of writer. To me I want to point out the value of the written word in every profession, whether it be Rabin’s amazing work at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place or people who qualify more as poets, songwriters, playwrights, screenwriters, novelists, or journalists. To me, there’s value in perusing every art form in order to understand their impact.
I want to make this website more pro-literacy if just to better reflect the reality that I still love to read. I tackled Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” for fun. In the presence of the Coronavirus, it’s a great time to pick up that longer book that you’ve been holding off on because… what is there to distract you? I’m aware that there are those who still have essential jobs, working tirelessly from home to get things done. Everyone else has no excuse.
I chose to start with Nathan Rabin for reasons that I made clear in “The Pitch.” To summarize, I had a panic attack two weeks ago that caused me to reconsider a lot of my life, especially when it came to writing. I had to reinvent myself, and thus The Memory Tourist was born in the ashes of my old website Optigrab.
I’m not embarrassed by what I did there, but it started feeling limiting. I knew that I would be spending a lot of the near future in front of a laptop, sometimes due to California’s lousy weather with rain. I needed to do something.
One of my big revelations came when I realized the simple fact. To be a happy writer, I needed to write what made me happy. In recent years nothing has made me more thrilled than going to Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place to read how Rabin is doing on a daily basis (save weekends). I became enraptured by how his interests were varied yet all came from this personal place. In one column I could read about his thoughts on Tales from the Crypt or Weird Al, and in the next, I could be reading about his time in the foster child system or his ongoing economic woes.
To me, Rabin is more than just a critic. He’ll even tell you that he’s a FORMER movie critic because of a strange turn of events. His website was borne out of similar desperation where his career had been met with a few stumbling blocks. His surefire gig at The Dissolve had, ahem, dissolved, and he was reaching the end of his time at The A.V. Club, which had lost most of the staff that understood what his comedic approach to pop culture was going for. His columns began to be rejected by others and he decided to pack them into a caravan and head to “his happy place.”
What I get from him is a deeper understanding of how pop culture impacts his life. In some ways he has permeated the culture, having been referenced on Jeopardy! and Bojack Horseman. He is delighted by having these small moments getting recognized by a wide audience. It’s a feeling that I recognize in myself, even if I’m far from reaching his status. For starters, my Optigrab website wasn’t the most engaging writing. You got a sense that I liked Emma (2019), but could you understand how art personally touched me? Not exactly.
I notice this in every writer I love, but Rabin especially. The pop culture he talked about personally impacted him. He reviews a lot of older films and would talk about working at Blockbuster and seeing these box arts that created a nostalgic feeling inside of him. Suddenly you understand these otherwise disposable titles as something that once held a deeper relevance, and it’s endearing to go into Rabin’s psyche to understand what draws him to this art. You almost don’t want to see him review five-star movies because his heart opens up when he looks at the low-end stuff, creating entertaining pans that lack malice. He clearly has sympathy for these artists who don’t quite achieve their vision.
Nowhere has this been more apparent than in his breakout column that has had a couple names over its lifetime. At first, it was the novelty My Year of Flops before evolving to a full-time love affair called My World of Flops. He’s even written a book highlighting this column called “My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure.” It’s even coined one of pop culture’s more divisive phrases. In an entry on Eilzabethtown (2005), he uses the phrase “manic pixie dream girl” which has since become its own beast that he regrets creating.
I get no better sensation than when a movie comes to mind. I think of something from the mid-2000s and think of all the bad films I sat through. I become intrigued to know what Rabin thought of them. There are few writers I will automatically search for reviews (Roger Ebert being the other prominent) because I know that even if I disagree with them, their prose is bound to be an entertaining exercise, capturing why we go to the movies in the first place.
The only difference is that I mostly look at Ebert reviews for older movies that I have no idea about. Is Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst (1988) any good? It’s not quite the same with Rabin. Sure, I do love when he calls something a “Secret Success,” but more often than not I come out of Cats (2019) and immediately get impatient. My knees will be bouncing as I think to myself “Man, Rabin better get his review up soon.” I had to refrain from consulting his column on Who’s That Girl? (1987) just so I didn’t rip off his opinions.
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| Cats (2019) |
He doesn’t attack a film but embraces the oddity that consumes the frame. Sure he has reasonable critiques, such as the clunky origin-heavy dialogue of The Last Airbender (2010), but he does so in a manner that makes you understand that critiquing bad movies doesn’t need to be cynical. There can be warmness for why the film doesn’t quite land. He can crack jokes at the film’s expense without looking like a bully.
Most of all, there’s this great and infectious subtext that he’s doing it because he loves it. There is no sense that he’s doing it as some ongoing gag. He clearly finds value in a culture that humanity has largely decided to forget ever existed. Sure his reviews can get savage at points, but they all come from a place of reason. There are even moments where his personal anecdotes overwhelm his reviews, such as a take on The Brothers Grimsby (2016) that looked back at his youth before stating that he felt worse that people were “disappointed” in him. At this moment, he encapsulates the wasted potential of the film without ever having to mention it by name.
This isn’t his only column that does this, but it exemplifies what makes him a unique gift to film criticism. Along with the podcasts We Hate Movies and The Flop House, there has been a quest to look at bad movies as something more than trash. There’s something unifying about discussing their weird traits. Why else would Cats have rowdy screenings? I’ve fallen in love with being proud to like what you like and not letting the judgment of others stop you. So what if The Razzies tell you that Cats is bad? It’s still one of the greatest acid trips of the decade.
Rabin has now influenced two projects in my life. Besides The Memory Tourist’s quest to be a mix of the personal and critical, I used My World of Flops as an excuse for something more prestigious. I am personally not capable of falling in love with bad movies like he has. To me, I have limits and I love discovering the weird magic through his words. It’s as much about the film as it is the culture it entered, and knowing how a film flopped creates this understanding that while failure’s not flattering, it’s far more common than we think and, in the best of circumstances, we can move on from them.
My other column is one that looked at the Oscar season. I know that Rabin personally dislikes “good things,” but it’s been one of my personal obsessions for the past decade. That is why following the convoluted release of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014) lead me to start Failed Oscar Campaigns. I wanted to understand how films fail to win Best Picture. To be fair, they’re more history lessons than criticism, but I love that it’s my own take on his column. I’m exploring films that came up short and in some ways finding deeper appreciation for a good Oscar campaign. It has been going for six years now and remains one of my proudest achievements as a writer.
I continue to admire Rabin as a writer, especially as I enter this new phase of life. If he ever gets to this site and looks at the articles, I hope he doesn’t see a clone but someone who likes his technique. He’s inspired me to try harder with my writing and become something more engaging. In some ways, I worry that I will never have half of the independent success that he has, but then again Rabin’s openness about his doubt as a person only makes him more relatable. I may not have a family to take care of, but hearing him fall in love with Sesame Street obscurity somehow makes him more human. I feel like he’s more than a writer. He’s writing like a friend keeping us up to date. Considering that I see writing as a healing power, I hope to get there in my own way
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