Interview Drew McWeeny (Formerly Dangerous)
A film critic since the nascent 1990s Internet days of Ain’t It Cool News, Drew McWeeny thinks the chaotic “anything goes” milieu of that site is partially responsible for the onslaught of faux outrage we see today on countless TikTok and YouTube vids. “In many ways we are answering for back then, still. So much of our industry chases the lowest common denominator, chases outrage, chases video views in ways that are not healthy and really not based on the film conversation itself,” Drew said.
Even from his early reviews, Drew had a strong voice as a critic. His reviews were full of rich details of how his past viewing habits influenced his reaction on the films he was reviewing and focused on the content of the film itself instead of often vacuous celebrity gossip. Drew credits this to discovering the film criticism of Pauline Kael. “I started with books that collected her works, and then discovered her current reviews and keeping up with her. My parents subscribed to TIME Magazine, so I read Richard Corliss. There were other critics I read solely because of the publications they were in, but Kael was the critic I read solely because of her take on film. When she loved something, she loved it unreservedly. She loved it regardless of its success or its larger success in pop culture.”
Her thoughts on De Palma in particular grabbed Drew’s attention. “She wrote about De Palma in a way with a regard that no other mainstream critic did. Every other critic treated him like he was a cheap Hitchcock joke and nothing else. She treated him as if he was worthwhile on every film. It was illuminating even though I didn’t get to see a lot of his movies at that point; as they would hit home video, I would go to see them. It was the way she wrote about him, the fervor she had for his vision, his stylistic choices… She was just so passionate! It was exciting to realize you don’t have to love what everyone else loves. If you can articulate why you think a certain way, that’s it. She defined for me that film criticism can be a reflection of how a movie hit you.”
After writing for Ain’t It Cool News under the moniker Moriarty, Drew wound up working for HitFix as a film critic. One major thing that changed about the business was the expectation that film critics online should be on camera not just talking about films they reviewed, but doing Top 5 lists and so on. In other words, a job that wasn’t what they signed up for. “The whole pivot to video era was entirely because of Facebook. They lied to every website on the planet about what video metrics were and how they were at important so we would use their video services. At HitFix, we chased that fucking dog for three or four years.”
Drew felt Facebook’s encouraging sites to do video content caused a lot of harm. “They burned film criticism to the ground. It used to be based on words. I was a writer; that’s what I was hired to be. The entire notion that I had to get good on video, and I had to learn how to do that… That’s insanity! It’s literally the opposite of my skill-set that got me into this business. There was this artificial sense that everybody had to have a video component. During this time, I heard repeatedly from people that they wanted more words, more of the actual writing because that’s what they liked.”
After several years at HitFix, Drew started Formerly Dangerous on Substack. “In moving to Substack, I just do writing, period. I’m able to write about older movies. I’m able to write about anything I choose. It is a radically different experience. I don’t want to write 9,000 pieces about the state of Marvel or Star Wars. There’s a whole industry that covers nothing but those things; they are sort of McDonald’s at this point from being so omnipresent. I don’t really want to weigh in on them. I would much rather write about things I’m encouraged by. I just put up a piece where I wrote about five things I really enjoyed recently that are either in theaters this moment or coming out this month to streaming. The Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon is fantastic. Fincher’s film The Killer I got to see in a theater after seeing the screener Netflix sent. In a theater, it’s a radically different experience. Just on a sound level, that movie has to be seen in a theater. Some things coming soon are very exciting. The new Scott Pilgrim animated series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is truly nothing like I expected, and it’s nothing anyone online is ready for.”
Drew adds that some of modern film criticism done via video is quite good. “There are people that do great video work out there; Patrick Willems is phenomenal, Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou are great at what they do. I’m not saying that film criticism on the video side is not a valid form of criticism. In some ways, it’s exciting we get whole feature films now like Lynch/Oz or Room 237. These movies are works of film criticism that just happen to be movie length. Film criticism is evolving, and it will continue to do so.”
Read Drew McWeeny on Substack at Formerly Dangerous and The Last ‘80s Newsletter (You’ll Ever Need).