The Movie Girl In October 1996, I was 27, a freelance film reviewer at Philadelphia’s second best (of two) alt-weeklies and excited to see and review Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. My excitement was not about the movie itself, which I was pretty sure would be mediocre, but about its female star, Kristin Scott Thomas—then to me the apex of beauty—and the knowledge that for some significant portion of three hours, I would get to look at her newly blonde hair. During my time at this paper, I wrote three to four reviews a week: two short reviews and one or two long ones. Most of my reviews were negative, bordering on mean, for the simple reason that most movies are not good. But I still loved movies, and I had the highest, purest hopes for them. I wasn’t exactly quivering with anticipation when the lights went down before Powder or the remake of Sabrina, but for most films, I retained a childlike faith that I was about to behold greatness. So, when Braveheart, Toy Story, Shine, and—God help us—Swingers (!) were not great, I said so. Honestly, all I really wanted was to see a decent movie, and once in a while—Trainspotting, Bound, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Daytrippers—I did. My bad reviews were angry. But they weren’t about rage. They were about disappointment. For short reviews, I was paid $75. For longer ones, I got $125. Sometimes I interviewed people—like Kenneth Branagh (effusive, delightful), Lili Taylor (defensive; my fault), or John Sayles (pompous ass; his)—and got another $75. I think I made about $1400 a month, or $1600 if I was very lucky, but I didn’t mind. I could live off it and I spent all my time writing about movies. Sometimes, when I met people, they’d say, “Wait! Aren’t you the movie girl?” Sometimes they would say, “Do you like anything?” A guy in a bar told me once that he and his friends called me “the movie assassin.”
