I don't know about you, but I spent the majority of my youth watching Siskel and Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and scanning IMDb to see what movies I should watch over the weekend. I would scan the Arts & Entertainment section of the Philadelphia Inquirer to see who got four stars and beg my parents to take me if what I wanted to see got a good write-up.
Thanks to all that reading and watching, I learned a lot.
Film criticism is not just fun to read, but it's an amazing skill to have, especially if you want to work in Hollywood. It can teach you how to speak about the things you like in films. You can learn lessons about what you would want to add to your films, and just have a conversation with people.
We've covered some film theory on this site before, but today I want to focus on criticism.
But how do you become a film critic? And how do you learn how to talk about films in an educated way when making an argument on whether or not it's good?
Let's talk about it.
Want to Learn How to Become a Movie Critic?
Are you the person your friends go to before Rotten Tomatoes? Maybe a career in film criticism is right for your future.
As we mentioned before, it’s not about “good” and “bad” but having a breadth of knowledge that allows you to compare a movie/TV show to the pantheon of entertainment that came before it. You have to analyze character and plot development, performance, cinematography, directing, editing, and writing.
You can comment on how the lighting changes the tone. Or how the director’s control of the edit makes the movie too long, too short, or just right. Or you could even make a YouTube channel where you blow all that up and focus on nitpicks.
Film criticism is really about trying to figure out if the film accomplishes what it set out to do.
So where do you learn movie critic skills?
You can develop them in college by taking courses on analysis in film and literature. You can even get a degree in journalism. If you don't want to make this your concentration in school, you can spend some time reading as many different critics as you can. No matter what, you need to learn to be a good communicator and have a natural curiosity about the world and work.
Then, no matter if you got to school or not, you have to sit down and actually write some reviews. Take notes as you watch the films and really dig into the symbolism, meaning, and themes. Write an opening that draws them in and come to a conclusion that's fair and balanced.
You should write lots of reviews, and if you are serious about becoming a critic, maybe start your own website or try to submit to magazines or newspapers that take them. Make sure you read the briefs from these sites so you know you're writing in the style accepted by them.
As you get published or self-publish, you'll begin to get a portfolio that you can use to get other work.
The Three Kinds of Movie Critics
1. Amateur
An amateur critic self-publishes their work and usually makes no money from them. Sometimes they make their own YouTube channels where they dissect and pick apart cinema and all the little details.
They do it for the love of movies, but if they begin to hone and market their skills to make money, they can quickly move into the next section of criticism.
2. Journalistic
I qualify all paid critics or people who make money from their criticism as journalistic critics. These are the critics whose opinions we pay to hear. They're Roger Ebert, Amy Nicholson, and Justin Chang. They're people hired by magazines, TV channels, and websites to watch movies, interview actors, go to festivals, and bring us a lot of information about films and filmmaking.
3. Academic
Think about the film professors you had in college or graduate school. They write books, get published in journals, and typically do deeper analyses of movies, not just whether or not they are good. Academic criticism focuses on the film’s importance, how it reflects on real-life events, and its place within film history within its respective genre.
People can work in all three of these sections or multiple at once. A journalist could write an academic deep-dive book, or an academic could run a movie review website. But these are just the categories I see.
If you want to join the ranks, listen to this advice from Siskel and Ebert.
Summing Up How to Be a Movie Critic
Hopefully, all this information helps you set off on your course toward film criticism. If nothing else, it gives you something to debate at parties and something to talk about with your friends.
Who are some of your favorite film critics right now? Who are some of the people you most respect?
Standup comedy and filmmaking have a lot in common. Sure, one is individual performance art and the other is a collaboratively made audio visual medium, but hear me out. Both are art forms incredibly hard to break into that are often thankless, requiring an indelible passion to "make it" in, as they say.
Something beautiful about the Slamdance darling All I've Got and Then Some is the way it captures the passion-driven ethos of both mediums in front of and behind the camera.
All I've Got and Then Some is a day in the life of Rasheed, a homeless standup comic on his way to his first paid gig. Shot documentary-style in a way that blends the likes of Kevin Smith and Sean Baker, it's a miracle of indie filmmaking. Rasheed Stephens, the star and centerpiece of the film, and Tehben Dean, documentary filmmaker and cinematographer, are credited for literally almost every role. And all for a budget of under $300.
Below, we chat with the filmmaking duo all about the trials and tribulations of making a feature with a minuscule budget, as well as a punk as heck anecdote on Rasheed's early days as an indie filmmaker.
Check it outtttt.
Editor's Note: the following interview is edited for length and clarity.
NFS Interviews Rasheed Stephens and Tehben Dean
No Film School: How did you guys kind of get the idea for the All I Want and Then Some?
Tehben Dean: Rasheed had another film that I was going to shoot. We started to reach out to talent and stuff, but it lined up right around when the strikes were announced last year. So nobody's agent would talk to us, and so we were like, all right, well, what's next?
Then a week or so later I remembered that Rasheed pitched this idea for web series a couple years ago that was based on his experience when he first moved to LA, about this guy living in his car and dating a girl that lived two cars behind him. We could do that, but let's make it a feature, and more about the standup comedy experience.
Rasheed Stephens: I was thinking about that idea too, man. Tehben came up with the idea to make it a day in life of [a standup comic], and that way we could save time too. Also make it with a more effective budget, and more efficient as far as the storytelling.
NFS: Yeah, totally. It gave me a Clerks vibe a little bit.
Stephens: Oh yeah. I love Clerks.
NFS: It was almost a Sean Baker/Clerks hybrid, which I thought was cool.
Dean: When we were editing Rasheed said, "you need to watch Tangerine." And I had never seen Tangerine, and I waited to watch it until after we finished. I didn't want to be too influenced. Afterwards I was like, oh, that's a really good movie. A lot of people have commented on a similarity.
NFS: Did you guys shoot on iPhone like Tangerine?
Dean: It was all shot on a RED Komodo. And then we had a little Hi8 [camcorder] that was mixed in throughout a few places.
Stephens: It is an amalgamation of all those films—Clerks, Tangerine, and Robert Rodriguez' El Mariachi.
Our whole crew is right there that you're looking at. Tehben was our sound guy. He was our gaffer. What else? AC, camera Op, and co-director. So that's the El Mariachi reference. We were Clerks because of the dialogue—we wanted everything to be grounded. We were Tangerine because of the innovativeness. We shot this film for under $300.
Dean: We just went out and did it. It was me, Rasheed, and we somehow managed to get 55 actors, which still kind of blows my mind, because I wasn't part of figuring that part out. But the fact that we got 55 actors in the film that we shot in one week, to me, is one of the more impressive aspects.
All I've Got and Then Some
Courtesy of STRONGWOMENINFILM
NFS: Yeah, absolutely. Were a lot of them comics that you knew from the comedy community, Rasheed?
Stephens: Some of them. I think about maybe 10 percent of people in the movie were comics. The rest of them were actors cast by our co-producer, Amaka. But you think that number is accurate, Tehben?
Dean: Yeah, probably 10, 15 percent. And then the rest were actors that Amaka cast. And then some friends of Rasheed's. There were a few people that I brought in.
We had to find people and most of the time we'd bring an actor in and they'd be there for two hours. We'd shoot their scene and then they'd take off apart from the main characters. We did a lot of scenes per day.
NFS: I feel like it'd be pretty segmented to be like. Did you know any of the employess that worked in the locations where you shot? Or did you kind of just ask, hey, is it cool to shoot a quick little scene here?
Dean: It was a combination. Some people we asked, a lot of the locations were ones we had access to or friends' places.
Stephens: So I'm not going to lie, that hotel thing—when I was homeless, I figured I could eat in the morning if I went to a Continental Breakfast. I didn't look like the homeless guy. I would get up, shave, I'd go work out, and then I'd go to a hotel.
One of the girls at the hotel I used to sneak in, she told me it's a good place where I can get a continental breakfast. We shot in there and that girl gave us permission.
So yeah, that was amazing.
NFS: Yeah, I love that guerilla style. Was that pretty stressful for you, Tehben, to be operating so many positions?
Stephens: Tehben volunteered that shit himself. Whatever scene I wasn't in I would try to hold some mics. I would try to be a swing guy if I could.
But, again, we didn't have the resources, so we had to use everything we had in our own wheelhouse.
Dean: We some some microphones and a couple of small lights. I've shot a ton of documentary over the last 10 years, and so working as a one man band is something I'm very used to doing. The audio part on the other hand was something—not that I didn't want to do—but it came down to [the fact] we couldn't afford to hire somebody. Also, I trusted myself more than bringing on someone who was willing to do it for free and didn't really know what they were doing.
That was probably the most stressful part to me. But my brother's a pro sound guy, but he lives in Portland and he was not available. He was on another job, but I was able to hit him up with questions. Then he did the post mix on it, so he was able to clean up my mess.
Stephens: Before we collaborated, both of us had a plethora of experience doing multiple different jobs. I've worked as a casting director, producer, writer, director. So once worked cohesively together, we became magical because we both knew we could do a plethora of jobs at different times.
Of course it wasn't easy, but it's fun when you're in it. We both lived in a process and started making up stuff on the fly. I love doing stuff like that.
Dean: I would also say that honestly, there's something very just fresh about working with no crew. It in a way, it limits what you can do, but in another way, it expands what you can do.
Because Rasheed was in most of the scenes and I was shooting, and so most of the time it was just I could shoot anywhere I wanted on set. I was never going to run into crew. I was never going to run into lights or trucks. There was so much freedom to be able to be there in the environment. And that was part of the whole idea, too, because I had this idea in my head for a very long time that I wanted to shoot a narrative film, but approach it shooting a documentary. Rasheed's story was the perfect idea for that, and it also facilitated us being able to do it with virtually no money. Because I have a camera package, I didn't really need other gear. I didn't really need a lot of other crew.
Dean: Also we can do it quickly, because I never planned to shoot coverage.
And just the freedom of going into a scene and having a lot of improvisational dialogue. We worked with the actors, figured out what the scene is—sometimes we had key lines that they would need to say or points to hit—but we worked that and then we'd run through it and then we would make adjustments. Run through it again.
Each time we did a take, I shot it. That was the only take I was ever going to get. And I never shot one piece of coverage because I knew in the edit it was going to be cut like a documentary. It's more rehearsed than a documentary. We did multiple take, but I wanted it to still like it was captured in real time. So sometimes there's some jump cuts in there, and there might be a couple of times in the film where I jump from one take to another.
All I've Got and Then Some
Courtesy of STRONGWOMENINFILM
NFS: Rasheed, did you feel like the uphill battle of making an indie film was at all similar to the grind of standup culture, if that makes sense?
Stephens: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Standup is a thankless art. And sometimes filmmaking industry is a thankless art. I think film has more instant gratification than comedy.
I always say comedy is the hardest art, because I know comics that are really good that have been doing it for 20 years and they still haven't cut through but still have the love to do it. With filmmaking, at least, let's just say you want to be a director, you can at least go out and get paid as a PA for a while to get some kind of compensation. With a comic there's nothing else you could do for work other than work at a comedy club. But how many comedy clubs are there? There's not that many.
So I think they do have similarities, but I think there's a slight difference [in so much that] monetary gain is kind of impossible until it becomes possible [with comedy].
Dean: I think there's big overlap. This is a universal thing too, is that it's something you do because you're passionate about it. It's very difficult, and there's only the certainty that if you don't try it, you won't succeed.
This film really is about that, the standup bit before people make it, but also I think anybody in the film industry can relate to what it's about because it's about following a dream and it's all the challenges and roadblocks that come up. It would be much easier to just quit and go home.
This was a very meta process for me because we made it out of that sort of desperation. And so we just like, alright, we're just going to do it. We're going to do it ourselves. I'm not going to ask permission from anybody. And we made it. And then once we finished it, we showed it to cast and crew and some audiences, and it got really good reception. We got into Slamdance.
All I've Got and Then Some
Courtesy of STRONGWOMENINFILM
NFS: That's awesome. Do you have any advice for filmmakers, or even comics or comedy filmmakers? Any demographic you guys want.
Stephens: Actually, it's crazy. We were going to reach out to you guys up at Slamdance because our journeys are like an exact personification the title "No Film School." My journey started as a standup comic, an actor, and nobody was booking me. So I decided to create my own roles.
So, true story, when I first moved to LA, I would hang out at LA Film School on Sunset Boulevard. I would start conversing and networking with some of the students, and I realized all of them had became this plateau. They had no ambitions, no desires. I'm like, hold on, you get this equipment for free and you guys only use it when you have a project? So I found a way to start sneaking in that school.
I would read scripts all day, and I would teach myself how to write scripts. I would use those scripts as templates, and I would use their computers because they had free Final Draft. I would write so many scripts.
And then—this is fucked up—but I stole somebody's student ID and I rented out a camera. I asked somebody I knew that could work a camera and we started shooting content. That's how much desire I had. It took six months for them to finally kick me out.
[But before that] for my first film, Coffee and Cabbage, we used their 400 seat state-of-the-art theater. I had my first screener there. I filled it out with 220 people and I didn't even go to that school.
When I tell people I have ambitions bigger than an elephant—that's the kind of desire I have. I to want to pursue this thing I love. I snuck into a school and possibly went to jail [for it].
NFS: That's an amazing punk film school story.
Dean: I would just say that if you truly believe it's what you want to do, then don't give up and don't wait for anybody to give you permission, because it's very easy to be like, "Oh, I need this, I need that." But the only way you learn is through experience and making mistakes, and then finding successes. So don't give up.
Keep at it if that is truly your passion, but it's going to be hard
NFS: And sneak into LA film school. I think that's the best advice.
