The Ballad of the Unique Film Critic in America, as Hated by Angry Outerspace Guy

He used to be me.

Years ago, when I was reviewing movies for CNN.com, the Internet had just become a thing, and my name and opinions were tied to a strategic global assault by a famous news service with a logo, so lots of people felt obliged to pay attention to me.

It was a weird position for a relative anti-authoritarian like myself to be in. As much as it gave me the willies, I was definitely working for The Man, and I absolutely did not write as if that were the case.

I wrote like me.

Still, my CNN connection guaranteed me a sizable readership—and a living wage, which is no longer the case at the vast majority of websites—and the studios always invited me to private screenings, where I got to do unexpected things like tell Sylvia Miles to shut her big trap during a movie and bust a gut laughing with Gene Shalit over an hilarious Today Show interview he once did with Carol Channing.

Actually, let's pause for a minute. That interview is so great, you absolutely need to see it.

Shalit started laughing like that all over again when I described it to him, and I started laughing too.

Now, where were we? Oh, yeah...

Pivotal to my six years of survival at CNN was that my editors, Todd Leopold and Kristin Lemmerman, gave me complete freedom to say whatever I wanted to say, in whatever manner I wanted to say it, an act for which I am forever grateful. They never cut a single word of what I wrote. Never. And they didn’t have to do that.

I knew I wouldn’t get away with it forever, though, and I was right. I was eventually chained to some editor who, after I had written several hundred reviews for the site and fully established my voice and tone, suddenly decided I could no longer use the pronoun “I” and would have to switch to “this reviewer.”

I knew the moment he said this that the end was near, if not right around the corner.

Whether you liked my reviews or not, they were not generic. They were deeply conversational. I wouldn’t be so bold as to call it “new journalism,” but loyal readers knew I grew up in Alabama, loved rock & roll, lived in New York City, was a Cleveland Indians fan, and had a Hoosier girlfriend named Jill.

They knew who I was. That was my intent. My attitude has always been that a critic can only tell you what he or she thinks of a film. They can’t possibly tell you what you’ll think of it. They don’t even know who you are! So knowing my background was pivotal to my approach; readers could balance what I was saying against who they were and the kinds of attitudes they had about the world.

This was a conscious thing on my part. And I understood the immediacy of this newfangled contraption called the Internet, where readers could send you emails and converse with you on message boards seconds after reading what you wrote.

I wasn’t Bosley Crowther and a website was not a copy of the New York Times. And now I was being made to put on a top hat and monocle like Mr. Peanut and refer to myself as “this reviewer?!!” It was phony and also happened to be moronic.

Not long thereafter, I was done.

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But it worked for a few years. And, unlike you, I was paid three hundred bucks to sit through Big Momma’s House.

For the most part, readers would digest my movie coverage along with their coffee and cheese Danishes (or, if they themselves were Danish, with their traditional kackenlugenshneegen) when they sat in front of the computer in the morning. Since, by the very nature of the pursuit, I had to cover tons of outright drivel, my reviews were often served on a bed of withering sarcasm.

That’s how I tend to handle drivel. I imagine it helped wake people up. At lot them loved it. And a lot of them didn’t.

Over the years, many readers sent me gracious emails saying they were very entertained by my reviews, that I often made them laugh out loud, even when they disagreed with me. This was far and away my favorite type of correspondence.

I wasn’t looking to make converts. I definitely had strong opinions about what I was watching, but I thought critics were supposed to have strong opinions. The ones I read always did. It never occurred to me that I should be careful what I said, lest I rouse the embedded cretins.

Ah, but the cretins were roused.

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Virtually every week, somebody out there would get so deeply offended by one of my reviews, they just had to write me a nostril-flared response. There was one guy in New Zealand who must have spent half his day bitching about me on CNN’s message boards, a task that altered only slightly when he discovered my email address. (It probably didn’t help matters when I told him he should take a break and tend to his sheep.)

At one point, Oliver North (!) even burst a red, white, and blue blood vessel when I dared to pan Columbia Pictures’ Black Hawk Down, which, as we all know, is the same thing as spitting on the graves of dead American soldiers.

I later heard that a displeased higher-up at CNN complained that my writing about Black Hawk Down was “anti-war!” It was actually “anti-manipulative movie,” but I’ll happily admit that I am staunchly anti-war. Would it have been better if I had written a review lauding the concept of war??!

This type of misreading often occurred when I reviewed fact-based pictures. Dump on Shine, for instance—like I did; I fucking hated it—and you have no respect for mentally ill people who can’t shut up and like to play fractured Chopin preludes on the piano.

There are far fewer of those than there are dead American soldiers, of course. But the number of enraged emails was about equal.

After six years or so of watching godawful teen comedies in which “ugly” girls take off their pointy-framed glasses and turn out to be supermodels, and with CNN cutting assignments so severely I could no longer pay my bills, I finally surrendered my post. It wasn’t worth it anymore.

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But the Internet is nothing if not a massive stone tablet.

Dig deeply enough into ancient comment threads, and you’re bound to find red-faced missives on things I wrote nearly twenty years ago. They sit there, festering, like an injured marathon runner’s big toe.

I recently got all nostalgic and went looking for some of these conniption fits...and I found a guy I had completely forgotten about. He must have worked for NASA or something, because he occasionally popped up on space program-related message boards, fuming about whatever person, place, or thing had raised his space hackles that day.

But he had a genius of sorts for segueing into shitty comments about yours truly. I don’t know what the hell was going on with him.

Take a look at this one, from March 16, 2001. It’s Angry Outer Space Guy’s response to a post in which somebody notes that a CNN critic (not me, in this instance) gave a positive review to a now-forgotten movie called The Dish, in which a bunch of Australian science buffs build a satellite dish or something. I never even saw it:

…The reviewer actually *liked* the film, which should come as no surprise seeing as how it was Paul Clinton who reviewed the film. Clinton tends to give balanced reviews and a fair shake to pretty much any film. If it’s good, it’s good. If it sucks, it sucks.

….Now, had it been Paul Tatara, he would have bombed it simply because it had to do with space. In Tatara’s diseased mind, space=scifi=trash. For that matter, if it’s not an independent art film and/or something the general populace would not really want to see, then it’s trash. Hey, the guy hates "2001", ferchriissakes, just because it's sci-fi. That kind of thinking puts the dip in dipshit...

...Were I in charge of CNN, I'd have fired the talentless hack a long time ago. Then again, I'd have a beefed up space section with a *real* reporter who knows his material, too.

The unique spellings and creative syntax are all his. Who knows where he got the idea that I hate 2001: A Space Odyssey (ferchrissakes). I actually wrote in Stanley Kubrick’s obituary for CNN that it’s one of Kubrick’s two genuinely great films, the other being Dr. Strangelove. I also wrote a piece on a book covering the making of 2001, in which I practically glowed over the entire enterprise.

2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite movies!

Angry Outer Space Guy did get one thing right, however. The kind of thinking he ascribes to my “diseased mind” is, in fact, the result of syphilis, which has been slowly eating away at my cerebral cortex for the past three decades. (By the way, wouldn’t such thought processes actually put the shit in dipshit? We’ve all put shit into things. Is it even possible to put the “dip” into something? I mean, outside of a bowl that’s placed next to the chips at a party?)

But he couldn’t even let it go three years after I quit CNN! Here’s a post from April 1, 2005. Apparently, he and some other space-types had been discussing someone named “Bell” who writes for something called Spacedaily:

Just like how CNN finally had to weed out Paul Tatara when it became apparent that he didn't like *any* films unless they were art festival independent crap that looked as if it were filmed using some mutated form of a Kenner Give-A-Show Projector, Spacedaily needs to do the same with Bell. Preferably as painfully as possible.

Jesus. Someone needs an astro-enema.

But I’m glad he reminded me how much I loved my Kenner Give-A-Show projector! I actually had one when I was about 4 years old!

I also stumbled across my name in a chat that was taking place entirely in Russian! I don’t know if the guy writing this was a cosmonaut or not, but I cut and pasted his comments into a Russian-to-English translator and was given this perplexing little paragraph (I’m not making this up):

Anatoli Dontsov wrote: which Paul Tatara as the film critic quite arranges. Esteem its responses on those films which you looked, and understand for yourself. Esteemed. It does not arrange me. Well so it and not the unique film critic in the USA will be. And similarity of opinion of the critic with own is not too important; it is more important, i.e., say, any critic, whose estimation of films in accuracy it is diametrical mine, me too would arrange, because would allow to predict accurately.

Gee, I don’t know what to say, Anatoli. Thanks for the kind words!