Hello listeners, welcome back to another patron episode of 80s all over. I am Scott Weinberg and as usual, as always, I should say, I am joined by my wondrous co-host from across the country, Mr. Drew McQueenie. How are you, sir? I'm good. Thanks. I'm very excited about our guest today. Sometimes we do commentaries and interviews with filmmakers and actors. And I wanted to throw a spotlight on some of the people who inspired Drew and I. And that generally means film critics. And I am very pleased that we are joined today by a critic who I won't say I read her as a kid, but I will say I read her as a very young adult. And she was, she remains in my opinion, one of the very best film critics to ever write in Philadelphia, but she has a much larger career than just that. And it's Carrie Ricky. I was telling Scott that I'm jealous because I did not, when I was younger and I was reading film criticism, for me it was national. There was nobody local who I felt like I related to. And that's frustrating because you do look for sort of curation about what's happening your city or you're looking for a pit and I just I never had it like I lived in places where there was none so it's great that he said that relationship as long as he has with your work. Oh, thank you Drew, thank you Scott and I was five years old when I started writing. Perfect. I just wanted to tell you're born in LA. So what brought you, what in your career, your early education and early career brought you to Philadelphia? Well, I had moved to New York in my early 20s and started writing movie stuff for the Village Voice in about 1979, 80. And it was at the voice for three years, and then I was at the Boston Herald, and then the Philadelphia inquirer asked if I'd come to Philadelphia, and it was a great paper then, and it's still very good now, but daily journalism is very different now than it was in 1986. So they asked me, I can't. And did you fall in love with the city right away? Or was it a culture shock? How did you take to the city? Well, at first I was really annoyed because when you ordered a cup of coffee, it would take like a minute and people were really nice. And this was not I was used to from New York and I just wanted my coffee like that and I didn't want to interact. And then after about a year I just really liked it and my quality of life improved. Oh that I love to hear that. Drew is also a transplant. So would you find that your experience was the same Drew? Well, I mean, with me, it was coming to LA and because I had to be here. And I've always had the mindset that I have to live in this city. This is where I wanted to work. I'm really, I'm fascinated by when you sort of started because that feels like a real changing of a guard guard are to be writing about film from the late 70s in the early 80s because the business changed so much and one of the things we're seeing. It was so radical and I wasn't really totally aware of that at the time. I mean, I knew things were changing but now I can look back and say, oh my God, the distribution system changed radically. The number of films released every year rose radically. I mean, in 1986, there was 176 films released in Philadelphia. In 2011, there was 510, a 300% jump in 25 years. I mean, it was shocking. And then when we talk about marketing, really through the 70s, most movies were marketed to everyone. Yeah, except, yeah, kids movies were marketed to kids, but otherwise all movies were marketed to everyone. Nitch marketing starts in the early 80s with multiplexes. At multiplexes in Niche marketing go hand in hand. So you go to a multiplex and all of a sudden, you see all African American boys age 14 to 18 going to see, let's say, boys in the hood. And you see young girls of a certain age going to see how to make an American quilt. And everything is niche market. Not everyone is sharing the same experience. And I just think that sucks. I love going to movies with everyone. I do as well and I experience that with Get Out. And it did remind me of being like in a maybe mid to late 80s theater where you would look around and see a lot of Yeah, a lot of faces that look like mine, but a whole lot that didn't and yeah, that is a nice feeling I really don't want to be in a homogenized neighborhood or a homogenized movie theater at all um, so so yeah, we go to movies to see things that we don't know about and to see people who don't necessarily look like us and I'm finding that's more and more an ideological divide in how we approach films. And it's one of the things that, you know, I know that most Scott and I are very fond of Roger Ebert and we're recording this on what would have been his 76th birthday and a huge hat tip to one of the giants of our business. But one of the things that he always pushed out his career and I think it soaked in when I young, even before he really nailed down that it was the defining characteristic of his work, was how he talked about how important empathy was in film and what it does to create that in people. And I know we've talked on the show about how the moment I found foreign films, it felt like, oh my God, now I get to know what it feels like to live on that part of the world or that part of the world. And I love that. I found that almost like time traveler, like body travel, it was such a great feeling.

Yeah, even more. God, now I get to know what it feels like to live on that part of the world or that part of the world. And I love that.

I found that almost like time travel or like body travel.

It was such a great feeling.

Even more even. And yet, and yet it's the more I watch foreign films, the more I realized everything was, you know, universal. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't even have to be foreign. And I remember when boys, as you mentioned, boys in the hood came out and that opened

the floodgates for movies about young black men dealing with their environment, dealing

with their environment, dealing with their neighborhoods. And I learned empathy from watching juice and menist to society. I could not relate to what those boys were going through, but through those honest films, I learned a lot. I learned, you know, to empathize a lot more. That's what you get from films of any stripe, from any culture. And we would have a lot less empathy if we didn't see other cultures and other skin colors in movies. We just wouldn't. The way you wrote it, the era that you began, Kerry, when you started writing about film, it feels like it was an era that really celebrated film writing with giants sort of that they were treated like giants in print. What drew you to film writing in the first place and were there people that you specifically were drawn there by? My parents are both immigrants or both immigrants to the United States and the movies is where we learned how to be American. And what kind of clothes to wear and how to kind of talk cool or to speak American. And movie going was a big deal in my family. And so it was important. I think initially when I went to college, I wanted to be a poet.

And then a very great poet named Adrian Rich came

to visit our college.

And she, I was assigned to walk her around and be her guide.

And she asked me what I wanted to be.

And I said a poet.

And she said, well, you know, you can't make a living from it

because if you're a big poet, you maybe sell 900 books. And so you need a side gig. And she said, do you have a side gig? I said, well, I really like movies that I'm reviewing for my college newspaper. She said, you might want to think more seriously about that as a side gig. And then the side gig became a main gig. Nice. Carrie, just that little anecdote about your family growing up, I'm not kidding either as a biography is an autobiography or as fiction, that's a movie. Like, a family of immigrants and a young girl growing to love movies because they helped her communicate in a new home. That's a good story. Well, they were just trying to be American. No, I love that. The idea of learning, learning to be quote unquote American through American films. I think it's a beautiful idea. You came to Philly and you fell in love with the town and then when did you start to realize that like things were kind of shaky for the daily, the daily print gig as far as film criticism goes. Well, I realized it first around 2000. So I'd been at the inquire for about 14, 15 years at that point. All print journalism seemed to be endangered from around 2005 forward. So, yeah, I had kids, I needed to work, you know, was the best thing to just stay put. I'm not portable because my husband works in Philadelphia and he has a better job than I had. Not better, but he got paid more than I did. And it was complicated. So, And it was hard to branch out when I should have and for other places because I had really young kids. So. To those older views belong to you legally. No, they belong to the acquirer a lot. That's unfortunate because I would love to see a compilation, I'm sorry. Well, people have asked, but now I'm the raw, I'm the wrong age. People want younger people's collections and review collections that sell. I'm allowed to reprint my inquiry reviews in a book, but I'm not allowed to publish them online. So I'm gonna bind. But thank you for asking. Yeah, if anybody wants to- How come are university press you'd like to read them? I will definitely. If you send me the info, Drew and I will gladly start a campaign because I always found I'm going to just wax the car for just a minute. Every Friday I would get the day- my dad always got the inquire daily and I on Friday would go get the daily news. And for about a half hour either on my couch or at Burger King, I would read every review of every movie. Gary Thompson, Steven Ray, Desmond Ryan, you knew were my favorite. So big. It doesn't fit on my Skype screen. So thank you. Now you were a big influence. I could name if I could name 10 film critics who had a huge influence on my career, you'd be in the top three without question. So it's a pleasure to be friends with you now because I've always been a big fan. All right, and let's move into something that I hold near and dear to my heart. And I know it does, to Drew in some ways. Let's talk just for a bit about Philly movies in general.

Drew, why don't you tell Carrie how much you love Blowout? Well, blowout to me is, because I'm a big diploma fan and I think part of that was Kale sort of primed the pump because I read a lot of her work before I saw the films. And in a lot of ways, when I finally got to the movies, they were almost incidental to how I was thinking about them, not because I was already in love with them because I was

fascinated by them. And the Palmer was a- when I finally got to the movies, they were almost incidental to how I was thinking about them,

not because I was already in love with them,

because I was fascinated by them.

And DiPalma was a guy who, even before I got to see the films, I was so interested in the way she would talk about him as sort of a, he would boil everything down from his influences, and he would, he was so clearly in love with Hitchcock, but she had all these things she loved about his work.

So seeing the films and checking them off a list

was exciting to me.

Blowout was the first one that I saw when it came out and I saw it at the moment that it was released and fell in love with regardless of what she wrote. Like it was just a great suspense movie to me. And then beyond that, it led me into reading deeper in defilms. So yeah, hugely influential vote. Well, I love blow. I think it is the...

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