‘I wouldn’t know him if he stood up in me soup,’ mused Brenda Blethyn’s needy, good-natured mum in Mike Leigh’s 1996 film ‘Secrets and Lies.’ Sometimes by just recapturing a bit of dialogue, film critic Kenneth Turan makes us smile and eager to see a film for the first time, or once again. Turan, a longtime Palisades resident, has been reviewing films for The Los Angeles Times since 1991. In his first compilation, ‘Never Coming To A Theater Near You,’ he celebrates films ‘that have meant the most to me,’ films that many people missed in their initial release. The book can be taken as a personal recommendation from Turan, who took his time culling his favorite films from a list of hundreds and revising and updating those earlier reviews. ‘These are motion pictures I likely would not have experienced’and possibly not even have heard of’if reviewing weren’t my job, and there isn’t one of them I wouldn’t rush to see again,’ he writes in the introduction. Turan will speak about his favorites and sign his book this Saturday, November 13 at 4 p.m. at Village Books on Swarthmore. Readers recognize Turan’s style, which not only honors the layman’s interest in wanting to know what the film is about, but also assesses its merits and shortfalls. ‘I’m always conscious I’m writing for readers, not for the future or in an abstract way,’ Turan told the Palisadian-Post. ‘People are looking to read something interesting and need some help in figuring out if this is a movie they want to see. So I tell them something about the plot and then grapple with the film. I confront the film on its own terms.’ Turan has divided the book into five categories, including English-language films, foreign, documentaries, classics and retrospectives on directors, such as Robert Bresson, or genres, like Chinese martial arts films. In selecting the 150 reviews in the book, Turan considered only those films he had reviewed for The Times. ‘I went through a list of every review I had written and began to pare away. I chose films that I loved, smaller films that got away, and I also wanted the reviews to be well-written, reviews that I was happy with the writing.’ Some films, Turan asserts, proved to be so unusual, so iconoclastic that Hollywood had no idea how to market them: ‘Devil in a Blue Dress,’ ‘Election’ or ‘Wonder Boys.’ Others celebrate actors in unexpected roles, such as Nicole Kidman as a Russian mail-order bride in ‘Birthday Girl.’ Of particular interest is the chapter on documentaries, Turan’s ‘secret pleasure.’ In the last decade there has been a dramatic shift in the appreciation of the documentary, Turans says, attributing much of the turnaround to the Sundance Film Festival. ‘Fully half of the films in this section received their debuts at the Park City event.’ He expects documentaries to continue to compete for viewers’ attention not only because of the boost from film festivals, but also because the relatively affordable cost of making them. ‘Inexpensive, lightweight digital cameras are changing the way documentaries are made. Filmmakers used to spend half their time raising money. If you do a good job with a digital camera, you can have a long theatrical life that can play in any theater. ‘These films are making money. ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ is an example of a film that made over $100 million. ‘Spellbound’ was a wonderful word-of-mouth hit; people loved it.’ Like many of his generation, Turan grew up (in Brooklyn) going to the movies, and only got interested in ‘film’ while a student at Swarthmore in the 1960s. In graduate school at Columbia School of Journalism he took a class with Judith Crist, the outspoken critic for the New York Harold Tribune, who crystallized the notion for him that ‘maybe I could do this.’ After a stint at the Washington Post, he came out to Los Angeles in 1978 and initially freelanced for more than a decade before joining the L.A. Times. He was first hired as editor of the book review section’he is an eager reader’and then became the paper’s film critic. For the last half-dozen years, Turan has also been reviewing for NPR’s Morning Edition, which he says has been an education. ‘I have had to learn how to write for the ear, which has been a completely fascinating experience.’ Movies are what the job is, and Turan watches three to five a week. ‘Some days I see two: one in the morning before I go to work, and one at night.’ At film festivals, he sees three or four a day’for two weeks. Despite having seen practically every plot contrivance, and his share of bad films’and, yes, there are bad independent films too’Turan is still smitten with the medium. ‘Films are still the art form more people seem to connect with. Where else can you get a complete aesthetic experience within two hours?’
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