‘The Batman’ is pure emo as it should be

 

FilmFreakCentral's lead critic dishes on the latest tasty film treats

Walter Chow began writing about cinema 30 years ago. Since then...

Where did you grow up?

I was born and raised in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, where I went to school with the children of Denver Broncos and Coors. They called it “White Rich”, my high school. I was one of three Asians in the building, I think, [during] my three years there. I like to say that I didn’t even know that I was Asian until freshman year of college. I went to lots of neighborhood six-plexes as I was growing up, and a couple of art houses that I never went to until I moved to Boulder in my late teens.

What were some of your formative movie-going experiences?  

I saw “Star Wars” when I was three before I could speak English (it’s better that way, perhaps) and spent the next 10 years playing with action figures and wrapping tubes. My wife remarked once how interesting she found it that men of my generation all knew how to breathe like Darth Vader instantly. I saw “Dragonslayer” when I was 8 and spent a goodly portion of it hiding underneath the seat in front of me — didn’t stop me from seeing it three times that summer. 

Also, I sat through three consecutive screenings of “Back to the Future” with a pal of mine by telling the ushers that we’d missed the opening and would leave after a few minutes. The film that decided me on this path, though, was a screening of “The Conversation” for a college critical theory course … It was the first film that competed with poetry, literature and music in my mind as a testament to the soul.

When did you get started as a film critic, and was this helped by the rise of Internet film criticism?

About seven years ago now, I guess, occasioned by a massive heart attack that my father happened to survive. It caused me to reassess the path I was taking into owning a corporation and working something like 80 hours a week. I didn’t want to end up in my early 50s with a spotty relationship with my family, terrible stress, terrible health, wondering how it was that I squandered all the important things in my life in the pursuit of some hazy idea about financial/material comfort — though, ironically, being really poor and a freelance columnist puts you right back into that straitjacket in a lot of ways.

I will say that the decision probably saved my marriage, though. It wouldn’t have happened as quickly without the internet, for sure. I’m not a good hoop-jumper. Query letters and résumés give me migraines, [though I’m] probably just lazy or mentally ill. The internet allowed me to essentially just write—to post/publish in free public forums, and to eventually get picked up to do a few pieces in cult analog journals before [editor] Bill Chambers asked me to go to work for FilmFreakCentral.net “full time.”