SMASH UP!: AN INTERVIEW WITH KIM MORGAN

Kim Morgan hashes it out with Richard Roeper

There’s a very good film blog, Nathaniel R’s Film Experience, I visit so often that I just assumed I had it linked on my sidebar. Up through this morning, it wasn’t. Now it is. Nathaniel is a spirited writer—I particularly liked his even-handed take on American Gangster-- and he has a recurring feature where he’ll grab a screenshot from the 20th minute and the 07th second of a random movie, just to see what’s there, that is a surprising amount of fun.

And you gotta get over there before the holiday wraps up just to get a look at the Thanksgiving-themed header he’s got going on at the top of the page.

Yesterday Nathaniel unwrapped a very special holiday treat for us all by sitting down with one of my favorite film writers, Kim Morgan, for 10 Questions. This interview, in addition to being a funny, carbonated look at one writer’s obsessions, gives you some thoughtful insight into the intelligence behind those obsessions, an intelligence swimming upstream against the tide of assumptions about film critics, particularly female film critics, in the polluted river of sensory overload and lack of connection with film history that is Hollywood. Kim has never been too shy about talking about those obsessions either, and her rapid-fire enthusiasm is, as Nathaniel’s interview with her vividly illustrates, contagious as hell. As I wrote in Nathaniel’s comments column, the piece perfectly captures Kim's fevered cinephilia, but also her sly humor, her lack of pretension and her giddy smarts, as well as her disdain about the level of film education that runs through Hollywood like a dry creek bed. If you're lucky enough to spend time with someone who combines all those qualities, you'll come away from a conversation with a definite buzz on. And that's what Nathaniel’s interview with Kim Morgan did for me.

Read and enjoy!