Queenan is critic with a taste for danger

Joe Queenan

Joe Queenan on his life as an American writer and film critic.


Q: What did your [British-born] wife think about you going off alone to her homeland?

A: Not terribly keen. I like to travel when I can just jump on and off a train - I wasn't going to drag my family up to Liverpool and various places I wanted to see.

I grew up in Philadelphia which is a blue-collar proletariat rough-at-the-edges town so places like Liverpool and Glasgow were very interesting to me.

Edinburgh was too pretty. I enjoyed some of the grottier areas of London as well. I'm not crazy about places that have been done up a lot for tourists, like Glastonbury, which is crawling with Americans.

Q: When you went to Liverpool, you had a great Beatles day tour with the cabbie called Big Jim, who claimed to know John Lennon. That turned out to be a lie so why didn't you care?

A: When I was in England talking about that story people sneered at me. They said I was a typical stupid American in Liverpool taken in by a cabbie. The whole point was that experience would not happen to anyone in the US; the idea of the interesting, garrulous cabbie who has concocted the story about the Beatles would never occur in the US and that's what was so charming about it - to hell with the Beatles, what was great was that I had a rollicking good time with him.

Q: Your views in the book on people like Mel Gibson are very amusing. You don't like him, do you?

A: He hates the English. If you look at movies like Gallipoli, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Patriot and Braveheart - all those movies are filled with hatred of the English and no one but me seems to have made the connection.

Q: Do you think he'll read this book?

A: No, he's too busy counting the money he got from The Passion. He's just recut The Passion - a new edition came out in time for Easter - he says he's cut it so it can be watched by people who were put off by some of the insensitive parts. If he cuts out all the parts of that movie that are revolting he's gonna have a 13-second movie.

Q: Was it true you played Hugh Grant in a short telemovie called My Fair Hugh?

A: Yeah. I had a stupid wig, and glasses and a pink shirt and of course when I went into the Millwall [notoriously rough English soccer club] pub, they don't have much of a sense of humour. But they were smart enough to see they were the butt of the joke.

The producer thought we could just zip in and film but it was one of those situations when you wanted to get out of there as quickly as you could. It was one of the more unpleasant evenings I've had in my life.

Q: You seem to have a taste for danger, like the experiment written about in Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, when you did just that. Isn't sitting in a movie theatre yelling at the screen dangerous?

A: Well, now lots of people are doing it because they're so upset by the number of ads and previews before movies. But when I was doing that thing of talking in the theatre, the point I wanted to make is that when you are in any social situation and behaving badly, no more than two people in that room will have the guts to confront you.

And frequently, they will not be men. You'd think big strong men would be the ones, but often it's women. It was very interesting.

Q: How did you endure the experience of immersing yourself in dreadful West End theatre, like the Queen musical We Will Rock You and The Mousetrap?

A: The Mousetrap was pretty bad, the theatre is very small and very old, there's nowhere to sit comfortably if you are more than five feet three (1.6m) [Queenan is 1.8m]. That play was written in the 50s, and in the 50s it was already 30 years out of date.

It's excruciating. They come out at the beginning and ask you not to reveal the ending - first of all, there's no one left to see it, everyone on the planet has seen it. And second, you'd have to be a moron not to figure out who the murderer is.

But it's not as excruciating as the Queen musical. I remember distinctly that punk started three minutes after Queen's first single. It was like a direct response to Queen. Before that there'd been Steely Dan, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes - but it was Queen that really led to punk - everyone said no more of this stuff.

Q: So when you go to see the musical - which is set 50 years in the future, and society is suppressing Queen music - well, why not suppress Abba while you're at it?

A: You didn't see anyone there either who looked like they could remember Queen. They all looked like cops. Also, what was strange was that it was written by Ben Elton, supposedly this leftist hero back in the Thatcher era who is now the biggest sellout in history.

Q: How about the Eagles tribute band Talon you saw in England?

A: It was like everybody in town came out that night whether they liked the Eagles or not. Americans of a certain age and a certain sophistication level think of the Eagles as a harmless band - they are not the anti-Christ. To me, the anti-Christ would be Billy Joel.

The Eagles were like Credence, a pop band that had some good songs, some bad songs - and yet, when you go abroad, somewhere like semi-rural England, you're mystified why anyone would want to see an Eagles tribute band.

They were so note-perfect but when they started talking, it was like [he feigns a northern England accent] "can you put your hands together and give it up for Colin of north Wiltshire". It's so jarring. You can't talk like that, you've got to talk like Don Henley.

Q: What's the weirdest tribute band you've seen?

A: I saw Warren Zevon play with a bunch of fat guys at a club in New York. I found out later that this was a Warren Zevon tribute band he'd dredged up in a bar. He was in Venice, California, he went into a bar and there was a band - Thursday night they were a Grateful Dead tribute band, Friday a Kiss tribute band, Saturday night the Warren Zevon tribute band. So he hired them to go out on tour with him. This is just another sad Warren Zevon story. And they weren't any good.

Q: Do you still enjoy going to the movies?

A: Yeah, but I enjoy it mostly if I can go with my kids. My son is 18, my daughter is 21. I basically only go to movies I want to see - not necessarily because they're any good - the last thing I saw was John Travolta's new movie Be Cool, which isn't very good but I wanted to see that. Before that I saw Constantine, with Keanu Reeves, which was terrible but I wanted to see that.

Tomorrow, I'm going to see Ring 2 which has had terrible reviews but I don't care. Whereas if you're a regular movie reviewer, you have to go and see Lindsay Lohan movies and Hilary Duff movies and films where Julia Stiles falls in love with the Prince of Denmark - that's the stuff that's excruciating.

And most comedies. Like Meet the Fockers with Barbra Streisand and Robert De Niro, gosh, that sounds like a lot of fun.

When you watch a horror movie or a gangster movie, if it stinks, it doesn't matter. They're not acting like they're cool, whereas in comedies, the audience is always drawn in with the idea that the main people - you're supposed to be on their side.

I don't want to be on Adam Sandler's side. Or Ben Stiller's side. And I certainly don't want to be on Barbra Streisand's side.

Travel writing

*Who: Joe Queenan, American writer & film critic.
*What: Aside from writing regular movie critiques for the Guardian and New York Times, Queenan has a cult following for his books If You're Talking to Me Your Career Must Be in Trouble, Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler and The Unkindest Cut, about his (failed) efforts to make a movie using just his credit card.
*Out now: Queenan Country (Picador, $34.95).