Alejandro G. Calvo: “A lot of kids are studying film because of me, and I think, ‘I’m ruining their lives!’”

BarcelonaAn inspiration and absolute reference for the younger generation of film buffs, Alejandro G. Calvo's (Barcelona, 1978) film videos have accumulated more than 135 million views, but he has spent his entire life writing film criticism with passion and knowledge –also in the ARA–. After debuting as an author with a collection of reviews that broke sales records in the field of books on cinema, A movie for every year of your life (Temas de Hoy, 2023), a few months ago published Why do I have to watch this movie? (Temas de Hoy), which broadens the field of film criticism to also include its emotions, insecurities, and contradictions. In its texts, erudition and enthusiasm go hand in hand to tell the tale of cinema in its own way, without exhibitionism or war stories, sharing its ideas with passion and a sense of humor.

You always talk about how film criticism is a necessity for you, a way of relating to cinema. When did this need arise?

— Since I was a kid. I didn't want to make films or write scripts, or watch films. I wanted to write. In fact, before criticism, I was already writing stories and my own stuff, and I was a crazy reader. But it was when I discovered film criticism existed that my head exploded. Suddenly, I realized this is what I want to do. And I have hundreds of really bad reviews that I wrote as a kid. At that time, I didn't value sharing my opinion; I understood criticism as an act of creation that, in some way, connected you to the film forever. Thanks to criticism, the film is with you for the rest of your life. And it's also a way of understanding yourself, because you try to enter the mind of the director who made the film, but deep down, you're there too.

It's not just a way of relating to cinema, but to yourself.

— Exactly. That's why most film reviews are so personal, because movies affect us in a very brutal and intimate way, so much so that it's hard to explain, but that's our job. "Why did this movie move me?" That's why I advocate for talking about oneself as well, which is something that's frowned upon by mainstream critics but that makes me very happy. Even when it's a shitty movie like... Electrical status, because it allows me to build a discourse on the state of cinema mainstream today, which is painful.

In the book, you talk about how movies don't change, but we do, and that means movies, in some ways, change for us too. What films have changed the most since you started interacting with them until now?

— Husbands, by John Cassavetes, is a mutant film that gets sadder every time I see it. When I was 20, it was like The Hangover, hilarious: some friends partying, getting drunk and flirting at the casino. I'd watch it and think: how crazy they are, what animals! But when I watch it again later, it seems more bitter, and now, downright devastating. It's a terrifying film: they cheat on women, they don't care about anything, and one of them is an abuser. It's a portrait of the midlife crisis, a very bitter portrait. And it talks about friendship between men in a way that no one would dare to do today.

It is a portrait of male toxicity.

— Yes, but very realistic. It's not a satire. Cassavetes goes straight to the wound, where it hurts. And he doesn't pass judgment. It also happens to me with really brutal melodramas that at first make me angry and I feel like they're making pain pornography, that they're manipulating you, but it doesn't work. And ten years later you watch them again, and now they've really screwed you over, and you end up crying, devastated.

In fact, in the book you advocate changing your mind.

— Yes. When writing about Fellini, it would have been very easy to write about Eight and a half either La dolce vita, but instead I choose The road, which is a film I remembered as very neorealist and sad, but upon rewatching it I find it much more lyrical and affecting. And that blows my mind and makes me want to write about the film. There are already a million excellent texts about it. The road What do I want to contribute that's new? But that struggle against oneself, confronting your past ideas with those of the present... This also leads me to defend a film by Isabel Coixet. "But it's indefensible!" they tell me. But I try. Because despite being faithful to the authors' politics, we are fallible and can make mistakes.

In this sense, you quote a quote from the late Fran Gayo, who was programmer of the Gijón Festival, about the joy you must feel when a director you don't like makes a film you love.

— Yes. I'm very happy to have quoted Fran in the book... When Fran told me this, I kept thinking there was an important lesson there. Because the reality is that we always make it easier for the directors we like. A recent example is Mickey 17, by Bong Joon-ho. Mickey 17 I liked it much more than the film itself, which is a bit of a mess, even weak. It lasts for 15 minutes, and the rest... I might not have forgiven another director for the voiceover, the mid-tempo dip, or the histrionics. But since it's Bong Joon-ho, and he's one of us... A film critic isn't like a pH test; we're not like that. We're people, and we doubt, we screw up, and we say films are great that later turn out to be bad. And I learned that from Sergi Sánchez, who's incredibly clever, and in a talk, he defended critics' right to be wrong. And he's right. It's normal, and even more so given the conditions under which we see films at festivals, which are terrible. The important thing is that you're sincere.

And what is your biggest mistake as a critic?

— All or nothing by Mike Leigh, which is a film that few people will remember. I saw it in San Sebastián and thought: "That's the best film in the history of cinema. It's better than Bergman!" And six months later I see it again and think: "Wow, that's bad." I'll never forget it. And without going to that extreme, it's also happened to me with Emilia PérezI didn't leave the theater saying it was a masterpiece, but rather, "What a strange movie. That's a good thing, right? Okay, come on, it's in favor." And when I saw it again in February, I didn't like it at all. It's worth noting that from May to February, critics Daniel de Partearroyo and Alberto Lechuga did a great job of wearing me down by constantly repeating that the film was crap... But the truth is, they were right.

There's a key moment in your career as a critic: after many years writing about film and managing websites, you suddenly start doing video reviews. Why did you make that switch?

— The website where I work, Sensacine, was about to close because we were making losses, but no one knew about it except the company's boss, and I was just the editor-in-chief. Then they sold the company to the French group Webedia, who own it today. They fired my boss and offered me the position, but told me I had 11 months to turn a profit and turn Sensacine into the number 1 film website in Spain, when we were number 5 at the time. Suddenly, I was responsible for 13 people, and if I failed, they'd be fired. And we could have failed, but we banded together and pulled together. On the one hand, we cut expenses that could be cut, except salaries, and on the other, we dedicated ourselves to building an audience. So we created an SEO plan when SEO wasn't even talked about here yet, a social content plan for Facebook that worked very well, and finally, a video plan. I had everyone making videos, and, to set an example, I also made review videos. And that changed my life. At first, the reviews were terrible, but when we started making content that no one else was making—very cinephile and sophisticated videos—the numbers skyrocketed. Since the company was saved, they quickly brought in a new boss, and I went back to my old job, but that's how I've been able to dedicate myself to making videos all these years.

And how does your approach to criticism change when you move from writing to video? In what ways is one language different from the other?

— For me, it's been a very simple step. The key to videos is not to speak with the words I would use in a written review, but rather how you speak to friends. And this has been a tectonic shift in my career. In a text, you can become poetic, essayistic, baroque, cryptic... You can write literature, in short, and it can come across well even if you're not saying anything. But in a video, it's impossible. In a video, if you don't say anything, they'll catch you out. So, my process is a kind of Fordian distillation: if I watch a film and it provokes emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic reflections in me, I must be able to do them without losing depth but in a simple, direct, and empathetic way. And I say it's Fordian because it's necessary to do it with the minimum of elements, without embellishments. And in the end, you realize that the emotion isn't in the text or the literature, but in how you convey it. But you realize that a year later when someone tells you that you moved them with your review of... The brutalist, which is a good example because I recorded it without knowing what to say, because the film overwhelmed me on every level. But an emotion seeps into the video that, in some way, accompanies the reflection you're making.

I'd say making videos has also changed your way of writing. In the videos, you explain everything that happens to you before, during, and after watching the film and how you feel: the anxiety, the tiredness... And in the book reviews, you also do a bit of the same. making of of each review: the process that led you to choose it, the doubts, the state in which you write it...

— Yes, the experience. True, I hadn't thought about it. The thing is that the book is more intense, because the writing takes months. In the book, there are more orthodox texts, like the ones I dedicate to John Ford, but they're weaker than the ones I write when I think: "Since I can't tell anything new that hasn't been written a thousand times, at least I'll do something that's mine." And that's when I put myself in the text, but without keeping a diary. I'm not the guy who's had the most adventures in the world of cinema; I don't have any anecdotes with John Carpenter; I'm not like that. The anecdotes I have from festivals are with my friends. In the reviews, I talk about my emotions, and in the first book I did it in a more subtle and metaphorical way, but in the second I do it in the first person. And I always try to make it organic, because you can't find a metaphor for your life for every film, it would be ridiculous. But if you write the text of Rough diamonds The day a friend from my town dies, I feel like talking about my town's festivals. I don't want to talk about myself, but about cinema, explaining everything that's happening to me and what makes the book what it is.

And how did you choose the films you write about in the book?

— Initially, there were supposed to be 100, and I made a list of 500 films, but the texts ended up being longer than the first book, and in the end, there weren't even 50 titles. I chose some to take advantage of my work: when I watch Anora in Cannes I love it so much that I decided to include it in the book. I think it's an absolute masterpiece that, by the way, doesn't romanticize prostitution in any way. And since I was doing a retro-critique of Vertigo While writing, the book closes with VertigoBut above all, I choose movies because I really want to talk about them.

The largest block is dedicated to Spanish cinema.

— I was obsessed with Spanish cinema. I even suggested to the publisher that we focus exclusively on Spanish cinema because I was having such a great time. I'm planning to make a documentary series about Spanish cinema and tell its story, but not just the elitist view taught in film schools and in Spanish cinema history books, which always focuses on the same names.

In the book you mix Poachers from Borau with Panic on the Trans-Siberian Railway by Eugenio Martín.

— Of course! The portrait of rural Spain Poachers is just as important as the fantaterror of Panic on the Trans-Siberian Railway and the spaghetti western of Condemned to live, are all masterpieces. It is also important to me that they enter The crack by José Luis Garcio, the cinema of José Vale del Omar or Burned skin By Josep Maria Forn. The history of Spanish cinema is much richer than they'd like to tell us, and that also makes it easier to approach.

Returning to the videos, we live in the time of reels and TikTok, for short, viral videos. However, your most-viewed videos are the ones Point-blank, essays lasting over an hour on directors' filmographies, films from a century ago, or film genres. How do you explain this?

— Because people are smarter than the media and their editors-in-chief think. Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Bergman always said that viewers were intelligent and shouldn't be underestimated, and I think the same. Today's digital content is 90% copies of each other, and it's increasingly poor and sad. But everyone is desperate for an audience, because audiences are monetized by impressions, so they say, "Let's do what works." And then everyone does the same thing, and it's horrible. I just did what I wanted. A two-hour documentary on Westerns. Another one that was an hour and a half on silent films and the avant-garde movements of the 1920s. And now one on cinematic language. I also made a documentary on Tarantino and one on Scorsese, but with the utmost rigor, with long, in-depth analytical videos. And they are the greatest success of my career: millions of views for films that are one and a half or two hours long. And not because this is what worksNo, people should do what they believe in. And if they do it well, the public will see it. The problem is that editorial teams are now run by audience departments, not editors. And this is disastrous.

You've done well as a critic, but in recent years, criticism has lost social relevance and media presence. To what do you attribute this?

— It's the necrotic drift of digital journalism. First and foremost, film criticism has always been considered a residual space; there are very few media outlets that have a film critic on staff exclusively for criticism. Most media outlets are looking for a writer who writes SEO news and film reviews, walks red carpets, and records videos. And you can't even expect them to be a perfect critic, because criticism requires years of training and a deep knowledge of film history. It's the best job in the world, but it requires a lot of dedication beforehand. And the media don't want to pay for it because it doesn't get as many views as a news story that tells you the ending of a film. The precariousness is absolute, and who would want to be a film critic knowing you won't be able to make a living? The paradox is that now there are thousands of platforms to share your criticism, whether written, video, or audio, but it seems like no one is going to pay you for it.

The other paradox is that there have never been so many films and audiovisual products to criticize.

— And there are also more critics than ever. There are always people eager to criticize and people who want to hear those criticisms. But instead of criticism, we're hearing a bunch of trolls insulting and always saying the same thing. It's amazing how currents of opinion operate; they're unidirectional, like tsunamis. Suddenly, it's time to say that a new series is very good, and people are even afraid to say it isn't. Critical thinking is disappearing, but we must be able to break these trends and not let technology overwhelm us. We need 15-year-olds to start criticizing, and to invent their own formats, whatever they may be. It's as radical to write like André Bazin as it is to make a funny video on TikTok.

You're the critic of your generation who has connected the most with the public, especially young people. I've seen long lines at your signings. How do you experience that?

— It's mind-blowing, I don't even know how to process it. And the fans are incredible: a 17-year-old boy brought me a copy of The cinema from André Bazin to sign it because he'd discovered it in one of my videos. It was very moving. My first Sant Jordi, I signed more than 600 books, and I ended up with a dead hand. Then you feel deflated and you don't know why, but I think it's because of all the love and affection I receive from people. Many kids tell me they're studying film because of my videos. And I think: "I'm ruining their lives!"