Hello all and once again welcome back to Advice Cred – a handy online resource cultivated by the folks at Film Cred to provide burgeoning writers with answers to some of their most burning questions! There’s a massive and ever-expanding network of professionals with experience writing for all kinds of different publications, meaning there are many unique and valid lenses through which to write about the world of cinema. Take Sydney Urbanek for example – a freelance writer and editor with a specific niche in the intersection between visual storytelling and popular music.
Film Cred: Hi! Can you please introduce yourself and where you’ve been published? Feel free to mention any cool accolades.
Sydney Urbanek: Hi! I’m Sydney, and I’m a freelance writer and editor based in Toronto. I mostly write about the film and pop music worlds meeting somehow, whether that’s through music videos, musicians producing brand-control documentaries, music video directors becoming feature filmmakers (and vice versa), visual albums… anything and everything along those lines. I’m lucky to be a regular over at Billboard and CBC Arts, and I’ve written in the past for places like the Guardian and Sight and Sound. A lot of my work also gets self-published through the newsletter I’ve written for a few years called Mononym Mythology, and that’s arguably the writing I’m best known for.
FC: What was your first published movie review?
SU: I’d started having work published online a few years prior to this, including stuff related to movies, but the first film reviews proper I ever wrote were for Screen Queens. I read a few of them back just now, and while part of me wants to scream “This is the old me!” — they’re unmistakably my voice, but definitely a previous, less reined-in version of it — that was actually only four or so years ago. And I’m always telling other writers that cringing at your past work means you’ve probably grown as a writer since, so clearly I just need to practice what I preach.
FC: How did you get into film criticism?
SU: Initially, I wrote a couple arts-related things, then film-specific things, for my university paper. (I was majoring in film.) I not too long afterwards developed a chronic illness, and, I suppose, latched onto the idea that writing about movies — and editing other people’s writing, which I fell into in 2017 through this now-defunct film website I’d founded — could mean working from home if I needed to.
As I ran that site and wrote around the internet for a couple years after graduating, I found that I was always trying to write about movies and music at the same time — and often about musicians who seemed to think of themselves as filmmakers, at least in part — and, by 2019, realized I wanted to go back to school and spend some time with that in an official sense. I more or less stopped editing and did a one-year Cinema Studies MA program, where I wrote papers about things like Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment and Drake’s “God’s Plan” video. I’d initially planned on doing this thesis about the evolution of the visual album, and the general blurriness between movies and music videos. I continued to write for places online through all of that, and noticed that strangers seemed to respond in particular to these music video deep dives I’d taken to writing, which were at once being influenced by and influencing my academic work. March 2020 hit at exactly the mid-point of my program, and in the haze of all of that I launched my newsletter, which I’d had up my sleeve for a while. I also had to write my thesis over those first six months of the pandemic — the visual albums idea was deemed too big for the time I had to work with, so it ended up being about director Jonas Åkerlund instead, who’s probably best known for his collaborations with Beyoncé, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. So when I graduated in the fall of 2020, I’d built up a decent body of self-published writing related to pop music onscreen, and was also suddenly an expert in this very specific, idiosyncratic artist within that world.
Since 2020, I’ve basically just freelanced around and played everything by ear. I write film criticism whenever it makes sense — pretty much only reviewing music-related projects these days, and most often biographical ones—but also a lot of musician-related pieces where there’s some sort of film tie-in. Think Madonna starring in Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away remake, or something like Carly Rae Jepsen referencing Georges Méliès. I’ve also gradually returned to editing film criticism (as well as books and screenplays), but in a much more behind-the-scenes and perhaps selective way than before.
FC: Do you follow a particular film theory (formalism, structuralism, etc.)?
SU: No <3
FC: What do you think the structure of a good review should be?
SU: I think every review should make a particular argument, and that it should be pretty clear to the reader what said argument is, but I don’t necessarily believe in any one-size-fits-all thing past that. I don’t mind a little first person, for instance, and my time at Bright Wall/Dark Room in particular has sort of exploded the idea that film writing should look any specific way. But I definitely most enjoy reading criticism by writers who’ve been commissioned for a specific area of expertise related to the film, whatever that looks like in practice.
FC: Who is a film critic you admire?
SU: So many, so I won’t attempt to make this exhaustive. I appreciate when Angelica Bastién goes scorched-earth on a project, which you can always tell she does because she loves something and wants better because of that. I was in awe reading Christina Newland’s heated interview with Blonde director Andrew Dominik from not too long ago. I’ve really been enjoying Adam Nayman’s New Yorker era so far, especially his David Cronenberg profile and what he wrote about Bruce Willis’s career. And I have two friends, Izzy (aka Be Kind Rewind) and Dan (aka Eyebrow Cinema), who both put out wonderful work on their respective YouTube channels.
FC: What is your method for note-taking for a movie review? Do you take notes as you watch films?
SU: I definitely take notes, and I try to focus on recording specific thoughts and feelings rather than informational stuff that’ll be somewhere on the internet for me to grab later. Regardless of whether I take notes in a notebook or directly into a Word doc (which I’ll only do if I’m watching something on my TV), my next move is always to “kill” each note, which in my head means turning it into something resembling a sentence, or even just a fragment, and then crossing the note out. I then hook those sentences and fragments up like the “Conjunction Junction” guy, which typically leaves me with something like six to ten ugly blocks of text, which eventually — half a dozen re-writes later — become (hopefully) beautiful paragraphs.
FC: When sending a pitch to a publication, how long do you wait before checking in?
SU: I try whenever I can to stick to the one-week rule, and that’s heavily influenced by having been on the editing side of the equation. I’m lucky in that I’ve typically heard back by then, though I most often pitch editors I already have some kind of relationship with. If I’m cold-emailing someone and haven’t heard back by then, I might send a single follow up if it’s a publication that’s high on my list, but by that point my heart’s probably no longer in it anyway. I guess I’m just currently at a place where I most want to be working with editors who are jumping to work with me.
FC: How do you handle writer’s block and burnout?
SU: Historically, whenever I’m experiencing what seems at first like writer’s block, it’s always really one of two things: I’m either desperately in need of time off because I haven’t been taking great care of myself, or it’s the complete opposite and I haven’t actually tried yet.
If I’ve fried my brain, it’s simply not going to work with me, and I’ve learned—even if I sometimes still have to be reminded every so often—that the best way to handle burnout is to not burn out in the first place. But with me, it’s way more often the second explanation, where I might say “writer’s block” but have in fact not tried to write yet. I often have to remind myself that I can write my way to my argument, rather than knowing exactly what I’m going to say right out the gate. I’m dividing my time between some pretty big projects at the moment, some months-long and some potentially years-long if they end up going well, and it’s easy to get intimidated by the size of them and just shut down. But I find that the secret to writing, as with many things, is there isn’t really a secret; you just have to make an initial dent in it, even if that means setting a 15-minute timer and seeing what you can do in that stint.
FC: Do you have any advice for aspiring film critics?
SU: A few things come to mind. One is to read way, way more than you write, if possible — film criticism, but also whatever else you can get your hands on. It’s good to be exposed to new information and ideas on a regular basis, and creatively stimulating to immerse yourself in a totally foreign format now and again, but there are also lots of common writing mistakes that people wouldn’t make if they read more.
A second thing is to think of the editing process as a necessary, collaborative, and potentially very rewarding thing. You’re cutting yourself off from a ton of growth in thinking of your editor as, like, the opposing team trying to prevent your brilliance from getting in the net. They’re more like the coach whispering helpful things in your ear, maybe, or someone cheering from the stands with a sign that begins, “I’m wondering if…” Either way, they’re certainly not your enemy.
But, at the same time, a third piece of advice is that self-respect should take priority over what I just said. It should give you pause if an editor has zero edits on your work, and it should also give you pause if they’re practically rewriting your pieces, or making significant changes without looping you in, or severely underpaying you. I think a lot of young writers — and I’m not excepting myself here — can justify and stick around too long in dynamics that don’t serve them or their work because they’re not sure what else is out there, but the answer is: lots!
FC: Are there any books or articles that you would recommend a new writer read?
SU: I love Kim Liao’s essay reframing rejection, which was especially helpful to me when I first started freelancing officially a few years ago. There’s also a lot of good stuff in this interview with Jia Tolentino about being a writer who’s also been an editor, and therefore loves to self-edit and be edited. (The line “I love a hard edit” pops into my head anytime I get a more challenging edit and feel myself losing my cool.)
I appreciate anything that gets at how writing is a challenging activity that can also be extremely pleasurable—not one or the other, but both. During that same Trick Mirror promo cycle, Jia published this essay about her book-writing ritual of holing up for the first weekend of every month and doing little else but work and cook pasta. There’s also what Rachel Syme wrote about Valley of the Dolls author Jacqueline Susann last year, which makes the case for glamor and headiness in one’s writing life.
And not to go too off the rails with my books answer, but I really benefit from the years I’ve spent curating my bookshelves, which are this very telling snapshot/extension of the things that matter to me personally and professionally—things I already know lots about, but also things I don’t yet know anything about. I organize my books, which are mostly non-fiction, broadly by topic and more specifically by sub-topic, which over time builds out this very satisfying and useful gradient. I have these beat-specific staples that I’m always coming back to—I Want My MTV and Ryann Donnelly’s Justify My Love are the first ones that come to mind. But I have :sub-sections on, like… the Knowleses, the AIDS crisis, Classic Hollywood, sexuality, disability, David Bowie, and so on. I’m a huge believer in the idea that you can read your way to understanding just about anything; if there’s something you want to write about but don’t feel like you have enough background or expertise to do so, you won’t feel that way after reading a book or two by people who’ve already done the hard part. All of which is to say: I’d definitely recommend identifying the handful of things that feel like inconvenient gaps in your particular brain, professionally speaking, and then reading the most obvious handful (armful?) of books that would fill those gaps, or at least get you started.
FC: Do you approach writing about music differently than writing about film, and is there any overlap in how you analyze both?
SU: I don’t believe I approach them differently, since my whole deal is really that I think of and write about them at once. A lot of my work has me treating musicians as part-time filmmakers, for instance. I never really write about music that isn’t attached to a visual of some kind, since I’m not a music critic so much as a film critic who pays a lot of attention to the moving images that come out of the music world. And otherwise to how the film industry uses popular music — through needle drops, but also things like casting or the so-called MTV aesthetic.
FC: What was it like collaborating on a collection of essays, and how did you approach writing that piece compared to your online publications? Were you reading any of the other essays before or while writing your own?
SU: That piece was more or less about Nancy Botwin from Jenji Kohan’s series Weeds, and how she’s a character who develops over eight seasons from someone who knows she’s flawed and wants to fix that into someone who knows she’s flawed and couldn’t care less. What I wrote was partly television criticism and partly a personal essay about being chronically ill; neither Nancy or I is curable, so to speak, and we’ve both decided that we have better things to do than pretend to hate ourselves for others’ comfort.
I don’t typically write about television, so that was interesting in itself, and there obviously wasn’t any music-in with the piece, but I otherwise approached it the way I would any research project where I know the property I’d like to write about but not my angle yet. Scarlett Harris announced sometime while I was writing my thesis in 2020 that she was putting together a book on Kohan’s television projects. I was obsessed with Weeds in high school and figured I was overdue for a rewatch, and didn’t feel like I had anything interesting to say about the sole episode of Sex and the City she wrote, which would have been my other option. So I watched the whole of Weeds back after handing in my thesis, and took notes on things that stuck out to me; many turned out to be criticisms related to how the show handled disability, and then I’d also picked up on this interesting thread where Nancy and her aptitude for chaos are constantly discussed using the language of illness and disability. And then that turned out to be the crux of my pitch, and later my piece: Why is it that this show is so brutal if you’re a disabled character, and yet so comforting to me as a disabled viewer, concerned as it is with this woman whose self- actualization arc has her getting worse rather than better? I then watched the series back yet again once my pitch was actually accepted, and wrote the essay from my couch.
I ended up taking way longer to write than I was supposed to, so I owe Scarlett a lot for her patience with me throughout the first half of 2021 — it was mostly that the piece was so personal, and I was also just trying to do too much around that time. But the whole thing was very therapeutic in the end, not to mention cool and surreal to eventually hold the book in my hands and see my name there at the top of my chapter. I bought four or five copies just to be extra about it. But no, I had no idea what anyone else was writing (just that I was one of only a couple people writing on Weeds), or even who the other writers were (one actually turned out to be a friend), until I got the uncorrected proofs in my email. Every essay in that book is totally different.
To see more of Sydney’s musings on the relationship between film and music, check out her newsletter Mononym Mythology, and follow her on Twitter @sydurbanek! For more advice useful to writers, editors, and everyone in between, make sure to check out film-cred.com/advice.
