Amanda Hsu: Since his sophomore year, junior Peter Ostrem has been writing movie reviews for his beat “Off-screen with Ostrem“, consistently covering the most popular and controversial films of each month. I’m Amanda Hsu and in this podcast episode, I talk to Peter, A&E editor for The Rubicon, about his motivation and love for film critique.

Hsu: How did you come up with the idea of “Off-screen with Ostrem”?

Peter Ostrem: Well, my beat in my sophomore year, it was assigned to me, movie/TV review was assigned to me as a beat. The first six-ish months, I was just doing movies and then Ms. Campbell sent out an email to me and Eliana and she was like, I feel like we should make it its own thing, instead of just normal movie reviews. It actually was Ms. Campbell’s idea for the name. And then we just kind of started putting in Offscreen with Ostrem for every review. And there’s supposed to be a sidebar on RubicOnline that never happened, I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen.

Hsu: How often do you write these reviews?

Ostrem: So last year it was once a month, and it was only new movies. This year I’m trying to do two a month, a new movie, and an old movie. Last month, I only could do “Good Will Hunting” as my old movie because I had a concussion, I wasn’t allowed to go to a theater so I couldn’t review a new movie. So it’s supposed to be two a month, but that hasn’t happened yet. But I’m hoping that October is the first time that we get two a month.

Hsu: And how do you pick the movies you’re going to do?

Peter Ostrem: When I was just doing new movies, like some months, especially September, there’s no good movies coming out. My first movie review was “The Equalizer 3” and it was horrible. And well sometimes it’s just like, there’s not a ton of movies, I just gotta pick the most popular one that people know. Some of them are obvious to me, like oh yeah, “Challengers,” I was gonna review that. Like “Dune 2,” I had to review “Dune 2.” A lot of it is personal preference and what Online doesn’t steal from me. Now I do old movies. I think “Good Will Hunting”…I just kind of love that movie, I wanted to review it. I’m doing “Halloween” this month because I love that movie, and I also feel it’s kind of with the theme. And like I’m doing “Die Hard” in December. I love “Die Hard,” and it’s also a Christmas movie. So I try to make it relevant somehow other than just the movies I like.

Hsu: Do you review movies that you’ve seen before?

Ostrem: Yeah, all my old movies so far I have seen before, and they’re like, favorites of mine. But I try to do all my new reviews as my first reaction to it. So all my reviews last year were like, I went to the theater, saw it for the first time, got home, set up my laptop, and wrote my first draft. So I try to do it, especially the new ones, as my instant reaction to it.

Hsu: What is your what is on your movie wishlist that you really want to review but haven’t yet?

Ostrem: So “Die Hard.” So when I came up with the idea to do old movies, the first thing that came to mind was “King Kong” from 1933, I’m not sure why, but I wanted to get to that eventually. I meant to review “Megalopolis,” but it came out last month, and I think the time frame is kind of off for that. At some point, I’d like to review “The Godfather” because I also was gonna do that one last month, but that didn’t happen. And also I just want to do “La La Land” because it’s my favorite movie, but also it’s not very old, so I don’t know how I’m gonna fit in, but we’ll see.

Hsu: What review has been your favorite so far to write?

Ostrem: That’s a good question. I think I really… the first one that I wrote, and was like, man, I’m actually kind of good at this was my “Killers of the Flower Moon” [review] last October. And I wrote it and was like oh, this is kind of fun. Because my “Equalizer 3” review sucked because it was my first movie review, and the movie was horrible, and I didn’t really want to do it. But I really loved my “Killers of the Flower Moon” [review]. I think my “Dune 2” [review] was probably my favorite, just because I was looking forward to that movie for so long, and I saw like three times in one weekend, and I was like, I have so many thoughts on this movie. My first draft was like 2000 words or something, Elianna had to cut out 1300.

Hsu: Oh my gosh.

Ostrem: But so far, I really like doing old movies, because I love being able to write about movies I love, that’s kind of my favorite part about it, that I get to write, you know, 800 words or whatever, about some of my favorite movies, so like my “Good Will Hunting” [review] and then my “Halloween” [review] which I think is being published this week.

Hsu: What review has been the most challenging to write, or which review do you not like?

Ostrem: I really don’t like my “Challengers” review, which is kind of disappointing because I really like that movie. There’s a whole thing with Ms. Campbell [where she] thought it was AI-generated.

Hsu: Really?

Ostrem: Yeah.

Hsu: Really?

Ostrem: Yeah, I don’t know. She emailed me, and she was like, I put it into the thing, and it says it’s 75% AI-generated. I was like, it’s not, I must just have not written it very well. Because it [was] published in the last week of school, and it’s whatever. But I really like that movie, I’m sometimes disappointed that my review for it isn’t very good. I think a challenging one that turned out pretty well was “Poor Things,” which was my December [beat]. That was a really good movie, but it’s hard like some movies are hard to say something new about because there’s been so much material on the absurdity of it when it released. And I think I was like, man, I want to say something new that someone hasn’t said about this movie so that one took me a long time. But also my review for that sucks, it’s just really bad.

Hsu: What do you usually include in your reviews?

Ostrem: I like to do the usual things; I always touch on acting, script, editing, cinematography. I like to do sound design, I feel like that’s kind of an underappreciated part of movies. When most people in the movies, they’re like, man, the sound is really good that, so I like to kind of pay tribute to that. Also, another thing to do is name-drop the cinematographers and sound designers for the movies because no one…people know directors maybe, but they don’t know who the cinematographer of the movie was. And if they did a really good job [I’ll say] yeah, this dude has a really good career, and you should probably watch his movies. I like to talk about movies that have heavy themes. I think the themes are really important to talk about. With “Dune 2”, I had two paragraphs about how there’s a white savior complex thing. The core of my reviews is me interpreting what the director is trying to tell us. Because that’s what I think is most interesting about movies is that the director makes all these choices, and you as a viewer can see those choices, and then you have to figure out why they want you to see that. So I really like to focus on that. Also, I just like to talk about where the industry was when it came out, and how it affected people’s careers, and how important was to the industry or the genre. That’s usually what I like to do.

Hsu: And do you do any previous research?

Ostrem: I feel like for my old movies I have to do more of it, like my “Halloween” one I did, I talked about interviews that Carpenter did in the 70s. And I dig up all these old New York Times articles about the reception in the movie. But I have, on my Google Drive, an info template thing, that [includes] the budget, who’s starring in it, the director, cinematographer, what it meant to the franchise, and what it meant to the people. So I just fill it out so I have the basic information about the movie when I start writing my review, but it’s not very research-heavy.

Hsu: How do you think you’ve grown in your review writing?

Ostrem: I think in the beginning, it was very like, much like, oh…I think I was focusing a lot more on telling the reader what the movie was about; I remember in my first couple of reviews I had probably 200 words describing the plot, and that’s just not what you want to do. So now I cut it down to like, the plot focuses around this guy doing this thing, and this happens to him, and that’s it. Because you’re not…you’re trying to get the reader to watch it, you’re not trying to tell the reader what happens in it. The whole idea of having original ideas in review writing is very difficult, especially for these huge movies that the New York Times had four people review it, and I read the reviews and [think] man, I said the exact same thing, this isn’t beneficial to anybody. Developing my voice in review writing is really important, that’s why I like to focus on all the stuff that means [something] to the industry. I feel like that’s something that is kind of not touched on as much. So I think my voice has been more apparent in my reviews than it was at the start.

Hsu: And do you think you’ll pursue review writing once you graduate from SPA?

Ostrem: I would like to. I’m really interested in film, I’d like to do something like that in the future. I feel like being in some sort of film criticism, or even…I like reviewing plays. I’ve done two, I think, but they’re fun. So I would like to do something [like that] in some sort [manner].

Hsu: And this is like a closing question, but this might be a little hard, what are your top three favorite movies?

Ostrem: So my first favorite movie is “La La Land,” my second favorite movie is “Good Will Hunting,” my third favorite movie is “Punch Drunk Love,” which is from the early 2000s, it’s not an Adam Sandler movie, but he’s in it, it’s an amazing movie. So I think that’s my top three. “Ratatouille” was in my top three for a while…so was “Good Fellas,” I think right now those are my top three.

Hsu: You can read Offscreen with Ostrem’s latest reviews on RubicOnline. Thank you for listening to this podcast episode. We will be back next month with more behind-the-scenes stories from the staff. See you next time.