Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

For my 9th birthday, my mom gave me a fat paperback copy of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide. I read that thing so many times the spine eventually snapped (right on the page for the Friday the 13th films).

My mom once taught my Boy Scout Troop a bible class in our dining room. (I'm not kidding.) When she asked us to take out our bibles, I pulled out my copy of Maltin's guide. True story.

One of the greatest moments in my young movie-going life is when Leonard Maltin recanted his **1/2 review of Alien, adding an extra star and altering it from "It unfolds at a deliberate pace but adds stomach churning violence" to "It unfolds at a deliberate pace and adds colorful characters," or something along those lines (I'm doing this from memory). I even sent Maltin a letter explaining why he was so wrong about the film, though I doubt he ever got it. When he altered his review, sometime in the early-aughts, after the director's cut of Alien hit theaters, I remember shaking my tiny fist to the sky and proclaiming my victory.

I don't know if a 9-year-old should have Alien on VHS, or any of the multitude of R-rated movies I had (Terminator 2, Predator 2, The Thing, Nightmare on Elm Street), but that film, like Maltin's guide, had a profound impact on me. Maltin changing his review taught me a invaluable life lesson: You're never objectively right in criticism, and there's no shame in changing your mind about something. He explained, in his terse write-up, that he now saw the film differently than he had when he was younger. I'm always trying to decipher how and why my tastes have changed over the course of my short life, and I keep coming back to Maltin's Alien review as the root of my film critic aspirations. I'll miss seeing his guide taking up entire shelves in the book stores, a legion of bespectacled Leonard Maltins smiling jocularly at me.

Leonard Maltin's Film Guide gets five really tiny reviews out of five