“I do take notes in the dark”, says Rafer Guzman.
Rafer Guzman is the film critic for Newsday, a daily newspaper that is primarily written for people living in Long Island. Guzman started out as a freelancer in San Francisco, but later in his career began writing music reviews, sometimes for free. He started at a small publication and over the years went into bigger publications.
As for education, Guzman has a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and he graduated with a master’s degree in Journalism from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. “I’m still paying off my loans,” he says.
Before Guzman became the film critic for Newsday, he was a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. There he covered travel and tourism for about four years. He said that it was “fun”, but it was not really what he wanted to do.
In 2002, Guzman became the rock critic for Newsday. He said that being a rock critic was exhausting and tiring. “With music, I got sick of it”, he says.
As a rock critic, he sometimes wrote only “one film review every other month”. However, after the whole Newsday film department quit by taking money in a buyout, Guzman became a full- time film critic.
Guzman now has to review about three to five movies a week. Guzman watches every wide release movies that comes out. “I see it all”, he says. Unlike with music, Guzman does not get sick of watching movies.
Guzman has to view movies ahead of time and most of the time he views movies in private screening rooms, which are mainly in midtown Manhattan, but he lives in Brooklyn.
His favorite movie genre is action and his favorite director is Stanley Kubrick. His favorite Disney movies are Beauty and the Beast and Frozen.
Guzman enjoys his job even if he has to watch bad movies. “I think it is fun to watch bad movies because you can figure out why a bad movie is bad”, he says. Guzman has been a film critic for Newsday for around seven years now and he is happy with his job.