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Margaret & David: “We’ve been enormously lucky.”

Video: Legendary critics say thank-you after 28 years of going to the movies.

2014-09-17_0136The cinema community -and the TV audience- is reeling from news of Margaret & David’s retirement.

While David Stratton’s retirement at 75 was not unexpected, it’s easy to get sentimental over what will be the end of an era.

“It’s been an incredible run on television. We’ve been enormously lucky. Our longevity is due to you guys,” said Pomeranz. “All you film lovers out there. Thank you so much for supporting us, right from the very beginning.”

The news was comprehensively covered across media yesterday: online, radio, print and television.

“It’s so weird. I can’t believe it. I mean we’re just two old fuddy duddies talking about movies on television! The reaction has just been quite overwhelming. Really,” Pomeranz told Fairfax.

“I guess we’ve been in people’s lounge rooms for 28 years and, you know, we’d become [the viewers’] mates,” Pomeranz said.

In 2011 she told TV Tonight, “I’m slightly overwhelmed by the focus on us. Really, we’re just two people in front of the camera doing our job and it sort of seems a bit unfair to me that the people who work really hard behind the scenes don’t get that acknowledgement. We’ve had such great teams over the years and I said after the event that it’s like an accumulation of families.

“We’ve had such great kids come in who’ve been 21, keen as mustard, really love film and they’ve worked their butts off and achieved and now I look around and they’re wonderful producers in their own right. It’s just been the most exciting journey for a lot of people and for me, I’m like this mother who has seen her kids go through and become wonderful achievers in television.”

“We’re most probably there more often than a lot of their friends and that’s the way we’re greeted around the country, everyone thinks we’re a mate and I think that’s lovely.”

Guardian reminds us:
Having started out as a producer, Pomeranz’s reviews often favoured a more emotional, gut-level and notably feminist perspective. She has the ability to strike to the core of what a film is about and offer it to audiences in a way that can help them unlock it. Her inimitable sense of fashion and glorious laugh became her trademarks. But it was their partnership that made them a force of nature. Almost everyone might describe themselves as “more of a David” or “more of a Margaret”, and there may never be a running joke in Australian film culture as endlessly fun as trading ratings back and forth in faux-Margaret and David banter: “I’m giving it two stars.” “Oh, I disagree. I’m giving it four.”

A number of articles list the “most divisive” reviews they ever gave, including The Vine, news.com.au, while Fairfax looks at their roles in reviewing, Stratton’s displeasure for handheld cameras, and programming Rage.

For the record their most polarising review seemed to be for Dancer in the Dark, during their SBS days on The Movie Show.

Margaret gave it 5 stars and David gave it 0.

3 Responses

  1. Yes, definitely the end of an era. Sad to see them go but even more sad that At The Movies/The Movie Show will not be continuing on with new hosts (altho’, who?).

    It’s no surprise that a Lars von Trier movie was the most polarising.

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