Bob Mondello shares his passion for movies

Bob Mondello is a familiar voice to WFDD listeners. He’s reviewed movies and covered the arts for NPR for more than three decades.  

Mondello estimates he sees at least 300 films a year, while also making time for television commentary and theater reviews.  

He will moderate a sit-down with Emmy and Tony-winning actor and singer Kristin Chenoweth as part of Wake Forest University’s Face To Face Speaker Forum on Wednesday, April 12.

WFDD’s Neal Charnoff had his own sit-down recently with Bob Mondello to talk about his approach to movie reviewing and arts commentary.

Interview highlights

On his role as a film critic:

I'm a descriptive critic more than a prescriptive critic. I don't usually tell people to go or not to go to something when I'm talking about it on the air, since I'm pretty selective about the movies that we actually review. They're usually movies that I'm at least interested in, that I think have something interesting to reward an audience. So my job is kind of to lead them to things they might not otherwise find.

On writing for radio:

When I write a review, it's all about writing to the sound I have. And the sound allows me to do that more effectively than I could ever do in print. I mean, logically, you think television would make it even easier. And I used to work in television, and that was worthless. I was terrible in TV because the visuals always trumped whatever I was saying.  And visuals are stronger than sound. But sound is stronger than words. And so that's how that works.

On reviewing Marvel movies: 

There is a rhythm to a Marvel movie that is always there. And when you're trying to capture that, there are only so many ways to do it. I have to come up with a new way to do that.  Now, for one of the Avengers movies, I felt as if I had done it every conceivable way, and I was going to have to say 28 superhero names in the course of three minutes, and I couldn't figure out what to do. And somebody said, I think it was Glen Weldon at the office, "Why don't you try doing it like Modern Major General, like Gilbert and Sullivan?" And so I managed to get all their names in 22 seconds. I was very proud of myself for that. 

On spring/summer films he's anticipating: 

I'm looking forward to a couple of biopics coming out soon. Golda, about Golda Meir, with Helen Mirren playing Golda, which should be like, wow! And then there's one from Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer, which is about Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. And that has Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt and Matt Damon and Rami Malik and sounds like a really dramatic version of the Manhattan Project. So I'm looking forward to that. And then there's Barbie. I mean, and I gotta say it, Ryan Gosling playing Ken and Margot Robbie playing Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, sounds really interesting.