It’s the birthday of brilliant film critic and editor Jim Ridley (1965-2016), whose untimely death at the age of 50 ended a quarter-century career at Nashville’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Nashville Scene. Ridley appears to have been not only an unparalleled film critic, writer, and editor, but possibly the best-loved editor and mentor in modern history, thanks to his unusual humility, unfailing kindness, and great love for the humans who crossed his path.

(Aren’t people supposed to kind of hate or at least fear newspaper editors? Nobody hated this guy.)

Ridley was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to parents who founded the Murfreesboro Little Theatre; his brother, Read Ridley, is a filmmaker. He began writing reviews at the age of 13. His review of Mary Stewart’s The Last Enchantment read, “Stewart’s Merlin is made out to be an obnoxious, persnickety fool, and he speaks like a combination of the worst elements of John Cheever, a used-car salesman and Abigail Van Buren. The legend was treated with more respect by Monty Python. Throw this one to the dragon.” (How many young teens do you know who even know who John Cheever is?)

Ridley studied for a year at Vanderbilt University and finished his B.A. in mass communications and English at Middle Tennessee State University in 1989. He began writing film reviews for the Nashville Scene shortly thereafter. He eventually began managing editor, then editor in 2009. As a mentor for other writers, he was known for helping their voices shine through a piece rather than imposing his own, then stepping back and taking no credit; one former editor of the Scene said, “He made every single journalist around him better.”

Ridley won first place awards in arts criticism in 2006 and 2010 from the Association for Alternative Newsmedia, and the writers under him won a total of 40 awards from the AAN. Many of his mentees rose to high ranks in other papers and tried to offer him positions with more national exposure, but Ridley was loyal to Nashville and determined to stay local. He enthusiasm for all things Nashville was evidently unbounded and he lent important editorial support for The Belcourt Theatre, now one of the great art film theatres in the country.

Reading snatches of Ridley’s reviews and essays about such films as Underground (Emir Kusturica), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy), and Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone) is such a pleasure that I’m thinking of buying a copy of his collected reviews, People Only Die of Love in Movies: Film Writing by Jim Ridley (Vanderbilt University Press, 2018).

Ridley died of cardiac failure and is survived by his wife and two children.

Have a happy Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.