Nick Macpherson 20 March 2005 07:23:20 [ permanent link ]
Your Pal Brian wrote:
Well?
I feel like reading something.
Tom Shone's funny/astute defence of the post-Jaws/Star Wars American film industry, Blockbuster: Or, How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer is worth a quick read, and at the very least, it'll make you want to see Back to the Future again.
The Bennetts: An Acting Family by Brian Kellow. It's exhaustively researched, well-written, covers successfully the private lives of father Richard Bennett and his daughters Constance, Joan and Barbara, but also manages to illuminate the films. And it's a subject on which there are no books yet, so you read new stories. If you aren't put off as a film fan by the first hundred pages who deal with Richard's theater career I heartily recommend it. I always hoped for a bio about Joan Bennett and thankfully somebody did it and a excellent job, too.
Tom Shone's funny/astute defence of the post-Jaws/Star Wars American
film industry, Blockbuster: Or, How Hollywood Learned to Stop
Worrying
and Love the Summer is worth a quick read, and at the very least,
it'll
make you want to see Back to the Future again.
so you also think it's worth defending? what worth do you find it? what's defensible in it? could you plz outline the main points in its defense that this shone guy makes? thx
Leonard Maltin has one that just came out, it's called GUIDE CLASSIC MOVIES, not sure if there is 'overlap' here from the one he puts out every year, or if it's an all 'new' list of Classic film reviews.
Nick Macpherson 20 March 2005 17:26:35 [ permanent link ]
monsieurblob@hotmail.com wrote:
Nick Macpherson wrote:
Your Pal Brian wrote:
Well?
I feel like reading something.
Tom Shone's funny/astute defence of the post-Jaws/Star Wars
American
film industry, Blockbuster: Or, How Hollywood Learned to Stop
Worrying
and Love the Summer is worth a quick read, and at the very least,
it'll
make you want to see Back to the Future again.
so you also think it's worth defending? what worth do you find it?
what's defensible in it? could you plz outline the main points in its
defense that this shone guy makes? thx
Aside from Shone (born in '67, putting him in the ideal Star Wars demographic) thinking that some of these movies are actually good (though he gives up on latter day Spielberg and Lucas)he reckons that in a film industry split between massively budgeted event movies and quirky smaller movies financed by the success of the former, it's only middle-class smugfests like Ordinary People that aren't getting made anymore, and that's something he can live with.
Nick Macpherson 20 March 2005 17:37:35 [ permanent link ]
G. M. Watson wrote:
----------
In article <1111289000.375956.12750@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
"Nick
Macpherson" <NMacphe421@AOL.com> wrote:
Your Pal Brian wrote:
Well?
I feel like reading something.
Tom Shone's funny/astute defence of the post-Jaws/Star Wars
American
film industry, Blockbuster: Or, How Hollywood Learned to Stop
Worrying
and Love the Summer is worth a quick read, and at the very least,
it'll
make you want to see Back to the Future again.
"Again"??
Well, I only quasi-saw it the first time, since the VHS Back to the Future I watched at the time was messed up (my VCR had problems with the early macrovision tapes and that might've been the problem). I hadn't given the movie much thought over the decades until I read Shone's book. Deciding that it was only film snobbery that'd kept me away from it, I watched it on DVD a few weeks back and liked it. The passage of 20 years has given it a second layer of (80s) nostalgia over its intended 50s nostalgia, so maybe its improved with age. 1980s cinema was something that passed by me mostly unnoticed since I spent most of those years catching up with pre-80s cinema (well, splatter and cult films mostly) on VHS. Shone's book got me to watch Predator and Back to the Future, but I'm still not sure about Top Gun.
hoberman's 'dream life' is a fun, interesting read. it's as much--if not more so--about politics and history than film, or rather about how films reflected and even helped establish the socio-cultural zeitgeist of the era from late 50s to early 70s. nice companion to another book about 60s cinema, 'medium cool'.
there's another interesting book out there about film and politics. i think it's called nixon's screenings or something like that.
Roger Ebert's "Great Movies II" makes good toilet reading, Brian. I think it was published just last month.
Here's one to avoid, unless you want a cheap laugh: "Finding God in the Movies: 33 Films of Reel Faith" published last July. According to Publishers Weekly, "Each film gets a synopsis and theological reflection, a few 'dialogue texts' from scripture, discussion questions and suggested clips for viewing and analyzing. "
Another one to avoid, I would imagine, is "America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, & Sexuality at the Movies" by Harry Benshoff & Sean Griffin.
Hmm. . . thanks. There's also "The Real Life of Laurence Olivier" by Roger Lewis. It's not new, but it's not old. Lewis may think he's writing a biography, but it's actually a prose poem with some jaw-dropping opinions & weird, impressionistic language that pins Olivier's off-putting personality on the page.
It's a good read if you're interested in Olivier's stuff, which I am. I mean, what W.C. Fields does with a wink Olivier does in all earnestness: I mean his ornate verbosity, unbelievably turgid -- Olivier doesn't fall asleep, Morpheus applies his "gentle pressure to my dormic nerve" ("Confessions of an Actor").
