Film Critic Hall of Fame: J. Hoberman

Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum was the first book of film criticism that I read. They took a look at the rise of cult movies thanks to midnight screenings all over the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. My parents bought it for me at a bookstore in Toronto because of my newfound appreciation of David Lynch. Twin Peaks had premiered on television not long ago and I began seeking out everything he had directed. Midnight Movies devoted an entire chapter to his early work, in particular Eraserhead (1977), but it was the afterword where the two critics talked about Twin Peaks in relation to the midnight movie phenomenon that really stayed with me. Hoberman called the show, “the ultimate extension of the midnight movie aesthetic and went on to say:

“Twin Peaks is reportedly extremely popular with college students but what’s more striking is its figurative and literal domestication of the midnight aesthetic. I think it’s significant that the network switched the show to Saturday night, which gives it a kind of generational hook. Where once you might have run off to see Night of the Living Dead at midnight now you can stay home and watch Twin Peaks.”

After reading that and absorbing his chapters on the works of Alejandro Jodorowsky and John Waters, I had to read more of Hoberman’s writing. It wasn’t easy as, at the time, he wrote for the Village Voice, a newspaper I did not have access to where I lived in Canada. Eventually, thanks to the Internet, I was able to get access to his film reviews and read them voraciously.

Hoberman originally wanted to be an avant-garde filmmaker, but found it to be “really hard and largely thankless.” He had been writing features for counterculture magazines when Richard Goldstein, arts editor for the Village Voice, invited him to contribute reviews of avant-garde and cult movies. His debut review was for Eraserhead on October 24, 1977 where he famously wrote, “Eraserhead’s not a movie I’d drop acid for, although I would consider it a revolutionary act if someone dropped a reel of it into the middle of Star Wars.” At the time, Hoberman was the third string writer after Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen. He remembers that at the time, he wasn’t “particularly concerned with Hollywood and I didn’t really see myself as a movie reviewer—more like someone happily toiling in the vineyard of film culture and getting paid for it.”

When Sarris was seriously ill in 1984, Hoberman temporarily filled in for him, reviewing his first Hollywood movie, the Clint Eastwood thriller Tightrope (1984). Sarris returned and Hoberman did such a good job that he was given more mainstream fare to review and “that’s the point at which I began to hate Steven Spielberg.” He became the Voice’s senior film critic in 1988 where he worked until 2012.

Hoberman’s approach to film reviewing is “as a form of journalism. You’re reporting on something, and you get to be much more subjective and playful than you would be if you were simply reporting a news story, but I think that you need to provide a certain amount of information and context.” One of the things the draws me to his writing is a willingness to go against the grain and defend a film that is universally panned by his counterparts. Case in point: he was one of the few mainstream critics to “get” Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). While most everyone else was calling it an incoherent mess he thought otherwise: “At once prestigious literary adaption and slapstick buddy flick, this is something like Fellini Cheech and Chong—this is a lowbrow art film, an egghead monster movie, a gross-out trip to the lost continent of Mu, a hilarious paean to reckless indulgence, and perhaps the most widely released midnight movie ever made.” In that same vein, Hoberman was one of the few American critics that defended Richard Kelly’s much maligned sci-fi opus Southland Tales (2006): “Why was the Kelly Code too much to take? Sensory overload is certainly a factor, but unlike Da Vinci [Code], Southland Tales actually is a visionary film about the end of times. There hasn’t been anything comparable in American movies since Mulholland Drive.”

Unlike say, Harlan Ellison or Jay Scott, two film critics who I have already examined on this blog, Hoberman is a more cerebral writer. To whit, in his review of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998): “Terrence Malick’s hugely ambitious, austerely hallucinated adaptation of James Jones’s 1962 novel – a 500-page account of combat in Guadalcanal – is a metaphysical platoon movie in which battlefield confusion is melded with an Emersonian meditation on the nature of nature.” Another thing I like about Hoberman’s writing style is his ability to come up with some really brilliant observations about a given film. For example, here’s a gem from his review of Ghost World (2001): “It’s smart enough to recognize that, as fleeting as adolescence may be, the world is haunted by the post-adolescent walking wounded. There’s an admirable absence of closure. As the title suggests, the movie is a place—or better, a state of being.”

As is always the case with any critic, I don’t see eye to eye with Hoberman on everything. His review of Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) saw him take a few digs at the director’s signature style:

“Mann rarely misses a chance to savor the brooding dusk from a skyscraper window, while an ongoing search for the audiovisual equivalent of purple prose, underscores the high drama with a bizarre mélange of Gregorian chants and world-music yodeling. At 155 minutes, The Insider may be pumped-up, but it’s rarely boring.”

Hoberman did go on to give Mann’s next film, Ali (2001) a mostly positive review, but I always get the feeling that he is kind of ambivalent towards Mann’s films, like he wants to like them, but always finds something wrong with them.

Hoberman tends to play it straight for most of reviews, but every so often he comes up with a memorable zinger like in his review of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975):

“Back in 1976, Barry Lyndon’s most problematic aspects was its blatant stunt casting—the equivalent today of using Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Moss to anchor something like The Charterhouse of Parma. Still young and beautiful, O’Neal (a TV heartthrob turned superstar with the mega success of Love Story in 1970) starts out a ridiculously po-faced dullard and eventually ‘matures’ into a stern-looking dolt. But Barry Lyndon is a movie that encourages the long view, and seen from the perspective of a quarter-century, the actor appears as a blank stand-in for himself, just a good-looking chess piece for Kubrick to maneuver around the board.”

I find that almost every film reviewer as a critical blindspot – a filmmaker or genre they just don’t like or don’t get. For Pauline Kael it was Kubrick, for Hoberman it is the Coen brothers. His main issue with their work is of the anti-Semitism he feels is rampant in films like Miller’s Crossing (1990) and Barton Fink (1991). This is a rather odd charge considering that Joel and Ethan Coen are in fact Jewish. In his grudgingly positive review of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), he lays out his problems with the Coens’ films:

“Although a robust disdain for their creatures is a given, it is when the Coens deploy explicitly Jewish characters that their glee turns hostile. The spectacle of the pathetic cringing Jew played by John Turturro on his knees and begging for his life in Miller’s Crossing was less antic than appalling. Turturro starred as another sort of Jew in Barton Fink, which set in 1941, staged a virtual death match between two then potent stereotypes—the vulgar Hollywood mogul and the arty New York communist—without any hint that their minstrel show battle royale was occurring at the acme of worldwide anti-Semitism.”

He then proceeds to concede that Llewyn Davis is an “almost affectionate send-up of the early ‘60s Greenwich Village folk scene, is certainly their warmest film in the 16 years since The Big Lebowski in part because, as in Lebowski, the lead actor—Oscar Isaac—inspires a sympathy beyond the constraints of his creators’ rote contempt.” In a backhanded complement, Hoberman finds Davis “something more than a cartoon. So is the movie, which is predicated on the Coens’ enthusiasm for its music that, particularly as sung by Isaac, is surprisingly affecting. Malice is tempered by fondness occasionally verging on admiration.” Wow, it actually sounded like he sort of, kind of liked it, despite his best efforts not to!

The Village Voice fired Hoberman on January 4, 2012 and he became the next casualty on a long line of prestigious critics that have been let go from newspapers and magazines. If his firing really stings it may be that it feels like the end of era. Not to worry, though, he still continues to write film reviews for the likes of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and The Guardian among others. He also has his own website where he archives his reviews and promotes his latest book. Hoberman remains a strong and vital critical voice in a field that is increasingly dominated by writers that lack the kind of skill and knowledge that he has accrued over the years.

SOURCES

Goldsmith, Leo. “An Interview with J. Hoberman.” Not Coming to a Theater Near You. April 22, 2011.

Peranson, Mark. “Film Criticism After Film Criticism: The J. Hoberman Affair.” Cinemascope. 2012.

Film Critic Hall of Fame: Jay Scott

Growing up, I was an avid reader of movie reviews from two of Toronto’s most prominent newspapers, The Toronto Star and The Globe & Mail. The former had decent enough critics, but the latter had Jay Scott, a witty and passionate writer equally adept at championing films he loved as savaging ones he loathed. I always looked forward to reading his reviews every week regardless of whether I agreed with his opinion on a given film or not. His style of writing was so engaging and entertaining and I always knew how he felt about a film. Wishy-washy was not something you could ever accuse him of being.

Scott was born and raised in the United States where he studied acting and contributed to the arts section of the campus newspaper at the University of New Mexico. He got married and moved to Toronto, but was unable to become a Canadian citizen and returned to America where he wrote movie reviews for the Albuquerque Journal in 1972. He soon got a job as an arts journalist for a newspaper in Calgary, Alberta, undeterred that he had never been there before. A few months later, he won a prestigious National Newspaper Award (his first of three).

In 1977, he was hired by The Globe & Mail. As luck would have it, he arrived in the city in the early years of the Festival of Festivals, which would eventually go on to become not only one of the biggest film festivals in Canada, but also the world. Covering this annual event gave Scott an opportunity to review art house fare as well as international cinema. He also championed local talent, giving exposure to then up-and-coming Canadian filmmakers Denys Arcand and Atom Egoyan.

As Robert Fulford’s introduction to a collection of Scott’s reviews points out, his style of writing involved, “outlining a context, drawing a kind of cultural grid on which a film could be placed,” and utilized, “a brilliant mélange of far-reaching analogies, learned references and hip vernacular.” I’m sure I read reviews of his before the one he wrote for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), but that was the first one that really resonated with me (probably due to my affinity for Lynch): “Yet Blue Velvet represents for Lynch an evolution: rather than exulting in ugliness, he self-critically analyzes the desire to exult in it. Hidden things, he implies, become attractive things; that which is repressed becomes monstrous … The mystery Blue Velvet actually solves is the mystery of its hero’s identity: with an ear to the ground, so to speak, Jeffrey finds self-knowledge without which wisdom is powerless to begin.”

When Scott really was taken with a film, he let you know as he did with his review for Superman (1978): “The genius of Superman – and on a pop level, this is a work of genius – has been to eschew condescension while setting out to achieve both visual elegance – Geoffrey Unsworth’s cinematography effortlessly slides from the blanched, gauzy antiseptic brightness of Krypton to the heavy, boiling, pestilence-laden skies of America – and nostalgia at its most honorable, nostalgia for a common past, for a childish past when heroics weren’t corny and when death didn’t sting.”

Scott also had a knack for occasionally personalizing his reviews as he did with the one he wrote for The Deer Hunter (1979):

“As I watched the ‘God Bless America’ conclusion, feeling slightly sickened by Cimino’s avoidance of a moral statement, I remembered a high school friend who left home the same time I did. I went to college. He went to Vietnam. We were friends, but we had argued – I enthusiastically, he reluctantly – about the war. I came home at Christmas in a jet. He came home in a shoe box. Hank was serious in his support of what we called the U.S. involvement. He has been dead for ten years. Now, a movie is weeping for him and for the thousands like him. It weeps in a way he, and they, would understand. One does not have to agree with The Deer Hunter to sympathize. One does not have to like it to recognize its value.”

Scott did not like Cimino’s film, but the reasons why were complex and he did a fantastic job of explaining where he was coming from while also appreciating The Deer Hunter’s artistry.

Scott had a playful side that came out in films he wasn’t particularly crazy about, like the review he wrote for Bright Lights, Big City (1988), which was done in the second person style of the source material it was based on by Jay McInerney: “So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you’re going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you’re left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke?”

Not surprisingly, I didn’t agree with him on every film, including his dismissal of Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985) as “something closer to Ladyhawke Meets The Goonies,” or his harsh takedown of Phantasm II (1988): “Coscarelli has said he resisted doing a Phantasm sequel because, ‘I didn’t want to be stereotyped as a horror film director.’ He need not have worried: he’s not apt to be stereotyped as a director of any type.” But when our tastes intersected, it thrilled me to no end, like his spot-on assessment of Bruce McDonald’s Roadkill (1989) as “a woman’s Easy Rider, also a doper’s remake of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, also a nod to Goin’ Down the Road.” You have to appreciate the pile-up of disparate pop cultural references in that one sentence alone!

Sadly, Scott died of AIDS in 1993 – he was only 43. He deserves a spot in the pantheon of film critic legends alongside the likes of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris. Like them, Scott had his own unique voice, able to convey a genuine love of cinema with knowledge of what makes a film work or fail. For me, at an early age, his ability to write like that was something for me to aspire to as was his abundant passion for the medium.

SOURCES

Scott, Jay. Great Scott! The Best of Jay Scott's Movie Reviews. McClelland and Stewart. 1994.

Check out Greg Woods' excellent article on Scott.

Film Critic Hall of Fame: Harlan Ellison

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series of tributes to film critics that inspired me.

Whenever I feel frustrated, at a low ebb with my own writing and in need of some inspiration, I turn to Harlan Ellison’s movie reviews. Reading them always re-invigorates me and reminds me why I started writing about film in the first place – a passion for movies. One of the pivotal books of film criticism that inspired me was Harlan Ellison’s Watching, a collection of reviews culled mostly from his stint at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during the 1980s. Before I was able to purchase a copy for myself, I must’ve checked it out the local library countless times. Having grown up on fantasy and SF films and television shows during the ‘80s, his book tapped a rich vein of genre fare that I loved dearly. Much to my surprise, horror and bemusement, he had no problem skewering as well as praising movies with equal amounts of passion that came as a shock after being weaned on issues of Starlog as a child. The now defunct magazine championed SF and fantasy with an uncritical eye save for a brief experiment with guest critics reviewing movies that did not last long. With Ellison, here was someone unafraid to savage movies I considered sacred, but in doing so he made think about them differently. Sometimes I agreed with his opinion, sometimes I didn’t. But let’s be honest; who agrees completely with their favorite critic?

Among his many achievements and hats he wears, Ellison has published a vast work of over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, and essays. He’s been nominated and won all kinds of awards, chief among them the genre staples like the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker and Edgar. Ellison is an outspoken critic of fantasy, horror and SF from the perspective of an insider. His self-proclaimed role in life is “to be a burr under the saddle,” and was famously described by author Robert Bloch as “the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water.”

In the rather lengthy introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Watching, the veteran writer lays out his personal philosophy of film criticism. He feels that a critic should review films based on their “background, knowledge, sophistication and – most of all – affection.” Any decent film critic in his eyes should meet a minimal standard of cinematic knowledge. To this end, a critic “should love film. Should adore just going to the movies the way a kid adores going to the movies. Bearing with, a large measure of innocence; a large measure of I’ll sit here, you just do it to me.” Accordingly, a critic should also be willing to “savage that which is inept, dishonest, historically-corrupt, pretentious or simply meanspirited. That which demeans the art form. That which lies to the trusting audience.”

The inherent problem with writing film reviews, as Ellison sees it, is that “one is limited. The word-pictures can only do so much,” lest they risk “robbing the movie-lover of the frisson of joyful discovery.” After all, “the critic can only go huzzah and huzzah so many times before it becomes white noise. The critic is limited in vocabulary, because beyond a certain point it becomes dangerous and boring, and then dangerously counterproductive. Dangerous, because nothing can live up to such panegyrics; boring, because what can one say after one says don’t miss it?” This holds true for negative reviews as the “short memory of the reader comes to expect savagery and fulmination. Forgotten are all the palliating equivocations, all the positive comments, all the rave reviews. Only the violence retains the color of passion in a reader’s memory.” What inspired me was his statement that simple reviews “serve no worthwhile purpose,” and that an in-depth essay, “illuminates the special treasures a specific film proffers.”

As he pointed out in a two-part interview with Starlog magazine back in 1985, most periodicals, that covered genre fare at the time, had little to no critical faculties:

“I am always suspicious of whores. Starlog, Fantastic Films, almost all the magazines with the exception of Cinefantastique are flacks for the industry. They live off the free hand-outs and they can’t really say bad things. How honest can a magazine like that be? How penetrating can it be? So, you do articles on special effects and visits to movie sets. You’ve brought up an audience of kids who cannot tell good from bad.”

In the same interview, he infamously called Back to the Future (1985), “a piece of shit,” which did not endear him to Starlog’s readership. He called it “a rip-off, a steal from Bob Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love to begin with. It is absolutely mindless, empty-headed, manipulative and it’s a sitcom.” Ellison was unafraid to skewer sacred cows like Star Wars (in an entertaining takedown entitled, “Luke Skywalker Is A Nerd and Darth Vader Sucks Runny Eggs”) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), calling the latter, “a seriously flawed film. It fails the first order or storytelling: to tell a story.” And yet, he tempers this by saying, “the psychedelic segments are visually some of the most exciting stuff ever put on celluloid; in a way it’s what cinema is all about, really.”

Sometimes, Ellison used his insider status within the industry to shed light on why a film was the way it was, like with Dune (1984). He briefly takes us through the failed attempts by the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott, and then explains why David Lynch’s version was doomed to fail through studio interference. Ellison was of the opinion that Lynch's film was set up to fail even before it was released in theaters. In October of 1984, he was approached by USA Today to write a visiting critic's review of Dune. The film was due to be released on December 14th, 1984. Ellison figured that he had plenty of time to do a review of the film seeing as how he was on amicable terms with both Universal Studios (who was distributing the film) and Frank Herbert. And then something happened within Universal Studios:

"It was widely rumored in the gossip underground that Frank Price, Chairman of MCA/Universal's Motion Picture Group, and one of the most powerful men in the industry, had screened the film in one or another of its final workups, and had declared – vehemently enough and publicly enough for the words quickly to have seeped under the door of the viewing room and formed a miasma over the entire Universal lot – 'This film is a dog. It's gonna drop dead. We're going to take a bath on it. Nobody'll understand it!' (Now those aren't the exact words, because I wasn't there. But the sense is dead accurate. Half a dozen separate verifications from within the MCA organization.)."

Paranoia swept through Universal and screenings were canceled or rescheduled with rumors fueling the fire. Ellison mentions a meeting between the film's producer, Dino De Laurentiis, and the owner of a big chain of multiplex theaters that did not go well. This repeated itself at another screening in New York City. As a result, Universal got very nervous and said that there would be no screenings of any kind for anyone until the release date of December 14th. Ellison goes on to recount a screening for the film that he tried to attend on the November 30th but was not allowed entry after speaking to Frank Wright, National Publicity Director for MCA at the time. Even after telling Wright that he was not going to pan the film and getting USA Today's West Coast entertainment editor, Jack Matthews, to talk to Wright, Ellison was still denied access to the screening. Ellison recalls, "But if that was what happened to a reviewer from something as important to Universal as USA Today, do you begin to understand how, before the film ever opened, the critical film community was made to feel nervous, negative and nasty about Dune?" Two days before Dune opened in wide release, Ellison saw the film and ironically gave the motion picture one of its few positive reviews.

Throughout his tenure as a film critic, Ellison championed the underdog, going to bat for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) when Universal Studios did its best to marginalize the film by cutting their own version with a happy ending, which, as you can imagine, didn’t sit well with Ellison: “Sid Sheinberg has always wanted to be a creator. The frustration of his life is that he is merely one of the canniest and most creative businessmen in the world. So he wants to make Brazil better in the time-honored tradition of businessmen who run the film industry. He wants to piss in it.” Ellison went on to call Brazil, “heart-stopping. It is brilliant beyond the meaning of the word.”

Much to my delight, he championed favorites of mine, like Big Trouble in Little China (1986), describing it as “a film that combines Indiana Jones-swashbuckle, Oriental goofery, special effects magic, contemporary hoodlum-kitsch, pell-mell action to the exclusion of logic but who gives a damn, good old down home Yankee racism, parody, satire, the art of the jongleur, and some of the funniest lines spoken by any actor this year to produce a cheerfully blathering live-action cartoon that will give you release from the real pressures of your basically dreary lives.”

However, much to my dismay, he missed the boat on some of my favorite films, like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984), which he called, “An unintelligible farrago of inaudible sound mix, bad whitefolks, MTV video acting, blatant but hotly denied ripoff of the Doc Savage crew and oeuvre spiced with swipes from Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, a plot that probably makes sense only in Minkowski Space, six funny lines, four clever sight gags, and billions of dollars’ worth of promotional hype such as Big Brother-style rallies at sf conventions.” Ouch. However, I’m willing to forgive him for such transgressions, because even his takedowns are entertaining.

In his opening dedication, Ellison says that “one simply must have heroes & icons, mustn’t one.” He is one of my heroes whose quality of writing I aspire to but know, deep down, I’ll never achieve. That’s what makes him so unique – that brilliant mix of intensely personal opinion and vast knowledge of how films work and don’t work. However, it doesn’t stop me from trying. I appreciate the brutal honesty in his writing and his willingness to go deliciously over-the-top to make his point. He just doesn’t like a film, he loves it, and on the flip side, he just doesn’t dislike a film, he hates it. Most of all, his willingness to go into detail about why a film worked or didn’t is what inspired me the most and is why I prefer to go into the backstories of how a film came together (or didn’t) because sometimes that story is just as interesting as the finished product. Sometimes it provides insight into what we see on the big screen. Most of all, Ellison’s writing reminds me that the best criticism comes out of a passion for movies – the sheer love of watching something for the first time or revisiting an old favorite again.

SOURCES

Ellison, Harlan. Harlan Ellison’s Watching. Underwood-Miller. Novato, California: 1989.

Goldberg, Lee. “Harlan Ellison – Next Stop: The Twilight Zone.” Starlog. November 1985.

Goldberg, Lee. “Harlan Ellison – ‘Call me a Science Fiction Writer-I’ll Tear Out Your Liver!’” Starlog. December 1985.

Reading the Movies Meme

So, I got tagged by Jeremy over at Moon in the Gutter for this meme that has been going around the blogosphere started over at The Dancing Image by Movieman0283 where you list some of the books about film that most influenced you. I thought that was a great idea and have listed a few books that certainly shaped me as a moviegoer and a film critic.

Midnight Movies by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum: This was the first book of film criticism/history that I ever read and it really had a huge impact on me. I was just getting into David Lynch films and their chapter on Eraserhead blew my mind. It also pointed me in the direction of other great filmmakers like John Waters, George Romero and Alejandro Jodorwsky. In my mind, it still remains to be the best book on the midnight movie phenomenon written by two of the best film critics.



Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison: Ellison is known mostly for his prolific career as a writer fantasy and science fiction short stories but I am actually a huge fan of essays. This books collects reviews he wrote for a number of publications including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Cinema, The Los Angeles Free Press, The Staff, and Starlog. He was a rare critical voice in genres of SF and fantasy, not afraid to slam sacred cows like Star Wars and Star Trek in his reviews while also championing cult oddities like Repo Man and Big Trouble in Little China. Being someone with insider connections he also exposed the sabotaging of films like Dune and Brazil from within their own studios. Not to mention his style of writing is entertaining as hell. It's one of the rare books of criticism that I read again and again.

Michael Mann by F.X. Sweeney: I have been working on a book about the films of Michael Mann for some time and every time a new book comes out I fear that it will basically eclipse all of the hard work I've done. This one came close - a fantastic coffee table-style tome with some gorgeous stills and rare, behind-the-scenes photos from Mann's personal archives. The book is short on factual, production details and has some decent analysis but is a definite, must-have for any fan of Mann's work.



Lynch on Lynch by Chris Rodley: David Lynch has always been a hard guy to pin down in interviews as he refuses to analyze his films and often gives obscure answers. Rodley spent a lot of time with the filmmaker and one gets the impression that he gained his confidence as he talks at length about his entire body of work. There is some great insights and fascinating anecdotes about the making of his films. An invaluable resource on Lynch.


The Making of Citizen Kane by Robert L. Carringer: Hands down THE best book about how this film came together. Carringer goes into exhaustive detail about every aspect of this film, including Orson Welles' experimental take on adapting Conrad's Heart of Darkness into a film. This is one of my favorite films of all time and this book really does it justice as Carringer examines just how groundbreaking it was in terms of film technique. Great stuff.


BFI Modern Classics: The Right Stuff by Tom Charity: I could create a whole list just of BFI books as they have done so many great ones. I single this one out in particular because not much has been written about this great, underrated film of the 1980s but Charity does a great job putting it into historical context and he also had a chance to interview the film's director Philip Kaufman. As a result, there is a wealth of anecdotal information about how the film came together and the challenge to make it.



Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind: There's a reason why this book has popped up on a lot of people's lists - it's a fantastic, entertaining read of the hedonistic days 1970s Hollywood chronicling the rise of the film brats (Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Altman, et al). While it does tend to get a little too gossipy at times, it is still a helluva read and before this recent book on Hal Ashby came out, it was probably the best profile of this underrated filmmaker. I also found his look at Terrence Malick's career to be a interesting as well.

American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader edited by Jim Hiller: There are actually a few of these readers and they are all great reads. Essentially, they are collections of review, interviews and essays that appeared in the pages of Sight and Sound magazine. This book is a great resource that saves you having to hunt down and pay for all of these back issues. I've been a big fan of the American indie scene over the years and this book covers a lot of ground including the usual suspects (Jarmusch, Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson, etc.). I refer to it often.



The Battle of Brazil by Jack Mathews: There are actually quite a few really good books out there about Terry Gilliam and his films but this is probably the best one on one his films. If you have the excellent 3-Disc Criterion Collection edition of the film then this book is a great companion piece as it goes into even more detail (if that's possible) with a blow-by-blow account of Gilliam's struggle to get this film made within the studio system.



I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski by Bill Green, et al: I LOVE The Big Lebowski and have been waiting for years for a book like this to come along. The officially sanctioned one by William Preston Robertson is pretty good but this one was written by fans for the fans and covers the film in very exhaustive detail, interviewing pretty much everyone involved while also tracing its rise as a cult film. The Dude abides.

BFI Modern Classics: Dead Man by Jonathan Rosenbaum: It's no secret that Rosenbaum is a huge Jim Jarmusch fan and he does justice to this great film by analyzing Dead Man in detail and also interviewing the filmmaker that provides all kinds of insight into how it got made and the meaning behind it. If you like this film, this is the book to get.



Nightmare Movies by Kim Newman: This is one the best overviews of contemporary horror films that I've come across. I only wish that he would update it but it is still a great read. Newman doesn't really go into great detail about these films but rather attempts to classify them in his own uniquely named genres/chapter titles. What it lacks in depth it more than makes up for in sheer volume of films mentioned so that you can go off and track them down. This is a really great read by a film critic I have followed for years.

Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film by Peter Biskind: Biskind is at it again, this time digging up considerable dirt on the Weinstein brothers and Robert Redford and Sundance. What Biskind did for 1970s American cinema, he does for 1990s American Indie cinema. This is another wildly entertaining read that is, again, steeped in gossip, but there is some really interesting bits, like how the Weinstein's messed up Guillermo Del Toro's horror film Mimic and the struggle James Mangold had making Copland. If you are interested in the films from this period, then check this book out.

There are many, many more I could list but these are the ones I could think of off the top of my head.