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Overview
If going to the movies has been the twentieth century's most popular source of artistic pleasure, reading about the movies may not be far behind. For this delicious, instructive, and vastly enjoyable anthology Roger Ebert has selected and introduced an international treasury of more than one-hundred selections that touch on every aspect of film-making and film-going.Here is a book to get lost in and return to time and time again - at once a history, an anatomy, and a loving appreciation of the central art form of our time.
Synopsis
If going to the movies has been the twentieth century's most popular source of artistic pleasure, reading about the movies may not be far behind. For this delicious, instructive, and vastly enjoyable anthology Roger Ebert has selected and introduced an international treasury of more than one-hundred selections that touch on every aspect of film-making and film-going.
Here is a book to get lost in and return to time and time again - at once a history, an anatomy, and a loving appreciation of the central art form of our time.
Publishers Weekly
From one of the country's most popular movie reviewers comes this exhaustive and pleasingly eclectic selection of articles on film and filmmaking. Designed for selective browsing, the book contains a treasure-chest of fine works, and only the occasional well-meaning clunker. On the fictional side, the strange nature of fame and star identification is subtly exposed in a short excerpt from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, while novelists Elmore Leonard and Michael Tolkin both cut deeply and satirically into the odious nature of the moviemaking business. While John Updike is coolly humbled by Doris Day, Norman Mailer complains he could have used a whole lot more sex in Last Tango. Surprisingly, a few genuine geniuses come across a little stiffly, notably Alfred Hitchcock and Buster Keaton. But happily, light relief is close at hand: join John Waters for a gutter-level saunter through Hollywoodland, or thrill to Kenneth Anger's refined sleazoid take on the slew of tabloid-ready deaths the movie business has produced over the years, among them Lupe Velez in 1944 and Robert Walker in 1951. Elsewhere Terry McMillan compares her native Michigan to Dorothy's Oz and Kansas, Joan Didion finds much to admire in John Wayne and the incomparable Libby Gelman-Waxner from Premiere magazine disses film noir in her own catty fashion. A wealth of lore and legend is provided. (Nov.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
From one of the country's most popular movie reviewers comes this exhaustive and pleasingly eclectic selection of articles on film and filmmaking. Designed for selective browsing, the book contains a treasure-chest of fine works, and only the occasional well-meaning clunker. On the fictional side, the strange nature of fame and star identification is subtly exposed in a short excerpt from Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, while novelists Elmore Leonard and Michael Tolkin both cut deeply and satirically into the odious nature of the moviemaking business. While John Updike is coolly humbled by Doris Day, Norman Mailer complains he could have used a whole lot more sex in Last Tango. Surprisingly, a few genuine geniuses come across a little stiffly, notably Alfred Hitchcock and Buster Keaton. But happily, light relief is close at hand: join John Waters for a gutter-level saunter through Hollywoodland, or thrill to Kenneth Anger's refined sleazoid take on the slew of tabloid-ready deaths the movie business has produced over the years, among them Lupe Velez in 1944 and Robert Walker in 1951. Elsewhere Terry McMillan compares her native Michigan to Dorothy's Oz and Kansas, Joan Didion finds much to admire in John Wayne and the incomparable Libby Gelman-Waxner from Premiere magazine disses film noir in her own catty fashion. A wealth of lore and legend is provided. (Nov.)Library Journal
No, it's not a collection of the film critic's musings but a revival of a long dormant genre: the anthology of writing about film. Ebert arranges over 100 piecesmany of them book excerptsinto categories (Movie Stars, The Business, Early Days, Genres, etc.) and provides a brief introduction to each. The range is astonishing, from H.L. Mencken writing about Valentino to an excerpt from a web site devoted to Quentin Tarantino. Even novels that capture the moviegoing experience of the movie business have been excerpted. It's a first-rate collection that will stimulate interest in both the movies mentioned and the authors anthologized. One quibble: Ebert doesn't always provide publication dates. Still, this is an invaluable single source, appropriate for all libraries.Thomas J. Wiener, "Satellite DIRECT," Washington, D.C.Kirkus Reviews
TV film maven and Chicago Tribune columnist Ebert (A Kiss Is Still a Kiss, 1984) gathers 100 pieces in belated tribute to the first century of the movies.In attempting to create an anthology of outstanding film writing that would reflect film's multifaceted nature—at once art and aphrodisiac, entertainment and commerce, myth and industrial product—Ebert has stumbled a bit; the book suffers from a jury-rigged structure that mainly illuminates the arbitrariness of Ebert's choices. The pieces he has assembled are wildly uneven, although many do shine. The overwhelming majority of the collection consists of excerpts from longer works, some of which don't entirely make sense out of context. For example, the passages from Larry McMurtry's novel The Last Picture Show, while evocative, seem unduly skeletal when stripped from the heart of the novel. Moreover, although Ebert's attempt to represent the widest possible range of writing about film is admirable, with almost no writer represented by more than one piece, does anyone believe that a piece from a Web site devoted to Quentin Tarantino, an excerpt from Janet Leigh's pedestrian little book on the making of Psycho, snatches of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, and Charles Bukowski's musings on film represent the best writing available on the medium? Too many of the directors' entries are self-aggrandizing, the mix of fiction and nonfiction is awkward, and sudden shifts, such as the one from a chronological grouping on silent films to a handful of essays on genre, are unhelpful. On the other hand, Ebert has drawn from some unjustly forgotten books, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum's elegiac and rigorous Moving Places, and Christopher Isherwood's delicate and charming Prater Violet.
An entertaining hodgepodge, but a hodgepodge all the same.