Posts filed under 'books'
June 9th, 2009
Over at his movie blog, The Kind of Face You Hate, Bill R. writes a short tribute to his favorite movie novel — and it happens to be my favorite, too. You’ve probably never heard of FLICKER, but if you love movies — especially weird old movies — you owe it to yourself to track this one down.
Written by Theodore Roszak, FLICKER is the strange story of Johnathan Gates, a young man who becomes a devoted film fan in the 1960s, largely due to the influence of Claire, a tough-minded film critic a few years older than him. Gates gets an ad hoc education in film history thanks to Claire and the run-down theater they practically live at. All the big names are mentioned in a great portrait of what being a movie fan must’ve been like in those exciting pre-video days, but Gates and Claire become obsessed with a forgotten director named Max Castle, whose resume includes such ominous titles as GHOUL OF LIMEHOUSE, QUEEN OF SWORDS, JUDAS EVERYMAN and SIMON THE MAGICIAN. Those film, in the rare cases they can be found, have an eerie power that neither Gates nor Claire can explain.
FLICKER is a long novel with a complex plot that spans decades, but the reason it works so well is that Roszak blends fact and fiction so skillfully that you aren’t sure what’s real and what’s not. It generates a genuinely creepy feeling as Gates watches more and more of Max Castle’s filmography and eventually stumbles onto a young director who seems to be using the same ominous techniques.
Intrigued? Here’s an Amazon link to the book’s page.
By the way, director Darron Aronofsky was long rumored to be working on a big screen adaptation of FLICKER. I don’t know if it’ll ever actually happen, but he might be one of the few guys who could actually pull it off. (David Fincher would be another.) Even so, any actual depiction of Max Castle’s movies couldn’t equal the versions you’ll make in your own head when you read this book.
March 25th, 2009
I love books about movies almost as much as I love movies themselves, but there’s no getting around the fact that, in this crazy age of the Internet, one of the truly great — and completely free! — resources for film fans is the massive, easy-to-use, amazingly informative Internet Movie Database.
Whenever someone calls me with a movie question, that’s the first place I look for an answer, and it’s usually the only place I have to go. If you’ve never been there — and if you’re a movie fan with Web access, I can’t imagine you haven’t — by all means, check it out.
Over at his always-fun blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Dennis Cozzalio, looks back at the early days of the Database and how he used to to work on the film history, A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES.
And, just to tie this post back to the book-loving opening sentence, he also talks about movie books. Check it out.
February 20th, 2009
Over at Slate.com, Willing Davidson, who says “REVOLUTIONARY ROAD is both the worst movie I saw this year and one of the best novels I’ve read,” tries to answer the question: why do great novels make such bad movies?
He has an answer, too: Novels are long, but movies are short.
This is what the movies do to literature, typically: There’s so much plot to get in that there’s no time to tell the story. Perhaps it’s the insecurity of Hollywood: Inflated by the borrowed prestige of books, producers and directors won’t stray too far from the guide-ropes of the story. Â
And he’s right — though, of course, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Read the rest of his piece here.
February 3rd, 2009
Today’s recommendation is not for a movie, but for a book — PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD by Mark Harris. And it’s especially suitable for Oscar-time reading.
Using the 1968 Academy Awards as his starting point, Harris examines — in fascinating detail — the making of the five best picture winners: THE GRADUATE, IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, BONNIE AND CLYDE and DR. DOOLITTLE. He delves into dirt on the studios, discusses screenwriter and casting, and gives you a real sense of what it was like to be on the set of these five very different movies.
Here’s the cover of the hardback edition, with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as Bonnie and Clyde, but the paperback version is set to hit stores today. It’s a fun read, and it really paints a picture of how different the movie business was 40 years ago.
January 14th, 2009
Ever since he spent that ill-fated winter at the Overlook Hotel, literary fans have wondered if Jack Torrance’s once and only novel would ever see print…
That day has finally come to pass, though sadly the author didn’t live to see it. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY is available over at Blurb.com in a variety of formats. I think it’s sweet they put a picture of Jack’s widow, Wendy, on the cover. (Be sure to click on the preview — this is one book you can’t sum up in just one sentence!
There’s a paperback version available on Amazon, too, but something tells me the interior content is the same. Exactly the same, if you know what I mean.
November 5th, 2008
A while ago, I wrote about some of my favorite movie books — but I forgot to mention the single book that, more than anything else, shaped my tastes in film: Michael J. Weldon’s classic volumne on cult movies, THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM.
Thankfully, Rob Gonsalves didn’t forget, and he posted a nice write-up of this seminal volume here. As he says…
“Other movie books handled the mainstream stuff, the Mighty Films of Cinema, the ones you felt duty-bound to watch at least once. Weldon, with the help of Ballantine Books, legitimized the low, the weird, the obscure, the greasers and sluts and punks of celluloid. He made it okay for budding movie buffs to bundle in some Eurotrash sexploitation and teenagers-with-mutations flicks along with our Kurosawa and Bergman.”
I remember buying this one as a college freshman, way back in 1985, and actually felt a bit weird about doing so. Did I really want a volume extolling the virtues of INVASION OF THE BLOOD FARMERS and A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD sitting on my bookshelf, so close to my pure-hearted copy of LEONARD MALTIN’S VIDEO GUIDE?
Yes, it turns out I did. Because without Weldon’s book, I never would’ve heard of most of the great, offbeat movies that frankly, make it worthwhile to be a die-hard movie fan. I never would’ve gone to all those midnight movies in college, and I never would’ve collected hundreds of videotapes (followed, of course, by hundreds of DVDs). I probably never would’ve started writing my own video reviews at his paper back in the mid 1990s, which means I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog right now.
Weldon’s book (and its even-bigger follow-up, THE PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO GUIDE) embrace all movies, from forgotten silents to modern straight-to-video shockers. Sure, he loves weird movies, but above all, Weldon loves movies — and that’s apparent on every page. If you’ve never seen THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM, I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy. It just might change your life.
Heck, it sure changed mine.
September 15th, 2008
This post about cult movies led to some reader comments about CULT MOVIES, the book by Danny Peary, and a few of Peary’s follow-up volumes. (All come highly recommended by this book and movie lover.) So, continuing in that spirit, here are a few more of my favorite movie books …
DARK CITY: THE LOST WORLD OF FILM NOIR by Eddie Muller — Muller’s a bonifide noir expert, and this book gives a compelling, fact-filled overview of the genre by dividing the films into categories that mirror the neighborhoods of a dark, drama-drenched city. There’s a ton of great images (including some posters in full color), but the real drawing card here is Muller’s punchy, well-informed prose. (Also great — Muller’s history of exploitation films, GRINDHOUSE.)
HOLLYWOOD HELLFIRE CLUB by William Gregory Mank, Charles Heard and Bill Nelson — A hilarious page-turner all about the wild and crazy times of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn, John Decker, William Fowler, John Carradine, Ben Hecht, Sadakichi Hartmann and others who formed the (extremely) loose knit collection of oddballs in the early years of the 20th century. As their lives get more out of the control, the book gets more entertaining. You think modern stars behave badly? You have no idea. (But at least these guys did it with a little panache.)
MENTAL HYGIENE by Ken Smith — Smith takes a genre everyone else ignores — those education films generations of students had to endure — and writes a fascinating film history. Tracing the history of the producers, from All-American Coronet to crazed Sid Davis, Smith illustrates how young minds were molded via social engineering cinema. He also reviews hundreds of these short films, pointing out their faults but never descending into a “so bad they’re good” outlook.
THE MONSTER SHOW by David Skal — Probably the best history of horror movies I’ve ever read, this compact tome traces the genre from its silent roots up through the modern day, always taking time to discuss the real-world event behind the imaginary horrors. Skal’s discussion of how the mangled bodies of World War I paralleled the popularity of Lon Chaney (who knew how to mangle his own body for maximum effect) is just one example of his perceptive writing.
More to come –Â and please, suggest some of your own in the comments!
