David Thomson: Classic or Well-dressed?

DT, Grauniad, last weekend

Well, bugger that. I got my hbk free, but I dunno if I can blag new pbks in two editions. His new entries are 'minimal' anyway (ie one Kiarostami film) so I'd just leave it.

I'd like to see his entry on Wasserman, having said that, but you just know he cares more about that than about the challenge of WKW. Maybe he could give Moodysson the kicking he deserves.

DT decides to give the Coens a scrub-down. Typical bein-pensant Indy stuff. I guess DT was a major writer for me when I was just getting into films -- but now I can't bear to read him. It isn't at all that his stuff's too personal, it's that he is actually a typical English middlebrow in disguise, scared of new experiences, and with this absurd idea of in-the-moment inspiration: Kubrick is dud because he 'preconceives', Renoir is classic because he captures living moments.

Well, TS Kubrick vs Renoir belongs elsewhere, but the sterility of acting in SK is obviously deliberate -- as is the 'warmth' in JR. And JR very closely scripted and planned his stuff, as all commercial operators must.

Anyway, someone remind me what was so great about Thomson.

i'm thinking especially of his entry on charlie chaplin, where halfway through he says, out of nowhere, something like "really, was chaplin so different from hitler?"

anyway i read the coen bros takedown piece, which was sadly not the coen bros critique i wanted from david thomson.

(and honestly speaking of middlebrow aren't the coens pretty much as mb as they come these days? i mean talki about being scared of new experiences!)

(or maybe they're just totally boring)

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/features/story.jsp?story=578012

http://endlessbanquet.blogspot.com/2004/11/david-and-bens-pt-1.html

The fact that Mr. Thomson lives in the Bay Area and has access to the Pacific Film Archive, the Castro, et al. probably makes it a bit easier to weather the storm.

How come I NEVER see DT at any of these places???

This mysterious "m." character should have a blog of his own, I think.

Anyway, I like taking drinks.

It's a shame about Rivette's split infinitive.

-adam: i saw dt
-adam: i wished i'd put the moves on him
-me: that rivette thing ponged
-marcello: why
-me: here's why: [link]

I do think it's great. without spoiling it, he does have a tendency to keep comparing film to other art forms and then apologizing for it, more and more so as he goes in. I love the general chapter about California (but I would) and he is sometimes so good in individual figures like Nicole Kidman and Erich Von Stroheim. Sometimes I can forgive him for stating the obvious because his writing is just so exuberant and beautiful and...well, mad. Also unlike other people on this thread (and no disrespect meant to them at all), I don't tend to get caught up with small details and inconsistencies. Perhaps I would get even more from him if I did, I just have a very selective memory!

I apologize for the linkage but this event is taking place during the next month only 15 mins walk from my house!
http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/pfa_programs/hollywood/index.html

I wouldn't really call this book "lore", either. It's far more than anecdotal. I hope you don't think I am just being an apologist but I don't get some of your criticisms above (as in, I literally cannot parse them!).

better writers of his generation? vf perkins, robin wood, charles barr, peter wollen.

fair enough.

- millennarian viewpoint (it all went shit after 1974!!)

This is simultaneously the most common and most baffling criticism of DT. I'll agree that he is not on the cutting edge, but he talks about and trumps up a whole load of current stuff!

- self-regarding prose style

This is what I LIKE about him! :)

- doesn't actually like films, thinks they are silly

Haha. Well, this is what I was hinting at when I mentioned the ceaseless comparisons with other art forms.

I guess it all comes down to whether you like (and actively seek out) "self-regarding" writing about Hollywood!

Does VF Perkins (still?) teach at Warwick? I came very close to going there.

this shows some good, some bad. he thinks mainstream hollywood is a bust on the basis of 'troy', 'alexander', ect. and yet he not only keeps writing almost exclusively about hollywood, he also decides to ignore hollywood's better films: last year's mainstream comedies 'school of rock', 'anchorman', 'dodgeball', 'bad santa' were all first-rate. 'spiderman 2' and 'the bourne identity' were brilliant mainstream action films. 'eternal sunshine' and 'i heart huckabees' and 'before sunset' were superb mainstream comedies (for want of a better term). 2004 was not the fall of rome: it's up there with the mid-seventies.
dt is however entirely right about 'the power of nightmares'. none of the films in the doc boom (some of which -- supersize me and outfoxed especially -- were terrible) match this series.

He writes so much about the Oscars because he is a freelance writer with a family to support and no academic tenure, and that is what editors commission him to write! When I spoke to him last year, he readily admitted that he would much rather never write another word about the movies. He's caught in a trap, and he would be the first to admit that, in one of his more noirish moods.

Class.

Admit it - it's superb.

I am glad, I think, merely to hear that Perkins lives still.

(Adam: I am surprised.)

http://www.filmint.nu/eng.html is a qt good site/zine -- has occasional long wood pieces, and, recently, a long interview with vf perkins.

At the risk of "getting as bad as Marcello with his Petrides fixation" (this is a thread abt DT, so...), this is the rankest piece of film-rockism I've read in years.

I have been meaning to post and ask, perhaps pointlessly, why he likes Joan Didion so much. I mean, even if you like Didion, as in a way I do, there seems a disproportion in his ardour.

On;y two chapters in, I started it on my commute this AM.

I still want to hear what people made of it.

I wanted to start a complex thread on ILM about how DT's views on film might transfer to pop, and how we might then view them, etc; but - well, perhaps it was too complex for me.

"I do think that a lot of people my age--I'm 64--have given up on the movies. The truth is that television, if you pick and choose, is a lot more grown-up and satisfying these days..."

http://citypages.com/databank/26/1282/article13454.asp

Well, I think it's a great moment for critics to talk about the medium as a whole rather than individual films. I think there's a lot going on in the world of screens--which is a much larger world than just movies per se and it's very interesting. I mean, at the moment I would almost rather review some video games than movies--not only because more people are looking at them and because my children are looking at them, which are good reasons, but because I think they're almost more interesting.

So, my glitch must then be in thinking that he's even making any sort of statement whatsoever. Everything is more satisfying if you pick and choose, in my opinion.

this is kind of fallacious too, movies weren't ALWAYS 90 minutes and serials obv predate TV

I guess I at least admire that Thomson has the balls to say, not in so many words, "I'm falling out of love with movies and in love with TV."

Not particularly if the point of comparing them is to say one sucks in comparison to the other.

In any case, my stance seems to have at least one foot firmly, stubbornly planted in the idea of a*t**rism, with movies having a fixed director/screenwriter for the duration, whereas TV has a series of writers and directors (and, sure, a cohesive monolithic "creator")...

I won't deny that TV probably is a more suitable medium for works that have a more writerly emphasis, or at least gives them a lot more space to finesse out ideas and character arcs.

film is a collaborative medium too you know!!

Not particularly if the point of comparing them is to say one sucks in comparison to the other.

OTFM!

TV != dumb

"there are few cheerful congregations now in the cinema, but uneasy individuals with a dozen seats to themselves."

"so many public cinemas are now seedy and apologetic, as if fit for that nondescript who sits in baleful awe of the fantastic screen and may sometimes, in despair or vengeance, carry its melodramatic spasms over into life."

"the cinema is no longer of the people."

on taxi driver, one flew over the cuckoo's nest, network: "we gather in woe and dread for our wretched times, and the 'enjoyment' can be lacerating."

"when did you last see a film in which you believed people were in love, and cared"

of 'the godfather', 'jaws' and 'king kong': "i think i prefer them to anything else i have seen in that time."

I knew there was something fishy when the collection plate was passed down the aisle at my screening of Batman Begins.

It seems to me there was a long while when cinema was viewed by its many champions as an art form that managed to be at the same time both elitist and populist, and had improved upon and in many ways superceded its parents- the theater and the novel. Being disabused of this notion was a Great Disillusionment- A Loss Of Ideology or Death of God. Belief in cinema had been like belief in the French Revolution or the Enlightenment. Just because Thompson seems to have stuck his head in the sand a little too early doesn't mean that he's wrong.

I think it is quite good for someone to stick up for TV, because I recently read Jonathan Franzen's book where he is proud of having given his TV away, and he seems to think it's a choice between dumb TV and intelligent reading - whereas I keep turning on the TV and finding great fascination and movement: Wimbledon, Live8, even the repeat performance of Des on HIGNFY? last night. I don't find a lack of richness in these programmes. I could watch them all day. Which is a good thing as some of them go on all day.

I do think that the end of THE WHOLE EQUATION is a cop-out, though, in that he says world cinema and independent cinema are good, yes, but he can't be bothered to talk about them. His rationale - that it's what's Pop that matters to him - is a good one. But that doesn't mean he couldn't write a great book about, say, the last 30 years of independent US film - much of which is surely his kind of thing.

it's frustrating because when he does venture out and write about, say, alan clarke, he's good at it (sometimes he's terrible, though, when he can't really be bothered, as with most of the new entries in the BDOF).

but as in the quotes i posted, he has been lamenting the decline of film as a mass medium for more than half of his writing life. and the article they came from had a kind of power and authority (it's partly about his experiences teaching film in the states, partly about the death of his mother) that i think is lacking in his recent stuff. and given that 'everybody knows' (including dt) that the 70s were a golden age now, the article casts an interesting light on his equally pessimistic stance now.

I think DT is getting stick (a bit like Reynolds from Watson) for a book he didn't write. 'The Whole Equation' is a history of mainstream Hollywood - it doesn't pretend or aspire to be a history of World or Indie Cinema.

An interesting subtext to the Biographical Dictionary, btw, is how many of the best entries are about tv - Johnny Carson, James Garner, Lucille Ball, Madonna ... and Ronald Reagan.

some hollywood greats: lang, hitchcock, POLANSKI!!, woo.

and in recent hollywood: soderbergh, tarantino, PTA.

I don't mean to give DT that stick, JtN. You know that I like DT on Hollywood. But you yourself have often pointed out that he is tired of it, and could usefully spread his wings more, assuming he is allowed to. (Hm - 'David is like a seagull... he wraps his wings around Hollywood...')

I do feel that, given the ennui of the last book, the implicit question arises why he *didn't* write those other books. He raises it himself near the end, but doesn't answer it save by saying that Pop matters. Which is, as I say, not a bad case.

I haven't seen BW on SR yet, but someone told me it was nutty.

Perhaps the book that he should write is one (lyrical, fabulistic, musing, whateverr) about the Great American Songbook - veering back into Movie whenever he wants, as imaginative illustration, but not compelled to if he doesn't want to take it that way.

I heard that, along with doing the Kidman biog, DT has another novel on the go, and a book about American weather...

The weather idea sounds familiar - it must be because he touches on it in TWE.

I suppose IN NEVADA might stand as an example of what he could do.

The England idea is good, but 4-2 is partly that book? Remarkable how good that one is at times.

It's St Leonards, but I'm in London at least two days a week.

i don't think the films he's talking about are 'independent' in any meaningful sense -- but any case wasn't indiewood's moment like five or six years ago!?

i also think he's been mourning the decline of the communal moviegoing experience for far too long -- nearly three decades. do you not adjust, after a while, to the post-tv reality? maybe not, but being a person who grew up on films on tv/video, i'm not all that sympathetic.

and at the same time i think it's an article for lazy people who want to be assured they're not missing anything and that their twice-annual trip to the everyman.

and always with the oscars obsession!

however it is interesting that he's taking this line, that we're not all doomed, per most of dt's writings over the last few years.

A: He’d want to read The Whole Equation quickly. He’d be sad, very sad–but he was when he was alive. I hope he’d salute my book and we could share a drink, or seven. I would love to try to finish The Last Tycoon the way he laid it out.

is this really a pressing issue for anyone?

We were sitting in a large, packed movie theatre in San Francisco, the day after New Year's day. I had waited to see Million Dollar Baby in those circumstances because from the moment I first heard about it, only a few weeks ago, it was clear that this movie might be a sensation, and it promised a twist or a departure in its own narrative best experienced with the real thing - a large, raw audience, anxious to know what happened next.

This opening touches on many important general points that have little to do with Clint Eastwood's film, but which are worth addressing. Critics' screenings are the forum in which most "informed" opinions about your movies are arrived at. Such screenings are usually held in small rooms for between 20 and 40 people - a true but suspicious club, people who see all their movies together, in a spirit of edgy rivalry not inclined to give too much away. You can say that these are jaded victims of the system if only because they have to see just about every film made today. Can you imagine anyone under that duty staying sociable, let alone sane? And because their job is criticism, in a small knot of critics they are bound to keep their feelings secret. That restraint is not good for being an audience.

There's something else wrong with the critics' experience: they know too much about films in advance. There is too much talk on the internet. Too many stolen scripts are passed around. And then there is the modern way with trailers which reckon to deliver the big scenes and sometimes tell you what happens in the story. Again, that is not good for being an audience. After the dark and the size of the screen, nothing is more important to an audience than not knowing anything about the story they are about to see. And all too often these days, the critics and the public have a bored way of knowing in advance.

Clint Eastwood has always been one of the great producers in American film, and that was evident with Million Dollar Baby in his canny sleight of hand. The movie was made very quickly and quietly. No scripts got away. There were no early trailers, and no early screenings. Even now, in the first week of January, the film is playing on only seven screens in North America. Those screens are doing at least four times the business of any other screens and the word is spreading - what's this about Million Dollar Baby that I'm hearing? This is old-fashioned word-of-mouth, and the most modern thing about Clint Eastwood the producer is his faith in the old ways.

So there we were, my wife and I, at one of those seven screens, as Million Dollar Baby ended. We sat there as the credits unwound. We usually do, for a film writer needs to know the facts. But my wife looked around the theatre and murmured that about two thirds of the audience was also staying. "Really?" I said. "Why's that?" She looked again and she said, "They need time to recover". "Really?" I said. "Some of them are crying," she said. "Really?" I said. "Yes. You are," she said, looking at me. One of the best things about being in an audience is the kindness with which we look at each other.

Now, I am not going to tell you anything about Million Dollar Baby that isn't there in the first 10 minutes, except to say that Million Dollar Baby is a Clintishly clever title, one that makes you think of comedy and fun and high jinks. (It could be Steve Martin and Sandra Bullock having their life transformed when their kid becomes a star in commercials!) Clint plays a boxing trainer in a shabby gym where Morgan Freeman is his sidekick. Hilary Swank arrives and asks them to train her and make her a champion.

That's all I'm going to tell you beyond the fact that Million Dollar Baby is going to win Best Picture, and my tears were not just for its story but for the movies. Because at long last someone has said, "Look, this is how you do it", and made a film that hits you like one of Hilary Swank's punches.

Please don't assume that this is just an old Eastwood fan talking. Anyone who has read me over the years knows that I have had my reservations where Eastwood is concerned. A great producer - yes, and do not underestimate the rarity or the importance of that by falling into the orthodoxy that producers are hacks and scoundrels who get in the way of artists. Producers are often the showmen. I also felt and said that Eastwood was an actor of limited range and a rather modest, impersonal director. There were plenty of times when he settled for being Dirty Harry, when he was more intent on finishing his pictures than taking great care with them. I thought Unforgiven and Mystic River were both over-rated. But I think Million Dollar Baby is a great film.

And since I'm not going to do anything to spoil its story and its drama for you, I'm bound to concentrate on what has happened to Clinton Eastwood who will be 75 this May, and surely looks it, granted that he seems healthy still in the way of a man old and wise enough to walk, not run. What it amounts to, I think, is that at the age of 60 or so, he began to improve, no matter that he was rich and successful enough to do whatever he wanted. This is a very rare phenomenon in today's world of film where people of Eastwood's age either turn impossibly childish or senile, or stop. Instead, Eastwood has begun to search for better and better material and in the process he has enlarged himself as an actor and an artist.

The key to that is his performance in Million Dollar Baby: it is the first time, I feel, that Eastwood has decided not to be "Clint", but to find another character. And the magical bonus of that effort is that, in the process, I think we are getting our first glimpse of the real Eastwood. It has always been his code and perhaps his psychic need to seem tough, expert and in charge. Thus even in Unforgiven, he could not stop his fumbling gunslinger from reverting to the angel of death in the end. He settled for image and authority.

But in this picture he lets truth show - that of a rather harsh, emotionally shy man who may not always have been a sweetheart in life. The nearest I will come to talking about Million Dollar Baby is to say that it's close to a confession from a man who doubts that he has been an ideal father. That is art, and it is new in Eastwood. Yet the impact of his movie is enough to restore your faith in a medium that once knew to bring the lights up slowly as a film ended - to help the audience find its way back to reality.

ach god, it's just PATRONIZING!!!!

like, noooooooo, of COURSE no-one's heard of jim mcbride! it's only a landmark of US indie cinema after all.

I hear there's a vacancy on the next series of Grumpy Old Men. He and Morley should form a double act to trade wisecracks about how all our lives are rubbish unlike their own of course.

When DT says the sex scene shouldn't have been allowed, I think he means he likes it and enjoys the naughty world of movie.

A full-length study of his "decline" years would I think be especially welcome as DT, by his own admission, skips over it a bit in Rosebud.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0747577102/202-1095403-7919002?v=glance&n=266239&s=gateway&v=glance

i really hope the book is as good as the kidman part of "the whole equation". i fear that it won't be, though.

tbh it read like a cut-n-paster.

www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7891

they'll probably replace him with someone even worse though.

does that '#1' imply he's done a transfer. ffs!

Toby is right - it's been extremely poorly reviewed. Especially by that clown Raphael. I don't think it's a great book, but it's not nearly as salacious as the reviews led you to believe. It could have done with being a bit more salicious, if you ask me, more Bunuellian in its pursuit of that obscure object of desire.

I don't know about "Bunuellian" but the term "Jonathan Kingian" springs more readily to mind with the Kidman book.

there can be no defence of this!!!

it must be at LEAST the twentieth thing DT has written wehre he includes a fucking list of films he liked from 1974.

awful, awful, awful.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2223079,00.html

hey look everybody, it's the worst article ever.

soundbite of him this morning on NPR praising the "courage" of Heath Ledger, "a young MANLY actor," in playing gay. What a colostomy bag.

oh c'mon – they probably woke him early, whilst dreaming of Gene Tierney.

Was flicking through his new book in Waterstones a few days ago, "Have You Seen..." or whatever it's called. There's more unsettlingly abrasive dirty old manning, referring to Mary Astor's "fuckability" in The Maltese Falcon, for instance.

unsettlingly abrasive dirty old manning

http://www.comedycv.co.uk/bernardmanning/2002-november-bernard-manning.jpg

is it DOMing when the subject is so old she's dead? I testify to Errol Flynn's and Joel McCrea's fuckability.

Well, it's all imagery isn't it (see also "Pictures Of Lily" and "she's been dead since 1929") so it's probably a tribute to Astor that in her prime she can still be thought of as "fuckable." I'd like to see a lot more of that sort of frankness in film studies writing.

And the term "three long times" springs to mind whenever I remind myself that I have been remiss wrt "keeping up" with your writ(h)ing, Marcello!
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Friday, 3 November 2006

I read this a few times yesterday but still don't understand it.

I recently finished a slow lingering savouring perusal of the Kidman book. It is terrific.

Did you wipe up afterwards?

Cannot, for the life of me, fathom the appeal of Nicole Kidman

There's more DOMing in the piece on Dead Calm, complaining about Nicole Kidman not swimming naked or something. But what's jarring is not so much the DOMing per se as how it sits amidst the general - as j.d. put it upthread - regal tone.

The piece on Dead Calm in Have You Seen?, that is.

Yeah, I think I'll wait until it's £2.99 in World's End Oxfam before I pick that new tome up.

It isn't his DOMing that's the problem, it's his PASSANTINOing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/film-depression-steinbeck-1920s-1930s-creditcrunch

Someone post the list of the 1000 movies in his new book pls thx.

I thumbed through the book this weekend: some of the entries are slapdash, but it's definitely something I want on my table this Christmas.

Gosh, yes. So do I! That's a good idea.

This about six months after DT and others were raving on about the New Golden Age Of American Cinema. Make up your minds, chaps.

Thumbing through his new directory of films is impossible since all the copies I've seen in the bookshops are sealed.

I saw his Kidman book for two quid in the charity shop in Saturday, thumbed through it and decided there were much better things to spend two quid on.

I enjoy Enrique's mounting exasperation throughout this thread - the bit quoted from Thomson about Before Sunset is pricelss.

Really liking "Have You Seen?", although it's infuriating that there aren't more indexes; how much effort would it have been to have chucked in an index by director, for example?

enjoy Enrique's mounting exasperation throughout this thread

more where that came from, fella.

new book also out now, in USA only je crois!!

it's available here pretty easily

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Try-Tell-Story-David-Thomson/dp/0375412131/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234703528&sr=8-1

i hope it's only the first volume. childhood memoirs not usually my bag; but if he does one on being 18-35ish (ie up to when he wrote the biographical dictionary), i'd be stoked. i remember him writing a thing about choosing to go to the ldn school of film technique over oxford once.

I'd usually wouldn't go for it either, but maybe going to the cinema at wartime, etc. might be really readable, who knows?

Just looking at a review a rev of 'Have you seen?' and the head-scratching snap judgements thing comes up again (as above in this thread when discussing the "biographical dictionary"). Haven't read either book, but snap judgements alongside considered opinion sounds attractive to me.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/feb/27/michelle-williams-heath-ledger

this is dt running through an imdb listing, afaict.

He's published a few Guardian pieces lately; I just read this one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/apr/10/movies-economic-recession

Really not very convincing. Sure, movie might not now match what it did then - but I don't see much point in saying so. Quite odd the relish he takes in simply lambasting the present. And the assertion that movies now don't aim to move people sounds not only false but like something he knows is untrue. What about all the bad schlocky romances and whatnot that are made all the time? Might as well say not that movies should be more moving, but that they should be tougher (as screwball can indeed be).

stevie t, i challenge u to get to the end of this!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/19/christian-bale-david-thomson

"Christian Bale is a real movie actor.

Don't be surprised."

now I can't bear to read him.

Oh but it seems as though you can.

Seems a reasonable enough piece to me.

State of the Union:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRavO6E2Ihk

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/10/12/david-thomson/heath-ledger/

durrr

Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did. They are a type of celebrity now.

durrrrrrrrrrrr

DT does his death-of-cinema thing, parses S&S and "Fuck Scarface":

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107218/not-dead-just-dying?page=0,0

Any thoughts on his new book or is it more of the same?

hey someone got me this for Xmas. so far it is not bad, altho not particularly mind-blowing either.

When [David O.] Selznick was just fourteen, his father, the pioneer Lewis J. Selznick (born in Lithuania), had sent a cheeky cable to the beleaguered tsar (and, at the same time, to the American press):

"When I was a boy in Russia your police treated my people very bad. However no hard feelings. Hear you are now out of work. If you will come to New York can give you fine position acting in pictures. Salary no object. Reply my expense. Regards you and family."

6th ed of 'Dictionary' reviewed by Dana Stevens

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2014/05/david_thomson_s_new_biographical_dictionary_of_film_sixth_edition_is_the.html

How is the Nicole Kidman entry? Hot or not?

on Cranston:
Long-form television is the narrative form that has transcended movies in the way, once, the novel surpassed cave paintings

yow! get this guy on ilx

I am part of a weekly Best Show on WFMU get-together on Skype and AP Mike was reading the other day from Thomson on the Marx Brothers...it is totally batshit crazy, one of the weirdest things I've ever read by him. But highly entertaining. Check it out.

James Franco:… If anyone can get films made of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury in this world and time, you have to hand it to that guy—it doesn’t matter if the films are any good, he is an operator. … He is immensely sympathetic and entirely implausible; he has over ninety credits already—and I promised only a few hundred words. He is Gatsby—and better him than Leonardo DiCaprio!

v otm

fwiw that television quote is perhaps the first truly hateful thing I've noticed Thomson write

breaking bad is a good show but it turns people crazy

it's entertaining & manages its tone skilfully

It did occur to me that the extended narratives of these big production value TV shows essentially transforms them into 12 hour movies.

with repeating hour-long episodic cycles of tension and release, like any great movie

all based on The Godfather

zzzzzzzzzzz

In Have You Seen…? he does devote individual entries to some television series (Python, The Singing Detective, Sopranos). With the latter he comes to the conclusion that because the show went on too long (?), that James Gandolfini/Tony Soprano was essentially a bore (??) and that because there was no closure, as such, it is inferior to…The Godfather. Yawn yawn yawn, Howard Hawks, zz zz zzz Cary Grant, maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance to write this.

Not new, but an interesting review of the Biog Dic by Clive James: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/06/hollywood-a-love-story/308501/

Often spot-on, sometimes creepy

This is coming from a Diana 'fan'.

tot OTM on this Marseillaise/Casablanca stuff (listen)

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/schedule-for-monday-november-16-1.3320550/should-we-watch-movies-to-escape-harsh-realities-1.3320558

Got a thrift-shop copy of this today, cheap and in good shape. 1967, his first book--didn't realize he went that far back.

https://i.postimg.cc/NMKk0sZ5/dt.jpg