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

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