Five Movies: Five Books About Movies Worth Your Time

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned that literature about film was a useful way of feeding the Cinephilic meme, so it only seemed fair that the Cap'n give you some suggestions. More often than not, the casual-to-curious film fan will wander into their local bookseller (or retail chain), head for the "Media" section, and find themselves inundated with oversized "making of" books, unauthorized celebrity bios, and more "1001 ____ Movies You Must See Before You Die" than you can shake a stick at. The end result tends to be that they leave with nothing, feeling perplexed about where all these "great books" their friends talk about are.

One of the problems - perhaps the largest problem - is that the critical analysis or scholarly approach to film texts are limited to small, university presses, and most major chains don't feel the need to carry them. It is, after all, not their target demographic - typically the casual shopper looking for a paperback to enjoy on a sunny afternoon - so you won't find analytical texts just anywhere (periodically they pop up in used book stores, especially ones in the vicinity of a college campus).

Then again, the neophyte or leaning cinephile will want to wait for most of those texts, so while I'll mention a few after the list proper, this edition of Five Movies will focus on good "entry points" with a dash of heavier reading to keep you busy. Whenever possible, I'll link the titles to Amazon, so you have a reasonably priced starting point.

1. VideoHound's Cult Flicks & Trash Pics (edited by Carol Schwartz with Jim Olenski) - Let's start with a video guide; when I was younger, I used The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter, but as the list of films grows, the reviews become shorter and shorter, and omissions ramped up. VideoHound publishes guides by topic, genre, and year, so you get more concentrated subsections of films, with better information about the film and its relative merits. I chose Cult Flicks & Trash Pics because if you want a handy guide to the "underground" films that exist in the realm of meme-dom, this is a great point of entry. It also makes a good companion to J. Hoberman and Johnathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies.

2. Hooked by Pauline Kael - From movie guides, let's move on to collections of reviews by critics; while I do own a few books by Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael was far and away my favorite "newspaper critic" - her reviews are insightful, witty, and so effortlessly well written that it drives me crazy I can't come anywhere close. Kael died ten years ago, and her collections are woefully out of print (I found Hooked at a used book store), but our number 2 pick is a little bit easier to find than 5001 Nights at the Movies, which is also excellent. Hooked deals with reviews from 1984-1989, covering a number of titles you may be familiar with (and many you won't be), and even when I don't agree with Kael (like her pans of After Hours and Raising Arizona), I appreciate the level of writing she brings even to pithy dismissals. This book would make a fine counterpoint to Harlan Ellison's Watching, which covers much of the same time period in cinema.

3. The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans - You may have seen the documentary based on our third choice, also narrated by Evans, but it doesn't even scratch the surface of this entertaining, frank, and frequently revelatory autobiography from the former head of Paramount Pictures. Evans makes it clear from the get-go that this is his version of the story, but his path from salesman to B-movie actor to mogul is never dull, even if the facts tend to lean only in one direction. As "tell all"'s or Hollywood biographies go, skip what you normally see on the shelf and gravitate towards The Kid Stays in the Picture; you'll learn a lot more and have more fun doing it.


4. The Director's Series by various authors, editors, et al - This series, which sometimes goes by the name Directors on Directors, is a collection of interviews with various filmmakers about their process, history, craft, and themes in their body of work. There's one for just about any director you could be interested in: David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg, Douglas Sirk, Lars von Trier, John Cassavetes, Louis Malle, Ken Loach, Woody Allen, Kryzysztof Kielslowski, Pedro Almodoovar, Tim Burton, Paul Schrader, Barry Levinson, John Sayles, Robert Altman, and Terry Gilliam. Personal favorites? I'd start with Lynch on Lynch or Gilliam on Gilliam, which have a more conversational tone with the directors in question. Burton on Burton is a treasure trove of information, but its structure is more of introductory text preceding a quote from Tim Burton moving chronologically through his films. It's interesting, but less intimate, so I'd start with Gilliam or Lynch and more forward from there.


5. The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film by J.W. Rinzler - As chronicles of making a film go, you'd be hard pressed to find a more in-depth exploration than The Making of Star Wars. I assure you that even the most die-hard Star Wars fan is going to find plenty of revelations in the book, about the writing process, the conceptualizing of Lucas' vision, the perils of making the film, its disastrous first edit, and the effort that went into making the first film a cultural landmark. Rinzler does similar work with the Indiana Jones series and The Empire Strikes back (and, one must assume, eventually Return of the Jedi), with plenty of access to everyone involved in the making of A New Hope, and the book feels like it steps beyond the typical "Lucas whitewash" that other "histories" of the films have.

This is just to get you started, of course; if you want some really good "theory" I suggest More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts by James Naremore, Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie, or Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction by Scott Bukatman. If you like more niche or subgenre guides, hunt down Stuart Galbraith IV's Japanese Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films.

If you want to have some fun with reviews or career pieces, check out Vern's Five on the Outside, Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal, or "Yipee Ki-Yay, Moviegoer!": Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema, and Other Important Topics. You can also look at the series of director interviews with the likes of Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch and The Coen Brothers. Want to know how to make a movie? Try Robert Rodriguez's Rebel Without a Crew or Lloyd Kaufman's Make Your Own Damn Movie!. Want a cultural history of a genre? Check out David J. Skal's The Monster Show, Kendal Phillips' Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, or Joe Bob Briggs' one-two punch of Profoundly Disturbing and Profoundly Erotic.

I'm always looking for more good reads, so if you have one, pass it on.