books about cinema

Also, two anecdotes you overlooked are the one about the bumping landing before shooting Out of the Past when he said "Anybody got any gage?" and the one where he got to LA first because his brother got arrested by a railroad bull. When his rother finally arrives, Bob is in the tub taking a bubble bath, smoking a cigar, reading Hollywood Confidential and says "What kept you?"

bumpy

brother

More than bumpy, no brakes. Plane knocked over an outhouse. Two men were out cold.

Finished David Thomson's How to Watch a Movie. Really liked it--the title's a come-on, it just wanders around and doesn't really try to guide you about anything (thankfully), and even though I wasn't always sure what point Thomson was trying to make at any given moment, I liked the mix of personal anecdote and unanswerable (meta-) questions, and the mix of films suited me fine.

I wonder if he's got ghost writers or grad students. No way this guy has been so prolific the last three years. No detracting from quality: I read Sleeping With Strangers in 2020 and shared excerpts with students then.

Three books in three years, 200-300 pages each, two published during a pandemic, doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Some people rhyme slow, some people rhyme quick.

Also, the way David Thomson watches a movie is to frenziedly masturbate every time Nicole Kidman appears on screen, and you probably don't need a whole book telling you how to do that.

I love my DT books but this is v true

there's a good bit in a rosenbaum review of the dyer stalker and mars-jones ozu books where he is taken aback that both writers seem to regard thomson as an unquestionable expert

That's because both of them don't know much about film and are weak critics but were indulged by their publishers.

Dyer's Stalker book works because he isn't a film critic.