Recently Read Books!
James Naremore's Acting in the Cinema - read this, it's a good way to start thinking about movie acting besides having a lot of great case studies on James Stewart, Lillian Gish, Cary Grant, Charlie Chaplin and more.
Jason Starr's Hard Feelings - like many of Starr's books, a man is driven crazy by the pressure-cooker of work. Not quite the book Cold Caller is, but still very good.
Eric Ambler's Passage of Arms - compared to Ambler's very solid WWII-era thrillers, this one just doesn't........doesn't hit the spot. There just isn't a thrill - the Nazis, Fascists and Soviets always bring a buzz to Ambler's early work, but the baddies here are......Indonesian seperatists? (we're never really clear on their ideology).
John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. Takes far too long to get moving, but this is a critical resource you'll need to understand Katrina.
Charles Willeford's High Priest of California - extraordinarily black tale of an absolutely amoral used-car salesman who sees a woman.......and that's where it starts.
Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy - since Willeford was a poet and himself a painter, many of his noir novels focus unusually on art. This one is a unusual tour-de-force - a dark noir that is also a nimble dissection of Dada / Surrealist art theory.
Joseph McBride's Orson Welles - an excellent discussion of Welles through his work, rather than the infantile personal trashings handed out by Callow and Thomson. Too bad I haven't seen enough of the Master's work to be able to read many of the chapters. Somebody release The Other Side of the Wind, dammit!
Jason Starr's Hard Feelings - like many of Starr's books, a man is driven crazy by the pressure-cooker of work. Not quite the book Cold Caller is, but still very good.
Eric Ambler's Passage of Arms - compared to Ambler's very solid WWII-era thrillers, this one just doesn't........doesn't hit the spot. There just isn't a thrill - the Nazis, Fascists and Soviets always bring a buzz to Ambler's early work, but the baddies here are......Indonesian seperatists? (we're never really clear on their ideology).
John Barry's Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America. Takes far too long to get moving, but this is a critical resource you'll need to understand Katrina.
Charles Willeford's High Priest of California - extraordinarily black tale of an absolutely amoral used-car salesman who sees a woman.......and that's where it starts.
Charles Willeford's The Burnt Orange Heresy - since Willeford was a poet and himself a painter, many of his noir novels focus unusually on art. This one is a unusual tour-de-force - a dark noir that is also a nimble dissection of Dada / Surrealist art theory.
Joseph McBride's Orson Welles - an excellent discussion of Welles through his work, rather than the infantile personal trashings handed out by Callow and Thomson. Too bad I haven't seen enough of the Master's work to be able to read many of the chapters. Somebody release The Other Side of the Wind, dammit!
posted by Alex | 7:04 PM
3 Comments:
Alex, I noticed in a comment on Cinemarati that you saw "The Phenix City Story" in Chicago. I run the projector and take admissions at LaSalle. Say hello next time you're out there.
Goatdog,
Of course, LaSalle was precisely where I did see The Phenix City Story. Unfortunately, I moved to Northern California a week ago, so I probably won't be at LaSalle in the near future.
And so now we'll never meet the "mysterious" Alex.
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