This is one of the first serious film books I ever picked up. The picture of ol' Jack Nance from David Lynch's Eraserhead is what caught my eye. After reading the first paragraph of the first chapter, I was hooked.

Written by, arguably, the two best critics around -- J. Hoberman (who writes for the Village Voice) and Jonathan Rosenbaum (who writes for the Chicago Reader) -- this is an excellent look at a bygone era of movie-going. They document the midnight movie circuit that used to exist across the country for films too weird and strange for mainstream consumption. Sadly, most of these theatres are gone now -- swallowed up by the multiplex monster.

These guys clearly did their homework -- their chapters on the early careers of Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Waters and George Romero are definitive. Best of all, their writing style is never dry or academic but very readable (it helps that these guys write for weeklies).

This book is a must-have for any fan of cult movies (and esp. the above mentioned directors). I have read it many, many times and it inspired me to be a writer myself. Great stuff.

A lot of these directors have had entire books written about them since this book was published, but the authors manage to make this book so entertaining and fascinating that I've reread it twice-- I usually just read nonfiction once and then use it for reference. If they would put England's The Incredibly Strange Film Show (and the spin-offs Son Of... and For One Week Only)out on DVD, it would rival this book. Until then, this is the most vital source of information on cult movies.

Still in print after almost 20 years? You know it has got to be good. This book was an essential part of my film education, turning me on to a dozen great flicks I might never have heard of otherwise.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is a rare film critic. He writes with an understanding of film theory and history, and also with a perspective of culture and politics, which is emphasized in the selection of these essays. At the same time, he never gets academic to the point of dryness, though many complain precisely about this point. Always, there is a respect for the intelligence of the reader, and he does what I think a film critic should do, which is to teach the reader something about a film, and to help him/her see it in a deeper way. This is not the method of "I recommend this movie / I do not recommend this movie" critiquing.

The films he covers in this book range from those that most moviegoers have seen (Schindler's List, Star Wars) to those that even dedicated film lovers may have missed (Black Girl, Tih-Minh). Of course, it helps a lot to actually see the film before reading the essay on the film, and it's worthwhile to try doing so. Still, some of the films are hard to come by, and even reading Rosenbaum's essays without seeing the film(s) referred to can be a learning experience. He supplies you with information about the film, the director, history and culture, and the film production process, and in reading him, you can't help but begin to integrate all these elements into your film viewing experience.

This book is entertaining and informative, and has deepened my appreciation for film. The Chicago Reader's film column has gained a fan.

Rosenbaum is easily the most interesting film critic writing in english these days, and this is the most accessible collection of his work available. Refusing to succumb to the mindless thumbs-up-or-thumbs-down tactic so common among non-academic critics, while avoiding the endless mire of carrying on a dialogue within the confines of the Ivory Tower, Rosenbaum's writing and analyses are engaging and pursuasive. I certainly don't find myself agreeing with each turn of his discourse -- but nor do I feel insulted. Rather, as often as not, such disagreements serve to inspire thought -- a pleasure that too little writing about film seems to induce.

For years now there have been two kinds of movie critics: those who like the movies that win the Academy Award for best picture and those who are actually worth reading. Rosenbaum as a critic clearly falls into the second category and his book is invaluable for the perspective it presents on modern cinema. Hollywood has become increasingly depressing over the past two decades. The autopsies of Pauline Kael in 1980 and Mark Crispin Miller in 1990 have been vindicated in spades. The Academy Awards, instead of honoring the usual middlebrow works such as Amadeus, goes for such lowbrow historical works as Braveheart and Titanic. To the isolated critic, the appearance of such films as Fargo and such companies as Miramax appears as an oasis. The value of Rosenbaum's book is that it shows that this is a mirage.

The problem, says Rosenbaum, is not that there are not good movies being made anymore. The problem is that most of them are foreign movies and both Hollywood and the media take an obtuse and philistine approach towards them. One could simply look to the Village Voice Critics List and one would see such films as Beau Travail, The House of Mirth, Yi Yi, The Wind Will Carry Us, L'Humanite, and Time Regained all in the top 10, but they would be virtually unknown to the rest of continent. Rosenbaum is particularly fond of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and the Portuguese Manuel De Oliviera. But these and many other directors that Rosenbaum mentions do not get the attention they deserve. Miramax concentrates on "feel-good" foreign films, such as Life is Beautiful or Chocolat. Rosenbaum's description of Miramax's version of The Wings of the Dove, as middlebrow soft-core porn that traduces its source, emphasizes the problem. Miramax picks up the distributing rights to more challenging fare, not to show them, but to prevent other companies from seeing them. Rosenbaum is particularly cutting about how Mirimax executives monopolize media discussion at Cannes by putting down other movies and appealing to xenophobic and philistine instincts of American reporters. Critics are often obtuse about films. (Rosenbaum is particularly cutting about the cheap Francophobia of such well respected writers as David Denby and James Wolcott). This unpleasant isolationism is all the more dangerous because the American industry has such an enormous influence on the rest of the world's movies.

Rosenbaum emphasizes the self-serving illusions of Hollywood hacks who say they only make what the public wants. After all, they claim, people won't watch movies with subtitles or in black and white. As Rosenbaum points out, audiences had no trouble watching subtitles in Dances with Wolves, and watching black and white subtitles in Schindler's List. The basic problem is that the movie testing machine is designed in such a way as to give the audience limited choices and to verify the prejudices of studio heads. The book is not perfect. One may feel that if one needed to defend a Hollywood picture you could have a better choice than Small Soldiers. Likewise, one may wonder whether Paul Verhoaven is a brilliant satirist or just deeply cynical. And if you think that Casablanca, or Quientin Tarantino are better than Rosenbaum suggests, you will not find much counter-argument here. But if you have never heard of Robert Bresson, you must read this book.

Jonathan Rosenbaum takes cinema for what it is and what it could be. The author is a passionate movie critic, who believes passionately in the power of the "movement-image." He writes weekly reviews in the Chicago Reader. He might be the only critic I know of in the US who actually DEFENDS certain movies. His highly vitriolic discussion of the practices of major movie studios is refreshing and right on target. Rosenbaum's exploration of the socio-economic and cultural reasons why US audiences cannot easily access foreign movies leads him to a larger reflection on the very nature and/or possibility of an "American" cinema in the age of globalization. Rosenbaum vehemently criticizes the current status quo and the US film industry for treating movies as disposable commodities and the audiences as hapless consumers. He also shows how the "entertainment-industrial complex" has taken over the shaping of the public's taste through mainstream media outlets. Rosenbaum argues forcefully against the cliche that so-called art movies - and those who enjoy them - are hopeless elitists. As a matter of fact, in the book he discusses Starship Troopers and Orson Welles' Ambersons with equal interest. He makes the case that movies can tell us crucial things about the world we live in, or in other words that movies - foreign, US, artsy, indie, whatever - matter because of their ethical value. A vital, and extremely minoritarian position nowadays. In summary, a very lively and at times very funny book, which considerably enriches the discussion on cinema. Invaluable in the era of the E! channnel.

Movie Wars is a powerful and lucid corrective to the intellectual laziness that distinguishes 90% of film commentary in North America. As the chief film review of Chicago Reader, Rosenbaum is one of the few sources of lengthy, intelligible prose (as opposed to the tenure seeking obscurantism that distinguishes so much of contemporary film studies) about world cinema. What I like about Rosenbaum's writing is that he makes you want to seek out films that may eventually surface on video and DVD if you live outside the Festival-Cinematheque circuit because he communicates the beauty, intelligence, integrity and mystery of these films through his writing (keep a notepad handy when reading this book to jot down titles). Rosenbaum is never an art-house snob in his approach. His appreciation of Joe Dante's Small Soldiers in this book reveals that Rosenbaum is happy to pay credit to a genre-busting auteur when the work merits it. Movie Wars deftly analyses the collusion between studios and mainstream critics to limit viewer choices. It is a polemic informed by a profound knowledge of film history and a keen sense of what film (US, European, Third World, etc.) can be when audiences aren't underestimated. Above all, this is a book for film lovers who haven't let their cinephilia blind them to the fact that the best films always connect with the world beyond the screen.

I received this book as a gift recently, and I got a lot out of it, despite the fact that I am not a Kane-ologist. Welles is revealed as a man who cared about his craft, and it details the inside story of many of his films, including the bastardization of the Magnificent Ambersons. As a director, Bogdanovich speaks the language, and does well to coax the reticent Welles to open up about various moments in his checkered career. Again, the serious film buffs get the most out of this book, but as a more than casual movie watcher I have read and re-read this book as I've discovered more of Orson's work.

I commend to the book above, an interview with Peter Bogdanovich.
Although I'm not a huge fan of the latter's movies (with the exception of "Paper Moon," which I loved ever since it came out when I was eight, and fell in love with tomboy Tatum O'Neill forthrightly), I have begun reading about half of this book over the past few days, and find it better than my previous favourite, the Hitchcock/Truffaut book. Of course, much favoured above Wilder/Crowe, namely because of Crowe's incessant name dropping of "Jerry Maguire" and "Tom Cruise" every other irritating sentence, which prevented the reader from finding out what
Wilder had on *his* mind.

What impresses me about the Welles/Bogdanovich volume is the raucous sense of humour Welles brings to the conversation, always as lively and as larger-than-life as Welles was. Also, Bogdanovich has laced the book with pertinent interviews, articles, anecdotes that elucidate certain points of the text, as well as Welles' lines cut from "Magnificent Ambersons" and the long memorandum he wrote to Universal studio chiefs and cc'd to Chuck Heston, trying to save what I consider his masterwork,
"Touch of Evil" from falling prey to overzealous editing by indifferent studio hacks.

But most of all, I am touched that when all the world was dumping on Welles, when he was being derided as a has-been and a spendthrift, that up-and-coming director Bogdanovich gave him his friendship and accorded him the respect he was so shamefully denied. Even Pauline Kael couldn't resist savaging Welles, and she wrote a particularly nasty and libelous article that Welles didn't write any of the screenplay to "Citizen Kane."

Of all Hollywood's sins (and I retain in memory a cross-indexed catalogue of them), the fact that even when Welles started getting "lifetime achievement" accolades, he still couldn't get any financing for his movie projects, on which he worked until his last days, leaves the bitterest taste in my mouth. There must be certain people destined to the lowest rungs of hell -- or at least purgatory -- for creating a world in which Orson Welles' last paid acting role was as the voice of the evil planet in a "Transformers" movie.

Of all books about Orson Welles, this one gives us the closest understanding of his genius. It contains a collection of interviews given to Welles by his good friend, Peter Pogdanovich. We are given a personal tour of Welles' thoughts and motivations behind some of his greatest or most notorious works, without the pompous guesswork of an independant biographer. At the same time, Pogdonavich acting as interviewer lends an air of honesty, as Welles isn't as free to reinvent history as he might have been if this were simply an autobiography. However, this interview format makes for a rough chronology, as conversations jump all over the place. The book does give some basic dates and highlights of Welles' life and careers, but the reader is still expected to know a little about Welles. You might want to suppliment this volumne with another Welles biography.

What entertained me the most was Welles' genius for story, which he not only used in such mastery on stage, radio, and film, but also in telling us of his own personal stories. I didn't realize the extent of Welles' accomplishments, which include some of theater and radio's finest moments, as well as film. Before making Citizen Kane at the ripe age of 26 (or 23?), Welles had a fuller, more distinguished life than most people manage to squeeze into a lifetime. Most importantly, this book can give a film fan some general insight to all those great "lost masterpieces", the films in which Welles often lost control over (which basically are the majority of his films). He explains his original visions and where the studios altered his work. Watching these films with this book as my guide, I noticed more of his touch and his genius than I would have without it. A great book and gift to filmmakers everywhere.

Rosenbaum is, for my money, the best film critic out there. His original essay on "Dead Man" led me to take another look at the film, which has since become one of my all-time favorite movies. This thoughtful commentary will help you think about what is probably the best American film made in the 1990s. And, if you like this, you should follow Rosenbaum's columns in the Chicago Reader. I often disagree with him, but there's no one more thoughtful, informed, and passionate about movies; he's a treasure.

a much maligned and mis-understood film when it came out, it's great to see a writer the stature of Rosenbaum giving "Dead Man" the respectful examination it deserves.

Rosenbaum mixes his own thoughtful analysis with excerpts from various interviews he conducted with Jarmusch to illuminate the many aspects of the film: from Neil Young's haunting soundtrack, to the role of tobacco, to its place in the acid western genre.

if you love the film, this book is the perfect companion piece.