Review by New York Times Review
THE MOMENT HELD forever on the cover of "Moments That Made the Movies" is a lulu: Joe Gillis floating facedown in Norma Desmond's swimming pool in "Sunset Blvd." The water is lit from below; the palette is 5 a.m. City of Angels black-and-white. Gazing at the image even in silence, anyone who loves movies can conjure the voice-over narration of the dead man, talking to the audience directly, describing to us how he, "just a movie writer with a couple of B pictures to his name," has wound up at the decaying mansion of a faded movie star with two shots in his back and one in his stomach. The poor dope. Maybe an advanced movie lover can even hear the unique voice of the speaker - William Holden as Gillis - telling the tale that won the picture 11 Oscar nominations in 1951. But leave it to David Thomson to add color: "From 'Sunset Blvd.' to 'The Wild Bunch,"' Holden "was superb as a guy who wanted to believe but who had been born a few pounds light when it came to faith. When you hear him start to tell the story of 'Sunset Blvd.,' and when you see him dead in the water, but not swallowing water, you're in touch with one of the finest dry, ironic voices in American culture (including Mark Twain and Jack Benny)." "Moments That Made the Movies" is full of assured declarations, chatty asides and free-associative essays like that, accompanying images from 71 films (and one still-photo coda). And the result is both fun and not a little feverish, overchatty and underweight. It's the dashed-off (or maybe on-deadline) reworkings, in a souped-up book, of a style of movie analysis for which Thomson has been famous a long time. This prolific, professionally provocative British-born film critic and historian, who has lived on the Hollywood side of the Atlantic for decades, has made a jolly good career out of twinning solid erudition with big, arguable opinions, confidently pronounced with plenty of cheeky verve to charm. Pull out the author's indispensable, regularly updated "New Biographical Dictionary of Film" to look up info on Holden, for instance, and get sidetracked by a swell pensée: "You could pick a dozen or so maturing close-ups of Holden and the series would tell the horrible story of movies as a marinade called early embalming." "Moments That Made the Movies" is in the same product line, if unlike Thomson's other survey books - most recently his somewhat melancholy, whither-the-medium sweeper, "The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies" - in two major ways. First, it's produced coffee-table style, thick with large, movie-still illustrations, fancy with white space and goosed with large-type pull-quotes. (The book production is glossy, all right, but persistently unhandsome - something about the clunky page layouts, the less-than-crisp photos, the quotations pulled so randomly as to be meaningless.) Second, well, it's organized by moments, isn't it: Movie by movie (and chronologically), Thomson zooms in on one thing that, for him, he says, gets at the whole thing. What's fun about the organizing principle, for the writer, is that he doubles the opportunity to ply his trade, both in the movies chosen (or not) as well as in the moments with which he has chosen to engage. Or not. Browse through the pages on "Psycho," say, and it's not the famous shower scene the guide wants to talk about, but the one before that, where Marion Crane/Janet Leigh shares supper and conversation in the Bates Motel office with Norman Bates/Anthony Perkins. Thomson calls it the movie's "most remarkable and affecting scene," and then continues with an interesting thesis about the way Hitchcock likes to set up kindness before horror. Get to "Bonnie and Clyde," and Thomson gotcha-checks expectations immediately: "You know very well that you think I'm going to pick the big shoot-'em-up at the end." Hah! In fact, Thomson prefers to analyze the scene where Clyde/Warren Beatty takes Bonnie/Faye Dunaway to a coffee shop and wins the girl by telling her to change the spit curl in her hair. "It's a film about Warren and Faye making it, which in Hollywood is rather more important than making out, or whatever it's called," he concludes. Moment by moment, each statement is certainly worth considering, made as it is by a highly respected critic who is appreciated exactly for such a garrulous parade of this-not-that explications. Accumulated, though, the insistent breeziness (or is it breezy insistence?) may have the backfiring effect of pushing a movie lover to argue back, "No," and turn the page. Especially when the critic works so strenuously at maintaining a tête-à-tête conversational style pitched to an imaginary reader who is part movie buff (of course we know the shoot-'em-up scene in "Bonnie and Clyde") and part neophyte who might appreciate being told, about "Mickey One" : "This is a real film - you can look it up." Finding beauty in "Blue Velvet," Thomson supposes: "Beauty? Some of you are aghast." (Me: "No, I'm not.") Championing "In the Cut," a movie he describes as "a masterpiece" (me: "No, it's not"), he coyly frets that some 20 pages earlier, less than in love with Meg Ryan's fake-orgasm scene in "When Harry Met Sally..." "I may have hurt or disappointed you in dismantling a scene that is proverbial good fun in a film that was a hit." (Me: "I'll get over it.") "Moments That Made the Movies" becomes increasingly arbitrary and blearyeyed as the author browses among 21st-century titles; in the final dash he declares Joel and Ethan Coen's 2008 comedy "Burn After Reading" "one of the funniest films made this century." (Me: "What the ... ?") By the time he closes with a meditation on a photojournalist's still picture taken after Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup showdown between Boston and Vancouver, even a devoted Thomsonite can be excused for going, "O.K., whatever." Meanwhile, we've turned every page, curious about what's on this indefatigable writer's mind, moment by moment. ? MOMENTS THAT MADE THE MOVIES By David Thomson Illustrated. 303 pp. Thames & Hudson. $39.95. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance writer.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 8, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Our memories of movies tend to be dreamlike impressions. Often they involve the look, the pace, the movement, the texture, the context, a scene, or an image of a film. Film critic Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2003) presents us with his selection of idiosyncratic moments, chronologically arranged, that are guaranteed to pique our interest and prompt us to revisit films or add others to our movie queue. Thomson, sensitive to film's innate eroticism, begins in 1887 with Eadweard Muybridge's One Woman Standing, Another Sitting and Crossing Legs, less film than experiment, featuring the titular women in the nude, before moving on to more contemporary films, such as Sunrise, Pandora's Box, and the famous lovemaking scene in Don't Look Now. Moments with Jack Nicholson are featured five times, with four films by Hitchcock, three by Antonioni, and two starring Meg Ryan (really). Thomson is authoritative, yet personal, and includes anecdotes, little-known facts, juicy gossip, and a number of surprise selections (see Ryan, above), especially from the past 20 years. Accompanied by wonderfully evocative stills, this eminently browsable book is certain to delight film lovers.--Segedin, Ben Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When we think about the movies we love or even the ones we hate, specific moments come to mind. Whether we recall a scene or an image or certain dialogue, these moments define the film in our recollection. Prolific film-critic Thomson's (The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies) new art-sized book examines these "sensational" moments from more than 70 films in this film-lover's treasure. Organized chronologically Thomson begins in the year 1887 Eadweard Muybridge's Animal Location and spans all the way to 2008 with the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading. The selection largely encompasses American classics-Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd-and a smattering of foreign films directed by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michelangelo Antonioni. He'll occasionally include less known films such as Danny De Vito's Hoffa or Jane Campion's No False Glamour. The "knock-out" set-pieces often lean towards the violent or erotically charged, but all include multiple images, sometimes full-page spreads. Thomson warns in his introduction that readers shouldn't interpret the chosen moments as "the ¿best' moments" or his "personal favorites," though recent history definitely gets downplayed: 1959, for example, gets three entries, while there are none from 1996 to 2000. The book's effect is undeniable, as the reader feels determined to hit the nearest theater. Agent: Steve Wasserman, Kneerim & Williams. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Film critic Thomson (The New Republic; The Biographical Dictionary of Film; Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick) has taken more than 70 films and captured the exact scene (with text and illustrations) that he felt made the movie. The examples are listed in chronological order, from 1887 to a still photo taken in 2011. They encompass such classics as Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard, A Star Is Born, Psycho, The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, The Right Stuff, and When Harry Met Sally. There are also interesting choices such as M, Tokyo Story, Blow-Up, The Conformist, The Shining, Heat, and Zodiac. It is fascinating to read why such moments as the airplane scene in North by Northwest, the initiation of Michael Corleone into the family business in The Godfather, the noir mood of the pool scene in Sunset Boulevard, the cafe scene in Bonnie and Clyde, and the Robert De Niro/Al Pacino meet up in Heat-and many others-are important in the history of film. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers who enjoy motion picture history, cinematography, and movie plots and themes.-Sally Bryant, Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
