Sometimes the most interesting stories in cinema take place behind the camera. Ben Taylor’s APOCALYPSE ON THE SET: NINE DISASTROUS FILM PRODUCTIONS proves that page by glorious page. While hardly the first book to tackle the subject of problematic shoots, it beats the pants off the more superficial entries, such as FIASCO by James Robert Parish (who, incidentally, provides the back-cover blurb).
One smart decision that Taylor has made in choosing which films to focus on is that he didn’t pick the obvious. Another is that roughly half of the movies turned out to be widely considered as good, such as Werner Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO or Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW — it just took a boatload of blood, sweat and tears to get there.
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Now updated from its 1999 publication, the paperback release of Kenneth E. Hall’s JOHN WOO: THE FILMS is able to tell a more complete story of the Hong Kong director. At the time, Woo’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II hadn’t been released, which would mark his American commercial peak, followed by the disappointing underperformer WINDTALKERS and the downright disastrous PAYCHECK, after which the filmmaker retreated to Asian cinema.
Now, you get the whole Woo, and nothing but, in a book that doubles as biography and critical assessment, covering the director’s entire career, from his early start in throwaway martial-arts pictures and comedies to the recent epic RED CLIFF. Naturally, the focus is on his late-’80s/early-’90s body of work that redefined the action film, both at home and abroad.
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If I were to list my top 10 most influential movie books, Kim Newman’s 1988 edition of NIGHTMARE MOVIES would sit snugly right alongside Danny Peary, Pauline Kael, Phil Hardy and Joe Bob Briggs.
And if I were to list my top 10 film personalities, both John Landis and William Castle would be on that list — both boisterous, larger-than-life and whip-smart directors, and both with new books. Given that Castle shuffled off this mortal coil some 35 years ago, makes his penmanship appearing now, indeed, larger than life.
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Not one who could afford a subscription to THE NEW YORKER, I had read Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in sparse instances over the years. In other words, my exposure to her — this was pre-Internet, mind you — was limited compared to other film critics.
It need not matter when presented with PAULINE KAEL: A LIFE IN THE DARK, Brian Kellow’s biography of the woman, who passed away in 2001. The author does his job in letting readers know why she was important. He also does his job in not deifying her, allowing her own words and actions to stand for themselves — sometimes, that doesn’t show her in the best light, but she had only herself to blame.
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Ever since I was introduced to the magical wonderland that is DVD, I have been an off-and-on reader of Glenn Erickson. He’s the reviewer who writes under the name of DVD Savant at DVDtalk.com. Now, some of those reviews are among the more than 100 collected in the SCI-FI SAVANT paperback from Point Blank Press. It’s endorsed by director Joe Dante, so who am I to argue? (Well, maybe a little.)
Arranged chronologically by film, the book acts as a virtual tour guide through the history of science-fiction cinema, starting with reviews of Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS — Kino’s recent restored version, to be exact — and some obscure foreign titles, and ending with one of the genre’s most acclaimed ever, James Cameron’s AVATAR.
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