Books, 8/2.

"Two new voyages into Kubrickian scholarship suggest the vitality of the field and the variety of its approaches," writes Thomas Doherty in the Chronicle Review. "On Kubrick, a synoptic probe from [James] Naremore, out this summer from the British Film Institute, and The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, a collection of essays from the University Press of Kentucky, edited by Jerold J Abrams. Both books indicate that the artist is not ready yet for a therapeutic session of warm and fuzzy revisionism."

Kristin Thompson reads Roger Horrocks's Len Lye: A Biography and tracks down several of the works: "Lye was born and grew up in New Zealand, lived for stretches in Samoa and Sydney, moved to London as a young man, and moved permanently to New York in 1944. He was extraordinarily attuned to sensory perception and rhythm and was drawn to the indigenous art of the southwest Pacific area. From an early age he studied modern art and especially abstraction."

"Why most Hollywood films stink is a big question, but why we go on eagerly inhaling their smell is a bigger one. David Mamet thinks he knows the answer." Walter Kirn reviews Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business for the Scotsman.

"In an age when gangsters have given way to gangstas, it's refreshing to find a book that takes the older breed seriously - the guys (and sometimes gals) who shot, stole, and swaggered their way through high-octane Hollywood movies from the silent-film era through such recent offerings as The Sopranos and Martin Scorsese's baroque crime-family sagas," writes David Sterritt at PopMatters. "Gangstas make a couple of appearances in Gangster Film Reader, but editors Alain Silver and James Ursini focus primarily on the tried-and-true Americana linked to infamous motion-picture outlaws like Rico Bandello of Little Caesar in the 1930s, Cody Jarrett of White Heat in the 1940s, and Don Vito Corleone of The Godfather in the 1970s. They're a compelling lot, and this is a compelling collection."

For Outlook India, Meghnad Desai reviews Anupama Chopra's King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema, "a good readable account of Shahrukh Khan's life before and during his cinema years."

Jonathan Lapper retraces a personal reading history and arrives at "an appreciation of the critics that shaped the way I feel about movies, how I view them, what to look for and in no small way, how I write about them." The F.R.E.A.K.S. "Farber, Rosenbaum, Ebert, Agee, Kael, Sarris."

"Sloppily edited, printed on inferior-grade paper, with names misspelt and sentences and quotations mistakenly repeated, even on the same page, [Hollywood on Trial: McCarthyism's War Against the Movies by Michael Freedland with Barbara Paskin] is disappointing," writes Christopher Silvester in the Telegraph.

Many, though not all, of these book reviews were first spotted via Bookforum.

Posted by dwhudson at August 2, 2007 9:24 AM