Have You Seen...?

"David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film has never received the acclaim it deserves," argues Geoff Dyer in the Observer. "Everyone knows it's a great book about film, but the more thoroughly one studies it the more those two words - 'about film' - rankle. It's a literary achievement of vast, even ludicrous, ambition, stylistic brio and creative daring" and "a vicarious autobiography and commentary on its own composition." These days, of course, Thomson is everywhere. "Would he write better if he wrote less? Impossible to say. Like a workhorse-star of the studio system, he keeps slogging away, partly for the dough and partly, one suspects, to keep some looming dread at bay. So it didn't take too much arm-twisting to get him to sign up for another half-million-word tome on his top thousand movies."

Updated through 9/26.

Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films "is crammed with insight and epigram ('The thing about Clint Eastwood's [Dirty Harry] is his tweed jacket') and, given that he has touched on much of this material before, it is remarkably free of recycling. Thomson is a jazz fan and he loves coming back to the standards, the classics of the medium, and improvising over them."

"Clearly designed as a book to be dipped into, most readers will find this singularly difficult to put down," writes Barry Forshaw in Crime Time.

Thomson will be discussing his new book at BFI Southbank tomorrow evening and at the Barbican to discuss Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be on Tuesday; he'll be at The Booksmith in San Francisco on November 12.

On a somewhat related note, there's a meme running around about films we have not seen. Sample entries: Joseph B, Bill (The Kind of Face You Hate), Dennis Cozzalio, Glenn Kenny and Bob Turnbull. Click on any of those names to see how the meme's spread so far.

Update, 9/26: Ambrose Heron talks with Thomson.

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2008 7:20 AM