PIC CRIT LIT HIT

Have You Seen…? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films by David Thomson
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1024 pp)
For a thinker with writerly titles (Warren Beatty And Desert Eyes), this literalism goes kerplunk. And the organizing conceit (1,000 films sequenced alphabetically by title, 1200 thoughtful words per), is even more humdrum. But conceits are for shredders, and Thomson cheats with glee: he’s not recommending each and every film, he’s listing a body of work worth talking about even when popular taste eludes him (like The Graduate). Typically fearsome, he recommends Platoon without blinking, and rejects Planet of the Apes. He assigns choice descriptions to key writers (James Ellroy’s novels are “crammed and hectic”), and notes how time works on cliched homilies (regarding It’s a Wonderful Life, he says “since 1946, the United States has come to resemble Pottersville far more than Bedford Falls…”) Choice daggers of invective slay the loftiest talents: Last Tango in Paris “…may be the picture where he is really being Marlon Brando, hunching up in stupid self-pity and behaving like a jerk.” Each entry teems with imaginary sidebars and parentheticals leading you further astray, and scores of cinematographers, production designers, script doctors and other offstagers get contextualized. Sentences scan beautifully, each detail pressing Thomson’s interpretations further. Some epigrams leap out tombstone-ready: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet becomes “Beowulf at the International House of Pancakes.” The botched title is mild compared to the nixed index, which for a Knopf book this handsomely produced amounts to criminal omission. Somebody put everything from this and his Biographical Dictionary online and make it all searchable. Now yer talking.