film art by david bordwell and kristin thompson

Although the authors are both university professors, there’s no need to hack through thick tangles of jargon to get to the point, and very little prior knowledge about technical matters is necessary. Other highlights include a dissection of “Mission: Impossible III” that reveals how complex even action movie narratives are, an analysis of Preston Sturges’ innovative use of flashbacks, and a fascinating essay about how Hollywood PR influenced the cinematic legacies of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland. Instead of falling back on easy pop-sociology-people need heroes after 9/11-he lists a variety of factors that relate not just to the content of the films but also to the business climate that Hollywood has faced in the naughts. A standout is Bordwell’s piece about why superhero films have become so much more popular in the last decade.

Split into thematic sections that explore the business of moviemaking as well as more traditional film-theory topics, “Minding Movies” shows just how rich film criticism can be even when the subject isn’t some obscure foreign flick. The fact that it does so in highly readable prose makes it all the more attractive. A collection of updated posts from the blog, “Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking” looks more deeply into film than most journalists can even imagine these days. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s popular Observations on Film Art blog is one of them. Happily, the past decade has seen the birth of a number of blogs about film that feature intelligent analysis, not just evaluation, but in a more accessible style than academic writing. At the other extreme were the scholarly books or articles full of vertigo-inducing sentences about Eisenstein or Ozu. First there was the consumerist newspaper review, a 300-or-so-word affair with a plot summary, typically some comments about the acting, and a short evaluation (“it’s a tour de force”) followed by a number of stars. With a handful of significant exceptions like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, writing about movies in this country once seemed to fall into two main categories.

Film art by david bordwell and kristin thompson