Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001 [Paperback]

Stuart Klawans (Author), Ben Sonnenberg (Foreword)

Book Description

Series: Nation Books | Publication Date: January 9, 2002

Here is the best of funny, sharp, and revelatory film writing for The Nation, brought together with new pieces written especially for this book and a selection of reviews and essays for the New York Times, the Village Voice, Film Comment, and other journals. A friend of independent filmmaking (but not of its pretensions), an enemy of big-budget productions (except when they're entertaining), Klawans writes under his own version of the banner "From Each According to His Abilities, to Each According to His Needs." Klawans explains how to approach a masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami as if it were a strange dog; why David Lynch would disappoint a visiting Martian; and what The Rage: Carrie 2 tells us about rage and Carrie. All this, plus insight into the quieter refinements of Moulin Rouge, the correct Talmudic interpretation of Natural Born Killers, and the reasons why they were never wrong, the Old Masters (Renoir, Dreyer, Sembene, and early 1930s Warner Brothers). At a time when too many film writers encourage cynicism and despair, Klawans finds vitality in the movies—especially those that record brute fact while aspiring toward a heaven of personal expression. Read him, and discover the fun of being Left in the Dark. "Mr. Klawans is one of the most incisive, provocative and best-informed film critics in America."—Vincent Canby "The genuine heir to James Agee and Manny Farber...dazzling to read."—Phillip Lopate

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The turn of the millennium has yielded many collections of film criticism and essays, from the humor-laden (Joe Queenan's Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler) to the ultraserious (Stanley Kauffmann's Regarding Film and Ray Greene's Hollywood Migraine). Having honed his skills in such publications as Film Comment, the Nation, and the New York Times, Klawans (Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order) brings considerable knowledge and analytical powers to bear on various foreign and domestic films. With his unabashedly left-wing perspective, he analyzes documentaries such as Hoop Dreams, 4 Little Girls, and Belfast, Maine; political films like L'America and A Moment of Innocence; and commercial features Matinee, Ed Wood, The Muse, and Gladiator. Even sequels of no immediately discernible impact can have socioeconomic significance, as Klawans demonstrates in his critique of The Rage: Carrie 2. Just as fascinating are the not entirely agreeable connections he discerns between Shakespeare in Love and She's the One. This collection of reviews and essays is appropriate for academic and larger public libraries. Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, PA

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Klawans, film reviewer for the Nation, is one of the few critics--Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman are others--who write about rarefied films and filmmakers for a general audience. When Klawans discusses such world-class but obscure directors as Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien, he is an enthusiastic, erudite advocate for contemporary cinema, arguing that today's best films are as worthy as the classics he reexamines here, such as Grand Illusion and Touch of Evil. The attention he gives deserving documentaries, such as Public Housing and 4 Little Girls, is most welcome and stems from a proclivity toward "fictions with a strong documentary impulse, or documentaries that play like fictions." When he deals with the worst that Hollywood offers, such as Gladiator and Star Wars: Episode One, he resorts to devastating ridicule, making us laugh, apparently, so that he may not weep. Championing excellence, he puts the lie to the "death of cinema" crowd by proving that a bit of digging will turn up plenty of worthwhile, engaging movies. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books (January 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560253657
• ISBN-13: 978-1560253655
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,025,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cool, March 3, 2002

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[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Left in the Dark: Film Reviews and Essays, 1988-2001 (Paperback)

For most of the past fourteen years Stuart Klawans has been the intelligent and amusing film critic for The Nation. Four years ago he wrote a column in which he joked that no-one would publish his book because he had not reviewed Titanic. Well, now we have the first collection of his film criticism. It is by turns sensible, sensitive, thoughtful, humane, very funny, cosmopolitan and internationalist in the best sense, and determinedly anti-parochial.

There is still no review of Titanic, a movie that can never be eviscerated enough. And Klawans did not include his review of Jurassic Park, with the unforgettable line "I think Theodor Adorno once reviewed this moview, around the time Steven Spielberg was born." But we do get his review of Jurassic Park: the Lost World" where Klawans suggests that it is best interpreted as a sequel to Schindler's List, since otherwise it would just be garbage. This review also shows his character of Rabbi Simcha Fefefferman, who is used to good effect in his reviews of The Last Temptation of Christ, and his properly indignant critique of Natural Born Killers.

So what does Klawans like? He is a firm advocate of foreign movies and does yeoman work in trying to get a complacent American media to appreciate the work of Abbas Kiarostami. There is a fine review of Time Regained, a film criminally under-released in the United States (and Canada as well). Klawans also provides thoughtful appreciations of Renoir, Godard, Welles as well as documentaries by Frederick Wiseman and a critical appreciation of the best films from Italy, Japan and France. This may make Klawasn appear highbrow, and he is. But like his colleague J. Hoberman he is more than willing to give popular culture its due. If there is nothing here like Hoberman's essays on the Honeymooners and Krazy Kat, we do get his praise of Magnolia and Ed Wood, as well as six reasons why you should watch Star Trek episodes for the 17th time rather than see The Accidental Tourist.

Among his other likes among recent films are Rushmore, Election, Topsy Turvey and Unforgiven, while he is quite cool towards Gladiator and Shakespeare in Love. It's unfortunate we don't get his praise of Matilda or Felicia's Journey or South Park, Bigger, Longer and Uncut. It's also unfortunate we don't get his pans of Dark City, Contact and his one sentence polemic on Das Boot ("`Nazi sailors were just regular guys!'") There are other one-liners one misses: ("Bram Stoker's Dracula is hardly that [a flawless movie], but who cares? It's not as if we were talking about George Eliot's Middlemarch.") and we don't get his acerbic critique of Michael Medved's Hollywood against America.

No-one should agree with everything here. There is Klawans' enthusiastic praise of Carrie 2 as an empowering feminist drama, when many people think such praise only plays into the hands of Stephen King and Brian De Palma. And I am inclined to believe that Moulin Rouge is suffocated by its own cheap irony about an hour and a half before Klawans does. On the other hand there is Klawans' praise of A.I., an underappreciated movie certainly much better than too many of the movies considered for best picture. Klawans is clever enough to argue that this movie is a parable of Spielberg's own intellectual failure to move beyond the visceral and the sentimental. It has been said (largely by me) that there are two kinds of movie critics: those who like the movies that win best picture and those that are worth reading. This book clearly shows that Klawans falls into the second category.