Customer Reviews

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

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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.