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Overexposures: The crisis in American filmmaking

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"Overexposures" is a work which strives to match the imagistic punch and musical flow of the best movies, and stirringly succeeds. The book is both a tribute to the pagan authority of Hollywood movies, with their overwhelming power to stimulate the senses, and a diatribe against their moral vacuity and tendency to deaden our more enriching emotions. The book spends entire chapters arguing against the flawed artistic dispensations of Hitchcock and Coppola; and, even though these artists are two of my idols, Thompson's reasonings make for compulsive reading. His chapters on L.A. are lush, provocative, and full of pleasurable revulsion with the duplicities and indulgences of Hollywood, as both location and state of mind. Most of all, perhaps, his chapter on Kubrick's "The Shining" is a manifesto for what he thinks of as a more Nabokovian cinema, a Looking-Glass world where imaginative surfaces can triumph over the banal realities of everyday life, without compromising our high hopes for human interconnection.