Amazon.com Review
As short a time ago as 1994, Leonard Maltin's movie guide could boast of "more than 19,000 entries, with 300 new titles!" But with 500-plus movies jostling into theaters every year, the pocket-size, curl-up-with-it film guide has become a relic. Nowadays, film books are faintly scholarly word-hoards with three
OED-style columns, a trade-size format, and a heft that calls for your sitting pants.
Videohound's 1,700-page edition sasses the new millennium ("Covering 1,000 years of Movie Making Magic!" the cover says), but its girth heralds the day when all such guides will be swallowed up by some vast digital database. Until then, there's this bright book, with its uncalculated number (a hasty guess would be 26,000) of reviews of movies on video, Laserdisc, DVD, and TV, and its massive cross-listings by star, director, writer, and cinematographer (cinematographer!). Retailing itself as an irreverent tour for movie lovers, the book has surprising range, with an equal appetite for difficult, small, and foreign films and Hollywood fare. Some inconsistencies? Yep, and that's what makes guides like this fun. Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai is hailed as a "masterpiece" and rewarded an admiring four bones (out of four), while the superbly Heideggerian
Wings of Desire, also a "masterpiece," is equivocated to three and a half. The woof-worthy
The Wedding Singer gets the same two and a half bones that they give Wes Anderson's estimably giggly debut,
Bottle Rocket. Terry Zwigoff's lovely
Crumb is M.I.A., and there's a tendency to eschew analysis for plot summary, but
Videohound has encyclopedic breadth and does the undeclared job it sets out to accomplish: entertain, inform, and give readers a giant list of movies to watch next year.
--Lyall Bush
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Several capsule movie review sources now appear annually, including Halliwell's Film and Video Guide (HarperCollins), Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide (Plume), and the Blockbuster Entertainment Guide to Movies and Videos (Dell). Comparable in scope, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever stands out by dint of its biting attitude. The latest edition adds 1000 reviews, bringing the total to approximately 22,000. Access is via 13 indexes: by cast, director, writer, and so on. Particularly helpful are the alternative title index and the category list, an acerbic grouping of titles under rubrics like "Post Apocalypse: No more convenience stores." Coverage of foreign films is solid, and the extensive cross references are to be applauded. An awards index and a website guide only increase the reference value. VideoHound's Horror Show is more focused, providing 999 paragraph-length reviews of horror films. Encompassing both silent films and 1990s slasher pictures, it is accompanied by a subset of the indexes found in the larger Golden Movie Retriever. The contents are fleshed out by 50 sidebars highlighting topics along the lines of "The 1950s: The Bugs, 3-D, and the Birth of Hammer." A "Horror Connections" section lists websites, magazines and newsletters, organizations, and books, and photographs enhance the text. Unfortunately, this volume suffers from the inclusion of nontraditional horror films like Apocalypse Now and Trainspotting. While these films are indeed chilling, their inclusion casts doubt on Mayo's entire project. Why, for instance, is Full Metal Jacket left out? Public libraries may nevertheless be interested in both volumes.?Neal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.