Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See

Rating:
Summary: I'm biased, but hear me out
Review: I don't understand critics. I understand people getting on to websites like these and briefly stating their opinions on art, but I have trouble understanding how having an opinion could be a paying job. Maybe I'm condemning too quickly, but I just don't have any respect for self appointed defenders of good taste. This book is great for the facts, horrible for the overall attitude. I was assigned the book as required reading for a movie class, otherwise I never would have touched it. There a lot of interesting facts and bits of history in the book, like which companies own which studios and some lovely dirt on the MPAA and blacklisting. It was great to see some good old muckracking about one of the filthiest industries around. What I didn't like was the incredibbly arrogant attitudes of the author, a film critic. You can't dictate people's taste. Exposure to new ideas can definately expand your tastes but you aren't guranteed to like it. There are plenty of people who can be exposed to foreign movies and underground cinema and will still regard it as crap and go see the latest Spielberg movie. I would personally regard these people with fear and suspicion, but I wouldn't write a book telling them how ignorant they are. Honestly, in this day and age, if you want to improve the state of cinema, its quite possible for you to make a movie on your own. We have digital cameras, editing software and no real need for a huge budget. It is always better to do something your own way than to complain about how other people run their lives and make their art. My advice is skim through the facts, and tune out the author.

Rating:
Summary: Movie Wars
Review: Rosenbaum's book is an incisive critique of the social and industrial forces that circumscribe the American movie landscape. In his view, the major (and major "independent") studios, film festivals, and the US critical establishment are all part of a terrible process that relegates exciting new films (esp foreign films) to virtual non-existence, while lavishing attention on big budget, heavily-promoted American films of (often) dubious artistry. There is nothing at all surprising about this insight; what makes "Movie Wars" compelling is less the sophistication of his analysis (although his chapter on Orson Welles as "ideological challenge" is eloquent and credible), than the depth of his anger (at lazy critics, at cowardly and/or sinister studio execs, at compliant festival promoters, etc.) and the strength of his commitment to movies as art. Rosenbaum's book is full of outrage--which might partly account for the other Amazon reviewer's wariness about his critical tone--but, truly, the book is anything but cynical. Its polemic is distinctly at the service of promoting a kind of open-mindedness about the cinema and its contemporary achievements and possibilities. It is easy, Rosenbaum suggests, to claim (as many critics do, year after year) that movies are terrible these days, if your only experience of the state of the art is what is playing at the multi-plex. Rosenbaum's excitement about Taiwanese, African, and Iranian directors, his celebration of overlooked or misunderstood American auteurs like Joe Dante and Orson Welles, and his provocative alternate list of the Top 100 films of All Time--a withering riposte to AFI's blandly conservative choices--give the book a kind of moral center (while also offering the reader copious numbers of lesser-known films to look out for). While Rosenbaum's jibes at Miramax seemed to me almost de rigeur (whether or not warranted), there were many other moments in the book when I felt almost exhultant that a critic operating more or less in the mainstream of American film journalism would take such risks with what is usually perceived as "consensus" public opinion--e.g., in the aforementioned assault on AFI. Although his writing never achieves the buoyancy of Pauline Kael's at her best, he has her verve and frequently her insight, and this volume can hold its own with her similar, epochal rants for the New Yorker ("Why are movies so bad? The Numbers," "Are Movies Falling to Pieces," etc.).

Rating:
Summary: must have if you are passionate about film
Review: Rosenbaum's book is simply a great introductory read into the failures of how the American audience, and the distributors of cinema in the States are leading to a 'possible' decline in quality of film being seen in the United States. Rosenbuam points to America as being the leader and champion of exported culture (regardless if this a good thing or not is not the point), and the cause of a dumbing down of cinema all over the world, as great works get pushed to the side seemingly never meant to be appreciated.

One of the best things that comes across in the book is Rosenbaum's passion. Simply put he waxes poeticaly talking back to the days of his past and finding films on his own, be it an odd trek to see John Carpenters 'The Thing', or about his education with film in his years in Paris, or his insight about how the festival of Cannes has chaned, to his reaction of a critic during the first hour of a seven hour film masterpiece (the name right now escapes me and I don't have the book with me to quote the name it starts with an 'S'). The other side is filled with not so much venom as 'concern' if I could say with the concept of how America is not getting the film education and greatness it deserves.

He highlights this in several ways, such as his dicussions about Miramax (He points out that if Miramax gets a film chances of you seeing it are even LESS than if they didn't, and if you do chances are it's going to be chopped/altered in someway), the myth of independent film (he points out that Sundance and Telluride is just a cover and is in no way an independent showcase), and how most film critics are more in-debt to their papers and editors who call the shots (he highlights that with one critic as his popularity grew his word count and column got less real-estate space).

It's an absolutlely FASCINATING look at cinema and the state that it is heading in. This is a MUST have film book if you are passionate about film.

Some criticism's of the book though come from some of Rosenbaums overly-long wordy sentences, and his use of examples with films that can be for the most part with many first time readers, unknown. When he starts using films that he has seen for his arguments chances are you are not going to guess where he is coming from due to the fact you haven't seen the films yourself. But he certainly does point you in some interesting directions. However, with the films he does point out that you may know you get exactly where he is coming from.

Secondly, even though the book is merely only 4 years old, it is a little dated. Rosenbaum likes to bring up the obscurity of director Ozu (one of my personal favs) as a problem, however there has lately been a renaisance of his work and he is already starting to become quite a well known name (Criterion DVD releases are already proving that, and a recent tribute festival that I saw that came through DC).

Even with all that said, the book is a fascinating insight into the realm of how cinema is marketed and distributed to the mass American public. Rosenbaum throws in examples of dumbed down culture, coroporate marketing, distributor strangleholding and numerous other things that will keep you intrigued about the workings of the film process.

Great book, ecspecialy if you are a film nut like myself.