Cinema: Year by Year, 1894-2003

Rating:
Summary: Much more than a coffee table book
Review: If you enjoy watching or just knowing about cinema, this book is for you. For those of us that are old enough to remember, we are whisked back to what we were doing at the time and remember the impact of the first of a series or the first of a new technique. For the rest of us it gives us the backgrounds that we did hot have the privilege of seeing first hand.
Being divided into years makes it easy to retrieve information and to view what was going on at the same time.
The book its self looks like a collection of newspaper articles and posters of the time of each movie. You can not get this information from some cheap cinema magazine.
For those people who are too impatient or that browsing drives them up the wall there is a comprehensive Contents and Index; includes are special features such as "The Oscar Story" and "
Special Effects: Tricks of the Trade."
They seem to have left out a few of my favorites yet, I am just having fun reading the blurbs. The have everything from "Laura" to "Total Recall"

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Leisurely Voyage in Movieland
Review: This is a remarkable book but not a book to be read at a few sittings and probably not even in a single month. It is a book to be enjoyed leisurely, perhaps only one movie year per sitting for 110 sittings. It is a book to be savoured.

Basically, the book devotes from two to ten pages (943 pages in all) to each year of cinema from 1894 to 2003. The material is the leanest for the very early years (obviously) and becomes progresively meatier as the year increases. A typical year begins with a page of news flashes, births and deaths, followed by a facing full-page image (usually a movie poster from that year), then the main text made to look like pages from a cinema trade newspaper with three or four articles per page, and finally two facing pages of miniature movie posters and stills. Scattered through the book are a dozen or so two-page summary pieces. The book tries hard (and succeeds) to give the reader the impression of reading the material at the time the movies were current. But the "newspaper" pages are like no real cinema trade paper of the times, especially not for the first half of the twentieth century. The idealized newspaper of this book is too attentive to foreign cinema, especially Asian cinema, for it to be a realistic picture of a period trade paper. To my mind, that makes it all the better. This is, after all, a book for people who want to put on rose-colored glasses.

How you react to this book probably depends on how old you are. If you are in your mid twenties, then you probably began seeing films more demanding than Disney kiddie fare or action flicks only well after 1990, and 90% of the book is ancient history to you. If you are someone of Roger Ebert's age (61), then you began to see films from the 30s and 40s on 50s TV, and from the mid 50s on you saw many of these films first-run at a movie theatre. Only the silents were absent from your early movie experience, at least until cable TV and video rental stores really began to flourish in the late 80s. For the older reader the book is full of memories, for the younger reader it is an adventure into territory unknown.

You won't find every movie you like mentioned in this book. There are simply too many of them. And with so much information some errors do creep in. Occasionally, an actor or film is misidentified in a caption, or some equally minor error creeps into the text. One minor annoyance, that most readers won't even notice, is that the editor capitalizes French movie titles in a manner unknown to the French. There are, however, two serious defects in the book, which the editor would do well to correct for the next edition. First, the book needs an introduction which surveys the history of cinema decade by decade in a few pages. A lot of this material is in the two-page essays scattered throughout the book, but some of this material should be brought up front. Secondly, David Thomson is probably the wrong person to write a preface for this book. His writings, however valuable, are generally very negative, and when he tries to be enthusiastic in his preface to this book, he fails. Someone like Roger Ebert or Leonard Maltin, who are always enthsiastic, should write the preface for a book like this.

How do you decide if this is a good gift book for a favorite person? Easy. If the intended recipient watches Turner Classic Movies a lot or has a large collection of old movies on VHS or DVD, or rents a lot of old movies, then this is definitely the book for him or her.

I really like this book. It is celebratory rather than analytical. Reading it is not an intellectual experience, but it is truly a wonderful experience.