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I know you are out there, somewhere, waiting for the first review on amazon of this book, so it would be my honor to be that. I was able to get this book, by reading about it first on the Guardian or The Mirror or something British like that. Waited patiently for it to become available. Get it delivered, as soon as it was out on amazon, to my sister’s husband in the states, who hand-delivered it here to me in the Philippines on the 20th. I read it in 3 days. Anyway, unto the book. The book exactly captured the feeling I was feeling when I was reading Biskind’s book. I was like, am I wrong in liking BIG movies. By the end of that book, I only really read the Star Wars and Spielberg parts, because those were the only parts that interested me. I guess you also felt this way that’s why you wrote this book. Anyway, that’s all I have to say, that I am proud to say that I am one of the first Shonenites. And since I do not know how to contact you, I am using this review to get through, if Amazon would allow.
Merry Christmas!
joeydaninja@yahoo.com
Rating: 5 / 5
…But any movie where people talk to each other, instead of settling their problems with their fists, a crow bar, a car chase, witchcraft, or a snappy one-liner containing an adolescent observation about sex. Shone says he’s setting out to prove the opposite, but then does little more than give us anecdotes about the making of his favorite films for 200 pages. The chapter on Star Wars, for example, was heavily lifted from Dale Pollack’s book about George Lucas, while the chapter on Spielberg and Close Encounters was ripped mostly from Balaban’s “Diary” and Julia Phillips’ memoirs. More interestingly, the author starts out in his forward differentiating between true must-see blockbusters of years gone by and the everyone’s-gotta-see-it films that he claims we’ve been getting lately–movies like The Running Man and Godzilla that grossed zillions yet were generally disliked by critics and audiences alike. Yet there have always been plenty of these latter films: Superman and Earthquake and The Swarm. Many of these films, 30+ years later, are now being referred to as “classics,” but go back and read the original reviews (or just WATCH them) and you’ll see they were anything but. (And the original reviews are right. Today’s stinkers will become classics too when someone wants to remake them because they’re out of original ideas.)
I don’t think there’s much doubt that blockbusters have eroded cinema, turning the most complex artform of the 20th century into little more than a glorified video game. Just listen to today’s audiences discussing the latest spectacle film to see how this is so: they talk about the size of the explosions and not the characters or the acting. I was watching a documentary on the making of Bridge On The River Kwai recently and was amazed to see the filmmakers and actors debating and arguing over the motivations of the characters in the climactic scene. They actually took half a day of shooting time to decide where Alec Guiness’s character accidentally or deliberately fell on the detonator that blew up the bridge just as the train was passing by. They went into great detail about exactly how the character would keel over. Today they would just worry about whether the fireball was big enough. But director David Lean stressed over and over that you can’t leave details such as character intention neglected or you’ve cheated your audience and made a dishonest film.
Or consider Roman Polanski, talking about how he had wanted to work with Jack Nicholson for years, but couldn’t find a good script until Chinatown came along, so he waited. *Worrying about the script!* Can you imagine a Roland Emmerich or a Michael Bay saying that? Today’s films don’t even have plots that make sense! Not that anyone notices.
Rating: 2 / 5
Before I start of criticise, it should be noted that this is actually a rather good book. It is one of the best and most accessible books about film written in recent years; almost anybody with any interest in film of the last thirty years will find this book interesting and often entertaining.
The book is essentially a monologue (although Shone readily admits that it is the product of many conversations) expounding his thesis that blockbusters, starting with Jaws and Star Wars, saved Hollywood. Actually, it is not a particularly sophisticated thesis: he simply takes the opposite view to a very simplistic interpretation of the thesis expounded by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that blockbusters killed Hollywood.
There is a good deal of Biskind baiting in the early chapters of his book (although Shone seems to lose interest in this as the book progresses) and Shone’s makes some interesting points. However, he invites comparison between the two books and these comparisons are inevitably unfavourable to Shone.
Although there are lots of good and interesting sections, overall the book is a bit of a mess and there are some odd things about it. Shone seems strangely distant from the subject matter in the sense that this feels like a book written by a cinema goer rather than somebody with real inside knowledge and insight. Often he simply repeats well-known or previously published anecdotes. There is much less insider gossip (than the Biskind book), which some readers may approve of, but it also means that the characters are flat and uninteresting. It is also rather confusing that he wants to have his common man cake and eat it with a side order of rather esoteric, post-modern film criticism. At times it reminded me of an intellectual undergraduate post-pub rant.
Perhaps the biggest problem Shone faced is that his subjects Lucas, Spielberg et al, are dull (deathly dull in comparison to the characters in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls). Many of them appear to have no interest other than making profitable movies; this does not make them interesting characters to read about.
One other thing bothered me: the seriously over laudatory praise verging on hyperbole, from a group of people I suspect are his friends, which adorned to book cover.
Despite all my issues with the book I still enjoyed it. It is an enjoyable and interesting read.
Rating: 3 / 5
Some reviewers here accuse Shone of being simplistic in his rebuff of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders etc but in fact it’s simplistic to view the book in this way. I think Shone just wishes to continue the story beyond the point at which Biskind chose to end his; the Biskind-bashing very evident in the early chapters comes off the back of this but one of Shone’s main points is that Jaws and Star Wars should/can be seen as artistically rich and groundbreaking in their own right, just in a different vein to the films of Biskind’s heroes.
The view glibly asserted by an earlier reviewer here, that Spileberg and his ilk are “dull” and therefore unsatisfying as subject matter, is exactly the somewhat sniffy received opinion that Shone attacks, and it’s a pleasure to read, as is the long-overdue puncturing of some sacred icons. He isn’t simply defending anything that gets called a blockbuster – he calls into question our use of that term when it’s often used to describe over-hyped films that open big and then vanish. What is definitely simplistic is the notion that this is a phenomenon that can be blamed purely on Jaws and Star Wars.
I also like a good, genuinely informative list and his highest-earning films list adjusted for inflation I found very interesting (most of the very recent biggies vanish). And any book that has a graph of audience reactions during Jaws gets my vote.
Rating: 4 / 5
I watch a fair amount of movies, but I would hardly call myself a “film buff”. I was a little skeptical of the book, but I bought it anyway on Nick Hornby’s recommendation in Polysyllabic Spree. It turns out that this is a pretty fascinating subject. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be very interested in the making of Batman or Titanic, but I couldn’t put the book down.
Shone has a very enganging writing style, and the book is as much a history of people as much as of movies. He starts with the first big blockbusters of 25 years ago — Jaws, Star Wars, ET, Alien — and recreates the excitement we felt when we first saw them. The latter half of the book examines Hollywood’s hubristic blockbusters — Gozilla, Last Action Hero — and how we all went to see them anyway. I always thought of the big summer action films as something Hollywood slapped together to make a buck, but sometimes they represent somebody’s dreams (Back to the Future). Then again, sometimes they really are something slapped together to make a buck, maybe crushing some dreams in the process (Batman, Godzilla).
If you’re a movie snob, you may not like this book. Shone is going to take Spielberg over Scorcese, and you know if you’re not going to like that. But if you can take that, I think you’ll really like this book, and I say that as someone who hasn’t even seen Jaws.
Rating: 5 / 5