Film Criticism

[Feego]

Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide is coming to an end. I know it wasn't the be-all-end-all of film criticism, but it was my Bible when I was 14 years old.

[dustybooks]

Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide is coming to an end. I know it wasn't the be-all-end-all of film criticism, but it was my Bible when I was 14 years old.

Even with the internet and things like this forum, I still consult this book (both the classic and current editions) almost daily -- I continue to feel it's a handier and easier reference than a lot of other resources, including most other film books I use. The reviews were hit and miss in terms of lining up with my opinions but were often quite funny, and I can't even begin to name the number of films and directors I first heard of by poring through the book. I'll miss it.

[wattsup32]

Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide is coming to an end. I know it wasn't the be-all-end-all of film criticism, but it was my Bible when I was 14 years old.

I wonder what this is going to mean for "Doug Loves Movies."

[domino harvey]

I loved all movie-reviewing stuff when I was younger, but I could never get much out of Leonard Maltin guides since the thumbnails were so pitifully short and unhelpful. I am actually more surprised that they were still going up until now

[Gregory]

I loved all movie-reviewing stuff when I was younger, but I could never get much out of Leonard Maltin guides since the thumbnails were so pitifully short and unhelpful. I am actually more surprised that they were still going up until now

Seconded. Pre-internet, I used to sometimes reach for this guide to quickly check a cast/crew detail and would usually find an accompanying capsule "review" that boiled down an interesting plot into a sentence or two that made the film sound boring and mundane, along with a jaded-sounding dismissal or faint praise. The better guidebooks tended to have some amount of infectious enthusiasm for films that were not already canonical classics, but Maltin's guide instead seemed designed to be pithy, dismissive (even when doling out praise), and probably dampened a lot of people's potential enthusiasm. I see that the current edition is Amazon's #1 bestseller in the Movie Guides and Reviews department. VideoHound was much better, but bigger and thus more expensive, so surely didn't sell nearly as well as the Maltin Guides.

[Drucker]

Ha! Unfortunately I didn't get to start reading these until college. But I know where you guys are coming from, because I spent my teen years figuring out which records to buy with this bad boy. Ranged from pitifully unhelpful to enlightening!

[Michael Kerpan]

Am I weird in that I never relied on any of these guides? I just watched whatever was available and seemed interesting.

[Perkins Cobb]

Am I weird in that I never relied on any of these guides? I just watched whatever was available and seemed interesting.

How did you decide that it seemed interesting?

[Roger Ryan]

There are films I read about in some of these reference books that took me close to four decades to see. I imagined I knew what these film were like due to the pithy dismissals or endorsements and enjoyed having my expectations dashed (sometimes in a good way) or fulfilled. Part of the fun was identifying the biases present in just a couple of sentences.

[Gregory]

Am I weird in that I never relied on any of these guides? I just watched whatever was available and seemed interesting.

I didn't rely on them for their critical opinions, but before IMDb came along, inexpensive reference books like this were essentially the only way to easily consult a director or star's filmography. For example, Mick Martin and Marsha Porter's Video Movie Guide (later retitled DVD & Video Guide) had this information indexed at the back, and the reviews gave some idea of what the films were like. They included a lot of obscure titles but were heavily biased toward Hollywood and other English-language films, because that's generally what was broadcast on cable and available on video. The VideoHound books were better, but the Martin/Porter Video Movie Guides were inexpensive enough that one could buy each year's new edition (they added hundreds of new entries each year). The reviews were very superficial, but it was hard not to notice the 5-star and turkey ratings. Of course it was still very difficult to find most of the films. Those were dark days for film buffs who didn't live in a city like New York.

[Michael Kerpan]

How did you decide that it seemed interesting?

Intuition, whim, movie reviews (esp. those of Dave Kehr).

[colinr0380]

This hasn't anything to do with Maltin's film guides, but I still have a dog-eared, broken in two halves due to overuse copy of this edition of the 1995 Radio Times Film & Video guide by Derek Winnert, which I found was as comprehensive as the more popular Halliwell Movie Guides but actually seemed to feature reviews written by knowledgable contributors who actually liked the majority of the films that they wrote about! Where more than just a hundred or so films received more than three out of a possible five stars (Given the choice, I'll always prefer someone who can find worth in almost any film than a writer who hates everything but a few unassailable classics).

The Radio Times guide was also helped by its remit for inclusion being all the films screened on UK television in the five years preceeding its publication, and a lot of titles commerically released on VHS, which in the mid-90s meant a healthy selection of foreign language and arthouse films, documentaries and obscurities along with a wide range of Hollywood material got represented. That '1995' edition also included an additional 1993-94 A-Z update section of the films released over the previous twelve months since the previous edition, which admirably threw together films such as Sonatine alongside more mainstream 'just coming out to rent on VHS' releases such as Philadelphia! It was much more mainstream than confrontational and challenging, but threw just enough of the spicier titles in there to suggest that there was a wider world beyond even these films.

It wasn't comphrensive but I credit that as the first guide to cinema that enthralled me. I remember as a 14 year old just sitting spending days reading through the entries during the last few months of 1994, enjoying having a heavy encyclopedia that seemed to contain the details of every film in the world spread open before me. Of course that film guide, even then, was nowhere near comprehensive and contained its fair share of partial filmographies and omissions (mostly related to films that had never received a television screening or video release), but it provided a perfect entry-level guide to cinema appreciation and even the practice of film criticism in learning how the films were being assessed in their reviews. And I think it even helped me to develop my own filmic tastes in the areas in which I disagreed with particular reviews or ratings! (Two stars for Tarkovsky's Solaris! )

[Feego]

Like Gregory and dustybooks, I also turned to books like these as an easy reference. One thing I always appreciated about Maltin's guide was that he gave more complete cast listings than several of the other ones available, noting well-known supporting players even if they only appeared in one scene, and even mentioning notable cameo appearances. His book was indispensable for me when I was just getting into film between the ages of 13 and 15. I was indeed introduced to a great many titles that I wouldn't have otherwise known about at that age, as we did not yet have Turner Classic Movies in our cable lineup (nor an internet connection) and I had no idea as a freshman in high school which film journals or scholars were worth reading. Naturally, I have expanded my horizons greatly since then and have not consulted Maltin's guide in some time, but it was an important stepping stone for me.

[Michael Kerpan]

Around 15, my main cultural interests were classical music and opera, drama, reading (science fiction and "classics"). Movies were catch as catch can. This stayed pretty much the same until I discovered Ozu decades later -- and no movie encyclopedia would really be any use once I developed this obsession.

[Oedipax]

I came of age as a cinephile at a time when the internet was already available as a great research and learning tool, aided by discussion forums and the like. But most of my early exploration boils down to noticing the same guy that directed 2001 had also done The Shining and several other movies I'd not yet seen but heard about and set about seeing. Then I started exploring the "Foreign" section of our local rental chain, Hollywood Video, pretty much guided by intuition. Around this same time, I was becoming more aware of this thing called the Criterion Collection that seemed to be releasing a lot of interesting stuff, so many of my first encounters with the classic world cinema greats were more or less blind watches because they had the Criterion banner. I was maybe 15 or 16. Later, when I did turn more to books, I skipped right past any kind of encyclopedic 'movie guide' stuff and went directly to long-form criticism (Rosenbaum's Essential Cinema was a key text for me in college, along with Movie Mutations) and, especially, the various book series that compiled interviews with directors across their careers (Kubrick, Scorsese, Lynch, Godard, etc). DVD commentaries were also huge for me in branching out further.

[cdnchris]

My family had a large collection (hundreds) of CED/SelectaVision discs which I went through from a very young age and my dad had a large collection of film books that I also went through, including the Maltin books. Without the internet yet obviously and being in a small town these books proved very invaluable to me (along with Ebert's) just as a quick reference and to quickly read up on other films I had just come across or heard about. Even then I knew the reviews were useless but I admittedly still sort of used the star ratings to gauge a film, even if we didn't always see eye to eye on things. I would always use these resources to decide what movie to watch from the family collection.

[domino harvey]

This thread seems very much in spirit with a lot of the more recent posts about the effect of Maltin's book

[htom]

Started with the Maltin Guide, but the last one I referred to was the Time Out Film Guide, also now gone the same way in 2011. It felt like it covered many of the gaps of the other guides (such as Asian cinema, with Tony Rayns writing many of the capsules) with a bit more technical info than the Maltin Guide has room for. It was also easier on the eyes than the Movie Hound Guide for the large format book guides. The Halliwell guide was interesting to pore through but for me not a reference that ever made me try to seek out anything it praised. The generational bias was too much, I guess.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I didn't even realise the Time Out one had stopped. I think my copy's from 2006 or so and I actually thought the other day that I could do with a new edition. I always read the Time Out review of a film before checking IMDB.

[MichaelB]

Aren't all the Time Out reviews online?

[thirtyframesasecond]

Aren't all the Time Out reviews online?

There's something comforting about a huge book that beats going on IMDB any day of the week.

[matrixschmatrix]

Not entirely sure where to put this article from the AVClub, as it's not really film criticism, but I don't think we have a VHS collecting thread. It's an interesting article, and one that describes a collector's culture that runs parallel to the one to which I think of myself as belonging in ways that make it particularly fascinating- but little nuggets like

(Like CDs, DVDs are less than collectible at the moment, although they may end up having their day eventually.)

and

And unlike laser discs (or Blu-ray, which will prove to be the 21st-century laser disc soon enough)

are the kind of thing that make me wonder if this is how my preferred formats look to outsiders, or if they are the self-justifying sideways digs of someone trying to make their own preferences sound more defensible.

[domino harvey]

While such obsessive analysis may seem excessive, it’s understandable during a transitional period like the one the VHS market is currently experiencing.

By no charitable definition is the VHS market in a "transitional" period. It is dead and buried and only fringe horror nuts give a rip, a subsubsubsubsubsubset of the overall consumer base for anything. Well, and Everything is Terrible, though they're hardly working to preserve the content they so mercilessly mock (and this author is apparently a member of the EIT collective)

[Saimo]

New blog collecting the writings of Miguel Marías, "el más cahierista de los críticos españoles".
https://archivomiguelmarias.wordpress.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[AlexHansen]

Many many thanks Saimo. Marías is a favorite of mine.