My introduction to vaulted film critic André Bazin, co-founder of the influential and revolutionary Cahiers du Cinéma, arrived as yours should: via The Cinema of Cruelty, Arcade Publishing’s trade-paperback reprint of the 1975 text collected and edited by François Truffaut, who knew something about the medium himself.

Both Frenchmen, the director and his subject were unofficial members of a mutual appreciation society, but Cruelty finds Bazin, who died in 1958 at the age of 40, discussing six other legendary filmmakers: Erich von Stroheim, Carl Dreyer, Preston Sturges, Luis Buñuel, Akira Kurosawa and Alfred Hitchcock.

The latter makes up the bulk of the material, which is great for two reasons:
1. Hitchcock is my favorite director.
2. Hitchcock is not Bazin’s favorite director. In fact, the film theorist wasn’t exactly into him at all, at least not at first. Because Truffaut presented select essays and reviews Bazin penned on the master of suspense chronologically, we have the pleasure of witnessing Bazin’s slow progression from disdain to being won over.

Seriously, this is to the degree Bazin’s dislike began (italics added for emphasis): “Since 1941, Hitchcock has contributed nothing essential to cinematic directing. Mentioning his name along with that of Orson Welles or William Wyler (which I have also been guilty of doing) as one of the principal champions of Hollywood’s avant-garde, stems from an illusion, a misunderstanding, or a breach of trust. … But just between us, we’ve been had.”

When Bazin finally came around, it was to praise 1953’s I Confess, oddly enough, which most of the world considers minor Hitch at best.

However, I’d argue that such unpopular opinions — call them “quirks,” if you wish — help made Bazin unique and cement his global reputation. The man clearly harbored undying love for the art form, then still in somewhat of an infancy, and his passion is reflected in lines like, “If Buñuel made films exactly as he wished, the screen would undoubtedly burst into flames at the first screening!”

While I dislike the occasional style of “Now I will address this …” guideposts, there’s no denying his status as a giant in the field. He was an important voice silenced too soon, and The Cinema of Cruelty was and remains an important book that I hope wins him new fans — beyond myself, mind you. —Rod Lott

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I know Brock Wilbur intended Filmpocalypse!: 52 Cinematic Visions of the End to be read before that whole Mayan day of doom of Dec. 21, 2012, approached, but to hell with that; I didn’t know the book existed until a few weeks ago. The tinfoil brigade of fear once again was proven wrong; the world’s still spinning on its axis as usual; we’re still here; and Filmpocalypse! is still worth reading, no matter to which page your calendar is turned.

As an online project “in glorious celebration of our inevitable demise,” Wilbur watched and then reviewed one apocalyptic and/or post-apocalyptic movie every week, and this paperback rounds up the results. Because he is a stand-up comedian by trade, you can expect the book to be funny. But it’s also quite thoughtful and unafraid to address some Big Issues; this is legit film criticism that just happens to contain some killer jokes.

While his queue traverses nearly 100 years of cinema history, it also hops, skips and jumps among genres. Further livening up the action is that some chapters employ gimmicks. For example, in keeping with the loss-of-sight subject of Fernando Meirelles’ 2008 sci-fi drama, Blindess, Wilbur ran it twice — the first time experiencing it only as audio while he sat in a dark room. For one of Roger Corman’s rare bombs, 1970’s Gas-s-s-s, he live-blogs his mind-blowing experience — and it is an experience: “Nothing like thirty minutes of ‘silly rape’ to alter your perceptions of a cartoonish film.”

Most are straight-ahead reviews, however, and that’s A-OK, because they’re filled with such hysterical observations as:
• “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing when John Leguizamo is the strongest actor in a film, but I’m also saying exactly that.” (Vanishing on 7th Street)
• “Southland Tales is what all entertainment will look like ten years from now, and what most VH1 programming looks like today.”
• “Who looks at [Jackie Earle] Haley, even as a kid, and thinks that’s not exactly what a serial killer looks like? Sure, let him guard the woman. That won’t end in rape.” (Damnation Alley)
• “Can [M. Night Shyamalan] do anything without trying to show off? I’m surprised I can read his IMDb page without a cryptix.” (The Happening)
• “Is there a subset of viewers who were crying out for a Willem Dafoe porno? Identify yourselves!” (4:44: Last Day on Earth)

The chapters are most enjoyable when you’ve seen the movies discussed, not only because Wilbur goes into detail for Acts 1 through 3, but because you possess an understanding that allows you to laugh along knowingly. Trust me: You don’t know how dead-on he is in his wholly deserved takedown of The Darkest Hour unless you, too, have suffered through the stupidity of that one about the invisible monsters that our “heroes” keep craning their necks to try and see.

It could use a tighter edit, but the illustrations by Brandon Vaughn are of a higher caliber than one usually sees in a DIY project. As I would have with our world, I was sorry to see Filmpocalypse! meet its end. —Rod Lott

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Tim Hensley’s Ticket Stub is a collection of the cartoonist’s now-defunct zine, but that zine was really pages from his sketchbook. Don’t let that deter you in any way, however, because it has a theme and a point.

The backstory: For 10 years, Hensley worked as a closed-captioning typist for movies and TV shows. In his sketchbook, he would draw random scenes from said programming. Those pages became Ticket Stub the zine, and all eight issues now stand united like conjoined twins in Ticket Stub the book.

For those who love indie comics, oddball ideas or the medium of film — or, better yet, all three — the paperback will bring many a smile, and not just for its charming, wholly appropriate die-cut along the bottom edge. (That had to be an unnecessary expense for Yam Books, especially for such an upstart publisher, but damn, am I glad they sprung for it — a creative decision that just feels right.)

The scenes Hensley illustrates are not iconic; they appear to be chosen as haphazardly (if “chosen” is the correct term) as the films, which range from highbrow to lowbrow, classic to trash, beloved to obscure, Butterfield 8 to Big Momma’s House.

Each is accompanied by a few lines of Hensley’s own contribution. Some double as actual description, such as this bit on Hercules in New York: “A bear costume escapes the zoo and meets their carriage. Hilarity ensues — an Olympian in a taxi, or rather, a chariot, flexes. He kicks the shit out of sailors, drivers, mobsters. He cracks ribs.”

Most, however, read like bad poetry on open-mic night, and in this case, that’s a good thing indeed. Witness his words for The Care Bears Movie: “Bereft of pals, gather a gumshoe, a cigar between the plush pandas, a black widow knit near the wagon wheel and share — the clouds and rainbows mar with crevice. The witch concurs.”

The final issue takes a detour by stringing the panels together into a comic, but with invented dialogue. Why else, where else, would Casper the Friendly Ghost greet a girl with, “I was shot in my crib. Do I give you goose flesh?”

If you’re only familiar with Hensley — as I was — through his retro-teen-comics work à la Wally Gropious, note that this art does not resemble that art. The drawings here — far more fleshed-out than the word “sketchbook” suggests — demonstrate a different skill set and wider range. The witch concurs. —Rod Lott

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Somewhere before I’ve stated that I’m not automatically against horror remakes, because without them, we wouldn’t have such modern-day classics as John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly. It’s nice to know I’m not alone, now that James Francis Jr. has expanded my thought into an entire book with Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old.

It’s too bad the trade paperback’s cover captures Anne Heche in what appears to mid-salute to the Führer, but Gus Van Sant’s infamous, shot-for-shot redux of Psycho is one of four main examples the author explores. The others are, naturally, Halloween, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In doing so, Francis devotes a chapter to each to explain the differences between the original and the remake, and what worked and what didn’t — mostly according to general consensus, although he freely offers his opinions, which prove more lenient than the average academic.

The real meat of the book is the chapter immediately following, in which he takes the same approach, but shorter, to roughly two dozen more examples, from all the Island of Dr. Moreau movies to 2011’s Fright Night. Consider it the “lightning round” — a lot of fun.

Following are brief Q-and-As with six “industry professionals,” including Evil Dead captain Bruce Campbell and former Fangoria editor Tony Timpone, but the questions are staid and untailored to the subject, leading to mostly curt responses that lend no insight. Skip these and proceed to the “Remake Catalog,” a comprehensive table comparing budgets and grosses (pun not intended).

Francis makes his share of questionable blanket assumptions (“When people hear the name Michael Bay, they are interested to see what he has made …”), dubious statements (“[Rebecca] De Mornay — as fans may remember — came to fame … in the suspense-thriller The Hand That Rocks the Cradle …”) and outright errors (he’s under the impression that the 1973 telepic Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a foreign film) sprinkled throughout the text, but not enough to kill the overall buzz. —Rod Lott

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Man, oh, man, how I truly wanted to love — or even just like — Best Movie Scenes, because I find film-related lists a blast to read. One of my favorite parts of my recent Christmas-to-New-Year’s vacation was poring over all 288 small-print pages of 10 Bad Dates with De Niro: A Book of Alternative Movie Lists, an impulse-clearance purchase that turned out to yield rewards of pleasure exponentially greater than my meager $2 investment.

Needless to say, I was thirsty for more. Yet Sanford Levine’s paperback round-up is a bad date in itself, starting with a wholly unnecessary framing concept that simply does not make sense.

Barring a reprint of Levine’s two-page introduction, my words can’t explain adequately the bizarro idea the author puts forth: a strange scenario in which he and his friends are members of über-niche organizations like the Best Neck Brace Scenes Club, complete with regular meetings and voting and all.

Yeah, I don’t get it, either.

But that doesn’t stop him from carrying it out through the entirety of the book, organized alphabetically by subject, including such topics as “Sagging Shoulders” and “Name Mispronunciation.” (Admit it: You’re dying to know what he’ll name as cinema’s all-time finest “Fluttering Drapes” scenes, right? Right? Well, it’s here.)

Under each topic are several unnumbered examples, written in a mumble-mouthed manner that stands squarely between baffling and rambling. As an example, read this excerpt about 1979’s rom-com Starting Over, a Burt Reynolds/Jill Clayburgh pairing mentioned in the “False Teeth” chapter:

“While false teeth fans prefer to see an actual denture, they are not averse to scenes in which false teeth are merely mentioned, as long as they are mentioned in a favorable light. … For the record, marriage proposal fans: did put in a claim for this scene, but it was quickly dropped when false teeth fans, possessive about their territory, threatened to have every actor and actress in every winning marriage proposal scene checked for dentures.”

For a second example, this in-full verdict on the 1973 prison drama Papillon, within the entry on “Food Mushing”:

“Some food mushing scenes are not for the fainthearted. This is especially true when they are set in a solitary confinement cell on Devil’s Island. Food mushing fans, however, are not easily revolted. So when Steve McQueen is put on half rations for not squealing on Dustin Hoffman, he shows he can mush food in a revolting way with the best of them. The fact that the ‘food’ he mushes is beetles and grasshoppers in no way violates Rule 3 in the newly revised Food Mushing Manual. In essence, Rule 3 states to the be eligible for a food mushing award, an actor may mush anything as long as it is eventually eaten.”

Now imagine that for about 200 pages, because that’s what Best Movie Scenes is. And I stress the word “imagine,” because I discourage you from reading it. At least those two examples actually reference scenes, because Levine sometimes cheats by not mentioning any. One example, from “Accounting,” is Moonstruck: “In an informal vote the membership elected Cher the prettiest accountant ever to balance the books in a movie.”

I think that the author may be aiming for comedy, but if so, it was lost on this reviewer without a rimshot to cue me. Levine keeps returning to the same titles (Chevy Chase’s Funny Farm earns no fewer than three spots), which demonstrates a dearth of imagination, and occasionally throws in recipes. Repeat: recipes.

Worst of all, and perhaps I’m just nitpicking, but it pains me to no end when books on film don’t bother to get simple facts correct. Peter Riegert is a fine comedic actor deserving of more press than he gets, so it’s an insult to mangle his name as “Peter Reichart,” which isn’t even close.

Revenge of the Nerds II is referred to only by its subtitle of Nerds in Paradise; Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III is rendered as Godfather III; and in Levine’s mixed-up mind, David Fincher’s The Social Network is praised for having taken home Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director — prizes it famously lost.

And on and on it goes, wrongly, lazily, poorly and painfully.

Again, the friend in me grabs you by the shoulders and, with a gentle shove, nudges you instead toward 10 Bad Dates with De Niro, which is everything Best Movie Scenes is not: erudite, witty, logical, readable. —Rod Lott

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