I can’t remember the first time I heard of the boys who made a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I do remember thinking, “Cute, but what’s the point? Perhaps there’s more to the story.”

Turns out, there is … but only technically. With writer Alan Eisenstock, the once-juvenile filmmakers Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala tell their seven-year tale of production in Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. While certainly rife with details, it offers little in terms of meaty stuff that inquiring minds outta know.

For example, you’ll learn that Chris was a class clown, that Eric met him over the Marvel Comics adaptation, that Chris liked to lip-sync to Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl,” that Eric’s home eventually was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and so on. You may think otherwise, but I don’t think they add up to a compelling behind-the-scenes story. That they made a movie in and of itself was not enough for me.

At the end of each chapter — and even sections within those chapters — Eisenstock tries his hardest to squeeze drama out of mundane situations, or create drama where there is none. Dialogue here in particular rings false, with lines carrying the same clichéd cinematic weight of “You ain’t seen nothing yet” or “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”

Telling it from the kids’ viewpoint is what sinks it. Overall, the book has the feel of being the literary equivalent of re-enactments on America’s Most Wanted. —Rod Lott

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Limelight Editions has put out half a dozen If You Like … pop-culture guidebooks over the last year, using everything from The Beatles to The Sopranos as jumping-off points for recommended media, but Katherine Rife’s If You Like Quentin Tarantino … is the most logical of them yet.

Why? Because Tarantino is the perfect subject for such as series, for what are his movies but built-in recommendation lists? They wear their influences on their sleeves, right out in the open. Thus, Rife can feel safe in recommending, say, an Ennio Morricone album, because QT has drawn from that well many a time already.

A filmmaker herself, the Chicago-based Rife has structured the paperback into eight chapters, one for each of his directed features, from Reservoir Dogs 20 years ago (feel old yet?) to next month’s hotly anticipated Django Unchained. Moving chronologically through them, she delivers mini-essays and reviews on flicks and other media that directly match each; thus, she covers crime, noir, blaxploitation, martial arts, Italian horror, biker pics, war epics and spaghetti Westerns at large, with many subgenres peppered about.

She doesn’t always pick the obvious, too; although those are there — say, Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter trilogy, the first part of which is practically a plot point of True Romance — she also digs down to the obscure, or obscure enough that you’ll curse her when you can’t find the film in print. The lady knows her stuff; depending on what her feet look like, she could be QT’s idea of a perfect woman.

Personally, I love her ain’t-screwin’-’round writing voice, as witnessed by such lines as “Dicks don’t get more dickish than Mike Hammer” or for pegging Martin Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha as “hobosploitation.” That’s new.

Generously but not overly illustrated, the book swims in sidebars, too, in order to suggest some pulp fiction (as in novels, mind you), count down the seminal blaxploitation soundtrack albums, or sludge through the high (low?) points of rape-revenge movies. These shortened bits also serve as quick-fix 101s as such important topics as Wu-Tang Clan, Brian De Palma or Goblin. We all should be as schooled. —Rod Lott

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What makes Skyfall, the new James Bond film, all the more terrific is that its theme song is, too. That hasn’t happened in, what, decades?

I’ve long thought that the 007 franchise producers have grown to be behind the times in selecting artists to do the theme, grabbing them well after their flame has burned brightest. As a result, the songs simply don’t chart anymore. This time, with Adele fresh off two arms full of Grammys, the tide will have reversed.

That’s a story I’m sure we’ll see covered in the next edition of Jon Burlingame’s The Music of James Bond. Until then, this does just fine as is.

Coming from Oxford University Press, the handsome hardback tells not only how each and every 007 main theme came to be, but how its overall soundtracks — and accompanying albums — were assembled and shaped. Broken into chapters movie by movie, logically enough, the renowned music critic Burlingame covers the entire canon, both official and not; therefore, the stories behind Michel Legand’s Never Say Never Again score nor Burt Bacharach’s wonderful Casino Royale ’67 melodies don’t go untold.

Who knew there was anything to reveal? While the “true authorship” debate between Monte Norman and John Barry over the series iconic, indelible, immortal main theme has been covered elsewhere, I don’t recall it being done so at this depth, this lively, and with something that at least approaches a modicum of suspense. Same goes for the tale of Barry’s battles in studio with Duran Duran for the A View to a Kill theme, which turned out to be the biggest Billboard hit of all.

While it’s interesting to read how the likes of Paul McCartney and Carly Simon came aboard, Burlingame also reveals stories of the Bond themes that never were. Among others, you’ll learn about Kate Bush almost breathed her way through Moonraker‘s credits, and how Eric Clapton jammed in a Licence to Kill track that was scrapped.

The author also briefly discusses David Arnold’s excellent Shaken and Stirred electronica tribute album of 1997, which helped him become Barry’s heir apparent to the franchise, and notes other 007 collections of interest. Sidebars in each chapter review the score highlights, time-coded to their appearance in the films.

Illustrated with a wealth of archival photos and original album covers, The Music of James Bond is as much fun to look at as it is to read. If that Skyfall isn’t covered is the only negative I can find — OK, second, because I wished Moby’s remix of the 007 main theme for Tomorrow Never Dies merited more than a mention — I can recommend it strongly to the series’ legion of fanatics. Dare I say it? Nobody does it better. —Rod Lott

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Asks venerated critic David Denby in the ’78 Superman-styled title of his new book, Do the Movies Have a Future? (Spoiler alert: Yes. Yes, they certainly do.)

Don’t be misled by the title, as this is not a near-400-page examination of the arguably rhetorical question. He deals with cinema’s place — and the criticism of cinema — in the Internet age only in his introduction and first few chapters, which then give way to an unthemed collection of essays and reviews, most previously published in the pages of The New Yorker. Whether you’re new to Denby or not, it’s a pleasurable, first-rate read of film criticism.

Among the features and profiles on stars, directors and genres, he delivers the single-best summations of “mumblecore” and “chick flicks” I’ve ever read. He’s sharp in both brain and barbs, able to break apart a genre with wit without being entirely dismissive — for example, “In romantic comedies as well as in chick flicks, Hollywood has been throwing women against the wall of Matthew McConaughey’s stupidity to see what sticks (the answer: Kate Hudson).”

In another piece, he gives director Victor Fleming his due and wonders, as I have, how the man responsible for helming two bona fide classics in The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind — both from the same year, mind you — isn’t often top-of-mind among discussions of finest filmmakers. He even examines two film critics, notably Pauline Kael, which backs up the entirety of Brian Kellow’s recommended bio, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark: namely, that friendship with her was often one-sided and doomed to be temporary, and that she could be quite the rhymes-with-stunt.

Now, Denby is not the type of film critic who second-guesses his use of a word like “exegesis.” If you don’t know what it means and don’t bother to look it up, that’s your loss. The man definitely has his own language, which I’d argue is part of why he’s been able to carve a career out of talking about the language of movies themselves. Phrases like “a bounder” and “learned boobies” abound — and with the latter, he’s not talking about the breasts of a hot teacher.

Speaking of the body, I was amused at how often Denby describes his subjects in physical terms, and in the inimitable way he does it. For example, he notes Julia Roberts “for her big easy carriage” and “with her loose, shambling, cowhand’s walk”; Seth Rogen, meanwhile, sports “the round face and sottish grin of a Jewish Bacchus.” Whereas some may find these observations off-putting, I chalk them up to part of the book’s overall wide appeal.

Show me one online-only, fanboy “critic” who can turn such a phrase. You can’t; it’s as futile as viewing a film on a iPod screen — the subject of an early chapter. Do the Movies Have a Future? is a strong antidote to the ill-informed, online fanboy poison that sadly passes for film criticism these days. —Rod Lott

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One of the books I’ve looked forward to the most this year has been David Konow’s Reel Terror, a paperback original aiming to tell, as its subtitle promises, 100 years of horror-movie history. I cannot say that it disappointed me in offering behind-the-scenes stories on scads of classic films, even if DVD documentaries and/or commentaries have rendered most of them superfluous.

While he hits all the usual suspects — many of them the subjects of their own texts, including Night of the Living Dead to The Exorcist — it’s also nice to see due given to less acclaimed but no less entertaining flicks like Creepshow, The Evil Dead or the Hammer output.

I can forgive that the new wave of Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises don’t merit more than a few lines in an epilogue, as insanely profitable and hugely influential as they already are. I’m also willing to overlook that, unlike Jason Zinoman’s recent and superior Shock Value, Konow doesn’t attempt to thread it all together into a nifty narrative that places the films in a cultural perspective.

What I cannot forgive, however, is that the author has made an ungodly amount of errors. Either Reel Terror skipped the fact-checking and shaping processes, or — and I’m not being hyperbolic — is perhaps the worst-edited work of nonfiction I’ve seen come out of a major publishing house. The repetition alone is maddening.

Like what, you ask? Well, for instance:

On page 47, we get this quote from Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson: “Rod had been shaping the idea of doing half-hour science fiction stories because that way he could escape some of the worst aspects of censorship.”

Two pages later, we get this quote, also from Johnson: “He had been shaping the idea of doing half-hour science fiction stories because that way he could escape some of the worst aspects of censorship.”

On page 181, in the Jaws chapter, we’re introduced to “Jeffrey Kramer, who played Deputy Hendricks,” and three pages later, we meet “Jeffrey Kramer, who played Deputy Hendricks.”

On page 199, while discussing The Omen, Konow writes, “Seltzer named his Antichrist Damien after Father Damien, who was one of his idols. A single sentence later, the next paragraph begins, “Father Damien was one of Seltzer’s idols.”

On page 464, Konow states that “There’s a joke in Hollywood that directors don’t want writers around once a movie’s under way, comparing them to hookers that won’t leave after they’ve been paid, but Demme kept Tally around for just about everything.” That joke must be worth repeating, because on page 508, he writes, “Unlike a lot of productions where the writer’s the hooker overstaying her welcome, Williamson was very welcome on the set.”

The author’s mistakes are factual as well. We learn that Jaws “made $7,061,513 opening weekend, which today would be $70,000,000, almost twice what The Dark Knight made opening weekend.” TDK‘s actual opening weekend, per BoxOfficeMojo.com, was $160,887,295, meaning Konow is off by roughly $126 million.

We’re told Richard Donner “had also done two feature films prior to The Omen, X-15 and Salt and Pepper, starring Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford.” This ignores Donner’s Lolita knock-off starring Charles Bronson, Lola, readily available on many public-domain collections.

Titles just are not Konow’s strong suit, either, despite the ease provided by the Internet Movie Database, not to mention poster images galore available via Google’s image search function. John Carpenter’s 1978 telefilm Someone’s Watching Me! is correctly listed (although without exclamation mark) on page 252, but then incorrectly named two sentences later as Someone Is Watching Me. On page 258, it becomes Somebody’s Watching Me. All future instances are correct, if you forgive that pesky punctuation. Outside the book’s genre, the maternal word in Throw Momma from the Train is Mama on page 460.

And then there are the misspellings — not typos, but brazen misspellings, especially in a work on horror films. Witness:
• genre staple Lance Henriksen, credited on page 205 as “Lance Hendrickson”;
• the Child’s Play killer doll Chucky, noted on page 497 as “Chuckie”; or
• Edgar Allan Poe, appearing on page 444 with the middle name of “Allen.” I see that error all the time, but again, this is a book devoted to horror history. There should be no excuses when you’re discussing the guy who arguably kickstarted the entire genre.

It’s as if Konow did most of the homework assignment, but didn’t check his answers before turning it in. With such a public forum at stake, that, my friends, is frightening. —Rod Lott

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