What are you reading?

[allegate]

It was OK. There are certainly parts that make you laugh but there are also parts where you're pretty sure you're not smart enough to get the joke. I don't blame Moss for this at all because he had a much better education than I. And the constant usage of film-specific terms was a little off-putting but again that's on me as I'm reading/listening to a book about film so of course there's going to be some terms that are specific to that: he's entrenched in the film-making process so he would know them and use them in conversation without a second thought.


The analysis compared to other films was usually great, really enjoyed those bits. I was definitely primed for those with all the behind-the-scenes extras from DVDs. Which appear to be missing anymore, have you noticed? You put a DVD in and it's a static screen with four (if you're lucky!) buttons that look like they were designed in 1999. No modern aesthetic at all, just functional harshness. Which sounds like I'm doing a bit like he does in the book, now that I'm re-reading this...huh.


Anyway. It's not laugh out loud funny and you don't need to have seen the movie for it to work. That said, I do think you might need to have seen some of the films he compares it to just to get an idea of why he's comparing them. I mean that film in question is so milquetoast and by-the-numbers that you can picture every scene he describes! But the comparisons are important for the juxtaposition.

[allegate]

I would say this is 70% art history, 15% alt-history, 10% funny romp, and 5% anachronistic blather. I mean, I just don't think Toulouse-Lautrec was running around Paris talking about wanting to bonk prostitutes.

I hope that someone walked out of this with a Master's in Art History because it seemed very complete and complex in that category.

(I am glad I had the audiobook so I got accurate pronunciations of all of the artists, like Van Gogh)