John Mowitt

This might be a good read if you're looking for info on the book's featured films and directors, but it just plain annoyed me at times. My major issues were frustration with the needlessly over-complicated (at moments even slightly pretentious-seeming) prose, and the author's tendency to engage in brief shots of name- and concept-dropping on every other page. (I mean, it must be lovely to have such a range of knowledge, I'm sure, but the trick is to showcase it without alienating your readers! This felt too much like a grad school seminar with one of those wise but irritating profs who just LOVE to toss out every single name or title they can think of, but without deeply engaging with the ideas... just tossing them around to show us how well they can toss...) This was particularly irksome because my gut instinct was that this author could have been much, much more engaging.

The intro in particular drove me batty, and negatively shaded the body of the book for me. It seemed like a perfect example of why people outside academia like to scoff at 'ivory tower' types for their overblown rhetoric... jargon, jargon, tedious rhetorical 'play', then more jargon... Being direct isn't *automatically* the equivalent of dumbing something down. In fact, it can be really impressive... and I wish this book had been. 3 stars.… (plus d'informations)