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Kenneth Turan has been film critic at the Los Angeles Times for more than ten years. He can also be heard every Friday morning as film critic for National Public Radio's "Morning Edition." The director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, he lives in Los Angeles.
Never Coming to a Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie
eBook
$9.99
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ISBN-13:
9780786723942
- Publisher: PublicAffairs
- Publication date: 11/01/2005
- Sold by: Hachette Digital, Inc.
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 352
- File size: 914 KB
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It is in the nature of today's movie business that while Hollywood blockbusters invade every megaplex, smaller, quality films often don't get screen time. Fans of finer films have to count on catching up with them on video and DVD, but even the most hard-core devotees have trouble remembering what sounded good when a film was originally released. Never Coming to a Theater Near You will remedy that situation.
This selection of renowned film critic Kenneth Turan's absorbing and illuminating reviews, now revised and updated to factor in the tests of time, point viewers toward the films they can't quite remember, but should not miss.
Moviegoers know they can trust Turan's impeccable taste. His eclectic selection represents the kind of sophisticated, adult, and entertaining films intelligent viewers are hungry for. More importantly, Turan shows readers what makes these unusual films so great, revealing how talented filmmakers and actors have managed to create the wonderful highs we experience in front of the silver screen.
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Publishers Weekly
The title of this book, a collection of Turan's daily newspaper reviews from the Los Angeles Times, promises the unearthing of deeply obscure material or a truly revolutionary take on old favorites. Turan, who is also a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition, sets the book up more modestly in his introduction as a guide to unsung films now on DVD and video. He's a lovely reviewer, able to encapsulate a film's charms in a few phrases, and he has a particular knack for opening sentences, an important tool for any newspaper writer. But the section on English-language films contains reviews of movies like Election, Dead Man Walking and Muriel's Wedding-i.e., multiple Oscar nominees and winners, many that benefited from mass-market publicity campaigns. In essence, Turan's favorite flicks are already sung. His section on foreign films is far more useful, since many of them had very limited releases. Turan saves the best for last: nine longer essays he calls "Retrospectives." These pieces treat topics we don't hear much about: the great directors Max Ophuls and Frank Borzage, the delectable treats that came from "pre-code" Hollywood, and Yiddish film. And Turan's funny gloss on the familiar conventions of Chinese martial arts films shows how perceptive and winning he can be. Agent, David Halpern. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
As a remedy for the lack of exposure for small, quality films, Turan, critic for the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio's Morning Edition, offers this compilation of a decade's worth of reviews, a "guide for the perplexed viewer looking for something different." Divided into categories of English and foreign-language films, documentaries, classics, plus some career retrospectives, the reviews are brief and accessible but grounded in solid film history scholarship. The author tries to indicate what makes each film special and why the reader should seek it out on cable television, video, or DVD. Some of the films, e.g., Whale Rider, may already be familiar to the discerning filmgoer, and some readers might wish for a greater length and depth to the essays. Turan lacks the intensely personal voice of Pauline Kael, but his uncluttered prose is inviting, and the collection fills a niche as one of the better recent surveys of independent film. Recommended for public and academic film history collections. Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Los Angeles Times/NPR film critic Turan presents a book-length favorites list. Whip-smart and to the point, the author's cogent movie reviews are perfect for reading in the newspaper over your morning coffee, and he's even better on the radio. Unfortunately, these brief pieces don't work as well between hard covers. The premise of here is admirably simple: these are the films that have affected Turan the most, and for the best. The result is a joyously hopscotch catalogue of cinema, everything from John Sayles to John Frankhenheimer, highbrow to lowbrow (though not surprisingly, indie critical faves are overrepresented), but since the pieces are uniformly positive, a numb feeling soon sets in. And since the reviews are not long enough to really get into the meat of a film, Turan is forced to present his views rather plainly, with laudatory adjectives paraded one after another to the point of sounding like a press release ("Prepare to be astonished by 'Spirited Away' "). Blame it on the format, but that still doesn't make this a compelling read. Agent: David Halpern/Lucas, Alexander & Whitley