Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media

Now that Jonathan Rosenbaum has retired from regular, weekly reviewing, I'd have to pick J. Hoberman as my easy favorite favorite film critic in the USA. He's been with "The Village Voice" for over 30 years, having done a review of ERASERHEAD as his very first piece; he started out as the third-string guy but has been the senior critic since 1988. VULGAR MODERNISM was Hoberman's first collection, first published in 1991 and collecting a goodly-sized chunk of his writings for the "Voice" as well as a few pieces originaly written for "Film Comment" and other publications. Most of the pieces are 2-3 page (1000 words or so) single film reviews, but there are longer portrait-pieces on directors like Scorsese and Lynch, and also some writings on other arts, including an excellent piece on George Herriman's seminal early 20th century comic strip KRAZY KAT. Hoberman tends to cover the avant-garde and "outsider" American cinema a little more than his colleague and MIDNIGHT MOVIES collaborator Rosenbaum; witness the several articles on Andy Warhol and Jack Smith. And he's got a taste for what is often considered "bad" cinema - Ed Wood and Oscar Micheaux in particular. My favorite article in the whole book in fact is probably the piece on Micheaux, Wood, the French surrealists and the bad movie books of the Medveds. Hoberman has a tendency to a certain self-conscious hipness at times, a smugness I think, which can get tiresome, but the best pieces like the bad movies one profit from his erudition and his dismissal of some of the critical norms that even a Rosenbaum or Dave Kehr have accepted. Like Rosenbaum and many of the other critics who cut their teeth in the alternative weekles, Hoberman has little patience for or interest in commercial, American "blockbuster" cinema; what few mentions of Spielberg and Lucas you'll find aren't terribly complimentary. So be warned, this is "elitist" New York criticism - at it's best. If that's your bag (it should be obvious now that it's mine, mostly), I certainly wouldn't hesitate to recommend this. The cheap paperback is apparently out of print, but you can easily get it used.