Books. They’re a right pain, aren’t they? They take absolutely ages to get through and they cost a fortune.
But without them we wouldn’t be able to read and we wouldn’t have some of the greatest movies ever made, movies like Die Hard and First Blood. Yes, both based on novels!
Books that inspired movie adaptations are wonderful, of course, but for me, the real gold has always been found in the books about what goes into making the movies.
I am always on the lookout for a good behind-the-scenes book about film, and the great ones are slightly harder to find these days, given that perhaps the market for new books about the filmmaking process doesn’t exactly rival fantasy romance.
However, over the past few years there have been a few literary gems in the movie-making category, books to throw on the pile with some of the greatest ever written.
With that in mind, I have decided to compile my own list of my favourite books about movies, just as I have added two more to my Kindle – Michael Douglas’s autobiography One Helluva Ride, and the brilliantly titled The Book Was Better by Louise Willder. Give me a few months – I am a notoriously slow reader – to see if those two find it on to the list below.
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I need to talk about the 1990 Gene Hackman film Narrow Margin
Posted in COMMENT with tags Film, Gene Hackman, Movies on August 29, 2023 by Ross McGAnyone turned on the TV lately?
It’s bloody awful out there, isn’t it? Critics who drone on about how we live in the golden age of television clearly haven’t switched one on in the last ten years or so.
I’m not talking about the endless options on streaming – which, lately, is its own problem – but the daily shovelling of crud you are fed if you are unlucky or, like me, stupid enough to try to find something to watch on terrestrial telly.
I was in Ireland earlier this month, where, secret payment scandals aside, viewers are lucky enough to have good old RTE. For those of you reading this in the UK, RTE is like BBC, only useful, and not totally beholden to the endless ream of sewing, repairing and masterchefing shite that is served up nightly.
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