By Ray Pride

As I write, I am surrounded on three sides by books; one window looks out onto the horizontal play of snowfall. Inside it’s warm: books do furnish a room.

Ways of reading and ways of writing are shifting; that opening paragraph’s fourteen characters too long to Twitter. Whatever to do! From the cool hearth glow of computers and laptops, rampant idle bloggotry is committed every hour of the day and night. Everybody’s writing about movies even if no one’s making a remunerative career of it for the moment. Scanning these bookshelves, especially of the titles on film from past decades that seemed important enough to acquire, alphabetize and dust, I wonder how many tomes on the subject will be committed between covers, hard or soft, in coming years. The tacky tens: the decade when the listicle became literature!

For me, the year’s most important film book is “Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber” (Library of America, $40). Read the rest of this entry »

Esteemed film critic and historian Jonathan Rosenbaum will give a talk at the Newberry Library on December 2 at 5:30pm about his upcoming collection of reviews and articles, “Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition,” set to be published in fall of 2010. A book signing will follow. Rosenbaum will be discussing the changing nature of film in regards to the Internet and digital media. “When I do these talks there’s an element of improvisation,” says Rosenbaum. “There’s a kind of division between the older generation of people who believe it’s the end of film, and the young generation of people who think this change is for the better, and it makes movies more accessible.” Rosenbaum finds himself on the side of this new generation of film enthusiasts. “I tend to think that the future of cinema will happen in places other than theaters. It’s no longer operated by the industry; it happens in storefronts and homes.”

By Ray Pride

One of the metro daily film critics still standing, the Oregonian’s Shawn Levy, has written four nonfiction books, including “King of Comedy,” a life of Jerry Lewis. His “Paul Newman: A Life” (Harmony Books, $29.99, 490 pp.), is the first complete biography of the charismatic actor, underappreciated director and epic philanthropist. Levy thinks Newman was a lot like Lewis, or Frank Sinatra, whom he wrote about in “Rat Pack Confidential”: “Men like this have incredible capacities for work and activity.” Levy expects there’s probably a scurrilous book in the works, but he says the man and the life that he found in extensive research, poring over archives, articles, interviews, letters, legal documents and his own interviews. It’s a no-nonsense read with a satisfying amount of detail. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Skin may specialize in finding breasts in films, but he can appreciate finding irony in bookstores as well. The film-nudity mogul, whose recently released book “Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide” reveals his 500 favorite movies for nudie-viewing pleasure, can’t help but grin when people inside Barbara’s Bookstore start to notice that the children’s book section is bordering the room where his people have set up a video screen. Any little one intently reading “What Color is Your Underwear, Mr. Moo?” could look up to actually see Shannon Elizabeth only wearing underwear. Luckily, there’s no one under 18 even in the store, otherwise there would be hell to pay for the open can of Budweiser literally four inches from Mother Goose.
Read the rest of this entry »