Not to be Missed
Fifty-four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The images and memories that matter most are those that are unshakeable, unforgettable. Kenneth Turan's fifty-four favorite films embrace a century of the world's most satisfying romances and funniest comedies, the most heart-stopping dramas and chilling thrillers.
Turan discovered film as a child left undisturbed to watch Million Dollar Movie on WOR-TV Channel 9 in New York, a daily showcase for older Hollywood features. It was then that he developed a love of cinema that never left him and honed his eye for the most acute details and the grandest of scenes.
Not to be Missed blends cultural criticism, historical anecdote, and inside-Hollywood controversy. Turan's selection of favorites ranges across all genres. From All About Eve to Seven Samurai to Sherlock Jr., these are all timeless films -- classic and contemporary, familiar and obscure, with big budgets and small -- each underscoring the truth of director Ingmar Bergman's observation that "no form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul."
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As a child, Los Angeles Times film critic Turan lost himself in the movies. Later, as a student at the Columbia School of Journalism, he took a seminar from Judith Crist, who told him that he could be watch films and write about them professionally. In this affectionate look at the movies that have meant the most to him, he chooses several films, beginning in 1913 with Louis Feuillade's silent film Fant mas, and proceeds decade by decade up through Joseph Cedar's Footnote (2011). He offers a brief introduction to the films of each intervening decade and then provides short and critically admiring analyses of his chosen films. The 1930s, he writes, were a "decade, as even the titles of the films like Bombshell and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang indicated, that started with a ferocious burst of uncensored energy; the ability to speak filled the movies with a kind of dynamism that never went away." Turan's crisp and deft analysis of individual films offers fresh insights into them; of the length of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (nearly three and a half hours), Turan observes: "the passage of time has one final advantage: it shows us the entirety of the agricultural year, from planting to final harvesting; that's critical because the film's final message is to reinforce the endurance of that kind of life." Turan's illuminating reflections do what the best essays on film always do: send us to watch the movie, whether for the first time or the 20th.
