Book Details
| Title: |
|
L.A. Noir |
| Author: |
|
Alain Silver, James Ursini |
| Times Read: |
|
1 |
| Last Read: |
|
04.12.12 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
Notes History
| Date Read |
Note |
| 04.12.12 | These guys have been writing, editing, and commenting on noir since forever. I have a whole series of Film Noir readers sitting on my shelf that I've never actually slugged through, and listened to a heaping handful of their DVD commentaries, particularly for their Fox noir films. It's clear that they are very knowledgeable about the genre but the writing is styles as formal criticism that reminds me of high school term papers rather than anything I'd choose to read for fun. I mean, it's not entirely fair to them since all criticism feels that way to me, but when compared to Eddie Muller's Dark City, this stuff is very dry.
In any case, this book is pretty short and mostly consists of pictures. I got it as a gift I think. The chapters cover different areas of LA county and summarizes the history of the area followed by some discussion of certain films that were shot or took place there. I'm a real sucker for location shooting especial in film noir when a lot of those locations don't exist anymore, so I enjoyed that aspect of the book. The film discussion constantly tied back to locations which I appreciated. Furthermore, a lot of the film stills used actually showed the locations which was pretty cool. Since it was so short, I'll couple this with a similar book before moving on to a different subject. |
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