Book Details
| Title: | Flicker | |
| Author: | Theodore Roszak | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 03.06.07 |
Other Books Read By This Author (0)
| Date Read | Note |
| 03.06.07 | kind of a Da Vinci Code for movies but much darker, this book was pretty great. Except the ending made me very sad. It was actually a thing where I was reading going "come on! the pages are running out! it can't end like this, can it!? But it does, and that's what drives the ultimate tone of the book i think. I'd read that this was dark and disturbing but I really didn't think so while I was reading it... but now i do. It's about a guy who falls upon an obscure horror director and sees hidden flashes of talent. In fact, they're subliminal techniques that are very powerful, leading this guy on a career-length mystery to uncover the lost work and figure out how he did it. It then gets very grand in scheme. The first 30-50 pages mirror very closely my recent experience at the Alamo... except it's trash films instead of art films and I'm not sleeping with the programmer. still though, Roszak communicateds beautifully the awakening to film and sets it in the perfect time: the golden age of arthouse theaters and influx of interesting new films from abroad. Later, he skims across the coming of 70s cinema, seeing it through an art film lover's eyes as bad taste and excess... which I guess it is. He throws a character in there to stand up for everyone that likes that sort of thing which again reminds me very much of the Alamo. It does get pretty conspiratorial though. about halfway through it stops being about film culture and history and starts getting more and more religiousy... my interest somewhat waned at this point but never to the point of not wanting to see what happens next. It presents an alternative history to film that, while I don't necessarily believe, definitely could be true. I guess we'll see in 2014. |
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