Beneath Mulholland Book

David Thomson is a leading film critic, and author of 14 previous books, including the highly praised A Biographical Dictionary of Film, and Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles. Mulholland Drive, the famous road winding through Los Angeles, is Thomson's Rosebud, his symbol of film as mythological reality, aspiration and disenchantment, "the shambles of destroyed hope". A half-life between screen and dream, which traps both audience and stars, the latter dazzled by their own light. Here are 21 not- so-easy pieces, covering everything from Chinatown to The Sheltering Sky, the veniality of star power, the blurred line between audience and screen. Investigating money, crime, conspiracy, love and death, the prose is crisp, crackling with caustic epithets like a modern Dorothy Parker gone to Oz. Using essay and biography, mixing forms, lending voice to fictional recreations of real actors, a love of movies and of language is evident throughout. Thomson has an extraordinarily knowledge of the most obscure aspects of film, from which he draws startling connections and insights, presenting an almost hallucinatory vision of the inner life of the cinema. As much about Thomson as the film world it dissects, this mixture of new and revised reprints of magazine articles cover the gamut of Hollywood's recondite dreamscape with rare if caustic perception. Though the perspective is mordant, the focus is long and deep, re-imagining film writing as J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition deconstructed celebrity.--Gary S. DalkinRead More