The Best American Movie Writing 2001

by John Landis (Editor), Jason Shinder (Editor)

The Best Movie Writing 2001 is dedicated to collecting the best writing about our most influential medium, our most popular, evocative and hotly debated art and mode of storytelling, and includes several new introductions of each piece by the guest editor; comments by the contributors on their and a catalog of America’s most important movie magazines. Discussions are not limited to individual films, actors and directors but range from the racial politics of Gone With the Wind to the protest surrounding the 1999 adaptation of the book American Psycho; from how the MPAA rates independent films, to the battle between proponents of film and the new digital technology. Includes selections from Ian Buruma, Molly Haskell, Michael Herr, John Irving, Lawrence Kasdan, Jack Kerouac, Stuart Klawans, Stanley Kubric, and others.

352 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1998

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

John David Landis is an American comedy filmmaker and actor.
(source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing melange of entertainment journalism and more aspiring academic commentary, with most of the individual selections undeserving of book memorialization.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of 2022's Read Harder challenge. The prompt was "Read a book in a "Best of" series." Since I had this book on my TBR shelf (along with the 1999 and 2001 editions), I opted to read it. The title pretty much says it all. Editor George Plimpton relies heavily at first on articles from "Parnassus," also inexplicably includes an essay from (the pseudonymous) Libby Gelman-Waxner, as well as a self-aggrandizing essay about his encounters with Warren Beatty.

Those criticisms aside, it was wonderful to revisit some films and filmmakers I have neglected since '98. Kathleen Murphy's "Film Comment" essay on Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady is a particularly timely reminder of how astonishing a filmmaker Jane Campion has always been in light of her win as Best Director at this year's Oscars. Bonnie Friedman's interrogation of the ultimately confining definitions of what home and happiness are for young women in the Wizard of Oz took me back to my undergraduate days, teaching the same film as a seminal "road movie." These are only two of the outstanding essays in this collection and honestly reminds me of the essential truthfulness of the book's epigraph: "The next best thing to seeing movies is reading about them."