Things I've Found In Books

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, one of the things that somewhere between amuses and annoys me is when you get a book from the library and find that some thoughtful person has written little notes in it. A commentary, their own reaction to some of the wordage contained within.

So I'm reading David Thomson on The Alien Quartet, a book about the series of films starring Sigourney Weaver. Thomson is an...interesting writer. I haven't read his much-reprinted Biographical Dictionary of Film, but reportedly it contains few or no writers, so you know that pisses me off. And based on this and his more recent book about Nicole Kidman, he comes off as the very picture of the frustrated would-be director turned academic or reviewer.

He doesn't help himself in my eyes by his tendency to imagine on paper alternate, unmade films for his subjects. Lord knows I'm not saying Alien Resurrection was a creatively succesful movie or that every choice Kidman made has been wise. But...

If you're going to offer your own variation, with a sometimes-explicit but always implict air of superiority...you'd better be at least as much of a drama writer as, say, Tom Stoppard or Joss Whedon.

Note that I do not say "as good." Niether man did their best work on their Alien or Kidman projects, but they are drama writers. And Thomson isn't. He shows it with every paragraph he writes.

Not only that, he shows a kind of creepy preoccupation with his subjects as sexual (or sexualized) beings. Again, I'm not blind to the allure of Weaver or especially Kidman, and I won't deny the odd fantasy.

But Thomson's would be better off left on the wallscreen in his mind when all he can give us is a frentically imagined scene of the newly-cloned Ripley copulating madly with a scientist while being observed by a technician and nurse:

'Every man should have one like her'
'Or vice versa,' says the nurse.

I'll say a lot about what's wrong with the last two films in "The Quartet." Mainly, I think they've been on a probably-irreverible downhill slide ever since somebody made the stunningly idiotic decision to kill Newt.

But none of them contain such leaden dialogue and painfully obvious masturbatory material as Thomson does in his attempts to show why the movies could be so much better, if only someone would just please listen to him.

Which is why it was grimly satisfying to come to page 156 in this movie guide and find my thoughtful commentator asking on the margin:

"What the hell is wrong with this author and his moronic fetishes?"

A fair question.