Ok, I'll start. To be honest, I've gotten pretty bad about book reading during the pandemic (a combination of losing the commute that I used to squeeze my leisure reading into and my work hours getting terrible), but I did get back in the habit recently, racing through two very enjoyable books about cult cinema.

These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World by Grady Hendrix and Chris Poggiali, as you can guess, is about martial movies and their place in American culture. Hendrix used to write the Kaiju Shakedown column for Film Comment about Asian genre cinema, and the book combines his enthusiastic writing style with a maddening amount of research (although he's admitted in an interview that some of the subjects the book touches on he only scratched the surface of). A great mix of film appreciation and social/cultural context. There's a sidebar on Bruceploitation, one of the wackiest sections of the book (and probably one of the wackiest genres in cinema) that inspired some of my recent watching, although I have nowhere near Hendrix and Poggiali's stamina in exploring the subject.

Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square by Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford is an extension of the zine of the same name that Landis used to write in the '80s (and briefly revived in the 2000s) about grindhouses in New York's 42nd street and the movies that played in them. I've never read the original zine (although I have a PDF of the original run that was posted to Twitter by a guy who wrote a biography of Landis recently), but the book is a very entertaining mix of film appreciation with vivid "you are there" gonzo-ish depictions of the settings these movies played in and the reactions of the crowds. I understand Landis' editorial standards haven't always been up to snuff (in one of his more notorious articles in the original zine, he supposedly fabricated a story about a crime committed by roughie director Phil Prince, although to be fair, Prince was kind of a scumbag; in the book, he miscredits a pseudonymous role in an Ilsa sequel to Spalding Gray), but the book is a very entertaining read nonetheless. Like with the above book, I've been noting down recs, and probably the one in the book most tailored to me is Patty about a ripped from the headlines hardcore porn movie about the Patty Hearst that started shooting before Hearst was even released (they hastily shot an ending after her release). Alas, this doesn't seem to be on Letterboxd, and from the IMDb page, I'm not sure it's ever gotten a DVD release (although apparently the rights were sold to a DVD company). Paging Vinegar Syndrome.

I've been very interested in These Fists Break Bricks by following your blaxploitation/brucesploitation reviews lately.  And of course I'm interested in Fulci, but is it more of a film breakdown or is it more biographical generally?

I just read the Norm MacDonald 'biography', which I unsurprisingly really liked. Very few writer's can make me actually laugh, and this did the trick.

I'm currently reading Mark Lanegan's biography, which I surprisingly really like. I never really took him all that seriously (I like both Sweet Oblivion and Dust well enough, but have until now completely ignored his solo years), so I guess it is kinda weird having this book be what it took for me to actually change my opinion on him as it almost treats his musical career as an afterthought next to his dysfunctions and addictions. But after listening to a couple of tracks from The Winding Sheet, I think I may have underestimated him.
 

Rock wrote:

Jinnistan wrote:

I've been very interested in These Fists Break Bricks by following your blaxploitation/brucesploitation reviews lately.  And of course I'm interested in Fulci, but is it more of a film breakdown or is it more biographical generally?

I've just cracked the book open, but looks like it's more film-driven with biographical details added for context. I believe the author only got a brief interview with Fulci when his health was in decline, but I think one of Fulci's daughters was involved to some degree (she contributes a foreword).

I'm going through this pretty slowly, but so far this is proving to be a less engaging read than Nightmare USA. Not because of any shortcomings of Thrower as a critic, but because the early sections are devoted to Fulci's comedies, which he's able to muster little enthusiasm for even if he assesses them pretty comprehensively. Just page after page of unattractive comedians mugging and making all sorts of unappealing faces. We don't even get to his Edwige Fenech lawyer movie until around 100 pages in.

I don't know what you've already read, but I always recommend his Cities of the Red Night trilogy (w/ The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands), because they seem to be less familiar to people than his 60s cut/paste series of novels but, for my money, richer and more accmplished.

crumbsroom wrote:

I've only read Junky and Naked Lunch. I'm up for pretty much any of it though.

Oh man.  I'm going to have to temper my urge to recommend everything all at once.

I'll still go with the Red Night trilogy.  It's an amalgam of various characters and settings, but it isn't cut-up and random, so there are strong thematic threads running throughout.  I'm tempted to call them his best work, a culmination of his creative work over about a 20 year period (started in 1966, finished the final book in 1987).

Jinnistan wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

I've only read Junky and Naked Lunch. I'm up for pretty much any of it though.

Oh man.  I'm going to have to temper my urge to recommend everything all at once.

I'll still go with the Red Night trilogy.  It's an amalgam of various characters and settings, but it isn't cut-up and random, so there are strong thematic threads running throughout.  I'm tempted to call them his best work, a culmination of his creative work over about a 20 year period (started in 1966, finished the final book in 1987).

It's a mysterious absence of reading on my part. But, with very very few exceptions, I rarely read more than two or three books by any author. Not by design, but I can't blast through books like some, and because I want to get a sampling of as many voices as possible, I'm always leaving authors I really like behind.

But now that I'm old and basically dead, I should zero in on the ones that particularly matter to me. And Burroughs is very much on that short list.

Burroughs, Marquez, Dostoevsky, Pynchon are few off the top of my head I would like to read everything by.

 

Last edited by crumbsroom (5/25/2022 9:49 pm)

Trying to become a person who reads books again and just doesn't stare absent mindedly at walls all the time.

I probably shouldn't be, but I'm shocked at how well written Dracula is. I'd never heard of Stoker actually being a good writer, more that he just created an iconic character. But this evokes Kafkaian and Lovecraftian levels of black mood and dread.

Really impressed

crumbsroom wrote:

I probably shouldn't be, but I'm shocked at how well written Dracula is.

YES!!! He even adopts different writing styles to suit the various characters! 
 

Rampop II wrote:

crumbsroom wrote:

I probably shouldn't be, but I'm shocked at how well written Dracula is.

YES!!! He even adopts different writing styles to suit the various characters! 
 

I'm ignorant, but I'm wondering if there was a precedent to they way he tells this story. This collection of archived letters and materials to tell one story from different vantage points. It's of course been done a million times since....but before? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head.