Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever 2008 (Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever Series)
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Jim CraddockEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-13
ISBN: 0787689815
Number of pages: 701
Publisher: Gale Group
Book Reviews of Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever 2008 (Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever Series)
Book Review: This dog DOES hunt!
Summary: 4 Stars
My wife and I have been buying this book annually since the early/mid 90's. It's been a rare moment that it has disappointed, and believe it or not, the reviews are intelligently written and, in this movie nut's opinion much more fair and helpful to the would-be viewer than many of the top US newspaper's and web site's highly paid guns-for-hire. I don't want to put across the impression that all "big-time" critics aren't really that great, but more and more often these folks seem to think they're in a competition with their counterparts to see who can find and use the most obscure phraseology and biting criticism that it's like trying to follow a Dennis Miller routine if you haven't read every major newspaper in the country that day! These folks seem to understand the critics job in more of an everyman way, sure they're witty, and they can bite with the biggest dogs out there, but we find that the reviews are very often right on the money. It rates on a system of dog bones, 1 bone (actually they have a no-bone rating, simply stated as "woof") through 4 bones, and when they give a movie 4 bones, I think you would really have to try very hard to find that particular movie unlikable. We have rented or purchased a "4-boner" on those criteria alone. Just my opinion, but they just seem to tell it like it is, but still have a little fun with it. After all, it is a MOVIE, right? You laugh, you cry, yada, yada. Of course, it has to get bigger every year, (2008's has 1800+ pages, but it's also a blast just to scan thru...because as well as reviewing almost every movie made, the reviews give exhaustively complete credits, i.e., cinematography, music score, screenplay, based on a book by ___, etc., etc., you also get, after the movie section, a cross-referencing group of sections that defies you to try and play "stump the Hound". If you cannot find out information on, say, Bud Cort's first film appearance, (M.A.S.H.) or maybe a disturbing filmography of David Lynch, this is where you look. I would say it could satisfy (at least to a certain extent!), the very freakishly obsessed with movies and movie-making trivia. Just stroll through the section on actors, and you'll soon learn that many of your favorite star's went through a relatively inauspicious beginning, and that's just one of the many categories that are almost voyeuristic in their "completeness"...directors, with their bodies of work just lying there chronologically for you to pick at, lol, the category list, which contains genre, sub-genre, thematic, even significant scene selections, and a "kibbles and series" list, actually a bunch of off the wall indexes rolled into one index...you would look here to find out what your favorite movie's genesis really was...literary, theatrical, cartoon, television adaptations, plus there's a quality check with categories like "woofs", "4 bones" top grossing, jeez, I'm getting carpal tunnel while trying (woefully unsuccessfully) to keep this somewhat short. If you like movies check it out, if you love them, just buy it. My wife and I started calling it the "boner book" from the second week we found our first one. BTW...you can pre-order the '09 edition right now, you sicko!
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Summary of Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever 2008 (Videohound's Golden Movie Retriever Series)
With 27,000 on-the-money reviews between its covers, the 2008 VIDEOHOUND lives up to its reputation for putting out the movie review guide fans desire. Always popular with 9 Indexes: Videos A-Z; Category Index; Kibbles & Series Index; Awards Index; Cast Index; Director Index; Writer Index; Cinematographer Index; And Composer IndexAs short a time ago as 1994, Leonard Maltin's movie guide could boast of "more than 19,000 entries, with 300 new titles!" But with 500-plus movies jostling into theaters every year, the pocket-size, curl-up-with-it film guide has become a relic. Nowadays, film books are faintly scholarly word-hoards with three OED-style columns, a trade-size format, and a heft that calls for your sitting pants. Videohound's 1,700-page edition sasses the new millennium ("Covering 1,000 years of Movie Making Magic!" the cover says), but its girth heralds the day when all such guides will be swallowed up by some vast digital database. Until then, there's this bright book, with its uncalculated number (a hasty guess would be 26,000) of reviews of movies on video, Laserdisc, DVD, and TV, and its massive cross-listings by star, director, writer, and cinematographer (cinematographer!). Retailing itself as an irreverent tour for movie lovers, the book has surprising range, with an equal appetite for difficult, small, and foreign films and Hollywood fare. Some inconsistencies? Yep, and that's what makes guides like this fun. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is hailed as a "masterpiece" and rewarded an admiring four bones (out of four), while the superbly Heideggerian Wings of Desire, also a "masterpiece," is equivocated to three and a half. The woof-worthy The Wedding Singer gets the same two and a half bones that they give Wes Anderson's estimably giggly debut, Bottle Rocket. Terry Zwigoff's lovely Crumb is M.I.A., and there's a tendency to eschew analysis for plot summary, but Videohound has encyclopedic breadth and does the undeclared job it sets out to accomplish: entertain, inform, and give readers a giant list of movies to watch next year. --Lyall Bush
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