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Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?
One of the world’s most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital—and post-9/11—age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema’s most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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About the author
J. Hoberman
40 books81 followersAuthor bio from Verso Press:
J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.
J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
July 6, 2013
In the dimly-recalled tradition of Emily Litella, for some reason I thought this would be about the dawning age of future cinema, or some kind of projection, an appraisal of the possibilities of narrative form in the 21st century. Or at very least some kind of intriguing rant, about where we are now, and whether it matters.
The prescient and intriguing quote that the author places in the front of the book is this :
If you've ever wondered about whether those yawning, annihilated cityscapes or crowds of millions that recede all the way to the movie horizon were real-- both so important to the "apocalyptic" film-world of the American blockbuster-- don't bother wondering, they're not. And generally, if seen twice, a child can tell that they're fake.
Even for fans of the photographic cinema, where things actually have to exist before they find their way into movies, this is generally not an issue, really. Until it is, and until we see it spread into every nook and cranny of the film experience. Which isn't film, of course, anymore. Into the digital motion-picture, then. A cloud shadows the trees, a branch wavers in the wind, a bird lands on the branch-- was this a lucky happenstance that just appeared during shooting, or was all of it dialed in carefully in some South-Asian postproduction suite ? (Bet against lucky here.)
All interesting questions, all worthy of discussion and analysis. And all in some other book. The bulk of J. Hoberman's "Film After Film" doesn't really discuss this, since it's more a compilation of his movie reviews, pasted into a political/ historical context of the early 2ooo's. I suppose if you're after a dissection of how the commercial studio product of that era applied itself to the discontents of the Bush administration, and wanted an extremely Hoberman-centric view of same, this would be the ideal volume. Or if you're a left-leaning aficionado of the ambiguities of the War On Terror (and I have to say there is schadenfreude and bitter savor in every vitriolic absurdity of that era)... you might want to pick up this book.
As it is, as per Ms. Litella, "never mind".
The prescient and intriguing quote that the author places in the front of the book is this :
"I predict that all movies will be animated or computer-generated within 15 years."...which to an ever-increasing extent, they are. Not entirely, of course, but when and wherever a producer can convince a director that no one will notice, or that audiences are singlemindedly focused on foreground, not bits of hardly-discernible digitalia in the background.
Bruce Goldstein, Village Voice, 1999
If you've ever wondered about whether those yawning, annihilated cityscapes or crowds of millions that recede all the way to the movie horizon were real-- both so important to the "apocalyptic" film-world of the American blockbuster-- don't bother wondering, they're not. And generally, if seen twice, a child can tell that they're fake.
Even for fans of the photographic cinema, where things actually have to exist before they find their way into movies, this is generally not an issue, really. Until it is, and until we see it spread into every nook and cranny of the film experience. Which isn't film, of course, anymore. Into the digital motion-picture, then. A cloud shadows the trees, a branch wavers in the wind, a bird lands on the branch-- was this a lucky happenstance that just appeared during shooting, or was all of it dialed in carefully in some South-Asian postproduction suite ? (Bet against lucky here.)
All interesting questions, all worthy of discussion and analysis. And all in some other book. The bulk of J. Hoberman's "Film After Film" doesn't really discuss this, since it's more a compilation of his movie reviews, pasted into a political/ historical context of the early 2ooo's. I suppose if you're after a dissection of how the commercial studio product of that era applied itself to the discontents of the Bush administration, and wanted an extremely Hoberman-centric view of same, this would be the ideal volume. Or if you're a left-leaning aficionado of the ambiguities of the War On Terror (and I have to say there is schadenfreude and bitter savor in every vitriolic absurdity of that era)... you might want to pick up this book.
As it is, as per Ms. Litella, "never mind".
October 3, 2024
A little narrow in its scope, the book should have been named Film After 9/11 as most if not all its existence is predicated on the American cultural fallout from the Event. Still it’s a great compilation of writing done during the immediate aftermath and the years after, leading up to the 2008 election. Some of the material has been very well documented (like the bloodlust of Americans fueling the onslaught of so called ‘torture-porn’ movies of the 2000’s) and some very illuminating coverage on oft forgotten conservative productions that attempted (and succeeded) in creating the myth of the “real president” which at the end of the day is just Reagan parts 1,2 and 3.
He usually post scripts these articles with current day (2012) thoughts but these are rather short and usually act as a segue between articles. Seems like a wasted opportunity to not counterbalance raw first impressions with thoughts vindicated by time. It’s still a worthwhile read if not for the third part which is an attempt to build a syllabus of 21st century films. Most of them went largely unseen and/or dismissed when they came out but Hoberman makes great points as to why the films he chose are representative of our time. Going to have a fun time picking off from the half I haven’t seen.
He usually post scripts these articles with current day (2012) thoughts but these are rather short and usually act as a segue between articles. Seems like a wasted opportunity to not counterbalance raw first impressions with thoughts vindicated by time. It’s still a worthwhile read if not for the third part which is an attempt to build a syllabus of 21st century films. Most of them went largely unseen and/or dismissed when they came out but Hoberman makes great points as to why the films he chose are representative of our time. Going to have a fun time picking off from the half I haven’t seen.
Read
July 17, 2021I have seen almost none of these movies but I did enjoy many of these reviews.
May 29, 2025
My review in the Arts Fuse:
It may be only a movie, but in his book Film after Film, former Village Voice writer J. Hoberman proves he isn’t just a movie critic.
Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? by J. Hoberman. Verso, 296 pages, $24.95.
By Peter Keough.
It never fails: whenever a critic tries to put the latest Hollywood product into a broader context, in particular by demonstrating how it might reflect deeper issues brooding in the communal subconscious, snobs and fanboys and other scoffers will counter with the irrefutable, meaningless rejoinder—“it’s only a movie.” It might be some consolation that Aristotle might well have been rebuked by the statement “it’s only a play.” Or that Siegfried Kracauer probably had his share of sneerers when he showed how the cinema of Weimar Germany prefigured the Third Reich in his masterpiece From Caligari to Hitler.
On the other hand, when pundits do take it into their heads that some blockbuster movie has more significance than just being a product marketed for mass consumption, they invariably turn it into fodder for their own ideological agenda. An amusing example of this occurred last summer with the release of The Dark Knight Rises. Left wing critics condemned it as agitprop for fascist capitalism. Right-wingers, Rush Limbaugh most notably, denounced it as pinko propaganda. Both versions shriveled into inconsequentiality when a gunman entered the jammed Century Theater in Aurora, Colorado at the film’s midnight premiere screening and systematically shot 12 people to death, wounding 58 others. Once again the nightmare of the real confounded anything that Hollywood could throw on the screen.
In the cacophony of strident, numskulled discourse that followed, one voice of clarity was missing. After serving for almost 35 years as their most prominent, clear-headed, and entertaining film critic, J. Hoberman had been canned in January by the Village Voice (he did write a piece on The Dark Knight Rises as a freelancer for the Artinfo.com website). However, he did shed some light on that film’s predecessor, The Dark Knight (2008), in a Voice cover story entitled “What We Learned About the Movies in This Summer’s Movies” (an example of his insight: “Smeared lipstick notwithstanding, one of the scariest things about the Joker is that he has no respect for money”).
The latter is one of the many brilliant pieces included in his new book, Film After Film: Or What Became of 21st Century Cinema? Tantalizingly brief, breathlessly urgent, and necessarily inconclusive, it’s his fourth such volume, joining The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New Press, 2003), The Magic Hour: Film at Fin de Siècle (Temple University Press, 2003), and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (The New Press, 2011). Together they examine the shadow history of our times as manifested on the big screen.
Or, as is increasingly the case these days, on the little screen. “[T]here are two–or even two and a half–reasons,” Hoberman writes in the book’s introduction, “to consider the possibility that, since, 2001, the nature and development of the motion picture medium has become irrevocably altered.” One of those events was historical: 9/11. The other was mechanical: “the shift from the photographic to the digital.”
The latter change Hoberman discusses in provocative depth and detail in the first section of the book, “A Post-Photographic Cinema,” expanded from an essay he wrote for Artforum magazine. In it, he revisits Andre Bazin’s notion of “Total Cinema,” which posited the ideal goal of the film medium as the fullest possible representation of reality, with every technological advance—sound, color, 3D—serving to advance that purpose. CGI and other computer wizardry would seem to be welcome advances in pursuit of that goal. But, as Hoberman points out, Bazin was thinking of film as a photographic medium, in which the image is a direct imprint of an external reality. Rather than represent reality, this new kind of “film after film” ignores it.
“Bazin had imagined cinema as the objective ‘recreation of the world,’” Hoberman argues. “Yet digital image-making precludes the necessity of having the world, or even a really existing subject, before the camera—let alone the need for a camera.”
Neo (or might that be all of us?) in THE MATRIX — the “Desert of the Real” arrives.
So perhaps the rabid naysayers are right—it is only a movie after all—and Hoberman pursues this line of investigation by analyzing one of the top fanboy movies of all time, The Matrix (1999), with its premise of a “Desert of the Real,” as described by Jean Baudrillard, that lies beneath the appearances of real life. It is “‘a real without origin or reality,’” explains Hoberman, quoting the French philosopher, “which might be one way to characterize CGI, as well as The Matrix itself.”
So what of 9/11, that seemingly irrefutable reality, the other event that irrevocably altered the nature of cinema and pretty much everything else? Hoberman poses hard questions: “Did the history-changing shock of this cinematic event plunge the nascent twenty-first century into an alternative universe, one in which motion picture fairy tales actually did come true? Or was it rather a red pill [the disillusioning tablet taken in The Matrix] that parted the veil on a new reality that already existed? The 9/11 Event was understood by some filmmakers as a horrible unintended consequence of their medium and taken by others as a challenge to the notion of the movies as a medium with a privileged relationship to the real.”
In other words, had cinema’s estrangement from its supposed subject somehow encouraged a mentality that describes catastrophic experiences as being “like a movie,” a paranoid consciousness that sets up conspiracy theorists to deny the evidence of their senses and common sense and insist that 9/11 never really happened or, more recently, that the horrific damage done by the Marathon bombers was faked? Hoberman ponders these puzzles in discussions of films ranging from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), from Pixar’s WALL-E (2008) to Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). As Hoberman would be the first to admit, these are not challenging cultural questions that can be answered after only a decade into the new century, let alone in a 46-page essay.
The bulk of his book does not directly discuss this notion of “film after film.” Instead, in the remaining two parts—“A Chronicle of the Bush Years” and “Notes Toward a Syllabus”—the title of the book takes on a different meaning. Here Hoberman reviews one film after another, at times expanding his reactions into the inevitable “think piece,” with each under-deadline dispatch from the film front illustrating, in varying degrees, his central theses. As such, these parts of the book are at times digressive or repetitive, but all express the urgency, intelligence, and passion of a first class critic in action. As he explains in the book’s introduction, “The 750 word weekly film review is a specific journalistic form: over a period of months and years these topical short pieces document a writer’s attempt to make sense of the ongoing flux of movies amid the ongoing flux of events.”
But why can’t you just enjoy them? So goes the usual follow-up to “it’s only a movie.” As these reviews demonstrate, how can you fully enjoy them otherwise? The movies discussed in Part Three, “Notes toward a Syllabus,” certainly are more rewarding in light of Hoberman’s astute analyses. He examines some of the most challenging films of the recent past and illuminates them with verve and incisiveness. Starting in 2001 with the indomitably cryptic Jean-Luc Godard’s beguiling In Praise of Love (“its tragic grandeur is as graspable as running water and as shifty as smoke”) and ending in 2010 with the eternally young, century-old Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica (“for decades now, [he] has been making each movie as though it were his last”), Hoberman should convince any who reasonable doubters (including the rational fanboy or two) that film is indeed an art.
But what of those films that are unabashedly products marketed to the masses to make money? Well, for many critics, that’s where the real fun begins. In Part Two, Hoberman recreates the excitement of a masterful critic fully engaged with the messy flux of movies and events. Though undeniably taking partisan positions, he doesn’t allow his political opinions to distort what he sees but lets them provide a point of view that adds clarity to what otherwise would be the chaos and confusion of the overwrought and ephemeral.
A scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s beguiling IN PRAISE OF LOVE.
Starting with a discussion dated “September 18, 2001” about Hollywood’s frantic adjustment to the post 9/11 world that includes Adorno’s baleful observation that “He who imagines disasters in some ways desires them,” and wrapping up eight years and 140 pages later on “October 15, 2008” with the anticlimactic release of Oliver Stone’s biopic of the soon-to-be ex-President, W, he puts together a breathless, often hilarious, and invariably astute mini-history of the era as discerned in the fantasies manufactured to entertain us. Of necessity, this section of the book touches only tendentiously on the more tightly argued ideas of the first part: the disparate pieces are connected by bold-faced transitional and contextualizing passages (as well as footnotes) that rival those in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for their extensiveness.
Some high points along the way follow:
On the Terminator movies
If it’s Terminator time, there must be a Republican president running for re-election. Appearing unheralded on the eve of the 1984 election, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger robot opera, directed by then unknown James Cameron and featuring the most compelling Frankenstein monster in fifty years, provided a dystopian alternative to the Reaganite ‘new morning.’ Released as Bush I girded his loins in the summer of the New World Order 1991, Cameron’s vastly inflated, post-Desert Storm T2: Judgment Day resurrected the president’s fitness advisor as a kinder, gentler killer cyborg . . . [A]nd now, as the Bush II juggernaut gets ready to roll, der Arnold—once hailed by Time as ‘the most potent symbol’ of Hollywood’s ‘worldwide dominance’—returns to save the world.”
On black presidents in movies
[A]ccording to Hollywood, a black man in the White House signifies disaster. In The Fifth Element (1997), with the entire universe under threat of annihilation, there was Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister; in the more provincial Deep Impact (1998), with a meteor hurtling toward earth, our leader was embodied by Morgan Freeman. Lou Gossett presided over the Christian-fundamentalist Armageddon of Left Behind: World at War (2005), as Danny Glover will over the multi-cataclysms of Roland Emmerich’s upcoming 2012.
Only a movie, indeed. The times and the films haven’t gotten any better, and now we don’t have Hoberman’s weekly wisdom in the Voice to guide us, interpreting the mystifying signs flickered by box office beasts like Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, and all the rest, as they slouch towards Bethlehem (via big-box cineplexes) to be born.
It may be only a movie, but in his book Film after Film, former Village Voice writer J. Hoberman proves he isn’t just a movie critic.
Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema? by J. Hoberman. Verso, 296 pages, $24.95.
By Peter Keough.
It never fails: whenever a critic tries to put the latest Hollywood product into a broader context, in particular by demonstrating how it might reflect deeper issues brooding in the communal subconscious, snobs and fanboys and other scoffers will counter with the irrefutable, meaningless rejoinder—“it’s only a movie.” It might be some consolation that Aristotle might well have been rebuked by the statement “it’s only a play.” Or that Siegfried Kracauer probably had his share of sneerers when he showed how the cinema of Weimar Germany prefigured the Third Reich in his masterpiece From Caligari to Hitler.
On the other hand, when pundits do take it into their heads that some blockbuster movie has more significance than just being a product marketed for mass consumption, they invariably turn it into fodder for their own ideological agenda. An amusing example of this occurred last summer with the release of The Dark Knight Rises. Left wing critics condemned it as agitprop for fascist capitalism. Right-wingers, Rush Limbaugh most notably, denounced it as pinko propaganda. Both versions shriveled into inconsequentiality when a gunman entered the jammed Century Theater in Aurora, Colorado at the film’s midnight premiere screening and systematically shot 12 people to death, wounding 58 others. Once again the nightmare of the real confounded anything that Hollywood could throw on the screen.
In the cacophony of strident, numskulled discourse that followed, one voice of clarity was missing. After serving for almost 35 years as their most prominent, clear-headed, and entertaining film critic, J. Hoberman had been canned in January by the Village Voice (he did write a piece on The Dark Knight Rises as a freelancer for the Artinfo.com website). However, he did shed some light on that film’s predecessor, The Dark Knight (2008), in a Voice cover story entitled “What We Learned About the Movies in This Summer’s Movies” (an example of his insight: “Smeared lipstick notwithstanding, one of the scariest things about the Joker is that he has no respect for money”).
The latter is one of the many brilliant pieces included in his new book, Film After Film: Or What Became of 21st Century Cinema? Tantalizingly brief, breathlessly urgent, and necessarily inconclusive, it’s his fourth such volume, joining The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New Press, 2003), The Magic Hour: Film at Fin de Siècle (Temple University Press, 2003), and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (The New Press, 2011). Together they examine the shadow history of our times as manifested on the big screen.
Or, as is increasingly the case these days, on the little screen. “[T]here are two–or even two and a half–reasons,” Hoberman writes in the book’s introduction, “to consider the possibility that, since, 2001, the nature and development of the motion picture medium has become irrevocably altered.” One of those events was historical: 9/11. The other was mechanical: “the shift from the photographic to the digital.”
The latter change Hoberman discusses in provocative depth and detail in the first section of the book, “A Post-Photographic Cinema,” expanded from an essay he wrote for Artforum magazine. In it, he revisits Andre Bazin’s notion of “Total Cinema,” which posited the ideal goal of the film medium as the fullest possible representation of reality, with every technological advance—sound, color, 3D—serving to advance that purpose. CGI and other computer wizardry would seem to be welcome advances in pursuit of that goal. But, as Hoberman points out, Bazin was thinking of film as a photographic medium, in which the image is a direct imprint of an external reality. Rather than represent reality, this new kind of “film after film” ignores it.
“Bazin had imagined cinema as the objective ‘recreation of the world,’” Hoberman argues. “Yet digital image-making precludes the necessity of having the world, or even a really existing subject, before the camera—let alone the need for a camera.”
Neo (or might that be all of us?) in THE MATRIX — the “Desert of the Real” arrives.
So perhaps the rabid naysayers are right—it is only a movie after all—and Hoberman pursues this line of investigation by analyzing one of the top fanboy movies of all time, The Matrix (1999), with its premise of a “Desert of the Real,” as described by Jean Baudrillard, that lies beneath the appearances of real life. It is “‘a real without origin or reality,’” explains Hoberman, quoting the French philosopher, “which might be one way to characterize CGI, as well as The Matrix itself.”
So what of 9/11, that seemingly irrefutable reality, the other event that irrevocably altered the nature of cinema and pretty much everything else? Hoberman poses hard questions: “Did the history-changing shock of this cinematic event plunge the nascent twenty-first century into an alternative universe, one in which motion picture fairy tales actually did come true? Or was it rather a red pill [the disillusioning tablet taken in The Matrix] that parted the veil on a new reality that already existed? The 9/11 Event was understood by some filmmakers as a horrible unintended consequence of their medium and taken by others as a challenge to the notion of the movies as a medium with a privileged relationship to the real.”
In other words, had cinema’s estrangement from its supposed subject somehow encouraged a mentality that describes catastrophic experiences as being “like a movie,” a paranoid consciousness that sets up conspiracy theorists to deny the evidence of their senses and common sense and insist that 9/11 never really happened or, more recently, that the horrific damage done by the Marathon bombers was faked? Hoberman ponders these puzzles in discussions of films ranging from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), from Pixar’s WALL-E (2008) to Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). As Hoberman would be the first to admit, these are not challenging cultural questions that can be answered after only a decade into the new century, let alone in a 46-page essay.
The bulk of his book does not directly discuss this notion of “film after film.” Instead, in the remaining two parts—“A Chronicle of the Bush Years” and “Notes Toward a Syllabus”—the title of the book takes on a different meaning. Here Hoberman reviews one film after another, at times expanding his reactions into the inevitable “think piece,” with each under-deadline dispatch from the film front illustrating, in varying degrees, his central theses. As such, these parts of the book are at times digressive or repetitive, but all express the urgency, intelligence, and passion of a first class critic in action. As he explains in the book’s introduction, “The 750 word weekly film review is a specific journalistic form: over a period of months and years these topical short pieces document a writer’s attempt to make sense of the ongoing flux of movies amid the ongoing flux of events.”
But why can’t you just enjoy them? So goes the usual follow-up to “it’s only a movie.” As these reviews demonstrate, how can you fully enjoy them otherwise? The movies discussed in Part Three, “Notes toward a Syllabus,” certainly are more rewarding in light of Hoberman’s astute analyses. He examines some of the most challenging films of the recent past and illuminates them with verve and incisiveness. Starting in 2001 with the indomitably cryptic Jean-Luc Godard’s beguiling In Praise of Love (“its tragic grandeur is as graspable as running water and as shifty as smoke”) and ending in 2010 with the eternally young, century-old Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica (“for decades now, [he] has been making each movie as though it were his last”), Hoberman should convince any who reasonable doubters (including the rational fanboy or two) that film is indeed an art.
But what of those films that are unabashedly products marketed to the masses to make money? Well, for many critics, that’s where the real fun begins. In Part Two, Hoberman recreates the excitement of a masterful critic fully engaged with the messy flux of movies and events. Though undeniably taking partisan positions, he doesn’t allow his political opinions to distort what he sees but lets them provide a point of view that adds clarity to what otherwise would be the chaos and confusion of the overwrought and ephemeral.
A scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s beguiling IN PRAISE OF LOVE.
Starting with a discussion dated “September 18, 2001” about Hollywood’s frantic adjustment to the post 9/11 world that includes Adorno’s baleful observation that “He who imagines disasters in some ways desires them,” and wrapping up eight years and 140 pages later on “October 15, 2008” with the anticlimactic release of Oliver Stone’s biopic of the soon-to-be ex-President, W, he puts together a breathless, often hilarious, and invariably astute mini-history of the era as discerned in the fantasies manufactured to entertain us. Of necessity, this section of the book touches only tendentiously on the more tightly argued ideas of the first part: the disparate pieces are connected by bold-faced transitional and contextualizing passages (as well as footnotes) that rival those in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for their extensiveness.
Some high points along the way follow:
On the Terminator movies
If it’s Terminator time, there must be a Republican president running for re-election. Appearing unheralded on the eve of the 1984 election, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger robot opera, directed by then unknown James Cameron and featuring the most compelling Frankenstein monster in fifty years, provided a dystopian alternative to the Reaganite ‘new morning.’ Released as Bush I girded his loins in the summer of the New World Order 1991, Cameron’s vastly inflated, post-Desert Storm T2: Judgment Day resurrected the president’s fitness advisor as a kinder, gentler killer cyborg . . . [A]nd now, as the Bush II juggernaut gets ready to roll, der Arnold—once hailed by Time as ‘the most potent symbol’ of Hollywood’s ‘worldwide dominance’—returns to save the world.”
On black presidents in movies
[A]ccording to Hollywood, a black man in the White House signifies disaster. In The Fifth Element (1997), with the entire universe under threat of annihilation, there was Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister; in the more provincial Deep Impact (1998), with a meteor hurtling toward earth, our leader was embodied by Morgan Freeman. Lou Gossett presided over the Christian-fundamentalist Armageddon of Left Behind: World at War (2005), as Danny Glover will over the multi-cataclysms of Roland Emmerich’s upcoming 2012.
Only a movie, indeed. The times and the films haven’t gotten any better, and now we don’t have Hoberman’s weekly wisdom in the Voice to guide us, interpreting the mystifying signs flickered by box office beasts like Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Man of Steel, and all the rest, as they slouch towards Bethlehem (via big-box cineplexes) to be born.
March 5, 2020
So close to five stars! Loved this. Saving the final section for when I can catch up on all his syllabus movies
Read
January 28, 2015"A vulgar Marxist might have noted that as Batman is the alter-ego of the richest man in Gotham City, his “law” was the protection of capital."
I cannot understand these non-vulgar types! So, only you have managed to reach the sophisticated, thesaurus-aided, adjective-abundant, not-shallow-but-deep understanding of the movie. Is it so hard to accept the significance of the obvious?
If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not." Of course, he is not even pretending to be a real Marxist at all, but just equating Marxism with vulgarity in toto.
I cannot understand these non-vulgar types! So, only you have managed to reach the sophisticated, thesaurus-aided, adjective-abundant, not-shallow-but-deep understanding of the movie. Is it so hard to accept the significance of the obvious?
If you want to show that your version of Marxism is better than somebody else’s, the quickest way to do so is to call the other version vulgar. One’s own version is nuanced, sophisticated, subtle, erudite, philosophically rich – all the things the vulgar is not." Of course, he is not even pretending to be a real Marxist at all, but just equating Marxism with vulgarity in toto.
September 2, 2021
J. Hoberman's collection of previously published film reviews and essays about the first decade of the 21st century (with new footnotes and connecting passages) is broken into three sections. The first part concerns the then-current technology and what it means for "film" when the celluloid image is replaced by a digital one. The second section chronicles the Bush II years, with an emphasis on 9/11 and the War on Terror (or as Borat calls it, "George Bush's War of Terror"), via reviews of mostly mainstream Hollywood films and political documentaries that directly reflect or comment on this period in the United States' history, with new material between each essay and review that turns the separate pieces into a long, unified, single work. The third section tackles a more globally varied group of independent, avant-garde/experimental, and art films (plus one art installation and the Beijing Olympics' opening ceremony) released between 2001 and 2011 that Hoberman views as aesthetically, formally, and essentially 21st century works. The book gets off to an uneven start with an opening section full of evaluations of then-current technologies, examples of films that were then a big part of the cultural conversation but have since faded, and predictions that don't quite land or land too obviously. I'm reading this section of early 2000s writing in 2021, so it's easy to judge it too harshly, but, fortunately, Hoberman is a much better historian and chronicler of the present than he is a prognosticator. The remaining two sections showcase him at his best as both an essayist on the confluence of politics and entertainment/culture/image and as a reviewer of film as an art form.
October 15, 2021
Hoberman's reflections on W-era film culture and the hegemony of the digital over the photographic isn't quite the extraordinary and sweeping accomplishment of the Dream Life trilogy, but he gets something very right about the vibe of post 9/11 movies in an area where the photochemical connection between the screen and the real world was decisively severed. The selections in the "Notes Toward a Syllabus" section are uniformly wonderful and I appreciate Hoberman's continued cheerleading for avant-garde film artists as well as his unwavering adherence to his own weird fetish objects (like Southland Tales!). Good, quick read.
December 2, 2020
Whilst The Big Screen gave a basic overview of the entire span film history, Film After Film focuses on film from the first decade of the 21st century.
His approach reminded me a bit of the Foucault literary criticism approach. He analyses a few of the decades biggest and most popular films within the zeitgeist of when they were released. So it comes off as a history of the decade through the blockbusters of the time. I liked this approach and found it a good read, but it does already feel dated 10 years later.
His approach reminded me a bit of the Foucault literary criticism approach. He analyses a few of the decades biggest and most popular films within the zeitgeist of when they were released. So it comes off as a history of the decade through the blockbusters of the time. I liked this approach and found it a good read, but it does already feel dated 10 years later.
October 8, 2024
This was a tough one to get through. I’ll admit it - definitely didn’t feel smart enough to understand the sentences the author strung together and that made it difficult to read. This is the kind of film criticism made for people that have seen video installations at museums and art galleries and I am not that guy. The movies I had seen that were referenced in this book were fun to read about but I can’t recall what my favorite part of this book was.
My brother got me this book for Christmas. If anyone asks - I loved it!
My brother got me this book for Christmas. If anyone asks - I loved it!
July 1, 2019
Wonderfully eye opening criticism. Essential!
November 6, 2020
nice writing hobie
March 8, 2025
So much 9/11 in this
February 21, 2021
Borrowed this from my local library and enjoyed it immensely. There are some lessons from it that have long-lingered, and anything that leaves a lasting impression is certainly worth looking at.
July 14, 2014
To be honest I read two of the three parts of this book. I believe the last third is comprised of the actual movie reviews that are edited or reviewed in the first two sections and I never saw one of the films reviewed in that section. The first section of this work is a summary of the film theory that the critic uses and the second section is a collection of his film reviews from the first decade of this millennium. His theory and his reviews are very sociopolitical and quite focused on the Iraq war. I found the reviews where they referred to movies that I had watched were well worth the time to read. The theory as most film theory leaves me in a bemused shock. Film as object or as new social real are to me quite slippery thoughts.
I'm glad to have read the book. The essays remind me that the USA has, as it did in Vietnam, created another world tragedy that the country will have difficulty addressing.
I'm glad to have read the book. The essays remind me that the USA has, as it did in Vietnam, created another world tragedy that the country will have difficulty addressing.
March 19, 2013
"I believe in the importance of remembering where we've been, and understanding our past. Furthermore, I believe our recent past holds just as much value as our distant past. Film After Film does an admirable job of summing things up, hopefully in ways that don't let us forget.
And if we do, the book has gone to great lengths to list the films we can watch if ever we need reminders..."
I reviewed this book in full on my movie site, The Matinee. Check out the full post here:
http://www.thematinee.ca/21stcenturyb...
And if we do, the book has gone to great lengths to list the films we can watch if ever we need reminders..."
I reviewed this book in full on my movie site, The Matinee. Check out the full post here:
http://www.thematinee.ca/21stcenturyb...
March 11, 2015
Judging by the title and very little reading I was expecting a book about the state of cinema today and the changes presented to the industry by digital filmmaking. The first of the three chapters is pretty much that. However, the book is mostly a compilation of reviews and other texts previously published by the author, in which he establishes parallels between movies and their political context (specially the Bush years and the war on Iraq). It is smart and interesting writing, just not quite what I was hoping for.
September 25, 2012
This isn't a review - just a comment/question? Don't publishers use fact-checkers any more? Hoberman is one of our best critics and the book is a worthy addition to his previous books about the films of the 50s and 60s, but there are an awful lot of minor errors in this book. For example: Irving Berlin is credited with the authorship of "America the Beautiful", the lyrics to David Bowie's "Young Americans" are misquoted, and actor Josh Brolin is confused with his father James Brolin.
December 4, 2012
Half scholarly/half pop. film review. A sound premise with smart discussion of digital/film debate, as well as some accessible musings on the ontology of the medium. Spoiled by a second half filled with j-hob's rhetoric-of-review prose.
May 14, 2016
Well written, often funny, film criticism originally published in the Village Voice. All these movies have the backdrop of the Bush years in common. These range from blockbusters to obscure indie titles
July 17, 2012
Review to come . . .
November 5, 2012
rekindled the sense that film was worth watching again...
November 6, 2012
I've now read more than I ever wanted to about In Praise of Love and Southland Tales.
March 10, 2014
The first couple chapters are interesting. All the NYC-centric-Sep-11-Village-Voice stuff is kinda mindnumbingly dull. But I dig the first few chapters, and the little appendix reviews.
July 27, 2013
Some interesting essays on cinema post 9/11, the last section was focused on films I had never heard of, so if you doing have a subscription to Variety or Premiere, you might be lost as well
January 20, 2014
Very heady stuff. I saw a lecture of his two years ago and got my copy signed. Who new that would happen?
April 16, 2017
This book is a collection of criticism of films from this century. Hoberman's unifying themes are primarily about the influence of 9/11 on moviemaking and how stories changed from the Bush years to the Obama years. There is a lot of repetition and I don't completely buy some of the theories. I do think film often reflects our societal values and fears, but I don't think this book succeeds in putting forth a compelling argument.
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