Harlan Ellison's Watching
by Harlan Ellison

Underwood-Miller, Los Angeles; 1989

  
Harlan Ellison is a thoughtfully opinionated critic, and an emotionally powerful storyteller. These are roughly separate endeavors, so liking or disliking his fiction is not a sure indicator of whether you'll appreciate his critiques of books, films, or television. Harlan Ellison's Watching is a book of movie criticism: some early movie-going nostalgia, some reviews from the 1960s and 1970s, but about two-thirds were originally in his column in Fantasy and Science Fiction from 1984 through 1989. Most of the films discussed are science fiction or fantasy, but not all.

Is Harlan Ellison's Watching a small-print guide to movies to look for, like Leonard Maltin's? No. Although Ellison makes plenty of recommendations, it's more a guide to movies to avoid. (There's a thorough index.) Or if you've seen these bad ones, what you should understand about why they don't work right on the screen. And what is even more fun, Ellison with his Hollywood writer's inside perspective, tells you how the bad ones got made that way: institutional failings of Hollywood film companies, and artistic failures of directors.

According to Ellison, both the companies and the directors, even if thoughtful or lucky enough to secure a well-written script, will ensure it is rewritten into murky confusion. Action, faces, special effects — all are more important than a well-plotted story which is worth watching. As for values, man — get real.

Although Ellison was writing for Star Trek at the beginning, he has biting analyses of Star Trek's development as well as of Star Wars. He does praise a fair number of films, maybe not the ones you'd expect; but praise is often in passing as he savages unworthily successful films. Ellison kicks ass and names names. He says why he feels the way he does, and there's a lot to learn from him.

So Harlan Ellison's Watching is erratic as a guide to the good, what there is of it, and reasonably devastating when he turns his critical artillery on the legions of bad. It's an entertaining book even if you haven't yet seen many of the movies, or don't know much about how Hollywood works.

It's lucky we get any good movies at all.

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© 2006 Robert Wilfred Franson

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