Book: Not the Movie of the Week: Frightening Flops and Fabulous Flicks
Author: Shaun de Waal
Publisher: Tafelberg
FILM reviews are the critic’s bread and butter, his weekly take on whatever the distributors throw his (and our) way.
When you put them together they can seem like a collection of diverse, discrete entities, with little or no relationship to each other.
It is a measure of the quality of Mail & Guardian critic Shaun de Waal’s first collection of reviews, Not the Movie of the Week: Frightening Flops and Fabulous Flicks that the book reads like a unity, the considered opinions of a critic with an academic background who has thought long and hard about the cinema and developed his own philosophy on this relatively new and exciting art form.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with someone or not about a film, so long as you find what he has to say stimulating and enjoyable. Based on that criterion, De Waal is someone with whom a cinephile can pleasurably while away many hours.
The 56 reviews, focusing on films that have been released in this country from 1999 until last year, are divided into six sections ranging from movies on South Africa, the family, sex, religion, Hollywood and period pieces.
In addition, there is an interesting commentary section with further details on some of the reviews as well as hits and misses of the first decade of the noughties and further lists of favourite directors and films.
De Waal’s easy style reveals a keen intelligence and a robust sense of humour.
Describing his reaction to Mel Gibson’s brutal The Passion of the Christ, De Waal comments: “My constant thought, while watching it, was not ‘Look how much Jesus suffered for my sins’ but ‘Oh, kill him already’.” - Cape Tonight