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    Harlan Ellison's Watching: Essays and Criticism
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    Harlan Ellison's Watching: Essays and Criticism
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    Harlan Ellison's Watching: Essays and Criticism
    Ebook802 pages10 hours

    Harlan Ellison's Watching: Essays and Criticism

    By Harlan Ellison

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “An enjoyable, irascible collection” of smart and sometimes-scathing film criticism from a famously candid author (Library Journal).
     
    Everyone’s a critic, especially in the digital age—but no one takes on the movies like multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison. Renowned both for fiction (A Boy and His Dog) and pop-culture commentary (The Glass Teat), Ellison offers in this collection twenty-five years’ worth of essays and film criticism.
     
    It’s pure, raw, unapologetic opinion. Star Wars? “Luke Skywalker is a nerd and Darth Vader sucks runny eggs.” Big Trouble in Little China? “A cheerfully blathering live-action cartoon that will give you release from the real pressures of your basically dreary lives.” Despite working within the industry himself, Ellison never learned how to lie. So punches go unpulled, the impersonal becomes personal, and sometimes even the critics get critiqued, as he shares his views on Pauline Kael or Siskel and Ebert. Ultimately, it’s a wild journey through the cinematic landscape, touching on everything from Fellini to the Friday the 13th franchise.
     
    As Leonard Maltin writes in his preface, “I don’t know how valuable it is to learn Harlan Ellison’s opinion of this film or that, but I do know that reading an Ellison essay is gong to be provocative, infuriating, hilarious, or often a combination of the above. It is never time wasted. . . . Let me assure you, Harlan Ellison is never dull.”
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 10, 2015
    ISBN9781497604117

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    Reviews for Harlan Ellison's Watching

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    • 4/5
      Disclaimer: I only read his essays about Lynch's Dune.Written during the period Ellison was the in house reviewer for Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, his deity like status within SF gave him free reign. Much like the D.F.Wallace essays about a Lynch film I reviewed recently, the author's killer wit and occasional genius are on display, but he also was in desperate need of an editor. Through self-aggrandizing diarrhea we can extract that Ellison thought highly of Dune, forgiving its operatic bulging due to the nature of the subject matter (writing the screenplay for which Ellison turned down years earlier). Only he and Newsweek's David Ansen gave the film anything close to positive marks. Ellison's out: it's long and complicated and subtle so naturally everyone who loved Star Wars would hate Dune.He also gives a great conspiracy theory as to why the film failed, and hilarious anecdotes about the studio buffoonery that took place just before the film's release. I don't want to ruin the fun, so you'll have to investigate for yourself.
    • 5/5
      Ostensibly, this is a book of film reviews. And it starts out that way. But even in those more straightforward reviews, you see something more going on. Not just a description of movies, but a description of what movies are about. And more and more you learn how movies are actually made – and destroyed. The book starts well. Sure, there are some older movies discussed that almost no one remembers (and by this, I don’t mean the newer generation losing the classics – I mean movies that showed up for a brief time, then burned out, that few, if any, of us recall), but that is not important to the message. And the book really hits it stride when the essays reprinted from Fantasy & Science Fiction appear. This is when Ellison truly begins to rip away the façade of movie-making, movie-watching, and the fans. As usual, this gets him in trouble (as indicated in some of the later essays where he quotes some of the letters he’s received) but then, the truth shall set them free or tick them off. Of particular interest is one of the later essays that looks to be a forerunner of his famous “Xenogenesis” essay – a description of just how bad fans can be.This book is fascinating. Ellison’s writing is at its strongest, using all the tricks he has honed over the years to reach sometimes startlingly (to those of us not in the business) conclusions. I can’t agree with every review, but that isn’t the point. The learning, the insight, the discovery, the joy of reading – those are the points.