Her comments regarding the problem of the director as anthropologist, and the predominantly white audience's reactions to the film are relevant and valid. In particular the text on paris is burning left a kind of poor aftertaste. I tend to agree with her in what she says, and I wouldn't have thought I'd say this but I think she fails in her intersectional analysis at times. Some of the essays interested me more than others. Hooks loves cinema and that passion comes through in her writing, I loath it and I suspect that might just come through in mine.Īs someone who cares a lot about representation in film, and is a fan of hooks from her other work, I was excited to read this book. If you have made the mistake of wasting part of your life watching American cinema and know any of the films discussed here, I suspect you would get much more out of this book than ultimately I did – reading this book will perhaps also open your eyes to the disgraceful way African Americans, women and poor people are treated in American cinema – you know, as two dimensional ‘extras’ at best. Nothing she said here in the least made me want to track down or see any of these films, if anything it merely reinforced my loathing, but I would be more than happy to listen to her tell me about just about anything all day long. However, bell hooks is a wonderful critic, so it is a delight to read her. So, a book of film criticism focused entirely on American films probably isn’t the most obvious book for me to read. It is important to remember while watching American films that you are supposed to be incredibly stupid, thinking while watching is likely to lead to disappointment, or much, much worse.

For the first, read the book, the second is a street car without desire, and the third is fine until it becomes so daft I wanted to damage the cars of everyone involved in the film, just to let off some steam. Oddly, in the last year I’ve actually seen three, The Great Gatsby, Blue Jasmine and Short Term 12. American films tend to be so boringly predictable, violent, sexist and formulaic that the idea of ‘choosing’ to go to see one just makes me depressed.

It ended up that I had seen one of his films, the one on the life of Capote, but couldn’t really recommend it, I assume his other work was better. When what’s his face died recently from a heroin overdose I honestly had no idea who he was when he suddenly appeared all over my social media feeds. I haven’t seen Reservoir Dogs or anything with Denzel Washington in it, and I haven’t seen a single film by Spike Lee. In the last 20 years or so I have watched probably a dozen American films – two-thirds of which would have been Disney crap with my daughters when they were quite young. I’m really not the audience for this book.

Reel to real bell hooks