david thomson Tagged Articles at Cinematical

After hearing one too many people go on about how bizarre film critic David Thomson's new unauthorized biography of Nicole Kidman is, I decided to blow through it. Turns out the book is hardly a biography at all, but something so oddly, intrusively personal and fetishistic that it seems like a translation of some French film theorist's meditation on screen beauty. Thomson mostly sticks to one source -- himself. He makes no effort to hide being in love with Kidman, and devotes paragraph after paragraph to describing her face, bone structure, legs, and "long white thighs," which are "the hands on life's clock, whirling onward." The book contains little information that wasn't already public, except when it comes to Kidman's sex scenes, which are chronicled to a degree that it's hard to imagine where the unsourced information was obtained. Thomson claims, for instance, that Eyes Wide Shut contained sex scenes that were shot but left out, including a "detailed" cunnilingus scene for which Kidman wore a pubic wig. He also explicitly reminds us (and you can imagine him licking his lips as he does so) that Kidman was paid for doing such dirty things.

The book is mostly chaptered by recent film titles, with the bulk of Kidman's early work left undiscussed; don't pick it up if you're expecting insight into the making of Watch the Shadows Dance or Days of Thunder. The recent films that make the grade, in Thomson's opinion, are Moulin Rouge, The Hours and to some extent, Dogville, while some like The Others come in for sharp derision. In each case, Thomson's internal monologue is poured out onto the page, and his recollections of each film, invariably focused on Kidman's body, get tangled up with the impressions of his more detached critical eye. Endless pages are devoted to deconstructing Kidman's look in Birth, for example. His fixation on that particular film is so bottomless that he invents alternate scenes and storylines that could have improved the film, including one in which we see Kidman menstruating in a bathroom and noticing her menstrual blood "as if it were something new, dramatic, but guilt-making."

Film critic and historian David Thomson had an interesting piece up yesterday in the Los Angeles Times on the history of the Oscars and the Academy - and what he would do to make the Oscars more relevant to today's audience. For starters, he'd toss out the awards for some of my favorite categories - Foreign, Documentary, and Short - along with the craftsy stuff like costume design and art direction.

I don't agree with him on that bit, but I do think his next suggestion has some merit: play up the importance of the technical categories. Celebrate people like Gary Demos, who "did much of the theoretical work in computer imagery"; Demos received an honorary Oscar on February 18 for his tremendous contribution to computer animation, but you won't see him in the front row come Oscar night.