As readers of epinions movie reviews know, Alex Diaz-Granados has an engaging personal style of writing about Hollywood movies. Born in 1963, he grew up in Miami a member of the “Star Wars generation.” One of the vignettes of formative movie experiences before the selection of epinions movie reviews in his new book Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer recalls seeing “Star Wars” when he was fourteen.

For me “Star Wars generation” is a pejorative. I recognize the movie watchers as well as movie makers are products of particular times. Alex is explicitly mindful of the latter (zeitgeist) phenomenon and not unaware of the former (expectation shaping). He begins with a “popcorn movie” from the year of his birth, “The Great Escape,” which he saw in Bogotá when he was six, as well as westerns and war movies his father watched on tv, often starring John Wayne.

The reviews he has chosen to edit and print are substantial, informative, and engaging. He lacks the inclination as well as the killer instincts for gleeful evisceration of really bad movies (contrast Jacksommersby hereon), writing in sorrow about such failures as “1941” and the three sequels to “Airport.” He did not import his number of star ratings, so I had to epinions to see where the original “Airport” fell on the good/bad/very bad continuum. (4 must qualify as “good.”)

At least on Kindle, Save does not have a table of contents (the hardcopy book does). This means that the Kindle preview provides no information (though some hints) about which movies are discussed within it. I wished for a table of contents with star ratings (I regret not having half-stars here, and would have used them in the table of contents. And yes, a set of nine grades is still reductive, I know!)

The contents, the movies reviewed, are not entirely predictable from the (also reductive) “Star Wars generation” label. There are a lot of insightful, well-written reviews about movies in which I have very little interest. I am sure both that more numerous other readers and potential readers share the guy “Star Wars generation” focus and that hardly anyone of any generation is interested in “Concorde: Airport 77.”

A substantial part of the not very long book is occupied by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg franchises (in both cases with some sequels or prequels directed by others. For Lucas (& co,), there is the Star Wars prequel trilogy with what became episode IV (the original Star Wars movie, four Indiana Jones movies, and Jaws), for Spielberg (& co.), Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Empire of the Sun, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jurassic World and its sequel Lost World, Minority Report, Munich, and War of the World. (I wish Alex had chosen to write about The Sugarland Express, The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Amistad and, especially given the dissensus in reactions to it A.I.).

The Lucas and Spielberg movies are intermixed and not in chronological order of their making. (Without looking, I’d guess that they are in the order in which the reviews were written, an order I find of no interest, since the first ones were written well, so there is no development on display. That is a compliment, though it has a backhanded sound!).

The final half dozen movies are in some sense “classics.” Instead of using that word, Alex opted for movies “that have stood the test of time. I am not convinced that “The Bridge on the River Kwai” and “Shakespeare in Love” have stood the test of time. It is not necessary to agree with a critic to enjoy and/or be stimulated by what s/he says (I grew up on Pauline Kael, with whose judgments I frequently disagreed; Alex on Siskel/Ebert, who were often most interesting when they disagreed), and Alex’s recent enthusiasm (an epinion published this year) for “Shakespeare in Love” provides interesting reading. (He does not comment on what I found impossible to believe in it: Gwyneth Paltrow passing to Will Shakespeare or anyone else as a boy. Indeed, his review hardly mentions her Oscar-winning performance.)

Similary, while addressing the racism of  “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” he does not mention what I find its greatest silliness: the notion that Japanese could not engineer a bridge (nuclear plant safety, yes; but there are more than a few bridges in Japan that somehow managed to be built without British know-how). At least he mentions that the real (not wooden) bridge had many Thai casualties. I agree with him that the movie would be better if it were shorter, and, in particular, shorn of William Holden’s phony love interest. (I don’t understand the American commando’s motivations including getting out of the POW camp: he was hoping to get out of his mission of blowing up the bridge alive, but was not in captivity himself.)

As Deborah Tannen taught me in You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, guys show that they take something seriously by finding points about which to differ. Being a guy, I find monolithic solidarity boring. To show that I take Save Me the Aisle Seat seriously, I will mention that Sergio Leone did not choose to film in Europe (Spain) in preference to the US West. Rather, until the international success of his movies starring Clint Eastwood, Leone was constrained by financial considerations to do so.

I know that there are hordes of fanboys of John Williams, and will not condescend further about that, but will express disappointment that Alex ignores the contribution of Elmer Bernstein’s music to “To Kill a Mockingbird."

Though the spacing of some lines was awkward (as hereon!), only one typo jumped out at me: it's Max von Sydow. (There may be more; I usually see what should be on the page rather than what is...)

The other two standers are “Fantasia” and “Gone with the Wind.” Alex cogently addresses the racism of GWTW. He admires the pluck of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara less than some, which is just fine s far as I’m concerned. After all, she gets comeuppances (not just the famous, “Frankly my dear…”).

©2012, Stephen O. Murray

Thanks to Stef for adding this to the database for review.

Recommended: Yes