Your Top Ten Non-fiction books?

[Madrun Badrun]

I'm reading Guns, Germs and Steel right now and I'l rather loving it, besides the opening which was like a rich white man donating to a black charity so he can tell his friends he's not racist.


Anyways I want some more suggestions on what to get next.  Whiteman, Drinky, Rygar, Malek and Ichi I'm looking at you particularly!

[FlameOfCallandor]

[Flannel Boy]

I'm not making a top ten list. Here are ten books off the top of my head

How To Think Straight About Psychology
The Blank Slate
The Moral Animal
Critiques of God
Man is the Measure
With Good Reason
The Selfish Gene
Blind Watchmaker
A Short History of Nearly Everything     
Utilitarianism and On Liberty

[Ichirou]

I'm swamped at work, but remind me to post here when I get home.

[Madrun Badrun]

Drinky post!

and I'm not sure what time it is in Japaland but this is your reminder Ichi!  I'ma going to bed. 

[Eric P]

i enjoyed last year's The Race Beat which was about how reporters covered the civil rights movement

[Ichirou]

This is Orson Welles, by Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
Sergio Leone: Something to do with Death, by Sir Christopher Frayling
Hitchcock/Truffaut, by Francois Truffaut
Something like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa
The Life of Johnson, by James Boswell
Scorsese on Scorsese, by Martin Scorsese
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind
The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom

This isn't a top ten, it's just the first ten that came to mind.  Lemme know if you find any of those choices useful or if you want more.

[Eric P]

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom
Hitchcock/Truffaut, by Francois Truffaut
Something like an Autobiography, by Akira Kurosawa
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, by Peter Biskind

these are def worth your time

the hitchcock book especially.  if you read it and enjoy it, give a shot at Daniel Spoto's ''The Dark Side of Genius'' and you can read about all the projects that almost made it to the screen (like a collaboration with Nabokov).

if you liked the kurosawa book, check out Emperor and the Wolf, a huge joint biography of Mifune and Kurosawa.  It looks like it's out of print, so check your library.

easy riders, raging bulls is pretty good, but it's also very salacious with quotes like "She was with me, but the whole time she was thinking about Beatty's cock" and the film casts George Lucas as a spured man who once is high art is rejected, he turns down the path of popcorn films as revenge (at least that's how i read it)

[Ichirou]

As far as Hitchcock bios go, I prefer Hitchcock: A life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan.  Much more readable than the Spoto book.

I'd like to reiterate my love for the Sergio Leone bio I posted, Eric P.  I think it's out of print, but you can probably get a used copy thru Amazon.  Great, great book.

And yeah, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is salacious and gossipy.  That's part of why I love it, it sort of indulges in aspects of  Lucas and Spielberg's personal lives that they'd much rather whitewash and have the public forget altogether.

BTW, you're misquoting the book.  It's actually "She was with me, but the whole time she was thinking about Steve McQueen's cock," said by Robert Evans regarding his wife Ali McGraw who was having a steamy affair with McQueen (and eventually married him) on the set of The Getaway while Evans was obliviously working at Paramount.

[Eric P]

BTW, you're misquoting the book.  It's actually "She was with me, but the whole time she was thinking about Steve McQueen's cock," said by Robert Evans regarding his wife Ali McGraw who was having a steamy affair with McQueen (and eventually married him) on the set of The Getaway while Evans was obliviously working at Paramount.

it's been a while since i read it, so i had guessed i was getting it wrong, but mostly right

i have never really watched a lot of Sergio Leone films, so i don't know how interested i'd be in his biography

i really really want to get Tim Lucas's Mario Bava book.  That thing is a MONSTER but it's also $250.

[Ichirou]

Leone only has seven movies.  Gogogo!  And the biography is an amazing read.

I like Mario Bava but I'd be more interested in a book about Sergio Corbucci.  Talk about a guy with an interesting take on the whole spaghetti western thing...and I'd also like to read anything about politics in Italian action movies of the '60s and '70s since it seems they were rife with socialist messages back then.

[Eric P]

That would be an interesting read, though possibly reading a bit about italy in the time period would be helpful.  I read a book about greece in the 70s and it touched on italy a little (where the intersected) but yeah, it wasn't devoted to it at all.

of the few i've seen (fistful of dollars, one other one i can't recall much about, and once upon a time in america) the one that i liked the absolute most is Once Upon a Time in America.

[Ichirou]

My personal favorite is Once Upon a Time in the West.  I could watch that movie over and over again.  The 2-disc set that Paramount released a couple of years back is pristine.  GORGEOUS restoration.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

.

[Eric P]

My personal favorite is Once Upon a Time in the West.  I could watch that movie over and over again.  The 2-disc set that Paramount released a couple of years back is pristine.  GORGEOUS restoration.

to my understanding it's still cut so i'm kind of hoping that eventually we'll see something like the blade runner collection

The American release

The film was a huge hit in Europe and quickly developed a cult following. In the US, however, it had a rather poor opening reception, gaining largely negative or indifferent reviews in its complete form (165 minutes). Paramount edited the film to about 145 minutes for the wide release, but the film tanked at the box office. The following scenes were cut for the American release:

    * The entire scene at Lionel Stander's trading post. Cheyenne (Robards) was not introduced in the American release until his arrival at the McBain ranch later in the film. (Interestingly, Stander remained in the credits, even though he did not appear in this version at all).
    * The scene in which Morton and Frank discuss what to do with Jill at the Navajo Cliffs. This scene was important because it established the growing rift between Morton and Frank -- a key reason why Morton decides later on in the film to have Frank killed.
    * Morton's death scene was edited considerably.
    * Cheyenne's death scene was completely excised.

[edit] 1984 re-release

The English language version was restored to approximately 165 minutes for a re-release in 1984, and for its video release the following year. This version has gained a large cult following in America.

[edit] Extended versions

A slightly longer, 168 minute version exists in Italy which features several scenes augmented with additional material, though no complete scenes are present that are missing. The longest known cut is 171 minutes long.

[Ichirou]

The "extended" versions aren't director's cuts, though.  They're like that TGTBTU "director's cut" where they added that needless scene with Tuco and the chicken, that was NEVER in any of the European releases and which Leone removed after initial test screenings.  The 165 minute version was Leone's cut, as I understand it.

[tiesto]

[Eric P]

The "extended" versions aren't director's cuts, though.  They're like that TGTBTU "director's cut" where they added that needless scene with Tuco and the chicken, that was NEVER in any of the European releases and which Leone removed after initial test screenings.  The 165 minute version was Leone's cut, as I understand it.

ok, i'll just add it to my queue.

[Ichirou]

The interesting thing about those old Italian movies is that so many of them had alternate versions made for different countries.  I mean, if you look at the DVD of The Great Silence, it includes this bizarre alternate ending that was made for certain territories where the studio thought a happier resolution would sell more tickets.

[Eric P]

well, HK does the same thing with the alternate ending thing for mainland china

one of the most intersting is the "law and order" ending for Infernal Affairs.

mainlanders must have been confused by part 3

[Ichirou]

Yeah, I saw that alternate ending.  Felt like a total cop-out...how weird that The Departed used a variant of that instead of the "real" ending.

[Eric P]

Yeah, I saw that alternate ending.  Felt like a total cop-out...how weird that The Departed used a variant of that instead of the "real" ending.

i like that it's 30 seconds long and uses the same camera set ups, so it's like the BAREST minimum of work went in to that.

[Ichirou]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

lol, yeah, it was like "Okay, the 'bad guy' can't get away with it in the mainland version...how do we fix it?" "Fuck it, just have some cops show up when he opens the elevator and arrest him." "Wait, but how do they find out he's the mole?" "Fuck it, we'll just toss in some explanatory dialogue and then have them haul him away.  The end."

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At least the alternate Great Silence ending is bizarrely imaginative.

[Eric P]

spoiler (click to show/hide)

The film is famous for its bleak ending, a bloodshed where everyone remotely good gets gunned down by the greedy bounty hunters. The director was forced to shoot an alternate ending for the North African market, where the hero's death in the end would've been deemed unacceptable.

The Fantoma DVD features the (silent) alternate "happy" ending with the comic sheriff played by Frank Wolff returning from the "dead" (he had sunk in a frozen lake) to save the day. It is unlikely that an English or Italian audio track was ever created for this ending.[1]

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ok, i have to see this now, lol

[Ichirou]

It's not just that...

spoiler (click to show/hide)

At one point in the movie, Silence's hand is put on a burning stove, crippling him and making him unable to shoot, which is why he gets gunned down so easily at the end.  In the alternate ending, he shoots the bad guys and it's suddenly revealed that under his bandages he's wearing a metal gauntlet on his shooting hand, which I think is somehow supposed to hearken back to the Fistful of Dollar ending where Eastwood had the metal chestplate when he was being shot in the chest.  It's just bizarre.

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