Gloriously cranky film book expands

LITTLE ROCK — New! Improved! Crankier?

The fifth edition of David Thomson’s invaluable and occasionally maddening The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is out (Alfred A. Knopf, $40), with 100 new entries (Judd Apatow, Emily Blunt, Paul Haggis, Mark Wahlberg) and many more that have been updated and, in some instances, radically revised.

Writing with authority and flair and no reluctance to express a contrarian view, Thomson uses his entry on Whoopi Goldberg to analyze why there are so few black women listed in his book (going way back to Hattie McDaniel and Gone With the Wind to mull things over). His citation on Jennifer Lopez begins with the observation that J-Lo is “the first Hispanic actress to be taken for granted in Hollywood,” which we can regard either as “a welcome innovation” or “an absurdly belated recognition of how far the social order in Los Angeles depends on the employment of people from south of the border to do the menial work.”

Thomson judges Hilary Swank worthy of her two Oscars (for Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby), but then, “that said, the fact remains that in nearly everything else she has done ... she has been pretty, dull, ordinary and incapable of lifting the project clear of a sanctimonious mud.”

About Brad Pitt, and his work in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, Thomson writes that it “only shows how easy it is for young, barely trained actors these days to show off - and be praised for it. It was a terrible performance.”

Whereas Pitt’s more recent work seems “less exciting or excited, as if the labor of being a movie star and the vagaries of popular taste are beginning to depress him.”

Thomson, a Brit who lives with his wife and children in San Francisco, is close to 70 and has been in love with the movies since he was a wee lad. He writes volumes (for the New Republic, for the Guardian in the United Kingdom, for Salon), has 20-odd books to his credit, and knows film frontward and back, inside and out. On the acknowledgments page of The New Biographical Dictionary’s fifth edition - the first, considerably thinner, came out in 1975 - he lists his three favorites of all time: His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball gem; Mississippi Mermaid, Francois Truffaut’s 1969 Cornell Woolrich adaptation with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve; and Celine and Julie Go Boating, Jacques Rivette’s 1974 meditation on magic and memory.

“They might change from day to day, but I’ll take those for now,” Thomson said.

He polled everyone he thanks on his acknowledgments page, too - editors, agents, friends, family - for their favorites. His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, emerged the winner (tied with Citizen Kane).

“That is a remarkable thing, because I’m sure when that film came out, I don’t think it got a single Oscar nod for anything,” Thomson says. “It was taken as an absolutely run-of-the-mill film, and yet I do think a lot of people now regard it as a monument. It’s survived wonderfully well.

“And for me, that film - and My Man Godfrey, and Midnight, films like that, they just get better and better. And the Preston Sturges films. The Lady Eve, for instance.”

Indeed, Thomson says that as he’s gotten older, he’s come to appreciate comedy in a new light. When he was younger, it was all about drama and gravity.

“When a comedy’s done well, I value it a lot more than these hundreds, it seems, of horror/shocker films,” he says. He adds that he caught the opening episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire - the one directed by Martin Scorsese - and found it “deftly done and watchable and entertaining and nasty and violent and all that, but I just feel you’ve seen that kind of depressive brutality so many times, whereas a comedy ... can be fresher and more dangerous.

“I’m very much of the feeling, growing older, that comedies have been the great American film achievement.”

For the fifth edition of Thomson’s nearly 1,100-page tome, the critic and historian revisited George Clooney for a longish assessment of his career. Drawing the obvious parallel to Cary Grant, Thomson says that Clooney “has a lot of the material it would take to be the most interesting and equivocal actor of our time.

“Everything except the parts?” he adds. “And everything except the innate anxiety that cannot quite trust his own image.”

Thomson says that with Clooney, and Johnny Depp, and other current Hollywood A-listers, “I rewrote those entries quite a bit. I felt one had to not just update them, but look at them again. ... There’s never time to redo the book completely, but that’s the temptation - to rewrite every entry.”

And then there are the problem customers, the moviemakers with whom Thomson still finds himself grappling.

“I find Woody Allen a very difficult figure to handle, because I think there is remarkable work in there, but some really terrible work in there, too. And he’s so productive, so it makes it very difficult to balance him, in a way. I would say with Francis Coppola and Scorsese, too - absolutely fantastic work, but in limited periods. Scorsese, for me, is not the man he used to be. I don’t think Coppola is, either. ...

“Also, with a director like Michael Mann - I was a huge Michael Mann admirer once upon a time, but I think he’s got very dull, lately, and I have to try and say that. It’s the point of this book, I think, to be sharp and opinionated and critical. It’s never been a flattering book. And I do think he’s kind of lost at the moment.”

In addition to the new New Biographical Dictionary of Film, the paperback of Thomson’s 2009 book, Have You Seen ...? - 1,000 pages on 1,000 films - comes out on Dec. 7. Read exactly why Thomson deems His Girl Friday “one of the glories of American film.” Or why TV’s The Sopranos rates inclusion. Or his take on Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Here’s an excerpt: “It’s worth noting that the Anderson who had been in love with human groupings (as in Boogie Nights and Magnolia) suddenly turns his attention to a man who has never seen a group he did not despise.”

Thomson goes on to say that with the Daniel Day-Lewis Oscar-winner “we are in constant, unblinking confrontation with a single man and his force - a prospector who shifts his attention from silver to oil, who nags at the earth like a vulture with a corpse, one of the blackest figures in American film history.”

True that.