Death Wish: A Novel Approach to Cinema (Deep Focus) by Christopher Sorrentino

Death Wish: A Novel Approach to Cinema (Deep Focus) Reviews

• 
  brian

  a frustrating book in that sorrentino did a great job of analyzing the movie and dismantling the lazy critical response, but i hadda keep flipping back to the author's page to convince myself that jon bruenning did not, in fact, write it.
  
  back in the day all the usual suspects (kael, sarris, ebert, canby, etc) dismissed death wish as a shoddily made (it mostly is) piece of right-wing agitprop (it's more complicated than that, as sorrentino expertly breaks down), but left out the part about it being kind of demented fun and zeitgeisty and, yes, morally complex... sorrentino kicks lethem's ass (see volume 1 in the deep focus series) as a film critic; in fact, sorrentino kicks most legit film critics' asses.
  
  worth noting that i masturbated directly onto the author picture for two reasons: 1. bruenning's facebook pictures have lost all erotic value from overuse and 2. i could then stick shut the page so i wouldn't have to stare at the offending picture.
  
  sorrentino:
  
  
  
  
  
  herr bruenning:
  
  
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• 
  Marc Weidenbaum

  One of two initial books from a new series of short books on singular subjects from recent pop-cultural history. There's no shortage of point-of-purchase non-fiction, from the 33 1/3 books to slim volumes on architecture to the Rough Guide series on music, just to name a few. This series, Deep Focus, puts writers to work on films -- not the Great Works but the solid ones, what Christopher Sorrentino at the end of his volume refers to as the "Middle Level."
  
  Some brief, semi-concise thoughts on this one:
  
  It's broken into standalone chapters that approach the movie from different angles (politics, city, performance, film) -- which is to say, it's sort of how Sorrentino's first novel, Sound on Sound, was structured.
  
  Not as much is made of Herbie Hancock's score as I would have liked. This isn't because I'm somewhat obsessed with scores to films, though I am. And it isn't because the score makes great listening on its own, which it does. And it's not because being reminded that Herbie Hancock composed the score has, blessedly, diminished in my mind the until recently indelible image of the cover of Jimmy Page's score to the second Death Wish film, which was to the used-record stores of my youth (late 1970s, early 1980s) what Don DeLillo's Libra was to used-book stores of the last decade of the 20th century. No, I just wonder what role Hancock plays in the film's overall impression in terms of the racial makeup of the city.
  
  The New York City character played by Charles Bronson gets his gun in Tucson, Arizona. I read this book shortly after the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, and couldn't get that fact out of my head.
  
  There's some good back'n'forth comparisons between the movie and the book on which it is based (a book I haven't read).
  
  Woody Allen comes off as a minor villain in the book -- not the movie, but this book about the movie, about presentations of New York, and about selective cultural editing. Not that it matters, but I agree with Sorrentino that Allen got off easy. Sure, there's always a voice loud enough to be heard, "The New York in this movie isn't colored like New York," but it's usually the same voice, and nothing really happens.
  
  About halfway through the book, Sorrentino tells us he's a liberal. Until that moment, you might wonder otherwise. I think he does this on purpose. That is, I think he delays affirming his political affiliation until after making the audience wonder.
  
  The informed dissent by Sorrentino from the critical drubbing the film took upon its release is some of the best reading in the book. He is dismissive of the knee-jerk response to violence the critics display, of how that response doesn't align with similar critics' takes on other (more self-consciously artful) films of that era (Dog Day Afternoon, Clockwork Orange, etc.).
  
  He also just plain reads the film more closely than the reviewers did. This may simply be a matter of the film reviewer having a short period of time in which to consider a subject before stating an opinion, but it also feels like the revenge-by-doing of a writer whose own work is regularly reviewed saying, "This is what reading is like." The enthusiasm for the act of diving into something and pondering its inner workings and contradictions is palpable.
  
  The other initial book in this series is Jonathan Lethem's take on They Live, which I'm reading. Then come two more: The Sting by Matthew Specktor (who wrote the novel That Summertime Sound, which Lethem has praised) and Lethal Weapon by Chris Ryan. Neither are movies I have as strong an interest in as I do in the first two in the series, but I may check them out. (I'm also not as familiar with the authors -- whereas I've read just about everything that Sorrentino and Lethem have published.)
  
  Far as I can tell, Ryan isn't a published novelist, and Specktor has published that one novel, with another due out soon-ish. I'm not sure what this does to the "A Novel Approach to Cinema" heading that appears on the top of the covers of at least the first two books in the series. The following is a sentence structured as I might imagine Sorrentino would in regard to this subject: If the author of the book is not a novelist, then it's no longer a meaningful and comfortably not-too-high-bar-setting pun, just a stated promise that's kinda hard to keep.
  
  Hey, and not to knock someone for not being a novelist. I sure haven't finished writing one.
• 
  Tom Stamper

  Years ago I was listening to Christopher Guest being interviewed on NPR. Guest said his first film was the worst film ever made, by worst he meant the most immoral. He had a small part in Death Wish. He didn’t like the politics of the movie because he felt it glamorized vigilantes. What’s interesting about this book is that the author (Chris Sorrento) shares Guest’s politics and yet sees the movie as escapism rather than an attempt at realism and therefore without any real political identity. Sorrento makes the astute point that critics savaged Dirty Harry for his unlawful search and seizure of the villain’s weapon and yet the cop here (Vincent Gardenia) does the same thing to Charles Bronson and not a critic mentions it. He surmises that critics had already decided what the movie was about before they saw it, so they never really saw it at all. The book is maybe the best takedown of mainstream critics since Manny Farber praised the genre films of the 1940s and 1950s by explaining what the others were missing.
  
  I like the section where Sorrento takes each character and performance and explains their success rate. He is particularly happy with Hope Lange’s performance in an otherwise thankless role as the wife/victim. The actress playing the daughter hardly registers. He sees tension in Lange’s relationship with Bronson. Sorrento points out that Bronson never tries to avenge her death by finding her killer. It’s not a revenge movie, it’s more about empowerment. Bronson likes killing criminals for the sake of killing criminals.
  
  Also low on the realism scale is the role of the cops. The cops are supposed to arrest Bronson, but they like the declining crime rate Bronson creates, and politicians fear backlash from the public that admires him. It’s an empowerment fantasy.
  
• 
  Prima Seadiva

  This was okay. I picked this up because I had read Jonathan Lethem's essay on "They Live" in the series and had happened to recently watch "Death Wish" on late night t.v.
  
  Death Wish a movie that is both often trashed and yet is also an iconic 70's movie.
  The writer had some interesting points to make but he got in his own way a lot with a level of pretentiousness and self absorption I did not enjoy.
• 
  Ian Hamilton

  I appreciated the critical deep dive into what is unquestionably a complex film, but the author’s analysis felt rehashed and overly academic.
• 
  Stephane

  An interesting perspective on a movie that i quite frankly forgot, apart from the fact that it seemed to be the first of the "urban vigilante" pack. I do tend to agree with the writer than most film critic of that particular Bronson movie were mostly knee-jerk reaction to what was on film, forgetting that it was indeed a movie and as such a fantasy. Sorrentino makes some interesting points and analysis, making sure to look at the film from different angles and see what it produces.
  Overall, an interesting read in an interesting series, but nothing amazing.
• 
  Allan

  Anyone who wants to get serious about how to review a movie could read this. It wasn't a great movie and the review is honest about that. It picks apart the reaction to the film and nuanced scenes the film had as art.