As its name suggests, this thoroughly enjoyable rattle through film is about the way cinema speaks to us, and we through it. Ross eschews a chronological approach to focus on topics including “The Body”, “Time” and “Power and Ideology”. That may sound serious; Filmish is big on theory, and peppered with quotes from everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Andrei Tarkovsky to Susan Sontag. Yet it remains a wonderfully breezy read thanks to its neat and appropriate marriage of words and pictures. The spectacled figure of Ross pops up throughout, whether floating in front of 2001’s spaceship to discuss the boundary between human and machine or clasping a syringe above a prostrate woman a la Pulp Fiction. His analysis of Die Hard’s subversion of corporate space and exploration of race and the “other” by way of The Jungle Book and True Lies are particularly nicely done. Students of film theory may not find much new here, but Filmish hangs together brilliantly, and Ross plainly cares very much about cinema and the influence it wields.
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