It's not that the ideas are bad--they're perfectly fine!--but he takes such a long time about them--unlike your LJ reviews.
I may still purchase his book, because I have read nothing formal on pre-Code cinema except for Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000)—which I adored; I keep an eye out in used book stores now for its companion survey, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002)—and I have spent this entire year increasingly feeling that I am running up against the limits of amateur observation.
That said, thank you. I have also spent this entire year noticing that I have enormous impostor syndrome where my thoughts on film are concerned. I really don't feel that I bring anything new or original to the discussion of these movies except for an entertaining prose style, but I want that to be wrong. My self-image is pretty terrible these days.
Re: Thomas Doherty
I may still purchase his book, because I have read nothing formal on pre-Code cinema except for Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood (2000)—which I adored; I keep an eye out in used book stores now for its companion survey, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002)—and I have spent this entire year increasingly feeling that I am running up against the limits of amateur observation.
That said, thank you. I have also spent this entire year noticing that I have enormous impostor syndrome where my thoughts on film are concerned. I really don't feel that I bring anything new or original to the discussion of these movies except for an entertaining prose style, but I want that to be wrong. My self-image is pretty terrible these days.