Mind Over Media: Essays on Film and Television

This collection by a San Francisco Bay-area actor and freelance film and television critic features diverse subjects and an ever-changing focus: discussions of science fiction and documentaries, of film biographies of writers Oscar Wilde and Stevie Smith, and of prose biographies of master filmmakers Hitchcock, Griffith and Welles. Stone devotes an entire essay to one film, and then crams nearly 20 movies into another piece; she spills anecdotes about herself, her children and friends as easily as she attempts a penetrating feminist analysis. This unpredictable style makes the essays intensely readable but ultimately fragments the study and undermines its thoughtfulness. What Stone does best is evoke the visual and emotional aspects of movies: readers will see John Hurt and Alan Bates as feuding aspects of the same man in the obscure The Shout, and feel the terror in Primal Fear, to date ``the only acceptable film study on rape.'' Stone possesses an energetic, appealing voice, but it requires some serious editing. (June)