Misreading 70s film icons.

It Don't Worry Me: Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars and Beyond By Ryan Gilbey Faber and Faber, 272 pages, $24.00 Hollywood has never been very good at making art. Putting big ideas and beauty on film is better left to countries with government film funding and strong intellectual traditions. The closest mainstream American film came to considering itself in the business of creating art with a capital "A" was the 70s. The have-a-nice-day decade's directors were treated like philosopher-king rock stars-geniuses deserving all the praise and pharmaceutical cocaine they got.

But did they make lasting art? Not really. Their best works are gussied-up, dressed-down B-movie formulas with heightened realism and muted mannerisms. But the evolution of the motion picture business into full-time digitized blockbuster production has aged 70s movies well. Current cineplex fodder looks like candy wrappers next to the grain and grit of Taxi Driver.

Great 70s movies like The Last Picture Show and Badlands retain their ability to compel audiences because of their almost physical urgency. They are bloody, pulpy and visceral-just ask John Hinckley Jr. These are not museum pieces. They're autopsy photos.

Film critic Ryan Gilbey wants to wash the blood off the bodies and put the pictures in frames. His exploration of post-studio-system, predigital blockbuster Hollywood, It Don't Worry Me, attempts a serious discussion of American 70s cinema, but may be the best argument yet for ending the canonization of 70s film.

Like a true spawn of wraithlike film critic Pauline Kael, Gilbey looks at movies and sees auteurs. Each chapter of It Don't Worry Me is devoted to a different 70s director, and even if his choices of directors weren't questionable (Jonathan Demme?), the approach is fundamentally flawed. Many of the best movies of the 70s were made by journeyman hacks (Sidney Lumet: Marathon Man, Network) and one-hit-wonderkids (Ralph Bakshi: Heavy Traffic; Bob Rafelson: Five Easy Pieces). Many 70s directors made some of their best work before or after the decade, like Kubrick, De Palma or Scorsese. But the director-organized approach ensures placement on college film course syllabi and a guarantee of steady, perpetual college bookstore sales.

The book will not be well received by students. Budding filmmakers will cast it aside for its lack of technical information. Pop-cult historians will find it useless for its lack of biographical information and historical context. Lazy film studies students looking for plot summaries and term-paper filler will hate the book's assumption that the reader has already seen the movies it discusses. Theory-head grad students will despise its lack of academic-speak. But professors will love it. The chapter structure makes for easy homework assignments, and its tone sucks the juice out from its subjects, leaving dusty skeletons.

In place of useful information, Gilbey fills the book with his opinions, which fall between ill-considered and insane. He is enough of a snob to rail against low culture and enough of a lazy postmodernist to define high culture in his own specious terms. So the same amount of attention in the chapter on Scorsese is devoted to Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as to Taxi Driver. Kubrick's 10-page chapter focuses almost exclusively on Barry Lyndon, with only a two-paragraph mention of that other movie Kubrick released in the 70s, A Clockwork Orange.

Gilbey's dismissal of Travis and Alex stems from his disdain for movie violence. Then why write a book about a decade's worth of movies predicated on violence-the first generation of R-rated films-instead of the films of Merchant Ivory? Because it wouldn't sell as well as a book about the 70s-especially one with a reproduction of the original Jaws poster on the cover. (Strangely, Gilbey describes Jaws in lukewarm terms-"a picture that seems to despise everything in the world except for the shrill kick of a well timed effect"-and dismisses Star Wars with disgust-"It looks brittle and hurried now and no amount of digital tinkering ... can compensate for its lack of heart and humor"-yet included them in the book's title.)

Jean-Luc Godard famously said the best way to criticize a movie is to make a better movie. Note to Mr. Gilbey: the reverse does not apply to books. In 1999 Peter Biskind wrote a visceral, insightful work about 70s moviemakers called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Biskind's lurid account of the 70s New Hollywood movement covered Scorsese's coked-up tantrums, Spielberg's emasculation at the hands of Amy Irving and Coppola's decade-long descent into madness. It's as pulpy, salacious and compelling as the best movies of the 70s. As portrayed by Biskind, the great films of the 70s were the inspired accidents of lifelong fuck-ups. Gilbey reduces those fuck-ups to names that will be misspelled on pop quizzes.