Rolling: The Endless Thomson Interview

The Morning News has a long fascinating interview with David Thomson. It's a fully absorbing read and too full of goodness to pick any one thing out. It's nice to see that he likes the Sopranos, too.

HBO’s record in the last few years on a big range of material—I’m bound to say that there have been some lapses in The Sopranos, but if you want to argue the case that the great modern movie is The Sopranos, you’ve got a case.

He thinks the face is the best special effect in film. and it's hard to argue against:

It’s a myth that the audience loves special effects and computer-generated images. Children do. But grown people don’t. I think these people remember movies ended on close ups. And in the crisis where somebody was going to do something good or something bad, the face told the whole story from the early days of movies, the silent movies, whoever the face was, Chaplin, Garbo, whoever you’d like to name, it was the face that could let us know what that person was thinking. That was the engine of films. It’s still true. I don’t think it’s changed.