Great Scott!: The Best of Jay Scott's Movie Reviews

Sarah Robertson is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

This collection of 125 reviews, selected from the thousands that the
late Jay Scott wrote during his years at The Globe and Mail between 1978
and 1993, begins with Woody Allen’s Interiors and concludes with
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. What would Scott, who excoriates the
latter director for typifying Hollywood’s post-Star Wars obsession
with churning out special-effects megahits, have made of the decidedly
unSpielbergian Schindler’s List? Would the admirer of Martin
Scorsese’s energetic mob masterpiece GoodFellas have taken a similar
shine to Quentin Tarantino’s high-voltage Pulp Fiction? Such are the
inevitable questions this volume gives rise to, adding poignancy to the
many pleasures offered up in its pages.

In a profession where hack writing all too often passes as legitimate
criticism, Scott stands out for his intellectual rigor; his challenging
of received wisdom, be it on the left or right of the sociopolitical
spectrum; his deep admiration for the uncompromising cinematic vision,
and equally deep disdain for pretension (his reviews of the much-praised
Resurrection and The Elephant Man are exemplars of tough-mindedness);
his playful experimentation with form (see his review of Arachnophobia
for an example of literary execution via the multiple-choice format);
his delicious bitchiness (The Lonely Lady’s Pia Zadora is reduced to
two words, “stacked Munchkin,” while Faye Dunaway in the camp
classic Mommie Dearest is likened to a “demented Kabuki creature”);
and, finally, his considerable gift for language, demonstrated by his
summing up of the post-Armageddon Testament as “a terrifying movie, a
whimper on the cusp at the end of time.” Jay Scott’s testament was
an unsentimental passion for the art and craft of filmmaking. These
reviews are well served by Robert Fulford’s introduction, less so by
the minimalist index. The most regrettable feature of the volume, of
course, is that it is not the first of many.