A couple of days back, we wrote about why we love Jeffrey Wells’ ever-
informative Hollywood Elsewhere website / blog, and why we’ve visited his blog several times a day for years (as well as all previous web incarnations of Mr. Wells’ work, from Reel.com through Hollywood Confidential).
This weekend, we’ll focus on another of our favourite cinema-related websites, a link to which we’ve built into our Firefox Bookmark Toolbar, and suggest why you might give this website due consideration for a visit.
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Anne Thompson’s Thompson on Hollywood: Former film columnist at Variety, and deputy editor of Variety.com, where she started the “Thompson on Hollywood” blog in March 2007, this New York-based writer has over the years contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Observer and Wired. From January 2005 to March 2007, she served as the Deputy Film Editor at The Hollywood Reporter and before that was the West Coast Editor of Premiere, from 1996 to 2002.
Before joining Premiere, Thompson wrote about behind-the-scenes Hollywood for Entertainment Weekly, and was West Coast Editor for Film Comment Magazine. From 1985 to 1993 she wrote the film industry column “Risky Business” for LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. A graduate of the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, she teaches the fall semester of “Sneak Previews” for UCLA Extension.
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At present, Ms. Thompson publishes daily at IndieWire, where she’s their stalwart and their defacto lead blogger (Leonard Maltin and Peter Knegt, among others, also write for IndieWire), her clarion voice just as passionate as Jeffrey Wells’ voice, her spirit upbeat and her love (and knowledge) of ‘the movies’ unparalleled.
Anne publishes three or four items a day, she’s always informed and informative, and (thankfully, cuz we need a voice of reason in the movie criticism field) rarely as provocative as the indefatigable Mr. Wells.
Last year (a full year before the estimable Mr. Wells, “imitation being the sincerest form of flattery“), Anne Thompson joined with In Contention’s Kris Tapley in posting a weekly iTunes podcast titled Oscar Talk which, sorry to say, lacks the energy of Jeffrey Wells and Sasha Stone’s Oscar Poker, mainly because we find that Mr. Tapley comes across as ‘angry’, as an inauthentic contrarian, strangely passionless about the movies, and (in our estimation) simply not all that well informed. Ms. Thompson is always great, though: engaging and thoughtful, with a ready, warm sense of humour!
Anne Thompson’s Thompson on Hollywood is a daily must-visit for anyone who loves the movies, and who wishes to read an informed, generous and keen insight into worthy upcoming films, and the U.S. film industry.
Next week, we’ll write about more of our favourite cinema-related websites.
