Sander van der Heide

I like vinyl records, I like coffee table books. Mix them together and you still can get disappointed. I'm scraping this one of my list. It's very superficial, it's full of usual suspects, the photography isn't impressive and most of them are about lounge cafés or trendy bars with some record players on display. It also feels the author is a bit frustrated with visual artists being asked to design the artwork instead of graphic designers. Something I believe is the perfect match for this medium. For the rest, the layout is messy and the text is dual lingual, which annoys me even more. There are better candidates for this subject.

It's not perfect (as with any encyclopedia), but very helpful when reading marvel comics or watching their movies.

Just as I always find ‘the making of' fascinating, this is to feast on. It is a miracle that the lord of the rings films have ever been made.

After taken 2 million photos over a period of 8 years, here we are presented with ‘only' 300 of them. Every single one of them nailing it, composition, the timing, the colours, the moment itself, but what stands out the most: Every single person in front (and probably also behind) of the camera is having fun, a good time or in appreciation of the moment. No one is posing, nothing is staged, it gives you the opportunity to really know a person in ‘just' 300 pictures. Or as photographer Pete Souza puts it himself ‘I hope the photos will show you the true character of the man, and the essence of his Presidency, as seen through my eyes and felt through my heart'

The Title: I don't get the title, 100 all-time favorite movies. Of whom? Of the film critics? Of the editor? Of the filmmakers? Of the public? There is no introduction why this book was made and why these specific 100 films were being selected. Of course there are a lot of really good movies missing (The Big Lebowski, Alien, E.T., The Nightmare before Christma) and also some of these movies are disputable as an all-time favorite. But if I had known the context of the ones chosen, it would have made more sense to me

Layout: I hate this format Taschen is using for their cheaper issues. As far as I know, this is the only format available, but 832 pages in such a small size is problematic to open up completely without ruining the book itself. I can imagine this wasn't a fun job for the layout department, only presenting the main credits on one page and the movie post on the one next to it, makes sense. But after that, the way the text and images are mangles together is utter chaos. The still from the films were cropped in such a horrible manner, it's a disgrace to the cineast who composed the original shots. A bigger size would have made it much easier to present the movies in a more respectable way and better looking.

The content: The facts and description of the movies vary a lot in quality. They are written by around 20 film critics, historians, journalists and professors from different countries. Some are spot on and with fun facts why the movie is made as it is or why it had a huge impact on the film making industry. Others are just descriptions on the story and some historical facts. There is no connection between them at all. That could have been a main reason to create a book like this. So now it's just 100 tip, which could have been presented in a whole other way (online playlist, a bucketlist app, a podcast series).