SOURCE: A review of Harlan Ellison's Watching and Quentin Crisp's How to Go to the Movies, in Film Comment, Vol. 26, No. 6, November–December, 1990, pp. 76–7.

In the following review, Thomajan compares Ellison's collection of movie reviews with that of Quentin Crisp, criticizing Ellison for writing in the “mock-heroic mold” and for Ellison's belief that science fiction is “the cinema's most important genre.”

Harlan Ellison and Quentin Crisp are probably familiar to you but possibly not as film reviewers, the magazines they write for being relatively obscure. Recently each had his reviews collected and published in hardcover. Harlan Ellison's Watching covers movies of the past 20 years (most of them American), with the emphasis on science fiction, his specialty. The reviews in How to Go to the Movies date only from 1982, but Crisp has been going to the movies more than regularly since 1918.

Ellison appears on the jacket of his book...