A sleek and hardboiled seminar on cinema’s glorious highs and hellish lows.
The playwright/screenwriter/director/essayist (The Wicked Son, Oct. 2006, etc.) presents lessons on the movie industry, seasoned with realism.
Most of multi-hyphenate Mamet’s previous sallies on the business of filmmaking conveyed the impression that he thought the whole thing was not much more than a lark, a mechanical process easily mastered. Initially, this collection of stark essaylets expresses a similar point of view. “Moviemaking,” the author writes, “is an appallingly simple process. One needs a camera, film, and an idea (optional).” Subsequent pieces, however, give voice to a far deeper love of the form. In between lofting daggers at industry fools, he celebrates the joys of Preston Sturges and does his best to provide the reader with easily reducible lessons on the intricacies of film and its history. (One interesting digression examines the question of why all of Hollywood’s founding fathers hailed from within 200 miles of Warsaw.) Among the pithy advice proffered to students of the craft are “burn the first reel,” “if you think that perhaps you should cut, cut,” “nothing with a quill pen in it ever made a nickel” and “do not shoot the pretty girl’s close-up last.” Mamet does an estimable job of marrying his expected cynicism with a less predictable but no less vehement defense of film as art. That’s not to say he’s lost his bite: “Critics are a plague,” he contends, and “everybody on the production end always assumes the writer is stealing their money.”
A sleek and hardboiled seminar on cinema’s glorious highs and hellish lows.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42253-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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