Scratch the willing suspension of disbelief. But never mind: this is good fun, and lots of it. And besides, anyone who...
A rollicking spoof by B-list actor Campbell, hero of the Evil Dead series, who attempts to rise above his station and wreaks havoc in the bargain.
There is a B-list, and there is the A-list, and never the twain shall meet, especially for the fellow who, like the author, just happens to be named Bruce Campbell, a man who ostensibly romances leading women but really “hoards Victoria’s Secret catalogs” and is otherwise a bit of a nebbish. Bizarrely, as if in an alternate-universe setup from one of the myriad Sci-Fi channel shows on which Campbell can be seen, Mike Nichols requests him to play the role of a wisecracking doorman in his next film, a hip update of Let’s Make Love, with Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere in the place of Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand. Campbell dutifully appears on location, layers his lines with a hammy backstory of his own concoction and amazes his fellow actors by his very presence. Things get better, and soon Campbell, secret agent of schlock, is running his lines with Richard Gere, coaching Renée’s costume designer and the star herself in B-tricks for accentuating breasts and bottom, and even outing the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (not Sigmund, as Campbell has it) as the filmic force behind long-forgotten embarrassments such as Psycho a Go-Go and Wild and Willing. Enter, as the story unfolds, the likes of Robert Evans and Jack Nicholson (who’s contemplating capping off Chinatown, about water, and The Two Jakes, about oil, with a film about vinegar), and the A-world begins to take on deeper shades of B. The story takes silly twists—well, sillier than what’s come before—as Campbell eludes SWAT team shooters and feds before winding up in the slam, where, “with a little ingenuity and two cartons of Kool Extras, I worked my way up to cleaning executive offices.”
Scratch the willing suspension of disbelief. But never mind: this is good fun, and lots of it. And besides, anyone who allows that Carrot Top’s agent is Satan is all right.Pub Date: June 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-31260-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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