For Wes Anderson fans who can’t get enough books about him, what’s one more?
The latest compendium of essays about a unique cinema stylist.
Stanley Kubrick fans who love books about directors are among the luckiest bibliophiles in the world. One could easily fill a couple of bookshelves with volumes about him. Wes Anderson fans are on their way to being equally lucky. Anderson’s style, like Fellini’s, is instantly recognizable, provokes strong reactions, and provides juicy material for literary works. Narbonne, a French critic, is the latest to present a series of essays on Anderson’s cinema. This work doesn’t say anything original, but an excursion through familiar countryside with a new guide still has its pleasures. In the book’s foreword, Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Frémaux rightly refers to Anderson, who has lived in Paris for two decades, as “someone who lives comfortably both inside and outside the system and who explores territories that clearly escape the Hollywood norm.” Narbonne covers the director’s work through 2023, from the Bottle Rocket short that was a hit at Sundance in 1993, to commercials for Prada and other companies, to Asteroid City, the semi-sci-fi play-within-a-film-within-a-TV-show inspired in part by the theater of Sam Shepard. Like all books of this type, this one has stills and behind-the-scenes photos, along with synopses, critical reactions, and technical details, such as the various lenses Anderson has used, from the “rare short focal length: 27 mm” he used for the 1996 feature-length Bottle Rocket to the “wide-format anamorphic lenses and a strong color palette” he has employed on every film since Rushmore (1998). Narbonne tries too hard to intellectualize Anderson’s cinema, as when he writes, “Symmetry is the ideal backdrop for the characters’ psychorigidity” or notes Anderson’s use of “visual pleonasm.” Fans probably won’t mind, however, and will enjoy stories such as that in the Rushmore scene where the protagonist releases bees into a hotel room, “Anderson insisted that real insects be released into the room and that no one wear face protection.”
For Wes Anderson fans who can’t get enough books about him, what’s one more?Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780762488643
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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