Though he won’t make you want to see all Godard’s films, MacCabe makes a strong case for the filmmaker who, “if he is not a...
Five ways of looking at the celebrated enfant grise of French cinema.
Whatever the result is, it isn’t a portrait of the artist at 70. As he ages, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard becomes ever more elusive, exactly as if he were ducking out of his portrait sitting—a treatment entirely appropriate for the bad-boy giant of the French New Wave who continues to turn out films (over 55 features and countless shorts to date) at a breakneck pace. MacCabe (English and Film/Univ. of Pittsburgh) approaches each phase of his career from a different angle. The history of his French/Swiss family frames the chronicle of his abortive school years through the death of his mother and his estrangement from his father. Postwar French intellectual history provides the background for his writing for the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma, and film history the context for his heady New Wave features, still intoxicating in their attempt to capture “the real on the run,” from Breathless (1959) through his split with leading lady Anna Karina after Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967). Noting that Godard is unusual in having participated in both the revolutionary New Wave aesthetics and the broader revolutionary stance of the May 1968 protests, MacCabe uses political history as a framework for the films his Dziga Vertov collective produced before turning finally to his personal acquaintance with the master to continue his story from 1971 to the present. The figure who emerges from this unorthodox biography is brusque, uncompromising, capable of great rudeness and sweepingly romantic gestures, and utterly devoted to a medium his films shook up from top to bottom.
Though he won’t make you want to see all Godard’s films, MacCabe makes a strong case for the filmmaker who, “if he is not a novelist . . . is the greatest essayist and one of the greatest poets that the cinema has known.” (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-16378-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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