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
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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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