A Woody Allen confidant follows the legendary filmmaker step by step through the making of a movie.
Whether you love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Allen is one of this century’s most prolific and influential filmmakers. Since 1969, he has written and directed 48 films (and acted in 27 of them), which is a mind-boggling average of one per year. For much of that time, Lax (Faith, Interrupted, 2010, etc.) has been a part of Allen’s small inner circle; he is the author of three books on Allen, including a bestselling 1991 biography. Here, the director allowed the author to follow along through every step of one film: the 2015 drama Irrational Man, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone. The intimate access makes the book: Lax was in Allen’s bedroom with him as he wrote the script in longhand, lying fully clothed on top of his bed—though, Allen emphasizes, scripts are often percolating in various states of completion for many years. The author walks readers through the peculiarities of how Allen movies are financed—unwilling to be held hostage to the needs of studios, Allen often pays extra costs out of his own pocket—and cast: “It seems like it’s almost on every actor’s bucket list to be in [a] Woody Allen film,” says his longtime casting director, Juliet Taylor. Lax was there for the location scouting, the shooting itself, the editing process, and the scoring, “a rich dessert for Allen,” who is passionate about jazz, classical, and the American songbook. The book is a highly personal portrait of Allen—we see his insecurities, his vulnerabilities, and his dogged pursuit of a good story, be it for comedy or for deep examination of human morality—and the narrative is ripe with anecdotes and quotes. But the real achievement is seeing in detail the arc of any creative process.
Allen fans will delight in spending time with him by proxy, and anyone interested in modern film should find much of interest in this well-reported study.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-35249-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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