Two efforts at uniting art and revolution. The first, an extended interview with French director Jean-Luc Godard and his associate Jean Gorin who discuss the goals of their recently constituted film group; the second, a film script ("written to be read not filmed") of the Soledad Brothers prison break and the life and death of Jonathan Jackson. Neither venture succeeds beyond stylized oddity. Godard, intent on demystifying his work and his status as an important "new wave" director, offhandedly debunks his early films, including La Chinoise and Weekend, as hopelessly bourgeois ventures and fumbles toward an inchoate Marxist-Leninist cinema which will include "paying everyone equally, in order to end the hierarchy." Various revolutionary attempts — British Sounds, East Wind, and a work-in-progress on the al-Fateh (none currently accessible to American movie-goers) — are deemed partially successful efforts to "organize ourselves in a new way" but what it all boils down to in terms of financing, filming, and editing remains highly abstract. This Is It: The Marin Shoot-Out plays on the Yippie notion of revolution as theater ("it looked like a prison break movie") and features a Dostoevsky-inspired Detective who reads Malraux's Man's Fate while trying to decipher the significance of the event. O.K. as an experimental work-shop exercise but not for the average film-goer seeking entertainment. Actors recalcitrant, camera twitchy, story-line dim.
Pub Date: April 14, 1972
ISBN: 0876900740
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outerbridge & Lazard
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1972
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
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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