A fond and funny look at the process of trying to succeed in the movie business and an inspirational tool for aspiring...
Director and actor Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers, Beerfest) gives a candid account of how he and the rest of the Broken Lizard comedy troupe broke into the movie business.
Readers don’t have to be fans of Broken Lizard’s sophomoric shenanigans on film to appreciate its ringleader’s infectious DIY spirit and can-do attitude. The author sets the self-deprecating stage early, reviewing his formative years as the scion of medically minded Indian parents who spent his high school days partying hard and then setting his sights on a “preposterous” list of colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, and “no safety schools.” Always aware that brown skin and a multisyllabic name didn’t exactly equate to Hollywood acclaim, Chandrasekhar refused to abandon the dream. Instead, the author devised a make-it-or-break-it test for himself involving Chicago’s toughest stages. “Most Colgate juniors spend a semester studying overseas,” he writes. “I decided to head to Chicago, where I would perform improv and stand-up comedy on real stages, in front of real audiences. Only if I could get strangers to laugh would I be willing to give acting a try. And if I couldn’t, then my plan would be to follow in my sister’s footsteps and go to law school.” He could, and emboldened by his experience, Chandrasekhar settled back down at Colgate, an indispensable incubator that would prove pivotal for everyone in the Broken Lizard gang. Talent and a gonzo zeal for moviemaking would not guarantee success, however. For one thing, there was another rising comedy troupe called the State that also demanded Hollywood’s attention. The author recounts how initially losing out to the State for an MTV gig almost crippled the Broken Lizard crew long before Super Troopers ever achieved its cult status.
A fond and funny look at the process of trying to succeed in the movie business and an inspirational tool for aspiring filmmakers.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98523-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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