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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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