A warm, intelligent story of life in film with family, friends, and fable by Merlin of the Movies. (40 b&w photos in...
An articulate moviemaker brings us not-quite-up-to-date in a thoughtful memoir of a life he has sometimes re-created on film.
Boorman’s evocative film Hope and Glory told the story of his youth in wartime Britain. Here, he recalls more of his middle-class life by the Thames in Shepperton. There’s the church choir, bowling googlies in cricket, and reading once-popular John Cowper Powys, all in a small world of semis and bed-sitters. The decided Briticisms fade as Boorman advances from hitches in the army and the BBC. He steps forward from cricket pitch to backlots around the world to become a first-rank filmmaker, one who appreciates the form’s debt to D.W. Griffith and Billy Bitzer. You may not have seen Leo the Last or even Zardoz, but just consider Deliverance. An extended journal extract recaps an exploration to a tribe in the jungles of Brazil. Buffs will lap up insider bits about script-timing, budgeting, and such. There are asides about sets, locations, jumpcuts, dubbing, looping, color desaturation, negative pickups, and completion bonds—all nicely accessible. There’s also commentary about negotiations with distributors, actors and crews. And there are the people, like talented Jon Voight, antic Burt Reynolds, and mendacious James Dickey. The requisite anecdotes are agreeably presented. Regard the one that ends with a traffic cop pulling Boorman over to inquire, “Do you know you have Lee Marvin on your roof?,” or the one in which Lew Grade cedes control of rushes, rough cut, and final cut and—“I don’t even want to see the picture when it’s finished!” Boorman is as clever with a memoir as he is with a script. Like a true pro, he hits all his marks. If only there were more tales of the recent films. Maybe next time.
A warm, intelligent story of life in film with family, friends, and fable by Merlin of the Movies. (40 b&w photos in text)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-571-21695-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
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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