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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
