Rent Truffaut’s Day for Night instead.
Identical twins make movie, write boring book about the experience.
“The Bros,” as they refer to themselves, recount their struggle to produce a feature film honoring the life of their father, a homeless alcoholic who died alone in jail. The baseball-players-turned-neophyte-moviemakers had a rough time, learning on the job as they struggled to find financing, negotiate with bureaucrats for permits and deal with inclement weather and skittish actors. They generally flailed about in the manner familiar to viewers of Project Greenlight or any of the myriad films about the difficulties of making films. The authors aren’t covering any new ground here, and the crises threatening the completion of their cinematic roman-a-clef—Touching Home, a title to chill discerning moviegoers’ blood if ever there was one—are decidedly low stakes. Compared to such infamous production snafus as Martin Sheen’s heart attack on the set of Apocalypse Now, the Millers’ picayune setbacks—crewmembers turning up late, equipment malfunctioning, money being mismanaged—fail to generate much drama. Much of the story centers around their successful campaign to secure modest movie star Ed Harris as the lead in their film. If Harris had been a raging diva given to outrageous behavior, there might have been a story here; as it stands, the authors’ effusive paeans to his professionalism and integrity quickly pall. Strangely, the Bros don’t discuss their baseball careers (apparently central to the film’s narrative), their cinematic inspirations, their feelings about acting and directing with no prior experience or Touching Home’s place in the tradition of baseball-themed male weepies. They are content to tell a few mild anecdotes, praise the cast and crew and lament the sad end of their father’s life. This pleasant, bland chronicle of a wearyingly familiar subject provides little of interest for anyone beyond the authors’ immediate circle.
Rent Truffaut’s Day for Night instead.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-176314-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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