An engaging and lavishly illustrated look at American film, from the master director. Based on the scripts of two documentaries on American film by Scorsese and writer/director Wilson, this is less a history than a catalogue raisonnÇ of the films that have shaped Scorsese's own works. He is a notoriously devoted film buff, and his knowledge of cinema is both encyclopedic and deeply, even humbly, practical: ``The more pictures I make, the more I realize that I really don't know. I'm always looking for something or someone that I can learn from.'' One of the rewards of this book is the number of filmmakers, such as Boetticher and Ulmer, and films, such as Silver Lode, that Scorsese retrieves from obscurity—the filmography at the end is not to be missed. As a director, he is understandably a strong proponent of the auteur theory and its emphasis on films as personal expressions. In fact, this book is organized around various modes and manners of directing, from the ``Director as Storyteller'' to the ``Director as Smuggler'' to the ``Director as Illusionist.'' Scorsese and Wilson's discussion of the difference between directors who worked subversively within the system (smugglers such as Fritz Lang) and those who worked against the system (iconoclasts such as Orson Welles) is particularly revealing, as is their analysis of the three uniquely American genres: musicals, Westerns, and gangster films. However, in line with this work's coffee table aspirations, Scorsese and Wilson often tend to favor ``let's go to the highlights'' film appreciation over rigorous film criticism. This book also suffers from its screenplay origins—it doesn't read nearly as well as it plays—but it is a worthy albeit idiosyncratic window on American film and its shaping influence on a major director. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-6328-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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
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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