A sad reminder of the current vacuum in American film reviewing. (100 b&w photos)
Longtime TV and newspaper reviewer Ebert (Roger Ebert’s Book of Film, 1996, etc.) hosts a genial, dutiful Cook’s Tour of 100 film masterpieces.
The selections themselves—two-thirds Hollywood product, the rest mostly from Europe—are hard to quarrel with: Metropolis, Gone with the Wind, The Bicycle Thief, The Seven Samurai, Pulp Fiction. About the most offbeat choice is the very last alphabetical entry, Written on the Wind, and here Ebert’s tone is largely apologetic, as if he were afraid to get caught with an original opinion. Generally eschewing interpretation, each entry—balancing appreciation, plot summary, and a lightly sketched overview of the director’s other work—is a feast of the obvious; readers will probably enjoy these revelations in direct proportion to how little they already know about movies. Ebert never misses a chance to bolster his authority by pointing out that he was the only reviewer to hail Bonnie and Clyde when it first opened or by recalling all the films he’s analyzed frame-by-frame on college campuses. But he never establishes his authority in the obvious way, by writing with the wit, economy, or passion of a reviewer like Pauline Kael (whom he often quotes, and who always sounds more savvy and unafraid than him). For every zinger Ebert gets off—“Louise Brooks regards us from the screen as if the screen were not there; she casts away the artifice of film and invites us to play with her”—there are pounds of blandly recycled filler: “Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist who went to obsessive lengths in order to get everything in his films to work just right.” Nor does it help when Ebert gets his facts wrong, as when he upgrades Eva Marie Saint’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar for On the Waterfront to Best Actress.
A sad reminder of the current vacuum in American film reviewing. (100 b&w photos)Pub Date: March 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1032-X
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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