Well-considered, engaging behind-the-scenes look at both the movie and TV industries.
A tawdry Hollywood game show is ground zero for celebrities to seek revenge against one another in Patrick’s (Tea Cups & Tiger Claws, 2014) darkly humorous novel.
The name says it all: StarBash thrives on ridiculing its thespian contestants. Audiences love it, and ratings couldn’t be better. But while participants are typically unemployed actors and has-beens fighting for the prize of a $10 million movie deal, no one knows why popular actor Cassandra Moreaux would sign on for its fourth season. Cass, however, has a personal reason: It’s the only way she can score a meeting with 87-year-old actor Lenora Danmore. Lenora initially launched StarBash to fund her interactive movie museum, convincing her reluctant manager, Micah Bailey, to act as the game show’s host. But Cass is more interested in an event 70 years in the past. She’s certain Lenora got her actor mother blacklisted as a communist. Though proof of this could blemish Lenora’s celluloid legacy, she doesn’t want Cass going anywhere. She’s planning to stoke ratings even further with contestant Brandi Bonacore, an actor who blames Cass for her own stalled career. Their inevitable feud becomes the latest season’s driving force as participants fall by the wayside. Around the same time, Cass learns that Micah is more than the Hollywood-loathing host he appears to be. She holds tight to her vendetta against Lenora while also becoming Brandi’s target for revenge. Regardless of how things unfold, Lenora may have a scheme of her own to counter any potential evidence Cass possesses. Patrick’s story is not an outright condemnation of Hollywood. For one, very little is known about additional contestants, including what presumed missteps have led them to StarBash. Likewise, much of the derision comes from Micah (as host), who even mocks penny-pinching guest Elmer and his tips on how to save money. The narrative’s true focus is the presumed artificiality of Hollywood’s denizens. Behind all that glamour, in other words, are genuine and struggling people. This is comically epitomized by glitzy New York Plaza Hotel as the fourth season’s setting. The cast actually lives in cramped trailers, films on California soundstages, and travels in vans with the crew to locations. Characters like Micah aren’t as insubstantial as they initially seem; he has such distaste for his hosting duties that he resists pressure from Lenora to hang on for seasons five and six. Furthermore, he and Cass unexpectedly bond by sharing their love of films. Cass loves the classics, while Micah prefers documentaries. The TV show’s concept is formulaic, but the cast continually evolves. Brandi’s contempt for Cass, for example, isn’t completely unfounded. The novel sometimes waxes profound, even when steeped in cynicism: “Almost anyone can be selfless, if they have enough time to think about it and to arrange the circumstances so that the unpleasant act will cause as little discomfort as possible.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this particular notion correlates with one character’s truly selfless deed.
Well-considered, engaging behind-the-scenes look at both the movie and TV industries.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9893544-5-5
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Country Scribbler Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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