If uninspiring, this is a user-friendly, nonintimidating guide to appreciating movies.
A film critic for the Washington Post offers advice on watching movies.
Hornaday isn’t the first to write a primer about critically assessing films instead of subjectively responding to them as simply good or bad. Avoiding critical jargon, she hopes to guide novice viewers into “appreciating movies more fully when they succeed, and for explaining their missteps when they fall short.” She has conducted extensive interviews with film folk over the years, which adds an informed, insider’s quality to her discussions. Hornaday smartly divides the book into seven sections: screenwriting, acting, production design, cinematography, editing, sound and music, and directing. Within each section, the author poses a number of questions that she then answers (“where was the camera and why was it there?”), giving the book an unfortunate textbook quality. The narrative is also heavily prescriptive. Hornaday is quick to give her likes and dislikes: “I’ve never loved the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu…credibility might be the chief problem.” On acting, “the most fundamental element of cinematic grammar,” she cites John Sayles: “casting the right actors is easily 90 percent of the [director’s] job.” But mistakes are made. Cameron Diaz was “fatally miscast” in The Gangs of New York. One of the stronger sections is production design, often overlooked by general moviegoers. It encompasses backdrops, locations, sets, props, costumes, hair, and makeup. Done well, writes the author, it establishes “the overall look of a film, the sense of richness, texture, and detail.” In the cinematography section, Hornaday confesses that one of the “few things I truly despise in life…[is] 3-D.” She was “awed” by Sandra Adair’s editing work in Boyhood; Raging Bull and GoodFellas are “masterpieces of editing and rhythm.” The section on sound and music is also good, the one on directing poor, and because the author’s picks are very American-centric, the book’s scope is limited.
If uninspiring, this is a user-friendly, nonintimidating guide to appreciating movies.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09423-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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