For fans of the iconic film, Aikman provides everything you wanted to know about it and then some.
The hidden story of Thelma & Louise.
The 1991 Ridley Scott film, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, became very popular and highly influential, but few fans know the back story. Thanks to former Newsday reporter Aikman (Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives, 2012), we do now. Drawing on extensive interviews with many of the film’s participants, the author creates an entertaining and in-depth film history. In the late 1980s, Callie Khouri, a college dropout from Kentucky, ended up in California, working for a small production company. Frustrated by the “male-driven, violence-tinged” films of the time, she felt like “she had something to say, something that mattered, and she knew it belonged on film.” Khouri wanted to write an authentic movie she wanted to see. Basing her main characters on a best friend and herself, she came up with Thelma, a “cheerfully scattered housewife,” and Louise, a “tightly wound coffee-shop waitress.” The movie started as a comedy but then went “someplace completely unexpected, someplace wilder and weighted with conflicting impulses toward emancipation and dread.” Aikman does a terrific job of showing how the film found the right director in Scott—who loved the film’s “romantic vision of Americana” and its “mythic grandeur”—an impressive cast (including Davis, Sarandon, Harvey Keitel, and Brad Pitt), settings, and the controversial, dramatic ending. Scott had hoped for the convertible to go off a cliff in the Grand Canyon but settled for one near Moab, Utah. The first car failed, the second just “sailed away.” Thelma & Louise received six Oscar nominations, but only Khouri won, for best original screenplay, the first woman writing on her own to win one since 1924. The book is enhanced by informative, brief biographies of key players and mini-essays on pertinent topics like the history of women in film.
For fans of the iconic film, Aikman provides everything you wanted to know about it and then some.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-671-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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