A merely proficient biography of the master director of such Surrealist classics as Un Chien Andalou and Belle de Jour. Like many early directors, Bu§uel stumbled into the film-making business. He left his native Spain for a putative Parisian diplomatic posting with an offshoot of the League of Nations. While waiting for an assignment, he began to work in a variety of capacities on film sets and as a film critic. At the same time, he was drawn to the Surrealist movement. Desperate for a career, he borrowed money from his mother, and together with Salvador Dal° made the short film Un Chien Andalou. With its dreamy eroticism, its shocking violence (most memorably epitomized in a shot of an eye being sliced with a razor), it was an enormous success, as was his next, equally controversial film L’Age D’Or. Beyond the shock value, there was a strongly considered—though often fetishistic—aesthetic at work. Octavio Paz noted that Bu§uel’s films balanced “ferocity and lyricism, a world of dreams and blood” with a “bare, spare style that is not at all Baroque and results in a sort of exaggerated sobriety.” Despite his notoriety, Bu§uel made almost no more films for the next ten years. The Spanish Civil War sent him into exile, first in Hollywood and then in Mexico, where, eventually, he was able to get work directing low-budget films. From their relative success, he was able to rebuild his career and to gain international acclaim. Unlike many directors whose late work is largely disappointing, Bu§uel enjoyed a great final flowering in his 70s when he produced three masterpieces in a row, including That Obscure Object of Desire, his final film. Veteran film biographer Baxter (Steven Spielberg, 1997, etc.) does a thoroughly competent job, but his writing is uninspired, and his research lacks a fulfilling depth. Not a tour de force but still a useful primer. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0506-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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