One of Europe's most distinguished screenwriters offers a philosophical rumination on his chosen medium, but those led by the title to expect a glimpse into the hidden world of filmmaking will be disappointed. Film is an art that has evolved at a highly accelerated rate. As Carriäre points out, movies have crammed into less than a century the same process of artistic development that led painting from the walls of the caves of Lascaux to the work of the great modern artists. The result, combined with the intense proliferation of television and videotape, is that we are bombarded relentlessly with images. Even film itself is moving faster, he writes, with quick-cutting moving from rock videos to the big screen at an alarming rate. Today, Carriäre argues, visual Muzak surrounds us constantly, and the image is increasingly devalued. Much of the book is taken up with his thoughts on this phenomenon, which he finds quite disturbing. Elsewhere, Carriäre talks about the ways in which film alters our sense of time, the subterfuges by which film editing expands or compresses ``real time'' into reel time. He also offers an essay on the process by which a screenplay becomes a film, but there is little of practical value here. The author is at his most engaging when he recalls his early apprenticeship under Jacques Tati and some moments from his 19-year collaboration with Luis Bu§uel. Unfortunately, his attempt at film history is filled with generalizations that won't stand up to serious scrutiny, repeating stories that have been disproved by the scholarship of people like Charles Musser and John Fell. Despite that, the book is engaging, and Carriäre's tone—witty, self-effacing, and concerned- -manages to be at once disturbing and soothing, a rare combination indeed. Deserves a place on a small shelf alongside such oddities as Bresson's Notes on Cinematography and Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time, studies in the philosophy of film written by great practitioners of the art.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42116-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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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