An oral history that delves deeply into video stores and the film movement they nurtured.
Using interviews with a wide array of filmmakers, former Premiere editor Roston brings the magic of video stores to life.
With movies now available to view at home with a click of a mouse, it may be easy to forget that as recently as the early 2000s, there were still tens of thousands of video stores in the United States. The Friday-night trip to grab a new release was an American ritual. Only a smattering of remaining stores have survived the industry’s precipitous decline, but, as Roston describes in this engaging oral history, its significance lives on—most notably as “an irreplaceable part of the independent film movement of the 1980s and 1990s” that spawned such award-winning directors as Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and David O. Russell. “Their films are a product of video store culture, both creatively and financially,” writes Roston, who interviewed more than 20 filmmakers for the book. The book makes the case that video stores gave aspiring filmmakers a forum in which to talk about and learn their craft; Tarantino, Smith, Joe Swanberg, and Nicole Holofcener even worked as store clerks. “It was like living in a film library,” Smith recalls. “You could watch anything, and you could watch it over and over again.” For Swanberg, video-store movies were “my film school before I went to film school.” On the financial side, this book points out, stores needed product to fill their shelves—a demand that companies could satisfy very profitably by making low-budget movies with relative novices. Some of these films, such as Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), which had a budget of about $1.5 million, got theatrical releases. “A vibrant independent film movement in theaters happened,” Tarantino says. Apart from Roston’s introduction, the book consists almost solely of verbatim quotes from his interviews, which can sometimes make for a somewhat pedestrian reading experience. However, there’s plenty of insider info here for film buffs to enjoy: “I memorized a thirty-minute sequence of Chinatown, which is how I taught myself filmmaking,” Russell recalls, for example, and Swanberg notes that renting Joel and Ethan Coen’s Raising Arizona (1987) made him realize that “not all movies are made by Steven Spielberg and star Tom Hanks.” Netflix and Redbox, among other things, may have made dinosaurs of video stores, but, as Tarantino laments here, “This next generation isn’t going to know what it’s missing....Something’s lost: that can’t be denied.”
An oral history that delves deeply into video stores and the film movement they nurtured.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941629-15-4
Page Count: 164
Publisher: The Critical Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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