Review by New York Times Review
ARE THE MOVIES entirely to be trusted as a design for living? "You can't expect me to keep up that level of charm, I'd have a heart attack," Woody Allen complains in "Play It Again, Sam," the 1972 film in which he takes dating tips from Humphrey Bogart. He realizes reality must win in the end, although the fact that the scene that symbolizes this - his ex-wife shooting Bogart in the chest - is itself a re-enactment of a scene from "They Drive by Night" tells you something about the elasticity of the medium, which, like Escher's eternal stairwell, feeds even our dreams of escape from the movies. We all agree with Allen, on some level. A life lived at a constant pitch of screwball comedy is a recipe for exhaustion. The relationship of most movie couples would not last five minutes beyond the closing credits of the films in which they appear. And yet such is the movies' unrivaled express train to the limbic brain, where Ingrid Bergman's face appears projected the size of a mother as seen by an infant, that trying to see what the medium has done to the shape of our desires can be as difficult as trying to see the edges of the sky. "Movies have created entire aspects of my self," the novelist and screenwriter Tara Ison says in "Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies," a series of essays about the effect of the movies on a nice Jewish girl growing up in the middle-class enclaves of the San Fernando Valley - "a good kid, trouble-free and achieving, good grades," who alternated thinking that something bad was going to happen to her with worrying that it wouldn't. "I want the distinction without the messy fallout, a manageable fairy dusting of Something Bad," she writes. If that isn't an invitation to buy a movie ticket, I don't know what is. From "Arthur," she learns that drinking gives you an adorable English accent. From "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," she learns never to take medication offered to you in paper cups. She is mesmerized by the ringleted Lolitas of "Pretty Baby," "Taxi Driver" and "Bugsy Malone," even after her middle-aged cousin Morris catches her on the toilet one night, ogling her for a few seconds with her panties around her ankles. "I still want to believe in the glory, and buy into the illusion, of erotic girl-child power." The tenacity of such illusions puts a high premium on candor in a writer. If the subject of sex makes for some of Ison's best writing, it is in part because it hews the closest to her own experience, which she uses as an obstinate crowbar to jimmy open the gap between representation and reality. Finally losing her virginity to a boy in her Shakespeare class whose wit and wire-rimmed glasses she has long admired, she finds it nothing like the Franco Zeffirelli adaptation of "Romeo and Juliet" that inflamed her senses years earlier. "We are not breathless and exquisite teenagers overwhelmed by heat," she recalls. Instead, it more closely resembles "a series of Ikea instructional pictographs," although not without its own "sweet comedy" and sense of connection. The further from her experience she strays, the weaker the book; an earnest falsity enters her writing, often enabled by the language of identity politics ("To imagine myself as an Other, and to layer that Other's experience onto my own"), from which Ison seems to have extracted the belief not so much that our tragedies are what best define us, but that other people's tragedies are what best define us. Her chapter "How to Be a Drunk: The Log Book of a Distinctive Alcoholic" - covering drinking at the movies, everything from "Days of Wine and Roses" to Arthur, "cinema's last innocent, unpathologized drunk" - turns into an account of her father's alcoholism, not her own, an idea with which she only coyly flirts: "So, fine, I'll say it: I'm an alcoholic. Well, maybe." Similarly, her interest in crackup movies, from "Cuckoo's Nest" to "A Beautiful Mind," turns out to hinge less on her own mental history than that of her Aunt Edith, who was institutionalized, although "long before my time and my experience of her." But we are not interested in the mania of her aunt, or the alcoholism of her father, or the cancer of her mother's best friend, because these people have not been brought alive on the page. We are interested in Ison, her experience, her chunk of flesh. "I have little memory of 'my experience' watching this film," she writes of "The Odessa File," which she credits with awakening a sense of her Jewishness. "I didn't exist during the movie; I disappeared into those images." Well, maybe. Either that or the girl who grew up wishing herself deeper and darker and more interesting than she felt herself to be has written a book that uses the discursive leeway of the essay form to avoid direct confrontation with herself, or the persistence of those illusions. A sharper sense of humor would have helped. The border between real life and the movies seems to cry out for comic treatment, which may be why Patton Oswalt's "Silver Screen Fiend" scores so highly. It helps, of course, if you have a set of synapses like a pinball machine and a prose style to match. "He wasn't simply riding a wave of success," Oswalt writes of Billy Wilder, whose "Ace in the Hole" he first sees in 1995, at the beginning of what turned out to be a four-year movie-watching binge at the New Beverly Cinema in West Hollywood. "He was on a three-engine speedboat of triumph and he punched through the waves like a shark gone blood simple on surfer guts." Wilder's triumph is Oswalt's abyssal trench. Returning from the "briny darkness" of the New Beverly each night, he logs every film dutifully in one of five reference books, before haring across town to do stand-up at the Largo, waking up bleary-eyed the next morning to scratch out gags fitfully for "MADtv." "I look back ... and I'm amazed I didn't kill anyone," he writes. "Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their 20s?" Oswalt's writing gives off the hallucinogenic shimmer of the true obsessive, packing all the sharpness and bite of his stand-up. His previous book, "Zombie Spaceship Wasteland," was a vivid, spongiform recreation of the coral reef of pop arcana he erected in his teenage years to keep suburban Virginia at bay: Stephen King, "Star Wars," Harlan Ellison, Dungeons and Dragons, "Night of the Living Dead," Edgar Allan Poe. He could as easily have been describing an adolescence on Mars. "Silver Screen Fiend" feeds two addictions, frequently straying from the confines of the New Beverly to provide vivid thumbnail portraits of his fellow comics, giving one another's jokes the "samurai" nod of approval in the back rooms of clubs that felt like "a tiny, hidden lobe of the world's brain," an image that feels smart and snug and fond all at the same time - quite a trick. The world's brain is lucky to have Oswalt knocking around in there, making connections, sparking those synapses, lighting us up. TOM SHONE'S "Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective" was published in October. He is working on a book about Woody Allen.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 25, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Readers who know Oswalt only for his supporting role on the television sitcom The King of Queens might be surprised to learn that he was one of the early proponents of alternative comedy, a style of stand-up comedy that rejects the traditional setup-and-punch-line structure in favor of a more free-form, unpredictable approach. Some readers might also be surprised at how accomplished a writer he is; this fine book, set during his early years in Los Angeles (the mid- to late-1990s), is downright impossible to put down. When the author, then a young stand-up comedian, first moved to L.A., his goal was to become a film director; the best way to accomplish that, he thought, was to immerse himself in movies, old and new, classic and unknown. At the same time, needing to pay his bills, he developed his performance comedy and even as he still dreamed of making his own movies found himself building a career on the big and small screens. Fans of Oswalt's earlier memoir, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland (2011), are pretty much guaranteed to enjoy this one; but, because it's set at a different stage in the author's life, and because it deals with the L.A. comedy scene, it could find itself a whole new set of readers.--Pitt, David Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Veteran stand-up comedian and television actor Oswalt brings his quirky persona to the audio edition of his latest book. Oswalt recounts a four-year period as a young adult in the 1990s when he became obsessed with vintage movies and spent at least three nights a week at the famed New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles. Oswalt provides a conversational and confessional style of delivery familiar to fans of his stand-up act; he moves at a fast pace, never slowing down to allow time for listeners to digest all of his unapologetically esoteric references to cinema and the comedy scene. Yet that mixture of eccentricity and bravado is the essence of Oswalt's appeal. A tribute to The Beverly Theater's colorful owner and operator, the late Sherman Torgan, is especially memorable, as Oswalt vividly recites a list of never-made films that he wishes Torgan could view as a reward in the afterlife. The audiobook also includes a bonus PDF with photos and a helpful index detailing all of Oswalt's movie-going during his addiction period. A Scribner hardcover. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Stand-up comedian, writer, and actor Oswalt reviews pivotal moments in his career in this memoir where he uses his (former) obsession with movies as a framing device for telling vignettes of his early work. Stories include performing stand-up comedy at the Largo, writing sketches for Mad TV, and his first acting job as an extra in the hilariously bad movie Down Periscope. Oswalt's writing style is clear and passionate, but he occasionally drifts into lyric prose and heavy-handed art metaphors that are better suited to print than the spoken word. The author does a good job of narrating his book, smoothly incorporating footnotes and side notes in an energetic, conversational style. VERDICT Although Oswalt is a gifted comedian, his stories here are moderately enjoyable without being funny; film buffs will enjoy the obsessive descriptions of cult film moments, while Oswalt's fans will enjoy the peek into his days as an up-and-coming L.A. performer.-Cliff Landis, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A comedian's lively memoir about his movie addiction."All this filming isn't healthy." That's the advice given to the title character in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), and comedian and actor Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, 2011) would no doubt say the same goes for viewing. In this lively memoir, the author focuses on his early 1990s career, when time was divided between hustling the Los Angeles stand-up circuit and filling his head with every available movie. As he devoured film after film, he told himself that he was getting an education: "As I filled in each hole in my movie buff's incomplete knowledge, perhaps I was unlocking some secret level of skill I had as a comedian." Oswalt was also thinking of the Woody Allen career arc: Germinate in the hothouses of comedy clubs and movie houses and blossom as a brilliant auteur. Instead, watching movies took over, alienating him from life and people: "Don't they want to talk about the movies of the newly rediscovered French crime master Jean-Pierre Melville, or the Dogme 95 movement, or the dozen or so hidden references in the latest Tarantino film? Why are people so boring?" Oswalt tells a variety of interesting storiesof half-assing his way through his days as a MADtv sketch writer, pissing off Jerry Lewis, obsessing over his first tiny film role, hearing an aging actor bellow drunken commentary during a screening of Citizen Kanebut he doesn't go out of his way to score punch lines. Actually, he's on to something more serious, which is how movies can simultaneously inspire and stunt ambition. After all, who has time to write a screenplay when a remastered version of Dr. Strangelove starts in a few hours? A funny, insightful homage to movie love and an honest account of growing up, personally and professionally. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
