Movie Freak
My Life Watching Movies
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Entertainment Weekly's controversial critic of more than two decades looks back at a life told through the films he loved and loathed.
Owen Gleiberman has spent his life watching movies-first at the drive-in, where his parents took him to see wildly inappropriate adult fare like Rosemary's Baby when he was a wide-eyed 9 year old, then as a possessed cinemaniac who became a film critic right out of college. In Movie Freak, his enthrallingly candid, funny, and eye-opening memoir, Gleiberman captures what it's like to live life through the movies, existing in thrall to a virtual reality that becomes, over time, more real than reality itself.
Gleiberman paints a bittersweet portrait of his complicated and ultimately doomed friendship with Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker film critic who was his mentor and muse. He also offers an unprecedented inside look at what the experience of being a critic is really all about, detailing his stint at The Boston Phoenix and then, starting in 1990, at EW, where he becomes a voice of obsession battling-to a fault-to cling to his independence.
Gleiberman explores the movies that shaped him, from the films that first made him want to be a critic (Nashville and Carrie), to what he hails as the sublime dark trilogy of the 1980s (Blue Velvet, Sid and Nancy, and Manhunter), to the scruffy humanity of Dazed and Confused, to the brilliant madness of Natural Born Killers, to the transcendence of Breaking the Waves, to the pop rapture of Moulin Rouge! He explores his partnership with Lisa Schwarzbaum and his friendships and encounters with such figures as Oliver Stone, Russell Crowe, Richard Linklater, and Ben Affleck. He also writes with confessional intimacy about his romantic relationships and how they echoed the behavior of his bullying, philandering father. And he talks about what film criticism is becoming in the digital age: a cacophony of voices threatened by an insidious new kind of groupthink.
Ultimately, Movie Freak is about the primal pleasure of film and the enigmatic dynamic between critic and screen. For Gleiberman, the moving image has a talismanic power, but it also represents a kind of sweet sickness, a magnificent obsession that both consumes and propels him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gleiberman, former film critic for the Boston Phoenix and Entertainment Weekly, often strays from the path in this spry but uneven memoir. His description of losing his "cinematic virginity" at a drive-in showing of Rosemary's Baby is an endearing passage. The excitement he remembers feeling after seeing Carrie and Nashville for the first time is infectious, as is the thrill when he met his idol, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. But once Gleiberman starts working at the Phoenix and, later, EW, the narrative devolves into a series of publication turf wars and feuds with a series of editors. There are some valid points about the work of film criticism, such as the importance of going against the mainstream and the critic's function in marketing, alongside too many observations that read like ax grinding against his former employers. Gleiberman's recollection of his friendship with Oliver Stone yields little insight, and his descriptions of junkets and film festivals are far too self-involved. When Gleiberman actually writes about movies, his book clicks, but his professional triumphs and travails won't interest non-devotees of film criticism.
Customer Reviews
GET YOUR FREAK ON
Move over American movie critic fans, us Brits across the pond like Gleiberman, too. I have followed his reviews for a very long time, so I was really happy to hear he’d written a book telling us how he ‘gets his freak on.’ From beginning to end – and like any good film - MOVIE FREAK engages, at times enrages (because of his battle to be true to his film criticism despite corporate politics), but the memoir is always as highly-entertaining as a good film. If I were reviewing this as a movie I’d give it an ‘A’