Movie Freak: My Life Watching Movies

Description

From a personal obsession with film, to an unorthodox mentorship with the legendary Pauline Kael, to establishing himself with the upstart Entertainment Weekly, Movie Freak is the memoir by veteran film critic Owen Gleiberman that will speak to anyone whose life has been changed by a great film. What molds a critic? Perhaps it takes parents willing to buy nine-year-old Gleiberman drive-in tickets for Rosemary's Baby. Like millions of us, Gleiberman loves movies and in this frank and funny memoir he not only reveals the details of how he became a critic but attempts to show why we find cinema so defining as a society. As one of the premiere tastemakers for more than three decades, Gleiberman, a self-confessed movie freak, explains why he, and so many others, equate film with life. Readers will revel in the juicy details of the behind-the-scenes life of a critic and cheer as he lifts the curtain on life along the red carpet.

Owen Gleiberman is an American film critic. He wrote for The Boston Phoenix and is best known as the founding movie writer for the then-startup Entertainment Weekly, where he was the lead critic for 24 years. Today Gleiberman continues to write for BBC.com and lives in New York City with his wife Sharon and two daughters.

MOVIE FREAK is a blast....Part autobiography, part magazine-industry tell-all and part love letter to movies, the book feels like a long, wide-ranging conversation with Gleiberman.... elegant, insightful, funny and provocative. Gleiberman remains one of the most astute and pleasurable film writers of the last 30 years....This funny, frank book is filled with irresistible digressions on movies.--Miami Herald Movie Freak mixes ideas and autobiography in a totally riveting way. Smart, gossipy, and entertaining, it's a flashback to a time when movies mattered and an insider's look at how that moment ended.--Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls A chronicle of his love affair with films...a story of societal change, rich in cultural as well as personal history.--Kirkus Reviews Film has devolved rather than evolved since the days of Pauline Kael, one of the major influences named by Owen Gleiberman in his fascinating memoir Movie Freak. Film criticism isn't something just anyone can or should do. Gleiberman takes us a journey inside the life and mind that built one of the best film critics around. His careful assessment of his own place in film criticism, his observations of his own influences - and perhaps, biases - make a good case that he is one of the few good writers, and good minds, evaluating films. Reading Movie Freak reminded me how much more we need of Owen Gleiberman and less of everything else that film criticism has become. I've been following his reviews for almost twenty years so it's no wonder it was such a pleasure reading about what helped formed him as a writer, a critic and a man.--Sasha Stone, publisher of www.awardsdaily.com Owen Gleiberman may be the most consistently perceptive of our big-league movie critics, and Movie Freak is filled with his provocative judgments. (Kurosawa, Godard, even Welles - these guys sometimes suck, right?) But Gleiberman also opens up his own life to lay bare issues of love and death and dreams and desire. He provides an insider's tour of the shark-tank New York media world, and more sex and drugs and rock and roll than you might possibly expect. This isn't just one of the most fascinating books of its kind - it's a new kind altogether.--Kurt Loder, author of The Good, the Bad and the Godawful and movie reviewer for Reason.com Owen Gleiberman's Movie Freak is a chronicle of rapture-the progression of a shy Midwestern boy, vibrating to images and sounds, who searches for his voice and his vocation in drive-in movie theaters, in shock and pornography, in Pauline Kael's prose, and finally in art (Carrie, Nashville, etc.). He becomes a full-fledged movie critic facing the competitive furies of New York journalism, where he remains devoted to an essential critical creed: Trust your pleasure. The book is exuberant and candid, a celebration of appetite, an essential, turned-on guide to American pop culture in the last forty years.--David Denby, The New Yorker With Movie Freak, Owen Gleiberman reminds us why he's remained one of the most incisive American critics working today. Pairing his burgeoning romance with motion pictures alongside various private and professional developments, he delivers a bracing cultural history of American movies through the intimate lens of his personal experiences. Along the way, he explores the subtle forces that contribute to the development of sharp, provocative opinions about cinema, art and life itself, illustrating that process through his typically engrossing prose and individualistic stances. Yet Movie Freak deepens its cause by extending beyond the limited arena of American film culture to capture its impact on Gleiberman's maturation as a human being. This is a coming of age drama as moving and profound as the big screen achievements that inspired its author.--Eric Kohn, Indiewire