I like the idea of Patton Oswalt.
He can be funny and snide and
smart.
It is just that sometimes he may
try too hard. I think that is the case here. He like movies and he went and watched
a lot of movies. But the book tries to put a narrative arc and significance to
some of the movies just where it doesn’t fit. I liked his previous book, but
that seemed to have more form and structure in an organic manner.
Not to say that this book does not have its good parts that
made me laugh. It does. It just felt less necessary than his other book and his
stand up.
He is self-aware though, and I can
respect that. He writes of a time he was opening for Louie CK, when he was younger
and “My ideas were simpler and less startling than I cared to admit, so I
masked that with a lot of unnecessarily ornate vocabulary an dense cultural
references” (134). Maybe he’s still there. Heck, this book isn’t all about
movies then, I guess.
And then, after all that, it’s too
short! It is only 220 pages with larger font and margin, and that’s padded out
with 40 pages of the movies he saw during the time period he’s talking
about. I was let down in the end, but
only because it didn’t meet my high expectations.
No comments:
Post a Comment