Silver screen fiend

Different from the book I was imagining in my head. I was thinking of a book where he talked about favorite films in detail and how they influenced his life and creativity. This is a sort of memoir about trying to make it in entertainment (stand-up comedy, acting) while at the same time obsessively consuming lots of it. He details a period of his life where he put other things aside to watch films, including his personal life and the one thing he actually hoped watching the films would help him do, make his own film.

This book might be interesting to people who can relate to his particular situation, not something I would recommend broadly. Not even to film fans as I don't get a feel for what appealed to him about certain directors, filmmaking techniques, and storytelling. He speaks of his heavy film watching years like a drug addiction that he beats when he has certain epiphanies. It's good advice for artists, living life and actually making art is more important than consuming art.

The best part of the book, that is to say the most intellectually and emotionally moving, was the “first epilogue” “Whistling in the Dark.” The story behind the chapter title is watching Casablanca in a theater when the film broke before a big moment. As they were waiting for the projectionist to fix it, the audience all started whistling “As Time Goes By.” One of those rare moments when a group creates a fun and positive moment together. The other worthwhile bit of the chapter is this:

“...I'm a stone-cold atheist who's grateful religion exists. All religions. I look at them as a testament to the human race's imagination, to our ability to invent stories that explain away—or at least make manageable—the nameless terrors, horrific randomness, and utter, galactic meaninglessness of the universe. Is there anything more defiant and beautiful than, when faced with a roaring void, to say “I know a story that fits this quite nicely. And I'm going to use it, pitiless universe, to give meaning and poetry and hope to my days inside this maelstrom into which I've, in Joseph Conrad's words, ‘blundered unbidden'”?

Then the chapter goes on to list some film projects that directors wanted to make but never got to make, sort of a dream library.

This could be a good book for hardcore film buffs or those who relate to Oswalt's situation.

I'm interested in any book in any form that explores one's relationship to film (see: love for Philip Lopate, Jonathan Rosenbaum, James Naremore, etc.). This memoir was just okay (many funny parts though), but I enjoyed it quite a bit and here, he says exactly how I've come to feel... Movies aren't, actually, EVERYTHING. “Movies–the truly great ones (and sometimes the truly bad)–should be a drop in the overall fuel formula for your life. A fuel that should include sex and love and food and movement and friendships and your own work. All of it, feeding the engine. But the engine of your should be be your life.”

If you read this on a Kindle, the progress bar will make it seem much longer than it actually is, as almost 40% of the book is Appendix. But the non-appendix part of the book is a really enjoyable read, just as much about stand-up comedy and finding your place in life as it is about a consuming passion for film.

If you read this on a Kindle, the progress bar will make it seem much longer than it actually is, as almost 40% of the book is Appendix. But the non-appendix part of the book is a really enjoyable read, just as much about stand-up comedy and finding your place in life as it is about a consuming passion for film.