Great books about movies are rare, and books that manage to truly capture the feeling movies can give you (like Patton Oswalt’s “Silver Screen Fiend”) are even rarer. Yet Owen Gleiberman’s “Movie Freak” may be the best book about movies I’ve ever read, and is the best book ever written about the lure of films, as evidenced from the book’s opening section about Drive-In theaters. Gleiberman gets you so inside that isolated-community of fogged glass and dirt-road wonder that it’s almost like sitting inside someone’s confessional booth that just happens to be playing a lurid 8mm of all their dark turn-ons. And that’s just the beginning…
It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Owen is so good at explaining the seductive thrill of movies, since he’s been a professional movie critic for decades, mostly for Entertainment Weekly and just recently for Variety. Full Disclosure: I’ve been reading Gleiberman (in the pages of EW) since I was 10 years old, and the book contains the revelatory kick that someone I’ve been reading for most of my life turns out to be someone I didn’t know much about at all. Yet I would say he’s had more of an impact on my own movie-reviewing style than any other critic living or dead, and is still at the top of my “Interview Get List.” His reviews always had an appealing dive into the psychological aspect of movies, and his thoughtful analysis into why they work (or don’t) has led me directly to watching all-time faves like “A Face in the Crowd” simply because of a line in his review.
“Movie Freak” works on a few different levels since it’s really three different books layered into one: There’s the quasi-“Rise and Fall of Entertainment Weekly” tell-all that is fascinating for longtime EW readers, especially those that loved the heartier period before Jess Cagle took over and basically made the magazine shallower and cheaper in almost every way. Owen’s story of beginning when the magazine did and getting fired more than two decades later could almost be a 90’s-era “Mad Men” retelling of the collapse of print.
Then there’s the added bonus that “Movie Freak” actually could serve as a good film history of the last quarter-century in movies. Those that have already seen these films will ponder questions like “was ‘Dazed and Confused’ better than ‘The Piano?'” “Did ‘Moulin Rouge’ deserve to beat out ‘Memento’ as Best Film of 2000?” “Were contemporary politics keeping Oliver Stone’s ‘Nixon’ from the respect it deserved?” And for those that maybe are looking for a guidebook of “Great Movies” (yes the quotes are necessary) to get acquainted with, it’s a good starter as well.
Still, those layers ebb and flow into the larger narrative of Owen’s life, and exactly what it’s like to be a movie critic. Owen has many falling-outs in this book with former bosses (a petty tyrant at The Boston Globe), former mentors (heralded critic Pauline Kael), co-workers, other critics (David Edelstein), friends (like Oliver Stone), girlfriends, and at one point his mother, yet most of these people are repelled by the same thing that put Owen into their orbit in the first place: his opinions. “Movie Freak” may also be the best book ever written about the freedom of expressing your unfiltered opinions, and the isolation that can come with that.
His take on a social-media-culture that “chains people to popular opinion” and makes our own takes inherently “right” or “wrong” through popularity, essentially commoditizing the polarization that people pretend they hate about this era is Orwellian, yet completely correct. It’s one of Owen’s sharpest points in his writing to examine the “costs” of unlimited freedom or if it’s really freedom at all. He mentions a few times in “Movie Freak” that he’s more culturally Jewish than religious, but a common theme in his reviews (from “Inherent Vice” to “Boogie Nights”) is the fall of the 60’s hippie dream into nihilistic scuzz, and he often describes this in near-religious terms like “The Fall” of the 60’s is akin to Eve biting that apple. It’s also a common theme in his reviews (like “The Sweet Hereafter” or “Penthouse,” a movie he mentions in the book I’d never heard of) to mention the downside of pleasure, and how people—like the navel-gazing voyeurs in “Blair Witch Project” who are about to get killed on camera—in horror films may deserve what they’re getting, with God as ironic executioner. His love of certain horror films and their primal, chickens-coming-home-to-roost dread may be more religious than meets the eye.
And no one is more aware than Owen that being a (financially successful) movie critic really is a dream job. I liked how he faced that aspect head-on, and even addressed some of the hogwash that tries to dilute the joy of being a movie critic. [Plenty of paying customers spend their own money to watch bad movies in a theater every year, why would getting paid to do it be so bad?] But ultimately, if he keeps turning out great reviews and the occasional great book, what is there really to atone for? Grade: A