Title: The Film Club
Author: David Gilmour
Series: N/A
Publisher: Thomas Allen Publishers
Publish Date: September 2007
Genre: Memoir
Pages: 264
Source: Borrowed from Library
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SUMMARY: At the start of this brilliantly unconventional family memoir, David Gilmour is an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his fifteen-year-old son Jesse to do his homework. When he realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, he offers his son an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent – but he must watch three movies a week of his father’s choosing.
Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from True Romance to Rosemary’s Baby to Showgirls, and films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Billy Wilder, among others. The movies got them talking about Jesse’s life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies.
Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship – and their own lives changed in surprising ways. (via Amazon)
BRIAN’S REVIEW: I first came across the simple but enticing cover of this book when I was walking through a Borders Bookstores (RIP) way back in 2008, and I was excited to read it someday. A true story about a father who lets his son skip school and just watched movies with him? Amazing! Well, that day has finally come. I’ve passed it by on so many occasions I haven’t been able to keep count, and every single time I see it, I pick it up, read the back, think to myself, “this sounds really interesting,” but then never buy it. When I found it at my local library a few weeks ago, I knew it was time to finally explore the unique concept that is The Film Club.
Considering that I’d been looking forward to reading this book for four and a half years, was all that anticipation worth the wait? Unfortunately, no. While there’s a lot to like about this book, ultimately the whole affair came across a little flat to me. My favorite scenes, of course, were the ones in which the father David sits down with his troubled but ultimately smart and artistically gifted son Jesse and watch movies. While author Gilmour doesn’t exactly go into any depth with the films he shows his son–this ain’t Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies–I enjoyed the unique perspective of presenting movies to a teenager not just to entertain him, but to teach him all the ways of life. I loved that Jesse watches the classics, like Casablanca and Notorious, but also camp fests like Basic Instinct and Showgirls. And throughout the story, Jesse seems to grow a little bit with every movie he watches, and in the end, he truly is a different person.
The mediocre material in the book is most of what makes this a “memoir.” You might be surprised to find in a book this slim that probably only a third of it is dedicated to the actual movie watching. While there of course needed to be material about David’s and Jesse’s lives outside the screening room, I was unmoved by most of it, particularly the constant nagging on behalf of Jesse concerning his borderline-obsessed feelings for a girl named Rebecca. I wanted this author to get across to the reader how cinema can change lives, and while Jesse is definitely a smarter, more confident person in the book’s closing chapter, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the way his change comes across.
Ultimately I have to give this book a mixed review. I was entertained by much of it, but in the end it left me wanting more.
