| Title | : | Moving Places: A Life at the Movies |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0520089073 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780520089075 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 202 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1980 |
Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of "screen memories," making us aware of movies as markers of the past―when and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly of Rear Window , a meditation on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with On Moonlight Bay .
Originally published in 1980,
Moving Places: A Life at the Movies Reviews
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This is a kind of experiment in film criticism, part autobiography (wherein Rosenbaum talks about his life growing up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as the son of the owner of a string of Movie Palaces), and part analysis of an admittedly low-brow film as he watches it repeatedly over the years. By analyzing each different viewing of the film Rosenbaum emphasizes the changing nature of our perceptions and critical faculties, and thereby tries to abolish the notion of detached objective critical standards. One time he viewed it he was tripping on acid! All in all it's a subjective but sharp record of his deep love for and involvement in film.
I give it four stars because at times the book does get egg-heady and annoying as he tries too hard to apply "serious" critical methods to film. In this it reads at times too much like a graduate school thesis. -
The very creative, literary memoir of my favourite film critic. Jonathan Rosenbaum considers his journey from childhood to adulthood, Fifties film fan to Seventies film critic. The text fills in much touching detail on his childhood as a sensitive Jewish boy growing up (in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house!) in Florence, Alabama. His family were well-off movie palace managers, owners of Rosenbaum Theatres; as such, Rosenbaum could spend his youth immersed in movies, inside and out. By the dawn of 1980, when this book was published, Rosenbaum had become an intellectual film critic, moving places (Paris, London, New York) to place movies in writing. This book puzzles at the connection between these two parts of Rosenbaum's life. The result is an at times beautiful, insightful meditation on the interrelationship between the movies we see and the lives we live.
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My guy.
