PositiveThe Wall Street JournalIrreverent, well-oiled ... Bishop-Stall packs his book with humorous and enlightening asides about alcohol in literature ... Some of the author’s assertions are of questionable veracity ... But, as in most tales told over a pint, a little bending of the truth can be forgiven if the story’s good enough.
A.D. Jameson
MixedThe Wall Street JournalMr. Jameson writes as a fan of geek culture and has a bone to pick with what he calls \'prestige critics,\' arguing that they, and the public as a whole, \'don’t take geek culture seriously enough, being too quick to dismiss its artworks as stupid and frivolous.\' If anything, though, films of the sort he praises are given too much critical attention ... But Mr. Jameson has a more troubling blindspot. He might be happy about geekdom’s recently found popularity, but he doesn’t seem to realize that these films crowd out creative competition ... the great conflict that Mr. Jameson can’t grapple with: that to make better geek movies, Hollywood needs to make fewer of them.
Jason Diamond
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalDo readers really need another memoir about a moody bearded man who moves to New York, drinks too much and barely scrapes by? Does running a car in reverse take mileage off a car? Even so, an overcrowded genre can make a little room for Mr. Diamond’s touchingly funny work ... it avoids all the pitfalls of the Very Serious Literary Memoir. Mr. Diamond pokes fun at himself ... While readers may walk away feeling like little has been revealed about the filmmaker’s life, the dozens of poignant tidbits in Searching for John Hughes shine brightly.
