MixedThe Guardian (UK)It is hard not to admire the gumption. Anolik swings big ... I remain sceptical about this two-halves theory ... This is vivid, entertaining stuff and often gallops along as if it’s been up all night at one of Didion and Dunne’s notorious Franklin Avenue gatherings, but it is, perhaps, more provocative than entirely convincing.
Griffin Dunne
RaveThe Guardian (UK)\"As a movie-business memoir, it is brisk and classy. Dunne’s sex and drugs years give it a Bret Easton Ellis feel, without quite the same level of brashness, and there is plenty of name-dropping, though most of it is well earned ... The second part of the story recounts his sister’s death and the appalling criminal trial of her attacker, John Sweeney. We move from Less Than Zero territory into something more reminiscent of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts, another indelible personal account of a murder trial involving a family member ... Though we witness Dunne morphing from self-confessed fibber into painfully candid memoirist, there is no sense that he is selling his family out here. His story is unsparing but also affectionate, alternately flattering and stark, depending on the scene. What emerges is a novelistic and compelling account of a life, and a self-deprecating guide to the Dunnes’s many highs and lows. It is a fond yet riveting family portrait.\
Ed Zwick
RaveThe Guardian\"...a fantastically entertaining memoir that shows the movie business in high definition. It is part how-to guide, peppered with frank lists that crunch hard-won advice into easily digestible bites, and will be useful for young film-makers – but the layperson will inhale it for the gossip and what it reveals about the frankly bewildering systems of power that prop up the entertainment business. Zwick writes briskly and warmly, with a clear eye to keeping things moving. He admits early on that he is pulled between telling a good story and a desire “not to be excommunicated from certain Hollywood parties that I don’t care to attend anyway.\' Happily for the reader, the storytelling wins that battle ... The book is at its best when it gently prises the movie-star business away from the business of making movies. Though the two are co-dependent, stardom and storytelling here seem like distinct industries, and Zwick seems as baffled as anyone by the ways in which the movie-star side truly operates. The power dynamics are fascinating ... for all that Zwick reveals, he attempts to give his anecdotes a soft landing, trying to either dull or explain what often reads as rude-to-appalling behavior ... Half the fun of Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is in reading between the lines. If this is the stuff that won’t get Zwick excommunicated from the parties he doesn’t want to go to anyway, then I’d love to know what he left out.\
