PositiveAir MailVon Doviak’s Southern-fried yarn is indeed terrifically cinematic ... Part breezy road-trip hangout and part exciting mad, mad, mad, mad chase ... The book is wonderfully lived-in and evocative ... An assured read.
Quentin Tarantino
PositiveAir MailAs he heads into the self-imposed end of his consistently successful directorial career, the 59-year-old is positioning himself in his planned retirement from filmmaking to occupy a role he was born for: as a critical institution of movies as a whole ... Expect many blowhard declarations, illuminating digressions, and insightful interviews peppered throughout the enthusiastic-to-the-point-of-horniness text ... It all adds up to something akin to a one-of-a-kind and compulsively readable volume of film criticism as self-portrait. After all, what better way for Tarantino, who has lived and breathed 35-mm. his whole life, to tell his personal story than via moviegoing? And who knows—Cinema Speculation might decades from now be referenced by a future director as a revelatory sandwich read for a germinating cinephile today, the way Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was for a young Q.T.
Quentin Tarantino
PositiveAir Mail... the 400-page novel wears its sprawling messiness on its sleeve and frequently expands on and deviates from the film ... Fittingly, the novel often reads like the affable, drunken remembrances of things past from those seasoned showbiz Old Timers—replete with Tarantino’s trademark foot fetishism for good measure. The most elating moments stem from the alternative Hollywood histories Tarantino concocts, bits of which yield terrifically fourth-wall-obliterating winks to the reader (including a brief reimagined possibility of his own career). Admittedly, for anyone looking to quench a thirst for something resembling truth about Charles Manson and the murder of Sharon Tate—not to mention Roman Polanski’s relationship with the actress—this book unfortunately runs dry ... However, for fans of Once upon a Time … in Hollywood’s buddy duo for the ages, Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth, those glibly shallow, factually weak points are easy to overlook in a book with such effervescent delights to offer in the company of these wonderful characters. If Tarantino’s 10th film is indeed his cinematic swan song, this novel bodes well for a worthy post-retirement creative chapter ahead.
