RaveThe Guardian (UK)Are we really going to need the audiobook version? From the very first page, the author’s unmistakable voice ricochets between the reader’s ears: giggling, provoking, digressing, seducing and dropping deadpan little hints about his own life ... superb, boisterous pieces ... Tarantino unleashes a trivia torrent, forcing you to stand fully clothed under his personal Niagara of cinephile references ... It’s exasperating at first. But as so often in the past, I fell under Tarantino’s eerie spell. His passionate knowledge of movies and TV is amazing and slightly terrifying. This kind of engagement is on a level that few ever reach. Among Brit film-makers, only Edgar Wright can match Tarantino’s superhuman encyclopedism ... Despite the title, there’s not much that’s speculative about it. The keynote is cheerful, resounding certainty. Having said which, he does indulge in some expert what-if fantasising about how films could have been made another way ... Yet Tarantino’s insights, brazen and brilliant as they always are, are weirdly upstaged by the tiny, unfollowed-up hints he drops about his own psyche – which comprise the ostensible \'memoir\' part of the book ... There is no self-analysis, no serious discussion of anything outside the movie theatre. Is he leaving the analysis – the speculation – up to the reader? Either way, this is an addictively readable piece of movie evangelism.
Quentin Tarantino
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)I have to admit I was disappointed with the way Tarantino changes the ending, giving merely a throwaway mention early on to the ultraviolent freakout that formed the film’s finale. Of course, fans of the original will know all about the big finish already; or it could be that he wants novel and film to complement each other, as a multimedia installation. But the book is entirely outrageous and addictively readable on its own terms – even the wildly prolix digressive sections and endless savant riffs about movies and TV ... As usual, the novel shows Tarantino as a black belt in provocation ... The book is a reminder that Tarantino is, in fact, a really good writer, and it should not be so surprising that his brilliance as a screenwriter should be transferable into fiction, in the firework displays of dialogue but also the building blocks of narrative. He’s maybe not in the Elmore Leonard league but, like Leonard, he’s refreshingly unconcerned with the literary mainstream. I read this in one sitting – just like watching a film.
Noah Isenberg
RaveThe New Republic... a richly enjoyable and atmospheric selection ... The journalistic work of Billy Wilder in Vienna and Berlin paints an amazing picture of improvisation and survival, excitement, cheek ... This thrilling and valuable book lets us see the European roots of a director who made so many classic American movies, and how they were shaped in the tumult and horror of the twentieth century ... He is jaunty and funny and cordially cynical with the rhythms of the born entertainer—something like a 1930s incarnation of Fran Lebowitz.
Charlie Kaufman
PositiveThe Guardian (UK)... funny, exhausting and very, very long. Reading it is like watching (or being) someone trying to sprint to the top of an Escher staircase ... With its unmistakable obsessive-compulsive aesthetic, it could only have sprung from the head of Charlie Kaufman. There is the magnificent joke-telling stamina working against a constant crisis-of-faith undertow, which whispers that all comedy is futile and dishonest. There is the metafictional self-awareness and incessant autoreferencing of real movie celebrities and writers, including of course a despised \'Charlie Kaufman\'. There is Kaufman’s fascination with the false promise of cinema – of all art – that human existence can be represented; he catches himself in the act of thinking about his own existence, and then in the act of thinking about thinking about his own existence ... It’s a gigantic book, crammed with insanely creative gags, though these thin towards the end; the material about Trump is a bit stale. Yet Kaufman gouges the reader for laughs with expert force ... Finally Antkind comes to its crazy, hellzapocalypticpoppin ending, and this twilight of the puppet-gods dwindles into darkness, leaving me with the punchdrunk feeling I have after all Kaufman’s movies. He may be someone for whom anxiety and sadness are a personal ordeal, but he transforms them into bleak, stark, unearthly monuments to comic despair.
