Mike's review

Mike's review

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
by Peter Biskind

10378 Mike's review
rating: 1 of 5 stars1 of 5 stars1 of 5 stars1 of 5 stars1 of 5 stars
recommended for: gossip hounds

Here's where I gave up, where the tasty gossip turned from alluring to absurd:

"Timothy Bottoms, a rising young star who would years after distinguish himself by peeing on Dino DeLaurentiis's shoes during the production of 'Hurricane,' had a crush on Cybill, and couldn't understand why Peter, who already had a wife and children, was hitting on her. They fought throughout the production, and eventually, Bottoms got his revenge: he gave Cybill a novel by Henry James called 'Daisy Miller.'"

Those two sentences are tangled up syntactically and semantically, a thicket of clauses. The winks and nudges about events not yet narrated by the book illustrate two key problems for me: a) bad behavior (with business info a close second) interests Biskind far more than any real insights into filmmaking, and b) the flash-forward to Daisy Miller illustrates his assumptions about audience, and he thinks--perhaps rightly in my own case--that we all already know the history, that what we...more

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comments (showing 1-11 of 11)

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message 1: by Mike
03/25/2008 10:01AM

10378 Marshall, you are too kind. You fucker.

That better? I'm working on my slash and burn.

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message 2: by Adam
03/25/2008 01:09PM

54068 Great review. I'm often interested in the subject matter of books about Hollywood history, but after reading the first chapter in the bookstore I usually just put them back on the shelf for precisely the reasons you've outlined above. A few juicy tidbits aren't worth page after page of sly winks and mind-numbing incoherence.

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message 3: by Donald
03/25/2008 02:33PM

537046 I feel a right wanker. I loved this book...

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message 4: by Mike (last edited 03/25/2008 04:18PM)
03/25/2008 04:14PM

10378 Nah, Donald--I think if I hadn't read the Harris so recently, I'd have been more open to Biskind. But it really pales in comparison.

You may be a wanker, but I don't have enough to go on to make that claim. (How was that Marshall?) Your appreciation for this isn't enough evidence, especially given your good taste in so many matters....



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message 5: by Donald
03/25/2008 11:21PM

537046 Fuckin' Marshall. Far and away the most passive/agressive action i've seen you do...

Yee bastard, you.

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message 6: by Simon
03/26/2008 06:08AM

211278 Have you heard the one about Rabbi Simcha and the Bruno Maglis...

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message 7: by Donald (last edited 03/26/2008 04:32PM)
03/26/2008 04:30PM

537046 fair enough and I agree. Also, tardy kudos on your own avatar. Sponge Bob is one of the Boddhisvattas of the age. a total spiritual genius of light and joy.

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message 8: by Mike (last edited 03/27/2008 06:48AM)
03/27/2008 06:45AM

10378 Marshall, thanks for the link!

Simon--okay, you've stumped me. I googled it and found out that Bruno Maglis are shoes, and that's as far as I got. What? Help a goy out...

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message 9: by Simon
03/27/2008 07:09AM

211278 Mike,

I feel silly now. It was just meant as a quick throwaway line, the beginning of a good shoe-pisser story. (I thought everyone knew that Bruno Magli was a type of shoe because of their starring role in the OJ trial.)

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message 10: by Mike
03/27/2008 07:34AM

10378 Nah, it was funny. I enjoyed the google search.

Never assume anything about my knowledge of shoes, or most any element of clothing or fashion. When you assume you make an ass out of you and ... well, actually, you mostly just make an ass out of me here, exposing my astonishing ignorance. I only just learned what a hoodie was, having gotten confused with those old spam messages about hoodia.

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message 11: by Donald
03/27/2008 12:39PM

537046 thought he was cuttting the sponge cheese.

Dude, you are not telling me that this is an anti-sponge picture, are you?

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