Word: memoir
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cinematic adaptation of the book. What works for the book--different incidents from McCourt's childhood that connect to create a rich, moving mosaic of his life growing up in Ireland--fails miserably on-screen. Episodic and unsatisfyingly static, the film is bound to disappoint fans of McCourt's memoir...
...only thing that has made her a star of the gossip pages. There were the slew of canceled concert appearances, the reports of erratic behavior, a faltering singing voice and a feud and chilled relations with her half sister Lorna Luft, author of a warts-and-all family memoir. No one ever said being the daughter of Judy Garland (dead of an overdose at age 47) was easy. But for a walking, talking soap opera, you'd have to look pretty hard to top Liza...
Which is not quite the way it sounds in Luft's tell-all book, Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (which, among other things, recounts Lorna's role in getting Liza into rehab). The two aren't talking now, though Liza doesn't describe it as a feud: "We're sisters, and we're going through something." She won't even bad-mouth the book, which she claims she hasn't read. "It's her point of view. I think it was probably cathartic for her to write it." Catharsis or not, Liza refused to join her sister...
...accurately describing a life, biographies give the reader a chance to get into some famous person's head. Two current bestsellers probably owe their success to this phenomenon: When Pride Still Mattered, the story of Hall of Fame Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, and John Glenn: A Memoir, the life of the former Mercury astronaut and former senator. Both of these books are about people who lived lives far removed from that of the average book-buyer, making the chance to relive their lives all the more thrilling. In the case of the current bestseller Galileo's Daughter, although...
...Neither does the fact that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind of a '50s male...