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A review by tfitoby
Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies by Hadley Freeman
4.0
Life Moves Pretty Fast, Hadley Freeman's equal parts autobiographical exploration of her youthful cinephilia, feminist analysis of contemporary Hollywood and love letter to 80s Hollywood, marks her as one of my all time favourite writers on cinema.
Her enthusiasm for her subject is completely infectious and her analysis of the strengths of such maligned (including by me) "classics" as Dirty Dancing and Romancing the Stone made me want to rush out to the nearest video rental store to rewatch them as soon as possible.
Having once been a pretty active member of a thousands strong movie blogging community I became pretty jaded with the constant hyperbole that the people who write about film seem to constantly aspire to, in response to that Freeman's honest, intelligent and accessible cinephilia is (to use her own words in response to my praise) like a balm. She's not selling anything to anyone by discussing the merits of Ferris Bueller and The Princess Bride, she's not trying to look cool to other film fans (in fact at times she revels in her outsider/dorky Jewish girl status); there's no agenda whatsoever other than to bemoan the ever worsening status of women in movies and the homogenisation of Hollywood that is aiding larger worldwide box office, and even then it's more to cry out for fun cinema that shows that Abortions Happen and That's Just Fine, Superheroes Don't Have to be Such a Drag, Romcoms Don't Have to Make You Feel Like You're Having a Lobotomy and Why Awkward Girl's Don't Have to Have a Makeover.
Hadley's writing is assured and often witty, her insights plentiful and accurate and it certainly helps that she has no real affection for Star Wars, Arnie, Spielberg, Apatow or Christopher Nolan. She seems to have positioned herself as the anti-Peter Biskind (as suggested in her introduction in fact) and despite her book not being quite as dense as Biskind's tomes she manages to provide as much thought-provoking content for the reader to ponder; here even weeks later I find myself going back to her arguments in my mind or excitedly telling friends that they need to read her book for X, Y or Z reasons, much more so than with anyone else who writes on the subject apart from, perhaps, David Thomson.
We received this ARC at the book shop I work in, it's easily the best one I've managed to snag so far and I cannot wait to start selling it to people this month.
Her enthusiasm for her subject is completely infectious and her analysis of the strengths of such maligned (including by me) "classics" as Dirty Dancing and Romancing the Stone made me want to rush out to the nearest video rental store to rewatch them as soon as possible.
Having once been a pretty active member of a thousands strong movie blogging community I became pretty jaded with the constant hyperbole that the people who write about film seem to constantly aspire to, in response to that Freeman's honest, intelligent and accessible cinephilia is (to use her own words in response to my praise) like a balm. She's not selling anything to anyone by discussing the merits of Ferris Bueller and The Princess Bride, she's not trying to look cool to other film fans (in fact at times she revels in her outsider/dorky Jewish girl status); there's no agenda whatsoever other than to bemoan the ever worsening status of women in movies and the homogenisation of Hollywood that is aiding larger worldwide box office, and even then it's more to cry out for fun cinema that shows that Abortions Happen and That's Just Fine, Superheroes Don't Have to be Such a Drag, Romcoms Don't Have to Make You Feel Like You're Having a Lobotomy and Why Awkward Girl's Don't Have to Have a Makeover.
Hadley's writing is assured and often witty, her insights plentiful and accurate and it certainly helps that she has no real affection for Star Wars, Arnie, Spielberg, Apatow or Christopher Nolan. She seems to have positioned herself as the anti-Peter Biskind (as suggested in her introduction in fact) and despite her book not being quite as dense as Biskind's tomes she manages to provide as much thought-provoking content for the reader to ponder; here even weeks later I find myself going back to her arguments in my mind or excitedly telling friends that they need to read her book for X, Y or Z reasons, much more so than with anyone else who writes on the subject apart from, perhaps, David Thomson.
We received this ARC at the book shop I work in, it's easily the best one I've managed to snag so far and I cannot wait to start selling it to people this month.