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The Film Club: A Memoir
by: David Gilmour

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9780446199292
ISBN: 044619929X
Label: Twelve
Manufacturer: Twelve
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: May 06, 2008
Publisher: Twelve
Sales Rank: 9473
Studio: Twelve

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
'I loved David Gilmour's sleek, potent little memoir, The Film Club. It's so, so wise in the ways of fathers and sons, of movies and movie-goers, of love and loss.'
--- Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

'If all sons had dads like David Gilmour, then Oedipus would be a forgotten legend and Father's Day would be a worldwide film festival.'

--Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All

'David Gilmour is a very unlikely moral guidance counselor: he's broke, more or less unemployed and has two children by two different women. Yet when it looks as though his teenage son is about to go off the rails, he reaches out to him through the only subject he knows anything about: the movies. The result is an object lesson in how fathers should talk to their sons.' --Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People

At the start of this brilliantly unconventional family memoir, David Gilmour is an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his fifteen-year-old son Jesse to do his homework. When he realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, he offers his son an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent - but he must watch three movies a week of his father's choosing.

Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from True Romance to Rosemary's Baby to Showgirls, and films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Billy Wilder, among others. The movies got them talking about Jesse's life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies.

Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship - and their own lives changed in surprising ways.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- More Like "The Author's Life Club"
The Film Club documents an interesting and novel method of home schooling. The author's 17-year-old son, failing school, is allowed to quit and do nothing, provided he watches 3 movies a week of his father's chooseing. Decidedly, there is a lot to be learned from movies, but the author's attitude toward his son and his focus in the memoir fails to take advantage of the strength of his premise. The son sleeps all day, becomes involved with emotionally manipulative girls, undesirable friends, underage drinking, and drugs. The father glosses over the lessons learned and horizons broadened by film and focuses instead on the relationships in his and his son's lives. The Film Club sounds like an interesting experiment, but its not one I'd risk repeating. There's no reason a love of cinema can't be instilled alongside other lessons of responsibility and accountability.

Rating:

- Mixed review
I would rate this on two aspects. One is that it was very engaging and well written. I have not read a"fun" book in quite awhile. Usually I read something serious and something along the lines of self help. This kept me very interested. I especially liked the way he related the movies to the situation at hand such as what the author and his son were going through. I also learned quite a bit about the movies.

I was not so enamoured by the author's parenting decisions. I feel as though I am fairly progressive. I would not have been an enabler for underage drinking of the son and his son's bedroom guests. Maybe he did not have much of a choice. He did develop a stronger communication and bond with his son and his former wife was on board also. I would give the book a 3 for this and a 5 for the manuscript itself.

Rating:

- Primer on effective fatherhood it ain't
This guy should be embarrassed to share his naivety and utter inadequacy as a friend, much less a father. It was excruciating to wade through anecdotes that demonstrated his ridiculous attitudes about parenting. Some of the movie ideas were entertaining.

Rating:

- More films, less bad advice
I was disappointed by this book. The discussion of the films the father and son watched together was interesting, but the relationship between the two was painful to read about. The son was childish and spoiled, and the father was the enabler. Unfortunately, the interesting parts of the book, (film discussion)were too few, and the creepy parts (the son's love life, Dad's "counsel,")way too many - and they were not related. I suppose that it is my own fault for assuming that the film club would have some effect on the boy's life. The only thing that seemed to tie the two together was that father exposed son to Chungking Express, so he had something to watch while he pined away for an Asian ex-girlfriend.

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