Customer Reviews

The Film Club: A Memoir

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

His grades started dropping in the ninth grade. In the tenth, they toppled. He switched to a private school. No difference. Jesse Gilmour just didn't give a damn.

His father --- David Gilmour, a well-known Canadian novelist --- was unhinged. At this rate, Jesse wouldn't be going to college. At this rate, Jesse would be flipping burgers at minimum wage --- if he didn't completely fall apart.

Dad had to intervene. And he did. He had been a movie critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His son liked movies. On that frail connection, he proposed that Jesse drop out of school and watch three movies a week. Dad's choice. Just the two of them.

The film club began with Truffaut's "400 Blows". European. Arty. Certain to bore the kid. But important because Truffaut was "a high school dropout, a draft dodger, a small-time thief." They watch. They talk. You're interested.

Then Rebecca Ng enters the story. She's mature, mysterious, unspeakably hot. Jesse's smitten. David's worried. Seeing Rebecca and Jesse together was "like watching him get into a very expensive car. I could smell the new leather from here."

Girls and movies make for a more complicated story. Now add another element: David's writing career. Suddenly it's going about as well as Jesse's schooling. It looks as if there are two dropouts in the Gilmour residence.

But David perseveres with the film club. In the course of the screenings, he serves up terrific tidbits. Did you know Alfred Hitchcock built a second set of stairs so Ingrid Bergman's long walk at the end of "Notorious" is doubly tense? That Stephen King didn't like the film of "The Shining" and had no affection at all for its director, Stanley Kubrick? That director William Friedkin got a great performance by a priest in "The Exorcist" by asking the guy if he trusted him --- and then slapping him in the face?

Yes, you learn lots of cool trivia from "The Film Club", but that's not the big takeaway. This easily digested memoir is about something much bigger than film --- it's about people, and how we see them, and how we treat them.

There are, if you think that way, "good kids" and "bad kids". And there are "responsible parents" and "permissive parents". You can put those grids over relationships and make some easy, smug judgments. And I'll bet, if you're that sort of reader, even this brief description of "The Film Club" is enough to lead you to conclude that Jesse's a bit of a loser and Dad's a bit of a flake.

If you're that kind of reader --- what am I saying? I'm that kind of reader! I judge like mad! And of course I feel superior to this father-and-son team. Why not: I loved school. And as a stepfather and now a father, the kids who have lived with me have also loved to learn --- even in school.

So if you're that kind of reader --- if, like me, you think of yourself as a rebel, but you don't color too far outside the lines --- this is a very subversive memoir. Three years in two lives. Father and son really getting to know one another. Boundaries broken. Generalizations shattered --- David and Jesse's first, but yours most of all.

Don't think this is a small book just because it's short (217 pages) and intimate. David Gilmour took a chance. A big chance --- few parents would tell their teenaged kid he/she doesn't have to go to school. To ask "Did Jesse's life work out?" is to reduce this complex story to a Hollywood movie plot. It did and it didn't. It's real life, not a movie.

On the other hand, "The Film Club" does have a pretty great ending.

The premise of this book intrigued me. When the school system fails to engage his son, Jesse, a father allows the boy to drop out, and attempts to teach him about life through film. And when the book stuck to that plotline, it was actually pretty engaging; I enjoyed the descriptions of many classic movies, and Gilmour writes about them with the passion and knowledge of a film critic, yet with language accessible to the average person. However, this kind of thing obviously can't fill the whole book, so the author pads it out with random things that feel like scenes from the life of your next-door neighbor. Not in the good, relatable, "I feel like the author's a personal friend" way, mind you. More like an acquaintance who you run into in the grocery store and delays you for 20 minutes chatting about basically nothing, while you desperately try to end the conversation. So in that spirit, we get some rather whiny and self-pitying talk about the author's difficulties finding employment; an unintentionally hilarious account of Jesse's career as a "white rapper", which Gilmour relates with a tone of dead seriousness and even pride; and most of all long, excruciatingly dull tales of Jesse's relationships with various girlfriends, none of them particularly remarkable. In fact, these sections even made me a tiny bit uncomfortable; I'm no expert on father-son relationships, but is it really normal for a dad to take such an interest in his son's love life? It's almost like he's living vicariously through Jesse. Even the sections on film begin to wear over time, as Gilmour starts name-dropping the famous people he's met and dispensing his "expert" opinions ("Richard Gere would do better to focus on his acting and stop trying to sound so smart all the time," he opines). Most annoying is how the author gives Jesse more or less a free pass on all kinds of behavior--trying cocaine, nearly getting himself killed in Cuba, taking a job scamming people--while continuing to insist, without any sort of irony, that his son is a bright and gifted boy. I read all the way to the end, hoping to learn about the "shocking decision" of Jesse's that's advertised on the book's cover. SPOILER ALERT--it's no big deal, the kid just decides to--gasp--finally get his diploma and go on to college. A fine choice, but not surprising or even interesting. And that sentence pretty much sums up the book, too; it reads as a man's attempt to glorify and give meaning to events that happen every day, to all kinds of people. And none of them felt the need to write a book about it.

Because my Father was the greatest Father in the world I always wanted to be a Father, and then I was blessed with the greatest son. Since the two roles in my life; son, when my Dad was alive, and Father now, are so special to me, I'm always enthusiastically interested in any literature regarding the magical union of Father and Son. The author of this book David Gilmour has been among other things the national film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and has written six novels. David was confronted with a personal and family crisis when his fifteen-year-old son Jesse was failing every subject in school. Jesse had no real desire to continue going to school so David had to make a gut wrenching decision... a decision that wasn't discussed in the "Being A Father" manual that you weren't given when your first child was born. David gave Jesse the freedom to quit school with one proviso: he had to watch three movies a week with his Dad, and his Dad chose the movies. Jesse gleefully accepted the deal. What the author wound up receiving was three years of indescribable time together that involved way more than just watching movies. The Father cleverly became a skillful teacher without standing up in the front of a classroom and announcing I am "THE TEACHER!" The teacher he became did not have a set curriculum that you would find in any institution of higher learning. The subject wasn't math, English or history... it was much more important! It was "LIFE". Though the author shared his lifetime love of movies with his son, the movie subjects were picked, and schedules changed, based on the curve balls being thrown at Father and son by a combination of destiny and fate.

This book is lovingly written and the reader shares the travails of a sixteen-year-old dropout with no job, girl problems, and a Father trying to feel his way blindfolded, through a darkened twisting tunnel, in an attempt to come out on the other end with a boy who becomes a man, and a loving Father/son relationship still intact. The tools the Father uses are of course great movies renowned and obscure, ranging from "The Bicycle Thief" to "The Exorcist" to "Scarface" and beyond. He reaches into his past experiences as a movie critic to share inside info with his son, such as when he interviewed Dennis Hopper and asked him who his favorite actor was. "I thought he was going to say Marlon Brando. Everyone says Marlon Brando. But he didn't. he said James Dean. You know what else he said? He said the best piece of acting he'd ever seen in his life was that scene with James Dean (in "Giant") when he takes his leave, he stops by the door, fiddling with a long piece of rope, like he's practicing a rodeo trick... he makes a movement with his hand, like he's sweeping snow off a desk. It's like he's saying "F" you to the business guys."

As important as the education by film, are the situations that force the Father to open up his own past, involving hurt and disappointments with women. As a parent, the reader feels the pain of indecision in a place that only one's child can penetrate to, as the Father decides what to share from his inner vault. The author makes it clear that at this stage of his son's life it's more important to be a Father than a friend. When Jesse starts drinking too much the author turns to literature and tells his son about Malcolm Lowry, a rich boy who leaves England and drinks his way around the world, settling in Mexico and writes a great novel about drinking, "Under The Volcano", and almost drives himself insane in the process. "I told Jesse, to imagine how many young men your age have gotten drunk and looked in the mirror and thought they saw Malcolm Lowry looking back at them. How many young men thought they were doing something more important, more poetic than just getting really smashed. I read Jesse a passage from the novel to show him why. "AND THIS IS HOW I SOMETIMES THINK OF MYSELF, LOWRY WROTE, AS A GREAT EXPLORER WHO HAS DISCOVERED SOME EXTRAORDINARY LAND FROM WHICH HE CAN NEVER RETURN TO GIVE HIS KNOWLEDGE TO THE WORLD: BUT THE NAME OF THIS LAND IS HELL." "Jesus, Jesse said, slumping back into the couch. Do you think he meant it, that he really saw himself that way?" "I do."

From there the senior Gilmour segues to a documentary on "Under The Volcano": "Canadian filmmaker Donald Brittain's description of Lowry's incarceration in a New York insane asylum: "This was no longer the rich bourgeois world where one fell about on soft lawns. Here were things that kept on living despite the fact they were beyond repair." Wow! What a powerful literary lesson from Father to son about not over indulging, without coming across like the Father is the only person seeing these possible horrendous pitfalls. On a family trip to Cuba Jesse gets himself into a bad situation at a bar, and Dad saves the day. And it's time for another lesson from Dad on the streets of life, to add to the lessons from cinema and literature: "There are a couple of inviolate principles in the universe," I said, suddenly chatty (I was delighted to be where we were), One is that you never get anything worth getting from an "A" hole. Two is when a stranger comes toward you with his hand extended, he doesn't want to be your friend."

This terrific memoir may have movies as its home base, but the education and bonding of love between Father and son has no boundaries in this book and in life.

I actually found this book to be a decent read, which is unusual because I did not really like any of the `characters' in it. The Film Club was actually biographical, the story the relationship between a father and son over the course of three years. David Gilmour allows his son Jesse to drop out of school at fifteen because Jesse just really doesn't like it. Um. His two requirements are that Jesse must abstain from drugs, and also that Jesse and his father watch three films per week (of his father's choosing).

David and Jesse have an admirably close relationship, but honestly, I was taken aback that David allowed Jesse to drop out in the first place. Not only that, he went out of his way to make Jesse's film viewing not seem too school-like. God forbid David should talk too much about a film - Jesse might have to experience being bored for a couple of minutes out of his life. David himself constantly displayed extreme self-centeredness and a lack of moral grounding. I was appalled at the point in the book where he is annoyed at not getting an early bid on a house in a buyer's market (what is so special about him that someone he doesn't even know should give him a better deal?), and sets out to sabotage the open houses that the owners hold. He eventually acknowledges that his actions were wrong, but his main concern seems to be that he now has to feel uncomfortable around the person he was trying to screw over. Other times, he is constantly degrading the actions of people who hurt his son (supposedly) while supporting the hurtful actions his son engages in towards others, including swindling people out of money over the phone.

David seems like the father who is just trying to be way too cool and relevant. He allows his son to continue with the deal they set, although his son repeatedly breaks the no drugs rule. It is just a classic example of a parent who thinks that their child can do no wrong. The women in the story come across as bitches or skanks when their behavior is really no worse than Jesse's. To top everything off, both father and son were both incredibly whiny and seem to cry a whole lot (often over perceived injustices).

The more I think about this book, the more I realize how much I disliked it. It was decently well written, but I really feel like there was no point to it other than to make me dislike a lot of people I've never met. I don't feel like there are any lessons learned on the part of either the father or the son (other than the aftereffects of cocaine and breakups are both crappy, relationships are difficult, and that morality only counts when it comes to other people). Well, scratch that, the son learns a lot about films, particularly the classics, which shouldn't necessarily be discounted. But the same thing could have been accomplished while the son actually went to school, or was homeschooled. I guess the point of the book is for the author to stroke his own ego and to gush about how awesome he finds his son. All in all, while this was a marginally entertaining read, I was not impressed.

Note - When I mention morality, I only mean it in a golden rule sense, as I am not particularly religious. However, I am against self-centered jerks on principle.

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.

My friend said this book would fail or be bad if the author didn't clue you in on some films, which made perfect sense to me (and I watch film). Unfortunately, that's about the only thing the book does well; makes you want to see or rewatch some films. The other parts, the father-son relationship, the presumed failure of the educational system, the son having an epiphany about his life through watching film, (because the father tries to make connections but the son usually just shrugs), or even how films can produce such epiphanies or connections, are all, well, missing or barely addressed. Maybe that is because there isn't much substance a teenager (at least this one) can make yet; he's concerned about girls. But still, moments that could have used more depth like when Dad tells son "you could be a film critic now" are just dropped, nothing happens. So in the end what's the point? You spend three years watching films with your kid, you bond, (which I'm sorry, anyone who has that kind of time would bond) the kid grows up anyway. It's like one of those college frat party movies. If you go to the frat movie wanting to be entertained, that's great, but since it's no Lawrence of Arabia, you won't remember it. If you expect more then some skin and gross humor from the frat film, forget it. And that's the problem with this book; it had potential to be so much more, to have insight and epiphanies, but in the end all you have is a befuddled Dad, an angst-ridden son (over school, over girls), who are both slightly more grown up in the end, yeah, but what either of them (and by extension the reader) learned, well, that's a mystery. There are better father-son memoirs and novels to read out there.

I was interested in this book because of the alternative education approach. I was curious to see if it could actually work.

However, upon reading it, it's not a book about any such experiment, but rather just a story about a dad and his dumb-ass son. I say dumb-ass having nothing to do with intelligence, but how he lives his life and the choices he makes.

Perhaps it is my definition of the word "education" that turned me off to this book. Education is not only book knowledge, it is the knowledge of self and others. Maybe it's because this experiment started at around age 15 and not age 17, when there would be only a year left in the son's basic education that crashed it. Maybe it's the cultural differences in US and Canadian culture. Essentially, this is a book about a dad who lets his son drop out of school and spend time watching movies with his film critic father, hoping that the boy will learn something either from the experience or maybe being with dad, who wants to be the best friend now.

The "experiment" goes on for a couple years and all you get out of it is that the son is allowed to drink, sleep all day, not have a job, smoke, chase girls, become a rapper, and start using drugs. Oh, and watch movies, which aren't reaching him really anything, except the cool inside stuff dad knows about the process and the movies. If the boy were interested in the creative process or making movies, this could be an education. This just turns out to be a story about how a father and son tried to grow closer and maybe keep the son from being a wast of human life. This is more of an "After School Special Movie" than a book that examines any kind of process that could be used with at risk youth.

If you are interested in a book about a dad who just turns his son loose to try and pick up life and smarts on the street, this is the book for you. If you want to see how someone applied an alternative education theory and what level of success they had with it, this is not for you.

I couldn't wait to read David Gilmour's THE FILM CLUB. I expected a funny, witty diatribe on the strangely educational aspects of movies on modern life and, especially, on teenagers, those wild and woolly consumers for whom most films are focus-grouped. However, the book turned out to be a deeply affecting parenting manual --- one that speaks directly to my own dementedly-in-love-with-movies soul.

When Gilmour allows his 15-year-old son Jesse to drop out of high school, given his steadily lowering grades and obvious disconnect to all things academic, he does so under one condition: Jesse must watch three movies a week with him and talk about them. Now, that might seem entertaining to most kids. But Jesse knows that his father, a former film critic for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, values the cinema too highly to treat it as a passing fancy. And so begins the film club --- a disarmingly fun way for a grown man to connect with his young son, to bridge the parent-child gap between them by letting movies do the hard work, coming up with what they need to talk about, coinciding beautifully at times with incidents from Jesse's own tumultuous life (especially his love life).

Gilmour breaks down the films into groups --- movies that are overrated in his opinion, movies with "buried treasures" that most filmgoers may have missed the first time around, timeless classics and classic timewasters --- and they all have something to say. Or at least Gilmour has something to say about each of them. As his son slouches from one lousy love affair to another, Gilmour finds, more often than not, a bon mot in a single frame of celluloid that can help them talk about what is really happening in modern-day Canada. It's a brilliant idea (one I adopt with my seven-year-old when the going gets rough), but the fact that he can actually lead his son into the decision he makes at the end of the book makes it a particularly special and remarkable one.

I thought I would be weeping my way through this memoir, as Gilmour passionately throws his son onto the ropes of the greats, expressing what makes the moving picture so special, while dealing with the difficulties of helping a child leave the nest as well-prepared as possible to deal with real life. And the fact that Gilmour can find the spots in the fantasy life of the movies that reflect most wisely on the real world makes him all the more enchanting a guide. But he never lapses into the sentimental (except for one passage in which he takes on fully the pain of his son's romantic agony).

Gilmour's view seems to be that the most important thing we as parents can do is to show...and listen. Show them by example (or John Ford's example or even Quentin Tarantino's) how to handle situations and then listen as the child uses this help as a jumping-off point for his own philosophizing about his personal situation. Every time Jesse calls his dad in the midst of a crisis, I think about how lucky Gilmour is and hope that I, too, am so fortunate --- that in the course of a child's life, their answer to the Ghostbusters' famous question, "Who ya gonna call?" is mom or dad, even when they're well beyond a 7:30 bedtime.

You might learn a few things about movies here, but mostly you'll learn about risky parenting and how one man's decision to save his son without shielding him from the realities of daily life by using moving art to have it all make sense became his greatest achievement. THE FILM CLUB is a great memoir and will certainly find its way to a lot of dads around Father's Day. But just about anyone can benefit from its wisdom and soft-hearted belief that love really does conquer all, in movies as much as in life.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

The book started off with an interesting premise - the author decides in the first chapter that since his 15-year-old son is about to flunk out of school, why not let him quit school and stay home, the only requirement being that he must watch films with his film critic father, hopefully to be taught some life lessons with this unorthodox method. Alas, starting with Chapter 2, it all goes downhill. The movie information is interesting but there isn't enough of it to offset the continuous moaning and whining. The father allows (even encourages) the son, even at this young age, to smoke and drink (and later the son gets into drug use, despite the father's original rule that in order to do the dropout-movie-watching deal there must be no drugs, ever, or no deal - of course, when the drug usage is discovered, the father just sloughs it off). The son is given no responsibilities at all but to occasionally sit and watch a movie whenever he manages to crawl out of bed. Far too much of the four-year span of the book consists of the son blubbering about his off-and-on girlfriends. Two stars for the movie info and the offbeat idea for alternative education, but I would not recommend this book to anyone.
[Note re the "tag suggestions" - the author of this book is NOT David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.)

I liked the premise of this book so I recommended it to my book club. Now I am not sure it was the best decision. The idea of allowing one's teenage son to drop out of high school and watch movies together sounded so far fetched I wanted to read the book to see how it happened. Though the plot moves along and the reader learns how the father and son get along and communicate, I always felt like there were unanswered questions.

For example, we know the mother agreed to the idea, but we don't ever get a sense of how she feels about the decision. Nor does the father's wife weigh in on the plan. The father freely allows his son to smoke cigarettes as well as encourage him to drink wine with him at restaurants. Perhaps rules are more lenient in Canada than the United States. The end of the book is somewhat rushed as well.

Good points - learned many new elements about movies and their background stories. Saw how a father can influence a child in good and not so good ways. The writing style is easy to read and offers some good prose as well. It is not a bad read at all; just not completely what I expected.