Customer Reviews

If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble: Movies, Mayhem, and Malice

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Queenan has an incredible knack to cut straight to the chase and give you wonderful fodder for thought and laughter. His scathing attack on Barbra Streisand ranks as one of the best and most merited public diatribes ever written. His Mickey Rourke piece also manages to blend pop culture, anger and the surreal in a brilliant manner. This book is truly a gem and I recommend it heartily to anyone with an interest in Hollywood and the idolisation of celebrities in general.

The skewering of Barbra Streisand in "Sacred Cow" would be worth the price of the book alone; however, Joe Queenan's other Hollywood targets (his observation of Melanie Griffith having "the most inexplicable career in the history of motion pictures"is one of his kinder moments) hardly fare much better. I never laughed so hard at other's people's expense in my life - amazing when once considers that Queenan never goes into depth regarding the alleged acting abilities of Sly Stallone. But his musings on John Goodman ("the American Gerard Depardieu"), Keanu Reeves ("His name 'Keanu' comes from his grandfather, and supposedly it's Hawaiian for 'cool breeze over the mountains', although since Keanu's the one supplying the information, it might actually be the Hawaiian word for 'Keanu'"), and Laurence Olivier ("Who can forget Olivier's odd squawking in 'The Betsey', in which his attempts to capture the inflection of an American auto tycoon end up sounding like a cross between Jed Clampett and Scrooge McDuck?") all draw blood. And I haven't even gotten to gems like "Mickey Rourke for a Day" and "It's a Man's, Man's, Man's World", a look at Oliver Stone's work where Queenan confesses not to believe the conspiracy theory presented in 'JFK' because of Joe Pesci's wig.

Read and laugh.

If you've sought out this book, I assume I don't have to tell you how agonizingly funny these Hollywood satires are. For those who stumbled upon this by accident, let me assure you: you will laugh out loud. Often. If you're shy, don't read it on the subway. Any afficinado of cheap sarcasm will find plenty to enjoy here. What is also evident, and perhaps less widely noted, is the critical acuity that is also evident throughout. For today's Hollywood (or any day's), perhaps contempt has a clarifying function. His dissection of Oliver ("James Cameron who's read one more book") Stone's misogyny, La Streisand's pompousness and inexplicable popularity, Melanie Griffith's meal- ticket posterior and Mickey Rourke's one-note grunginess are classics. I love Woody Allen, but laughed throughout Queenan's attack on him as well: "In the great films by Renoir, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman...[the characters] are not obsessed with getting to the Bleecker Street Cinema's 2:35 showing of the Grand Illusion so they'll still have enough time to screw their neurotic sister-in-law before schlepping uptown to see the 6:45 showing of the Rules of the Game at the Thalia." Ditto the Scorsese section: his paraody of Scorsese/Schrader that opens the piece is a small classic. Queenan, in short, is not a mere hatchet man; his precise, insightful hatchet jobs move this book into the realm of geniune satire

I picked this up at the library after reading Queenan's My Goodness (2000), a very funny book in which he pretends to seek redemption for his many journalistic sins.

Anyway, I was talking to Joe Queenan the other day and ventured the opinion that he is the undisputed king of snide remarks and deprecating asides. He responded, "I am the king," a line he stole from a mattress retailer out of L.A. He repeats that line to himself aloud every once in a while because he likes the way it sounds. "I am the king." There is a certain quick tempo to the "am" as though he is realizing as he says it that he is indeed the king.

Queenan is actually an entertainment biz critic who came up the hard way, a man who has mastered the fine art of the gratuitous put down and the non sequitur character assassination. He is a kind of like a low rent George Sanders from All About Eve (1950)--a film I know he saw as a kid because I can see his unconscious self still striving to emulate the Sanders character because, after all, the guy's girl of the evening was Marilyn Monroe. Ah, how the unrealized dreams of our youth do so guide our wayward path! Although he tries to keep hidden which babes he really likes in the movies, usually insulting one and all, especially the young and fetching ones (slyly kissing it up to his nonexistent female readership), it can be seen that he goes for those blond bombshells, but apparently doesn't want somebody, perhaps his wife, to know.

Our hero, for all that, does have a certain brassy felicity with words that commands attention, the same way a loud highschool band outside your bedroom window might. And the indefatigable choir boy from the mean streets of Philly really has seen more movies, especially bad ones, than I could ever sit through, and so has picked up a little bit of the art of cinema, enough anyway to qualify as a couch potato afficionado. Reading his rude lectures to semi-admired directors and his haranguing of actors he doesn't approve of (that appears to be ALL actors with the exception of David Bowie (yes!)and perhaps John Gielgud on a good day, and certainly NOT, e.g., Olivier, whom he refers to as "Lord Larry"), reminds me of a beer league basketballer critiquing the state college coach's substitution patterns. You have to sort carefully through all the snide remarks and deprecating asides to sift out a kernel of evidence that Queenan actually liked something he saw. My lord, what a life, to spend a significant part of your waking hours watching films you hate. But apparently somebody has to do it. Occasionally in a campy aside on a very bad film, Queenan will pretend to like something. He's like the tough kid who can't allow that he likes anything other than blood and guts for fear of losing face and looking like a wuss.

Anyway, this collection of his work ("essays" is what he calls them) from mostly Movieline Magazine and Rolling Stone in the early nineties will afford one a few chuckles and some real delight if he is lambasting one of your bętes noires. Otherwise you might find that our boy grates rather annoyingly on the nerves. But, hey, that was the idea.

If You're Talking To Me, Your Career Must Be In Trouble, Joe Queenan; Hyperion (DK); also, Red Lobster, White Trash, Blue Lagoon (Hyperion 1998) & My Goodness (Hyperion 2000)


With the exception of one torturous column, Joe Q's hilarious critiques of films & actors in "IF" constituted a smash hit (& to this day have stood the test of time, after 20+ years!).

Unfortunately, when Joe branched out into "Lobster" & "Goodness," he tossed the column format in favor of lengthy, facetious narratives.

Bad move. Zingers & acerbically funny put downs of bad actresses, over-the-hill singers & moronic social causes can't "carry" a book by themselves (for a primer in how to do this effectively, go to the source - H. Allen Smith's hilarious 1941 bestseller, "Low Man On A Totem Pole").

For every excellent punch line, the preceding set-up material in both L & G was too often tedious, strained, or incoherent (in Goodness, much more so than in Lobster). Apparently, it didn't occur to the author & his editors that pace in a comedy narrative is just as important as the punchlines.

The immortal Jackie Gleason despised inept comedians. He wrote a classic article (in Life magazine?) categorizing the various types of these pests.

Not overlooked was "the indefatigable laborer, who usually has some success because by the time he's three sentences into his joke, you're so numb that almost any finish is acceptable..."

And "the fighting-uphill type, who has to untangle himself from a million roadblocks. By the time he gets to his point, you've forgotten what he was trying to tell you in the 1st place. So has he..."

These liabilities in Lobster diminished its potential. They flat-out ruined Goodness.

Lobster made the cut (just barely). It stays on the shelf. And with its fleeting brilliant moments, I hated tossing Goodness (no vintage taped-in New Yorker cartoons were harmed in the straight-edge razor disassembly of this failed effort).

Not all is lost. Retrieved from the Guardian (UK) were his most recent columns (2002-09; of which until recently, I had had no idea existed). They were printed & assembled into binders & will be rewarding reading in the evening hours to come.

Just blew threw this is 2 days, one of those 'couldn't put it down' books. Rarely do I laugh, or even chuckle but Mr. Q provided 2 days worth of jollies. Interesting to see how some of these movie moguls have progressed (or degressed) in the few years since the books has been published. If you too feel insulted by what Hollywood offers us as 'entertainment' get this book. Enjoy!!

Even the index of this book had me laughing helplessly. Nasty at times, but never undeservedly. The two Woody Allen essays are classics, as are the ones on Striesand and Rourke

Some of you may have seen my earlier review of his newer book, Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler. That was a very funny, vicious look at Hollywood and the movie business. This is an earlier book, collecting essays from the early 1990s written for Movieline, Rolling Stone, and one article for the Washington Post, and contains many of the same elements. However, while Heckler was chock full of hilarity, insults, wisecracks and the like, this one doesn't have as many of these. Instead, there are some very fine articles analyzing movies and the careers of certain stars (Jessica Lange, Sean Young, Keanu Reeves, for example). Thus, while I found Heckler much more entertaining than this book, I found this one much more interesting.

That's not to say there aren't hilarious articles dealing with the categorization of movies by various odds and ends included in them (such as the opening essay, which deals with older men falling love and having sexual relations with jailbait in the movies). Some of the funniest articles I've read from Queenan are in this book, such as his attempt to "be Mickey Rourke for a day." In this article, he details how he went four days without bathing, dressed up all in black, and determined to travel throughout New York acting like Mickey Rourke, doing and saying things that he has said in his movies or in interviews. This includes trying to find a prostitute who will fondle a blond woman like the prostitute Rourke makes do this to Kim Basinger in 9 ˝ Weeks, smoking tons of cigarettes, and repeatedly telling complete strangers that "sometimes, you just gotta roll the potato." He also swears a lot.

The funniest article in the book has to be his list of 25 of the most senseless movies ever made. These are not movies that are just plain stupid, because usually even stupid movies are easy to follow. No, these are movies that make no sense whatsoever. Included in this list is Joe vs the Volcano, The Night Porter, The Two Jakes, and King David. He goes on to describe just why these movies have made the list. In this essay, he reaches the heights of vicious humour and commentary as he savages these films. Even if you disagree with him (as my wife does on a couple of them), you will still find this article worth reading and laughing at.

Other categorization essays include bad clerics in movies, musicians in movies (and why they usually are terrible), the first installment of "Don't Try This at Home" (where he tries various things that happen in movies and see if they are even remotely realistic), and a complete castigation of the use of bad accents in movies. These articles vary between wonderful and passable, with most being toward the former. "Don't Try This at Home" is the only one that is a letdown. Queenan's at his funniest when he lists movies by category and shows why it is a bad thing that they are in this category.

I was quite surprised, however, to find some truly introspective articles in this book as well. No, Queenan doesn't let his trademark wit leave him, but these articles are tempered by some true compliments and compassion. These articles were written before most of Hollywood started avoiding him, so there are some articles with actual interviews. Queenan uses these interviews as starting points to analyze the careers of the actor or actress in question, and he does a surprisingly fair job of it. The article on Sean Young is very fair to her, even though it does tend to emphasize the fact that she was taking high school algebra lessons right before the interview. Even so, he sounds quite impressed that she'd be willing to do this. Other interviews with Keanu Reeves and Jessica Lange, while perhaps showing them in not the best light, are extremely complimentary of their work, even in bad films. I found these articles very interesting and I'm glad I read them. They showed me a side of the stars that you normally don't see (and that is probably why nobody will talk to him anymore).

He is a bit less compassionate when he is analyzing a career without the input of the celebrity in question, such as when he questions Barbra Streisand's move away from light comedies to the pretentious and disastrous movies she's made since. He also has a brilliant analysis of Alfred Hitchcock movies (or at least brilliant-sounding, since I have never seen one of his movies) and how they represent some of Hitchcock's true feelings about things. It's very insightful, and will take the reader past the surface of his films and dig deep into how these movies reflected his own neuroses. I found it fascinating. Even in these articles, though, he finds some good things to say about the subjects, and that's what made them even more interesting.

The only real misses in this book are the shorter articles. I don't know if it's because Queenan needs time to really delve into his subject to make it interesting, or if he just needs time to get himself going, but the shorter articles inevitably fall flat. Thankfully, that shortness makes them easy to digest before moving on to the meatier, far better essays.

The book is still sprinkled with vulgar language and some of the articles are on the sharp side, so if you don't like biting humour and quite a few f-words, this book probably isn't for you. But if you don't mind that stuff and you like movies, this book is definitely worth reading. You may not always agree with Joe Queenan, but you will definitely enjoy the ride.

Joe Queenan's collection of essays on film stars is remarkably funny, and many of the people he criticises deserve all they get! His description of Barbara Streisand as a hatstand is particularly spot-on; she is, too!

But although Queenan frequently is on target, he sometimes misses the mark. 'The Seventh Seal' is a long film and Woody Allen makes mostly short ones, so it's unfair to criticise Allen for studying the Berman marathon. Also, I don't know who Sean Young is, but if he wants to improve his mind by studying maths, he should do so without Queenan's ridicule. And calling Sean a woman is a low form of abuse indeed!

This book is worth reading - gee, even the index is funny - but you'd get a better idea of what Queenan's trying to say if you watched his low-budget film, 'Desparado', which he made under the pseudonym Rodriguez.