Castaways of the Image Planet

by Geoffrey O'Brien

Book Overview

Castaways of the Image Planet collects sixteen years' worth of Geoffrey O'Brien's essays on film and popular culture, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Film... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582431906
• ISBN13: 9781582431901
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Counterpoint LLC
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

It's the dead center of my very being

Geoffrey O'Brien. Now here's a truly fabbalicious writer despite the faggy-pretentious Brit-git spelling of his first name. I recently saw his piece about the Christopher Plummer/Jonathan Miller production of KING LEAR. And I'm here to berate Geoff for not mentioning a certain ultra-mentionable thing. Namely, the mere fact that stage-actors are capable of memorizing all of that dialog. A capability that strikes me as being far more miraculous than the play itself (which is pretty corny). CASTAWAYS contains a piece about a movie called LAURA. And LAURA contains a policeman played by Dana Andrews. And I love what Geoff said about him: "In the dead center of the movie, at its witching hour, he sits up all night looking at her picture, smoking cigarettes, pouring himself one drink after another." Memo to Geoff: That scenario also happens to be *my* scenario. That's *me*, Geoff. That's me vis-a-vis you. In the dead center of my afterlife, at its witching hour, I sit up all night looking at your book-jacket pics and guzzling Thunderbird in your haunted wine cellar.

Emperor of the Image Planet

I once had the great, albeit far too brief, pleasure of working for Geoffrey O'Brien. I say this not only to reveal subjectivity on my part, when it comes to his work, but to proclaim that, in addition to his being a keen critic, a lapidary-sublime-limpid writer of prose, an accomplished poet, and a man with more than encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Beach Boys lyrics to Shape-Note singers to the work of obscure naturalist painters, I know that he is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, "fun on a party."Paraphrasing the man himself on the subject of Preston Sturges, to find so immediately, in _Castaways of the Image Planet_, "yodeling, bubble dancers, corsets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'My Indiana Home,' hypnotic catalepsy, and the remark 'in China they eat dogs," establishes that we are indeed in O'Brien territory. Since it is impossible to discuss his work without the use of eclectic compendia, allow me to add that only O'Brien could have penned this double-fistful of essays on topics as far-ranging as Japanese _Manga_, Orson Welles, the cinematography of Hong Kong and the PRC, Shakespeare, _Mad_, Brando, and the photography of Edward S. Curtis, and have the collective effort rise to such an exquisite acme above mere paean, homage, or pastiche.Most importantly, though, this collection goes beyond critique in that it strikes a blow for thinking audience members everywhere against the static presumptions of our existing meta-culture. As O'Brien remarks in "Free Spirits," a meditation on the work of film critic James Harvey and the Golden Age of Hollywood romantic comedy, "film books these days, with their emphasis on semiotic codes and quantitative analysis, tend to reduce moviegoing to a rather impersonal experience, as if we brought nothing to our encounters with the screen and emerged from the dark imprinted with precisely identical patterns."O'Brien lets the light and the air and the sheer pleasure of surrender to the screen, the page, the image--the spectacle--come romping back into the equation. He makes reading about these phenomena as moving and profound an experience as imbibing them first-hand. He lets you know that not only does someone else sitting in a library wing-chair or a plush seat in the darkened post-modern arena get it, he gets it in an incredibly cool and funny and enlightening way. Having this book of essays is like having sixteen great late-night café conversations with an effervescently witty and erudite friend on tap. My advice? Buy 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em with your friends. Once again, O'Brien is kiss-the-hem-of-his-garment good.