If you think you're a movie fan, you obviously haven't come across
John Walsh. Here is a man who is so obsessed with the silver
screen, and the stars that parade across it, that he allowed them
to shape and influence the whole pattern of his early years.
Everything the young Walsh did - from dating girls, to dealing with
teachers and parents - was a lesson learned from the myriad films
that he absorbed into his very being. This many all sound far too
escapist and self-indulgent for comfort, but isn't there a bit of
Walsh in all of us? Don't we all, in fact, grow up with some
obsession or other? And aren't all our lives shaped by this
obsession - be it film, television, theatre or books? In sharing
these vivid memories of his formative years, Walsh invites his
readers to recall their own early years, 'to raid his or her own
filmic image-bank and consider what flickering presences, what
seductive scenes and passionate epiphanies, made them into the
people they've become'. Walsh's own 'image-bank' began with Mutiny
on the Bounty, which he saw as an impressionable eight-year-old.
Horrified at having to witness a man receiving two dozen lashes, an
undeserved punishment instigated by the notoriously sadistic
Captain Bligh, Walsh suddenly found the courage to confront a
bullying sports teacher at school the next day. And so the pattern
was set. He learned about pulling girls from The Sound of Music,
about sexual decadence from Cabaret and, more alarmingly, managed
to set fire to his house after watching the likes of John Wayne in
countless Westerns. The result is a hilarious, highly readable
pot-pourri of anecdotes that will intrigue, delight and amuse. You
don't have to be a movie fan to enjoy Walsh's memoir, but it
definitely helps. There's even a useful list of further reading at
the end if this book leaves you wanting more. (Kirkus UK)
Wit and heartbreak collide in a memoir of a life intertwined with
an obsession with film. A 'Fever Pitch' for cinema lovers. 'This
book will consider the influence of movies on one life, the
interaction of celluloid fantasy and the growth of a personality.
It's not just a film buff's record of his enthusiasms. It's about
how some films do, weirdly, change your life.' Beginning with his
first cinema outing, 'The Mutiny on the Bounty', and tracing his
passion through his growing-up years to adulthood, John Walsh
weaves together his own life experiences with his rapturous
dependence on key moments in film. The result is a funny, personal,
loving account of the magic and drama of the silver screen and its
ultimate, all-encompassing power to become larger than (real) life.
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