The New York Times Book Review - Tom Shone
The border between real life and the movies seems to cry out for comic treatment, which may be why Patton Oswalt's Silver Screen Fiend scores so highly. It helps, of course, if you have a set of synapses like a pinball machine and a prose style to match…Oswalt's writing gives off the hallucinogenic shimmer of the true obsessive, packing all the sharpness and bite of his stand-up…The world's brain is lucky to have Oswalt knocking around in there, making connections, sparking those synapses, lighting us up.
Ricky Gervais
Patton Oswalt is one of the most brilliant comedy minds of a generation. This book confirms it.
New York Times
"[Oswalt has] a set of synapses like a pinball machine and a prose style to match....Oswalt's writing gives off the hallucinogenic shimmer of the true obsessive, packing all the sharpness and bite of his stand-up."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Oswalt is a great conveyer of his real-life (and reel-life) experiences....great insider stuff."
Joss Whedon
Silver Screen Fiend is both a love letter to artistic obsession and string of caution tape around it. Patton describes the ecstatic demands of the arts (in this case, Stand-up and Film) with insight, fond pity, and unfailing humor. This is a book for anyone who strives to be great, or is bored in an airport.
Philadelphia Inquirer
"Hilarious.... [Silver Screen Fiend] shows Oswalt's maturity as a writer and a thinker."
Tampa Bay Times
"Entertaining and maniacally informative."
USA Today
Oswalt's prose is sparkling.... A coming-of middle-age meditation, Oswalt's homage to films is both hilarious and heartfelt."
Entertainment Weekly
"Vivid and funny."
Paste Magazine
"Oswalt is...a formidable storyteller....A love song to the silver screen."
A.V. Club
"Immediate and vital... [Silver Screen Fiend is] enough to make any reader seek out the many films that made him hibernate in the first place.
Boston Globe
"Clever and readable...Oswalt’s encyclopedic knowledge and frothing enthusiasm for films (from sleek noir classics, to gory B movies, to cliche-riddled independents,to big empty blockbusters) is relentlessly present, whirringin the background like a projector."
Columbus Dispatch
"Anyone who loves movies...will be better for reading this enjoyable and funny memoir."
NPR
"Smart and pointed. [Oswalt] is a colorful writer."
Amy Schumer
"I loved this book. It feels like a great one sided conversation from your funniest friend. It made me feel less alone in the precious hours I read it. But now it's gone and I have nothing."
The Daily Beast
"A funny and sentimental read.... deep, passionate, and personal."
Ithaca.com
"A must for fans of comedy and film."
USA Today
Oswalt's prose is sparkling.... A coming-of middle-age meditation, Oswalt's homage to films is both hilarious and heartfelt."
Kirkus Reviews
2014-09-30
A comedian's lively memoir about his movie addiction."All this filming isn't healthy." That's the advice given to the title character in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), and comedian and actor Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, 2011) would no doubt say the same goes for viewing. In this lively memoir, the author focuses on his early 1990s career, when time was divided between hustling the Los Angeles stand-up circuit and filling his head with every available movie. As he devoured film after film, he told himself that he was getting an education: "As I filled in each hole in my movie buff's incomplete knowledge, perhaps I was unlocking some secret level of skill I had as a comedian." Oswalt was also thinking of the Woody Allen career arc: Germinate in the hothouses of comedy clubs and movie houses and blossom as a brilliant auteur. Instead, watching movies took over, alienating him from life and people: "Don't they want to talk about the movies of the newly rediscovered French crime master Jean-Pierre Melville, or the Dogme 95 movement, or the dozen or so hidden references in the latest Tarantino film? Why are people so boring?" Oswalt tells a variety of interesting stories—of half-assing his way through his days as a MADtv sketch writer, pissing off Jerry Lewis, obsessing over his first tiny film role, hearing an aging actor bellow drunken commentary during a screening of Citizen Kane—but he doesn't go out of his way to score punch lines. Actually, he's on to something more serious, which is how movies can simultaneously inspire and stunt ambition. After all, who has time to write a screenplay when a remastered version of Dr. Strangelove starts in a few hours? A funny, insightful homage to movie love and an honest account of growing up, personally and professionally.
