The Film Club by David Gilmour

The concept of this book had intrigued me enough to fork over the $3.98 from the Barnes & Noble bargain bin, but, I hate to say this, I wanted my money back when I finished. (Ok, my husband said that after I made him read it, only because I knew he would like the movie trivia and could finish it in a day.)

The concept seemed intriguing. The author is an unemployed film critic, formerly the host of an award-winning interview show in Canada, and his 15 year old son is failing in school. He offers him this deal – drop out of school and live rent-free in his home (the parents are divorced), but watch three movies a week of his choosing. Week by week they watch a wide variety of classics and obscure films. Reading it, I felt ignorant of most of what they discussed, but, despite the interesting trivia, my practical side could not let me get caught up in the story.

First of all, this was not, as I first thought, a year to get his act together – the father and son are still watching movies together, with both of them only sporadically employed, until he is 19. There’s no mention of difficulty with his school allowing this sort of thing, and I just kept thinking this is not a poor urban kid trapped on a dead-end path, this is really a story about a middle class spoiled brat. It’s one thing to have a troubled kid and want to do everything you can to help them, but it’s another thing entirely to coddle them the way this kid was coddled. (Gets up every afternoon after nights of drinking and smoking with his friends to watch his movie, moons over girlfriends incessantly.) He eventually does drugs (originally against “the rules”) but there are never any repercussions. This father is so over-involved in his kid’s life it’s embarrassing to read. I kept looking at the photo of them on the back cover and thinking, really? He got all these hot chicks?

Seriously, I already wrote too much – this book is about two self-absorbed people – so self-absorbed, in fact, that the acknowledgement at the end includes a note about his daughter. What? He has a daughter? Oh, and a first wife? (As opposed to the second and third.) I like to hope that the daughter was just too smart to get involved, but that’s just me.