Book Summary and Reviews of The Film Club by David Gilmour

The Film Club by David Gilmour

The Film Club

A Memoir

by David Gilmour

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  • Published:
  • May 2008, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

At the start of this brilliantly unconventional family memoir, David Gilmour is an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his fifteen-year-old son Jesse to do his homework. When he realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, he offers his son an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent - but he must watch three movies a week of his father's choosing.

Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from True Romance to Rosemary's Baby to Showgirls, and films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Billy Wilder, among others. The movies got them talking about Jesse's life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies.

Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship - and their own lives changed in surprising ways.



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Reviews

Media Reviews

"With his unique blend of film history and personal memoir, Gilmour's latest offering will deservedly win him new American fans." - Publishers Weekly

"Perfectly balanced recollections, brimming with pathos leavened by sardonic humor. " - Kirkus Reviews

"I loved David Gilmour's sleek, potent little memoir." - Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls

"If all sons had dads like David Gilmour, then Oedipus would be a forgotten legend and Father's Day would be a worldwide film festival." - Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All

This information about The Film Club was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Recommendations

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