If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble
Queenan, Joe
BOOK REVIEWS M r. Pulitzer, meet Mr. Joe Queenan, the hottest, zaniest, most wacked-out young humorist this side of Dave Barry and P. J. O'Rourke, a Mark Twain for the '90s. That's what we call a...
...And lastly, and most importantly, it violates all kinds of conflict-of-interest strictures, because it was written by someone, me, who is a close friend of the author in question...
...Queenan's humor is better savored in measured doses—a chapter on Oliver Stone's fascination with head trauma here, a dissection of the Streisand oeuvre there...
...And anyone who beats out professional porn film stars such as Annette Haven for a role as a professional porn film star—as Griffith did in Body Double—has clearly been spending more time in nightclubs than, say, the Sorbonne...
...Here is a man who has been staying home reading books about the movies, too...
...He's already taken an adult-education class in movie directing, so it should be good...
...Joe is known to readers of this magazine as a contributor of long standing, not to mention a contributor of more lucrative articles to GQ, the late and not particularly lamented Spy, and Rolling Stone...
...Clearly there are bimbonic qualities to her personality...
...The book is not a sustained etude on the state of American film, although Queenan does speak French...
...Melanie, he reasons, "is a cunning actress who masquerades as bimbos in order to draw attention to the plight of the bimbo...
...Not Joe...
...No one will sit down and read the book from cover to cover, except Joe...
...And so he began making fun of the movies...
...Queenan was uniquely equipped for sustained labor...
...He watched Heaven's Gate and Orca...
...But that's why I wrote the blurb in the first place...
...Movies are a tempting target for the satirist, because most movies are made by dolts and it shows...
...His subject matter has always been diverse: he has made fun of the world's largest mall, which is in Canada, and of minimalist fiction writers with equally unforgiving animosity...
...In 1990 he started contributing reguAndrew Ferguson is a senior writer at the Washingtonian...
...His essay about Alfred Hitchcock, "The Man Who Did Not Love Women," is a dead-on accounting of the tubby auteur's greatness, which managed to overcome some of the stupidest plots since the Restoration...
...Here, for example, is the perfect summary of the mind and heart of Melanie Griffith, who has come a long way since she told Seventeen magazine, these many years ago, that she wanted only to travel to the Sorbonne and study philosophy: Because Griffith has played so many nymphets, sexpots, hookers, strippers, party girls—or what the New York Times calls "sirens"—an unsophisticated moviegoer might find himself or herself asking the question: Is Melanie Griffith herself a bimbo...
...Actually, certain jokes recur, as the author himself cheerfully admits: This is not the result of an editing oversight...
...watch movies for uninterrupted weeks at a time...
...Joe Queenan had something more: he was actually willing to stay home and 62 The American Spectator June 1994 occurred to me that I had never heard of Vincent Spano...
...A t the risk of embarrassing him (not an easy thing to do), I should add that, along with the laughs, Queenan also writes about themovies with genuine sophistication...
...And not only is he a gifted stylist whose prose swings effortlessly from scabrous insult to semi-serious praise...
...Queenan's conclusion, by the way, is kinder than this passage would suggest...
...she talks like an idiot and does not always give the impression in interviews that she is participating in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Directed Readings Program...
...Rather, this repetition of certain pejorative remarks stems from my personal belief that it is impossible to remind the public too often that Diane Keaton is a really awful actress, just as it is impossible to make too many nasty remarks about short, bad actors related to Martin Sheen...
...he has watched every Barbra Streisand movie...
...It's not as easy as it looks...
...Oscar, meet Mr...
...Well, you could start by buying this book and reading it, which is advice I would give even had I never met Queenan and become his friend (which is no day at the beach, by the way...
...By page 8, I had laughed at three separate Vincent Spano jokes, before it IF YOU'RE TALKING TO ME, YOUR CAREER MUST BE IN TROUBLE: MOVIES, MAYHEM, AND MALICE Joe Queenan Hyperion / 267 pages / $22.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON larly to Movieline, a kind of anti-fanzine published in Hollywood...
...Dave Barry calls Queenan's method "informed viciousness," and he's right: his viciousness wouldn't be nearly so funny if he didn't know what he was talking about...
...This says something about the movies: they are so overpopulated with pampered, ridiculous jerks that you can be reasonably confident that any person mentioned in relation to them is a pampered, ridiculous jerk even when you don't know who he is...
...More important, you have to have an unerring feel for the soft spot, the point at which the maximum damage can be inflicted with the least apparent effort...
...Queenan is so comfortable writing about the movies that, for his next book, he is going to write one, and then film it, for $6,998...
...The blurb, moreover, is inaccurate in two ways: first, Pulitzer committees do not give prizes to collections of previously published magazine articles, though they have seen their way clear to giving prizes to Anna Quindlen, and second, Joe Queenan is no longer young...
...It fulfills all the conventions of the blurb-using community...
...The result is this book, a collection of twenty-four pieces, all but a handful from Movieline...
...Leitmotif for the uninitiated, is one of many words that Lou Diamond Phillips probably cannot spell...
...The important word here is collection...
...No other humorist would watch Yentl and A Star Is Born back to back...
...With this in mind, I would hope that the reader would look upon these running jokes not so much as running jokes, but as leitmotifs...
...Not Queenan...
...Here, obviously, is a man who has been doing more than just staying home watching movies for uninterrupted weeks at a time...
...But it also says something about Queenan: few satirists have shown such relish, or such skill, in making fun of pampered, ridiculous jerks...
...You would risk organ damage, for—and I'm being serious now—there is a line to make you laugh out loud on nearly every page...
...Other funny writers have done this, going all the way back to Robert Benchley, but only episodically...
...One of its comparisons—to Mark Twain—is implausible...
...I laughed at this last line even though I have only the vaguest idea who Lou Diamond Phillips is...
...Not only is his knowledge of movies encyclopedic, his visual sense highly refined, his nose for cant and sham unerring...
...Other humorists have better things to do...
...That's what we call a blurb, a perfect blurb...
...This is judicious, and true...
...It compares its subject to other authors who have been stupendously successful with book-buyers...
...It's a complicated argument...
...What are you going to do...
...SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzian Television Sarkes Tarzian Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference The American Spectator June 1994 63...
...So it's like a Catch-22...
...You really do, for starters, have to stay home and watch all those movies...
...It is suspiciously self-contained—a pre-packaged and easily excisable clump of praise, suitable' for framing on the back of the book when it comes out in paperback...
...And in "The Lonely Raging Bull," Queenan places Martin Scorsese in the second rank of great directors, a Dan Marino to, say, Fellini's Joe Montana...
...Great, even...
...The book hangs together anyway, for certain themes recur...
Vol. 27 • June 1994 • No. 6
