Book Review/Heather Seggel

See You At The Movies

You may know Lindy West from her memoir in essays, “Shrill,” which was almost uncomfortably personal and sometimes very funny. Her stories have appeared on “This American Life,” and her second book, “The Witches Are Coming,” finds a variety of ways to make the point that if we can’t agree on the basic facts in a conversation packed full of them, we are essentially doomed. It feels very of the moment and bleak, yet it’s also surprisingly funny in places. West makes plenty of high brow jokes, but is equally comfortable being silly, or raunchy. If she serves strong medicine, there’s a lot of sweetener helping it all down.

West’s new book, “Sh*t, Actually: A Complete History of Film” (Hachette Books) is so entirely funny it needs to come with a “no beverages while reading” warning. It’s all movie reviews, some of which previously appeared on Jezebel and GQ.com, and also several new ones; in the case of the older reviews, West watched the film again and expanded her take on it. The title comes from a review of “Love, Actually,” and suffice it to be said West did not find the film to have aged well. (I’ve never seen it but still found the review to be a raucous, fulminating riot.)

The standard against which all the movies are judged is “The Fugitive,” which is the first film reviewed (in an essay titled “The Fugitive Is The Only Good Movie”), and they are rated on a scale of 0 to 10 DVDs of “The Fugitive,” which itself gets 13/10! The Jezebel essays were intended to look back at blockbuster movies and see how cultural shifts have changed our take on them, a useful way of processing things we once loved that may be cringe-worthy now. It’s easy to recoil at movies that revel in racist stereotypes (like sounding a gong to punctuate Jackie Chan’s dialogue in “Rush Hour”) or treat women as non-verbal furniture with boobs (too many to list). But raging at the stupidity of Tom Cruise’s character in “Top Gun” is not an effective strategy for opening hearts and minds. What is? Poop jokes! A surprisingly large amount of them.

The things we love don’t always stand up well to the passage of time, but they were honest, sometimes earnest products of their time. Making merciless fun of them allows for relatively painless critical analysis. If you have that one friend who you love to pick things apart with, you’ll appreciate a review that finds so many unforced errors in the first Harry Potter movie, the review is simply titled “Harry Plot Hole.” West describes a text chain with a friend of hers that exists just to remind each other of these oversights and be newly infuriated by them, a state that coexists easily with general love for the series as a whole.

There are big swaths of all-caps shouting, and occasions when a sentence gets ten exclamation marks for emphasis. The recap style of the reviews means they thoroughly spoil the plot, but if you haven’t seen “Forrest Gump” yet, set the book aside and come back to that chapter (or don’t! I didn’t, and am no worse for it). You’re welcome to jump from piece to piece, but some jokes carry forward, so plot your journey accordingly.

The first national shutdown for COVID-19 happened while West was working on the book, and it finds its way into a few reviews in strange and funny ways, including a breakdown of why the exceptionalism at the heart of “Top Gun” has a thing or two in common with the kind of maverick who refuses to wear a mask while grocery shopping. If that’s not your bag, there is not so much of it as to overwhelm what is, truly, for the most part a hilarious look at a big old pile of very popular films. Sometimes a long review that finds numerous faults is perfectly summed up at the end, as with the observation, “Face/Off is just Big Boy Freaky Friday.” If you’re a fan of using pop culture as a lens through which to see how far we’ve come and where we’ve cratered along the way, you’ll find “Sh*t, Actually,” to be a catty but delightful double-feature matinee.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2020

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