A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey
by Kevin Murphy

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Book Reviews of A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey

Book Review: all that popcorn is making me sick
Summary: 5 Stars

Am I glad I did. This is a fantastic book. The interesting concept is that Kevin spent the entirety of 2001 going to a movie. Every day. Without fail (though he did almost miss a couple). Home rentals didn't count. One emergency in Italy necessitated watching a movie on TV, but that was the only time. Airline movies counted only because otherwise he wouldn't be able to travel anywhere. Instead, he traveled all over the world to fulfill his promise to his readers. He visited the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Finnish Lapland, where the sun never sets and everybody gets funky from weird sleep patterns. He went to Australia and visited the smallest movie theater in the world (around 25 seats). At home or abroad, he paid for at least one movie every day of the year. It's a project that I found impossible to resist, and I even envied him a little bit. Here was a guy who was going to write a book from the audience's perspective. He is one of us, just wanting to see movies.

The wonderful thing about this book is that it's not just a list of movies, or even a critique of them. He does judge some of the movies and tells us what he thinks of them. No, this book is a love letter. Murphy's passion for film shines through in every essay, and you can really tell that he loves the cinema. Every chapter covers a week in his journey, but he never mentions all of the movies he watched that week (though they are conveniently listed at the top of the chapter heading, with location included). Each essay, thus every week, has a theme. One week, it was the Sundance Film Festival. Another, it was Cannes. Another, it was Quebec City and the hotel and theater made completely of snow and ice. Sometimes, he just uses the week's films to talk about a cinema subject dear to his heart, like silent movies, or classic comedy shorts. The chapter for November 19-25, he details how he smuggled an entire Thanksgiving Dinner into a movie theater. The topics go all over, but in every one of them, you can see Murphy's love shining through.

Passion is not the only thing Murphy has, though. He has wit as well, and each essay has its share of it. Murphy doesn't constantly tell jokes and hope the reader laughs (which didn't work for Nelson but Joe Queenan does so well). Instead, the wit comes out of his personality and is a little more subtle. I found this book amusing, but not laugh out loud funny (with the exception of a couple of instances that would take too long to explain). The thing is, amusing is fine when the book is well-written and you enjoy reading it like I did this one. I expected a retrospective of bad movies similar to Nelson's book, but I guess he figured that had already been done. Not only had it been done, but it goes against everything Murphy wanted to get out of this project. After ten years of being on the show, watching cheesy movies and creating jokes for Joel and Mike (and himself as well) to tell, he wanted to spark his love for the cinema again. He wanted to become an audience member again and revisit exactly why he loves movies. Thus, this was the perfect thing to do.

I was especially interested in (and envious of) the travel he did. He went to France, Italy, Finland, Australia, Mexico, and the Cook Islands, which is where he was on September 11. He tells this in a very poignant essay, saying how he felt when he heard the news, the reactions of the other islanders, and how he almost gave up his odyssey because it felt very insignificant. But then he went to see Waking Ned Devine, shared a few laughs with friends even through their tears, and realized the human togetherness that movies bring, and that feeling of closeness that you get in a good movie crowd, even if you don't know any of them. You still share this one bond, this one movie, and you feel better. This essay actually brought a tear to my eye, something I really didn't expect in a book I thought would be a comedy.

A Year at the Movies contains 52 essays about the entire cinema experience. Kevin even worked for a theater for two nights and got to see exactly what a theater employee gets to see. He finds out that American movie-goers are pretty much slobs. Sure, there are a couple of clunkers in there. But you know, I wouldn't even call them clunkers. They were all interesting in their own right, just a few that were less so than the rest. Through his journey, he regains his love of film, his affection for that flashing light and flickering screen, and he brings us along with him. He's not the most wonderful writer in the world, but he makes up for it with an intensity about his subject that's contagious. I've never been a huge movie person, but he almost made me become one.

I think I'll go watch a Buster Keaton short film.

David Roy

Summary of A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey

Mr. Murphy, known to legions of fans as Tom Servo on the legendary TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, went to the movies every day for a year. That's every single day, people. For a whole fricken' year. And not only did he endure, he prevailed -- for this is the hilarious, poignant, fascinating journal of his adventures: the first book about the movies from the audience's point of view.

Kevin went to the multiplex, sure. But he didn't stop there. He found the world's smallest commercial movie theater. Another one made completely of ice. Checked out flicks in a tin-roofed hut in the South Pacific. Tooled across the desert from drive-in to drive-in in a groovy convertible. Lived for a week solely on theater food. Took six different women to the same date movie. Dressed up as a nun for the Sing-Along Sound of Music in London. Sneaked into the Cannes and Sundance film festivals. Smuggled an entire Thanksgiving dinner into a movie theater. And saw hundreds of films, from the Arctic Circle to the Equator, from the sublime to the unspeakable. Come along on a joyous global celebration of the cinema with a man on a mission -- to spend A Year at the Movies.

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