This book is not, by even the remotest stretch of the imagination, meant to be insightful or enlightening. It's meant to be funny . . . an extended exercise in the snarky sort of humor that movie buffs use to amuse each other and (mostly without meaning to) annoy the general public. Done well, it can be extremely funny (if your taste in humor runs that way). Unfortunately, it's difficult to do well, as this collection of essays by all-purpose smartass Joe Queenan demonstrates.

The essays in this book fall into two basic categories. In the first, Queenan devises some reasonably clever stunt and then executes (usually multiple times with minor variations) and riffs on the results. Go stand the lobby of a multiplex where some horrible, third-rate movie is playing. Offer exiting patrons their money back. Repeat. Go stand in other lobbies and ask people to name the director of the movie they just saw. Riff on the fact that none of them know. Repeat. In the second, Queenan picks some overdone movie theme or motif and rattle off all the movies in which it's recently turned up. Movies where the stars have bad hair. Movies full of overdone romanticism about Ireland. Movies where people's ears are cut off or otherwise mutilated. Any of these ideas is good for a page or two, and some of them for more than that, but very few of them are worth an entire essay. Somewhere around the midpoint of nearly every essay, I found myself muttering "I *got* it already!" and flipping the pages.

Part of the problem is Queenan's tone. He feels like a harsher, angrier version of Dave Barry, and like Barry (but unlike more subtle bad-movie conisseurs like Roger Ebert, Stephen Hunter, or Kevin Murphy), he doesn't believe in modulation or rhythm. He takes a couple of paragraphs to get wound up to full shout . . . and then stays there for the rest of the piece. The "thematic" essays are particularly prone to this: He pounds away at the chosen theme, reeling off example after example without much concern for context, nuance, or subtlety. Reading him at any length leaves me feeling grim and exhausted, like I went to amateur night at my local rock-and-roll club and stayed *way* longer than I should have.

I write all this knowing that one person's idea of great humor is another person's idea of fingernails on a blackboard . . . and admitting that Queenan frequently (though intermittently) had me smiling. If you like his other stuff (or have reason to think that you might like his style), don't let me put you off. In humor, more than in most things, "your mileage may vary."