Brooks on Books: Richard Roeper's movie list book

Yesterday, I praised a list book about D.C. sports, a book that gives great value to its readers, a work that adds insight and analysis to its entries while packing enough lists into its pages to satisfy its readers.

Richard Roeper's "10 Sure Signs a Movie Character Is Doomed & Other Surprising Movie Lists," unfortunately, is not such a book. I have nothing against the guy, I didn't resent his landing the co-host chair with Roger Ebert on his TV show, and I even bought a previous Roeper book, "Hollywood Urban Legends." But, boy, does he phone this one in. I don't know if he rushed it out to fulfill a contract or just didn't put the effort in, but this slim book, while entertaining enough if you get it from the library (as I did), is a bit of a ripoff at full price.

Roeper's format is: Provide a full page with the name of a list in really big type. On the next page, present a list of, say, "10 documentaries that are better than most feature films," or "20 movie characters men just can't resist doing," usually no more than a few pages long. Insert a blank page after each list. Start over again with the name of the next list on its own page. There's a lot of BS here to pad the page count, and it makes this an even breezier read than it ought to be, especially considering it's not big enough to at least provide a ton of lists. After the list of male imitations, he presents a list women can't resist, but turn the page, and aha, women don't do imitations. So he uses up several pages on a gag that could have been combined with the previous list.

So the book falls short on quantity, but what about quality? Well, I believe that this kind of work should either pack the entries with fun facts or clever writing and analysis, or the lists themselves should be so inherently amusing or entertaining they don't require annotation. Roeper doesn't provide enough of either approach. Compiling a list of "Reasons I won't ever attend a Freddie Prinze Jr. film festival," then naming a bunch of his crappy movies, is funny. But that's all there is. You can't get away with too many of those unless the idea itself is a little sharper or you give some good smart-ass commentary for each movie.

Even the more conventional lists often lack analysis. Take Roeper's picks for great movies that should be on the AFI 100. OK, it's interesting to see your opinion, but why should they be on there? What makes them so great? They're not obscure films, but you're a movie critic, and you should be able (and willing) to say something about them. He gives no commentary for his "loved by me, panned by critics" and vice versa lists.

The most amusing lists in the book are perhaps the least original. There are a bunch of entries which poke fun at movie cliches, like, "5 things that will happen in a movie home at the start of the day" (Sample entry: "The newspaper never makes it to the front stoop. It usually gets tossed into the bushes, or on the lawn just as the automatic sprinkler goes on, or even onto the roof.").

I laughed out loud several times during these parts, but I felt some deja vu, as other sources (like Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man) cover this ground. Still, at least Roeper is providing a point of view and some entertaining info here. Maybe expanding this sort of thing would make for a better book.

Richard Roeper's a sharp guy with opinions and a sense of humor, and regardless of what you think of him as a film critic, he's experienced enough to do better than this.