Monday, July 23, 2012

Review: "Save Me the Aisle Seat"

A love of movies since childhood and a passion for writing combined long ago to drive the author into creating an account at Amazon and later Epinions so that he could write movie reviews. While those reviews have expanded into other content areas, movies remain the primary driving force for Alex Diaz-Granados. The result is this self-published book featuring just some of his eight years of movie review work at Epinions.com.

After an introduction that discusses the passion the author has had all his life for movies¸ it is on to the reviews. The book is broken down into four chapter sections covering movies he liked and movies that he didn’t. The reviews are extensively detailed both in terms of plot and storylines as well as analysis of the films regarding these same details. As a result these are reviews you do not want to read if you have not seen the movie as the review will reveal all.

Chapter 1: The Star Wars Saga: "A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...." opens the book and clearly covers the various Star Wars films including the animated 2008 project The Clone Wars. The movies are reviewed in sequence order making the review of Star Wars-Episode IV: A New Hope released in 1977 the fourth review of this chapter. 

The title of the second section also makes it very clear what it is about. “Chapter 2: A Film by Steven Spielberg” covers the various films such as Minority Report, The Indiana Jones series, ET and others.

After discussing movies he liked in the first two sections, Author Alex Diaz-Granados turns to movies that he feels should not have been made in “Chapter 3: The Franchises That Shouldn’t Have Been Created.” This includes the Airport franchise though he does note that the original Airport does work well especially for its time period. Like with Airport, the original JAWS receives praise while the various sequels do not.

The book then moves on to the concluding chapter, “Chapter 4: Movies That Have Stood The Test Of Time.”  These are The Bridge Over The River Kwai,(1957) Gone With the Wind (1939), The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly (1966) a personal favorite of mine and others.

The book closes with a brief bio of the author.

Overall, Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer is an interesting book. The focus is primarily on plot and story details over technical movie making aspects of each film. The plots and storylines are covered in exhaustive detail and therefore contain numerous spoilers for those who have not seen the covered films. For those familiar with the 34 films covered in this book, such detail is not an issue. For those who are not familiar, it would be best to see the film first before reading the review contained in this book.

Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer
Alex Diaz-Granados
CreateSpace (division of Amazon)
978-1475075045
April 2012
Paperback (also available as an e-book)
114 Pages
$8.99

ARC provided by the author quite some time ago in exchange for my objective review.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2012

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