The Film Club by David Gilmour

The Film Club

by David Gilmour

(Twelve, $21.99)

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Film critic David Gilmour offered his son Jesse a surprising choice when the teenager began floundering in school and flirting with vandalism and drugs. Quit 10th grade if you want, Jesse was told, but promise to stay away from drugs and sit through three DVDs a week with your old man. “You’re kidding,” the boy said. Gilmour wasn’t. He did worry that he was “being hip” at the possible expense of his son’s future, but gambled that a sustained conversation about something they both loved could set the kid right. The first night, he popped in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. “A bit boring,” said Jesse. On night two: Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. “You have to admit it,” Jesse enthused. “This is a great film.”

One of the unexpected pleasures of Gilmour’s “wry, wondrous” memoir is wondering which movies Jesse will respond to, said Christopher Schobert in The Buffalo News. Gilmour, a popular Toronto broadcaster, isn’t a snob. He “defends guilty pleasures like Ishtar” and is quick to mention that he wishes to “steer Jesse away from the vulgarity of not being able to have a good time at a cheesy movie.” But the pair’s wide-ranging film chatter isn’t the book’s biggest draw. In fact, it’s soon “overpowered by something far more important and satisfying to the reader,” said Kevin Sampsell in the Portland Oregonian. The Film Club captures the twin struggles of parenting and of growing up. It abounds in “funny, endearing, and slightly awkward father-son talks” and along the way hits on some true wisdom.

Some readers, though, may feel “annoyed the entire time” they are stuck inside the Gilmour household, said Curt Schleier in The Seattle Times. Jesse seems to have survived his father’s maddeningly reckless parenting tactics, but the author is “lucky he didn’t get burned” for gambling that his film opinions would be more useful to the troubled boy than professional therapy. Gilmour can be forgiven for feeling self-congratulatory, though, said Ty Burr in The Boston Globe. “All books about parenting” are ultimately about what a good job Mom or Dad did. The best we can expect from most of them is that they offer their children “the keys to the world in the only language they know.”