Moving Places A Life at the Movies [Paperback]

Moving Placesis the brilliant account of a life steeped in and shaped by the moviespart autobiography, part film analysis, part social history. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America's most gifted film critics, began his moviegoing in the 1950s in small-town Alabama, where his family owned and managed a chain of theaters.

Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of screen memories, making us aware of movies as markers of the pastwhen and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly ofRear Window, a meditation onThe Rocky Horror Picture Showand its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters withOn Moonlight Bay.

Originally published in 1980,Moving Placesis reissued now both as a companion volume to the author's latest book and as a means of introducing a new generation of film buffs to this unique, often humorous exploration of one man's life at the movies.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic at theChicago Reader, is author ofGreed(1993) andFilm: The Front Line 1983.He is also co-author, with J. Hoberman, ofMidnight Movies(1983).

I would numberMoving Placesamong a handful of truly classic books about film. James Naremore, author ofActing in the Cinema