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Michael Douglas. Biografia (2013)

by Marc Eliot(Favorite Author)

3.18 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Wydawnictwo Axis Mundi

review 1: This is a straight-ahead film star biography, but with seemingly strong sources it provides a frank portrayal of the actor-producer who despite his best efforts, followed in the positive and negative footsteps of his famous father. The younger Douglas grew up with a mostly absentee father, living mostly with his mother, but provided for by his father's wealth. A child of the 60s, he dabbled in drugs, lived in a commune, worked at a car wash and barely scraped through college but showed a flair for the jobs his father provided on film sets. Soon Michael was scoring at auditions, took a film project his father could never get green lit (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and turned it into an Oscar-winner, and, like his father, married a very young classy woman and cheated on ... moreher virtually from the get-go. Readers get the impression that Michael Douglas still has not yet scrambled out from under the looming shadow of his father (whose own ego seems monumental, even in old age) but maturity and marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones has provided him with a stronger sense of contentment in his senior years.
review 2: This is not a consequential read of course. It’s the kind of book I like to read in the airport, when flying, or waiting in the dentist's office. It’s mildly diverting, like a more extensive, albeit still cheesy, celebrity magazine. The main beef I have with the book is the excess amount of padding it contains in the form of movie by movie plot descriptions. Honestly, is there anything more boring than someone reciting a blow by blow description of a movie, whether you’ve seen it or not? Most movie plots are so formulaic and boring these days anyway, that this rehashing was quite tedious and I just skipped over it.Michael Douglas seems like a relatively decent person, by Hollywood standards, which is a HUGE qualifier. The bottom line, his life is just not that interesting and so this book really wasn’t either. The only thing that really leapt off the pages for me, was the marked and cringe worthy way he has neglected and essentially abandoned his first born son Cameron, from his first marriage. When he married Catherine, and had children with her. He devoted himself completely to fathering their children, which is admirable. The only problem was, he had another son from his prior 25 year marriage who he essentially never had time for. To top off this neglect, he made many remarkably insensitive public statements about his new set of children that must have been devastating to Cameron. For example he repeatedly said publicly how much more involved he was with his current children and how they were the number one priority in his life, unlike when he was parenting Cameron and his career was his number 1 priority.Smooth moves Michael. This must have made Cameron feel just ducky.Michael also constantly laments his own father’s distance when he was growing up, and seems to use this as a continuous excuse and explanation for everything he does wrong, including his addictions, promiscuity and neglect of Cameron. You sense in Michael a person who feels sorry himself, even as he is harming his son. The author states, in re: Michael’s multiple public comments about his son, “He still sounded distant and dismissive of the boy.”Is this sounding like a typical movie star story to you? It is and it is boring.I guess the judge in Cameron’s sentencing hearing (for intent to distribute illegal drugs) said it best, when he said that Cameron experienced “problematic parenting by both his mother and father in the forms parental absence and distance, parental immaturity, and drug and alcohol abuse, in both the immediate and extended family.”Hooray for Hollywood! I guess good old Kirk is included as well in this zinger!Just read the second to last paragraph. It was the only thing of real value in the book. less

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