Book Review

Shit, Actually by Lindy West

A

Genre: Nonfiction

Every year around the holiday season, I see people squee about Love, Actually and I’m reminded all over again how much I hate half of it and how meh I feel about the rest of it. But then I remember Lindy West’s infamous takedown of it and I don’t feel alone. So, you can imagine how thrilled I was when I heard about Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema. Its recap-style takes on 23 famous films are hilarious and many of the pieces made me laugh until I cried.

Reading this book reminded me of two things at the same time:

  1. Laughing my ass off at snarky TV show recaps on Television Without Pity (RIP).
  2. That summer around a decade ago when a friend and I decided to watch our way through a bunch of 80’s and 90’s movies to see if they held up.

In the introduction, we learn that each film was chosen for inclusion because they fit one of the following three criteria: it was a cultural phenomena, Lindy West was personally obsessed with it, or it seemed like a movie someone should talk about. If you look at the table of contents, you may or may not be able to guess which movies are being critiqued. “Speed 2 Is Not Canon” is obviously about Speed, and I was easily able to parse out that “Shit, Actually” is an updated take on Love, Actually. But then there’s “On Marriage,” which starts with a thoughtful consideration of marriage and turns out to be about Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. That realization made me look around my bedroom to see who I could tell (sadly, no one), because I was struck by how brilliant and hilarious it is to juxtapose the thoughts on marriage with the marriage on screen in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

The first essay in the collection is “The Fugitive Is The Only Good Movie,” which opens like this:

Objectively there’s only one good movie, and it’s The Fugitive. The Fugitive is the only good movie.

This statement grabbed me by the face and made me pay attention as it lays the groundwork for why The Fugitive is the perfect movie. This essay also establishes how little chill there is to be found in a recap about a movie that the author loves. Just look at all of these exclamation marks (and there are many, many more in the book):

Richard gets sentenced to death by lethal injection, and keep in mind that this is only twelve minutes and forty-nine seconds into the movie!!!!!!!!!!

I laughed out loud when I learned that The Fugitive is so good, all movies in this book are rated on a scale of zero to 10 DVDs of The Fugitive (The Fugitive is 13/10 DVDs of The Fugitive).

I was not exaggerating when I said that this collection made me laugh until I was crying. I learned early on that it wasn’t safe to read while laying with my 5-year-old as she was falling asleep, because I shook the bed too much with my laughter. After that, I was careful to read it alone and cackle at the jokes without worrying about derailing anyone’s bedtime. In “Dude, You Gotta Stop Listening To Your Mom,” which is about Forrest Gump, the final line of each of the following two paragraphs caught me like a one-two punch.

After falling off of a disgusting bird somewhere, the feather floats over and lands on Tom Hanks’s foot. Tom Hanks plays Forrest Gump, our hero, currently waiting for the bus with childlike wonder and also bothering this elderly woman who is just trying to live. Gump picks up the feather (UGH, DON’T TOUCH IT) and presses it between the pages of Curious George, his favorite book. Congrats. Now your suitcase has bird mites.

“Hello!” Gump says to the lady. “My name’s Forrest. Forrest Gump. You want a chock-lit? I could eat about a million of these. My momma always said life is like a box of chock-lits. You never know what you’re gonna get.” I mean, you mostly know. They write it on the lid.

My favourite jokes in the whole collection were about movies that I don’t like, because who doesn’t love dunking on a movie that you hate? This bit from “Never Boring, Always Horny,” which is about the first Twilight movie, made me laugh so much that I made my husband read it the next day and he laughed his ass off too:

Their hands touch, erotically, and his is cold as ice. Because he’s dead. And old. Dude, Edward. Come on. All the other vampires are with other vampires! What could you possibly have in common with this teenage girl?

Yo, girl, lemme play u my favorite song.

[Gregorian chant]

That’s just one of many jokes about how old Edward is and I am here for Every. Single. One. Also, fun fact: it’s the first time I’ve shared a passage from a book I’m reviewing with my husband and he’s said, “What book is that? We need to buy that.”

My other favourite thing about Shit, Actually is that it is as sharp as it is funny. If a movie has a problem, that problem is named and discussed in a way that invites us to think about it and join in on the frustration. Like, why does Sandra Bullock, the civilian, drive the bus in Speed and not Keanu Reeves, who is in law enforcement? Or why does the internal logic of Harry Potter barely hold together? Or even this:

Yeah, there are technically black characters in Harry Potter, but tell me one thing about Dean Thomas.

Some of those moments are more serious too. For example, we’re told that the decision to watch or not watch Rush Hour is one of those post #MeToo judgement calls we all have to make, since it’s directed by Brett Ratner, who has been accused of sexual harassment and/or assault by several women. We’re also (rightly) told that the infamous webcam scene in American Pie is a crime and that the movie reinforces the idea that straight white men are owed access to sex.

Something that is to its credit, but might mean Shit, Actually doesn’t age well, is that it’s firmly grounded in 2020. In the introduction, we learn that West finished writing it six weeks into the COVID-19 quarantine, when people were on ventilators and Trump had already made his insane comment about bleach. I, for one, gave a “hell yeah!” to lines like this from “The Fugitive Is The Only Good Movie”:

Crashing a pharmaceutical gala when you are a fugitive positively drenched in blood? This movie is from 1993, but that’s a 2020 mood.

This book is a perfect balm for how hard and scary and awful it can feel to be a human this year. I deliberately took three months to read Shit, Actually so I could savour it, picking it up during the especially hard days when I needed a laugh the most. I read it when I was working an almost crushing amount of overtime, when my husband and I were agonizing over whether to send our kids back to school or keep them home, and when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and everything felt hopeless. I read the last two pieces on the night of Trump and Biden’s debate, so I could laugh instead of doomscroll on Twitter, and I was grateful for the distraction.

Near the end of the introduction, it says:

More than anything I want this book to make you feel like you were at a movie night with your best friend (me). I had no way of knowing, when I proposed Shit, Actually back in 2017, that I’d be writing it in a time when movie nights with your best friend no longer existed.

That’s exactly what reading Shit, Actually feels like. I’ve rarely felt so grateful to a book and I’m glad that it exists. Not only am I buying a copy for our bookshelf, but I’m buying it for friends too. We may not be able to have movie nights together, but we can all enjoy this book.

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Shit, Actually by Lindy West

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  1. Azure says:

    Oooh! I’m on my library’s wait list for the audiobook but I might splurge and buy it anyway!! This sounds exactly like the book I need with two weeks to go in this hell before Election Day.

  2. Qualisign says:

    HATED!!!! “Love, Actually,” so the book is sold on the basis of the title alone. (Was living through the Emma Thompson/Alan Rickman thing way back when it came out, so the movie was the antithesis of romance for me.) Thanks, Tara, for the excellent review, and your note about the timeliness and time-boundedness of the book is a very helpful caveat.

  3. Carrie G says:

    I’m not a big movie buff, but I may buy this book just to support someone else who thinks Love, Actually is a really awful movie that would not only NOT pass the Bechdel test, but is entirely male centric. It feels like a really sad metaphor for life in the US, where male pleasure is prioritized over everything else.

  4. Since I love THE FUGITIVE, this book sounds really fun. 🙂

    I also do not like LOVE ACTUALLY. I find it way more depressing than uplifting. Practically no one gets a happy ending in the movie. I want to watch fun, light, fluffy rom-coms during the holidays, not LA.

  5. Rikki says:

    My sister and I genuinely enjoy watching Love, Actually together. And I am unsure if I have actually watched The Fugitive all the way through. I loved TWoP when I was younger but that sort of review style no longer works for me. So while this review was interesting, I don’t think that I’m likely to pick this up.

  6. SusanH says:

    @Rikki – I also really loved TWoP back in the day, but I recently tried to read an archived recap and was surprised at how differently I felt about it now vs then. At the time, I thought it was a funny way of pointing out the weaknesses in the show, but this time through, I felt like it was bashing the show to demonstrate how clever the reviewer was. It was really interesting to see how much I’ve changed.

    As for the movies, I did watch The Fugitive back when it was released, but I can’t say I remember anything about it. There are several plots in Love Actually that I really like, and some that don’t work for me, but I do think about the movie occasionally, unlike The Fugitive.

  7. Heather M says:

    Add me to Team Love, Actually is trash. I’ve been watching a lot of Boys’ Love dramas and one thing that aggravates me beyond belief is that they all seem to have a “cue cards” scene. I’ve seen it in kdramas too. Blech. What hath Love, Actually wrought upon the world?

    Anyway, I’m not a huge movie buff and I was on the fence about this one when I first heard about it, but it sounds fun. I’ll have to check it out.

  8. Lilibet says:

    I know I have a stressful week coming up, and this sounds like exactly the book I need to get through.

  9. Emily says:

    I remember having strongly positive feelings about Love, Actually when it came out, but that was also during the period of time when I thought anything portrayed as romantic in a movie had to be romantic, because why else would anyone have put it in a movie?

  10. Penny says:

    That review of LA (back when Jezebel was worth reading)! It was a a thing of beauty.

    I saw this was out and had the half assed thought, wow why retread old ground? But damn, reading this review I realize that this is in fact exactly what I’m craving right now. Anyone else also remember when she wrote for The Stranger? Sigh. Good times…

  11. Lisa F says:

    Tara – your mentioning TWRP reminded me that they were supposed to come back as part of the zap2it network but tragically never did.

    I love these kinds of books, so yep, I’ll pick it up soon!

  12. Liz says:

    I HATE Love Actually and stand firm that it is a piece of garbage that is NOT A CHRISTMAS MOVIE. I get into fights with all my friends around christmas about this. I am ordering this book right now because that review was the best thing i’ve read in months and I work in politics and don’t know if I will survive till nov 3rd so gotta find my joy while I still can.

  13. Holly says:

    The trick to Love, Actually is to pretend it is an Adventure Time prequel. Joanna grows up to be Marceline the Vampire Queen and the rest is super poignant knowing that everyone else is dying or turning into candy or something in a couple weeks.

  14. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Liz:
    I have never seen Love Actually, and am not particularly interested in doing so, but the arguments with your friends reminds me of the argument with my niece when I said that “Hallelujah” is not in fact a Christmas song. Damn pentatonics. I’m sure they’re otherwise okay people, but still… that song was not meant to be a Christmas song. I guess we can sort of blame all of the American Idle style competitions for this as well. In any case, it is not on my Christmas playlist. Yes, I’ve got a lot of feelings about this damn song, one which I like very much in other contexts. I’m sorry everybody.

  15. Carrie G says:

    @Stefanie Magura
    I agree. Hallelujah is NOT a Christmas song! I’m old enough to have own the album by Leonard Cohen with this song on it. It’s full of wonderful, emotional, moving ideas and imagery, but not of Christmas.

  16. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Carrie G:

    To be fair, I didn’t actually discover the song through Leonard Cohen. I suspect the version I first heard was by John Cale, who I had certainly heard of because of the Velvet Underground, and which viewers might know from the Shrek Movie franchise or it might be the one by Jeff Buckley, whose music I don’t always like, but who did a lovely version, one which I think is the basis for the many many versions afterwards, or at least for Cale’s. In any case, I discovered Cohen later, and while I didn’t know his music backwards and forwards like some of my fellow concert-goers, I had the forethought to say to my parents that he seems pretty legendary, and that we really should see him. Of the hundreds of concerts we’ve seen together and apart, this one is easily in the top-ten for me. Maybe top five. Never have I seen anyone have the audience in the palms of their hands quite in the same way.

  17. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Carrie G:

    Also, a song which wasn’t written as a Christmas song, but works much better as one in my opinion is My Favorite Things. We have singer Jack Jones to thank for it’s adoption into the Christmas cannon. He recorded it on a Christmas album in 1964 and its images of sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles fit much better alongside jingle bells and chess nuts roasting on an open fire and even with nativity scenes. While the images in “Hallelujah” are certainly biblical, it’s not the right kind of biblical.

  18. Sydneysider says:

    I also loathe Love, Actually. Lindy West’s review of Sex and the City Two was amazing. This one is going on the wishlist.

  19. Azure says:

    People think “Hallelujah” is a Christmas song? No. No no no. Just listen to the lyrics, for God’s sake!

    And…I caved and purchased the audiobook this morning. I do a lot of driving and I figured I needed something to help me laugh this week.

  20. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Azure:

    Because the Pentatonics recorded it on their Christmas album, and it has really taken off since then, apparently so. As I said previously, adding my favorite things to the Christmas songs canon makes much more sense. Understandably, there are purists who think My Favorite Things shouldn’t be a Christmas song either because it wasn’t written for the holiday. Even so, I maintain that the imagery is much more fitting. If they had wanted to record songs with biblical imagery, they could have done what Elvis did and record Gospel songs which aren’t necessarily Christmas associated. There are plenty of those to be found.

  21. BrandiD says:

    I dislike The Fugitive (I don’t think it’s a bad movie, it just does THINGS to my anxiety) but I’m also not a huge fan of Love, Actually. The two little kids and their side plot are the only part that holds the movie together for me. I might read this, but I don’t think I’m the target audience. The promise of laughing a lot is helping my decision process, though!

  22. Emily A says:

    Wasn’t Leonard Cohen Jewish? Why would Hallelujah be a Christmas song?

  23. Ken Houghton says:

    Most of the best Christmas songs were written by Jews, Emily A.

    However, I believe we can stipulate that “You saw her bathing on the roof/Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya/She tied you to a kitchen chair/She broke your throne, and she cut your hair” shouldn’t make Irving Berlin (or even Mel Torme and Bob Wells) worry about competition for December airplay.

    Now I need to find out what Lindy West says about David Twohy’s earlier screenplay, Warlock.

  24. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Emily A: @Ken Houghton:

    You can also add Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Berry, Johnny Marks, Robert Allen, and Al Stillman to the list of Jewish songwriters of Christmas songs. For example, Allen and Stillman wrote “No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” while Marks wrote “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Raindeer.” If you look in to the history of holiday music, you find examples of Jewish songwriters writing more appropriately themed songs all over the place.

    To answer the question, he was Jewish, and it became a Christmas song because the Pentatonics decided to record it on their Christmas album with the original lyrics intact, and this version has been extremely popular around December for the past few years. A Google search revealed that a Christian rock band did record a version with the same melody and with more appropriately themed lyrics, before the Pentatonics did their version but the consensus is that it isn’t very good. Christian Rock isn’t my preferred genre either, so mileage may vary.

  25. Carrie G says:

    “Maybe there’s a God above
    But all I’ve ever learned from love
    Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya
    And it’s not a cry that you hear at night
    It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
    It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah”

    Yeah, not Christmas lyrics. Cohen was a secularist and this song is using biblical imagery to describe love and loss.

    @Stefanie Magura–I’m jealous you got to see him in concert!

  26. Carrie W says:

    The one good thing to come out of Love, Actually was the side plot of the younger boy with the crush on singing girl. The actors voiced Ferb and Vanessa in Phineas and Ferb. They end up together, also!

  27. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Carrie G:

    I’ve seen many excellent concerts, but none quite like Leonard Cohen. Honestly, it was almost like a religious experience or a sexual experience or both. I’m starting to think that Hallelujah might be an apt metaphor.

    @everybodu:

    For those of you who frequent the site, y’all now know that music is one of my interests. It was bound to come out eventually. I’ve got links since I went down a rabbit hole.

    Here’s one all about Hallelujah and now I want to read the book it references: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/how-leonard-cohens-hallelujah-brilliantly-mingled-sex-religion-194516/

    And this article about how it isn’t a Christmas song in the author’s opinion: https://www.stereogum.com/2068319/pentatonix-hallelujah-leonard-cohen-christmas/franchises/columns/sounding-board/

    And an article about how My Favorite Things became a Christmas song: https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/holiday/8078515/my-favorite-things-christmas-sound-of-music

    At some point I will post a link to my playlist, but I’ll have to get it onto multiple streaming services first; I only have it on Apple Music.

  28. Stefanie Magura says:

    Apparently, I should know that posting all the links I want to share in one comment will flag it in the moderation cue, so until that comment shows up, I’ll post these links in various comments.

    While doing Google searches as a result of these comments, I found this link on Rolling Stone which gives an overview of Hallelujah became so famous. It’s an excerpt from a book on the same topic by Alan Light. It was while looking at this article that I realized some mistakes I had made earlier in the comments. The important one is that Cale did the version which inspired Buckley’s. Furthermore, the book was written before the Pentatonics recording, but the author mentions Susan Boyle’s version which she did on a Christmas album, which means I should blame her too. LOL. https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/how-leonard-cohens-hallelujah-brilliantly-mingled-sex-religion-194516/

    @Carrie G:

    The concert was almost a cross between a religious and a sexual experience. I’ve seen many excellent concerts, some which were either sexy or where I felt like I was having a religious experience, but nothing that felt like it combined both.

  29. Stefanie Magura says:

    Since I mentioned that Jack Jones was the first to do My Favorite Things as a Christmas song, I did a search and found a link about how that came to pass. https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/holiday/8078515/my-favorite-things-christmas-sound-of-music

  30. chacha1 says:

    I think I need to read this, and also send it to a friend. We both could use a laugh. I’ve seen The Fugitive at least six times, IMO it’s one of the best commercial thrillers ever made. And shout-out to Sela Ward, whose performance made me care.

    Love, Actually – have seen this a number of times as well, and I do consider it a Christmas movie, perhaps because I do not associate Christmas with either spirituality or romance. My favorite part is the Alan Rickman/Emma Thompson story, because I love them both with all my heart, and it’s so perfectly played.

  31. Trix says:

    @Cohen/ “Hallelujah” fans: Ray Padgett from the Cover Me Songs blog just released a great book for the 33 1/3 series about “I’m Your Fan,” the long out-of-print ’90s Cohen tribute album that introduced the Cale cover (and Cohen) to Buckley, and also revived what was Cohen’s flagging career at that time. There are great chapters about all of that, but the stuff about the history of tribute albums and the motivations behind them is what really makes it. (There’s an interview with Juliana Hatfield that seems totally out of left field in relation to the story, and it puts the whole thing in context. Of course, the Pixies version of “I Can’t Forget” was always my favorite song on the tribute, so it may just be the ’90s bias talking.)

    Never wanted to see LOVE, ACTUALLY because I’ve hated every other Richard Curtis movie I’ve seen, and ensembles that big give me CANNONBALL RUN nightmares…

  32. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Trix:

    That book sounds amazing! As someone who just inhaled the book by Alan Light about “Hallelujah” after my comments here, and who also lists the Pixies as a highlight of my concert going life, it seems up my alley in several aspects.

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