Moving Places: A Life at the Movies

"Moving Places" is the brilliant account of a life steeped in and shaped by the movies - part autobiography, part film analysis, and 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 past - when 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 of "Rear Window", a meditation on "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with "On Moonlight Bay". Originally published in 1980, "Moving Places" is 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.