Laugh out loud funny. I loved this book! The first half was stronger than the second half, got a little repetitive in the last few essays. Lindy’s voice is so unique, her use of uppercase letters and exclamation points helped me hear her voice.

This book met my expectations, I've sought out Linday West's writing for a while now and I'm familiar with the piece on "Love Actually" that inspired this so I knew what I was in for when I started reading and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Shit, Actually was a fun read during the ongoing pandemic. It is fun, snarky, and not serious at all. West's funny take on popular movies had me laughing out loud more than once. Everyone needs a good laugh right now!



Thank you to Hachette Books & NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.
#ShitActually #NetGalley

It might just be a generation gap. I grew up on Mad Magazine, so I know there is no sacred cow that can't be looked in the mouth. (And that it's OK to mix a metaphor to make a point.)

I wanted to laugh, I really did. Unlike my mother, naughty words aren't off-putting-- unless that's the entire narrative style, along with lack of coherence. May I suggest Lindy West (and readers) seek out Anna Russell's analysis of "The Ring Cycle." Ask Alexa.

The one star is for using "The Fugitive" as a rating touchstone. Even though I would pick "Young Frankenstein" as a perfect movie.

Yeah, generation gap.

I am a huge fan of Lindy West. I love her radical feminism, her sense of humor (even though sometimes it makes me cringe - here that means a lot of references to pooping and penises), and her political voice. She and I are clearly riding the same political wave; and, even in a book about movies, she manages to get in plenty of punches against the current administration. Clearly, then, this is not a book for fans of our 45th president. Our people who don't like cursing in a book because, as you can tell by the title of the book, West doesn't pull any punches there, either.
"I love making fun of movies. I love turning a piece of criticism into a piece of entertainment. I love pointing out a plot hole that makes a superfine write me an angry e-mail. I love turning my unsophistication into a tool. I love being hyperbolically, cathartically angry for no reason. I love being flippant and careless and earnest and meticulous all at once.
...I'd rewatch a successful movies from the past to see how they hold up to our shifting modern sensibilities. That concept has grown even more relevant in recent years, as grappling with those shifts has become something of a national obsession...Are we "allowed" to like imperfect things that mean something to us?"
"...I selected movies that fit at least one of three categories: 1) cultural phenomena that took over the earth, 2) movies I was personally obsessed with, or 3) movies I picked because it seemed like someone should talk about them."
"...what I began working on as a silly book released into a darkness I understood - the demoralizing grind of public life under Donald Trump - is now to be a silly book released into a darkness I don't. I finished writing Sh*t, Actually six weeks into the COVID-19 quarantine - six weeks of trying to think of funny things to say about Face/Off while worrying about a friend on a ventilator, six weeks of mustering comical outrage over Harry Potter plot holes while the president went on television to suggest that the ill try drinking bleach."
See, even in the introduction, West works in politics. But that's hard to avoid when you're writing during a year like the one we're in. Kudos to West for being able to muster up the ability to find the funny in life right now. I need it. We need it.

You may have noticed that West suggests that The Fugitive reached perfection in movie making. She loves it so much that she ranks all other movies against it. It ranks a 13 out of a possible 10. But that doesn't save it from West's skewering. And if she'll do that to one of her faves, you can imagine what she did to American Pie, which earned 0/10 Fugitives.

West points out misogyny in these movies (lots and lots and lots of it), the lack of strong female characters (or any at all in some movies), and the lack of persons of color in the movies she's chosen. You might suggest that she handpicked the movies she reviews to make these points. But if you watches movies in the late 1990's, you'll quickly recall that she's pretty spot on. One of my favorite reviews was that of Face/Off, which is a movie I had, until recently, only seen once and hated it. But when my son was last here, he made us watch it because it finds it to be hilarious. As it turned out he was right and as I was reading West's review I was 100% in agreement with her because I could exactly picture the scenes she was talking about. My least fave review? The one the book's title is taken from, Love, Actually. Not because West is wrong about the movie but because she's right. I love that movie, even with the flaws I was already willing to acknowledge, and West may just have ruined it for me. And it's Christmas time, time for my annual viewing. Will I even be able to watch it? Oh, who are we kidding? Yes, I'll absolutely watch it. And I'll still love it (I mean, that scene of Hugh Grant, Prime Minister of Great Britain, dancing down the stairs of 10 Downing Street alone is worth watching the movie for); but I'll watch it with a new point of view.

Lindy West, once the in-house movie critic for Seattle's alternative newsweekly The Stranger, returns to her roots by watching and reviewing favorite movies. From Speed to The Notebook, asking herself how they hold up in modern times (2020). Some she now hates, some she still loves (The Fugitive being the #1 in her heart).

I loved this book. It was a great bit of nostalgia while also being a book I could quote because West is so funny.

Lindy West is usually an auto-by for me, and I was happy to get a chance to read this early! Unfortunately, whether it was timing or the actual book, it didn't really work for me this time. I just couldn't get into it, and it felt sort of frivolous and not as deep of smart as West's previous books.

Fun, sarcastic book about the movies we have grown up with. West (mostly) lovingly calls out well-loved movies for their absurdities and questionable plot points. Her essays may make you fall in love with the movies all over again or decide that what was good in the 1990s should stay there.

I have loved Lindy West’s past books but this one was a dud. What worked as an essay (the original Love Actually review, which was sharp and brilliant) drags on too much in an entire book full of reviews.

West skewers movies for their sexism and plot holes. That part is great and even eye-opening. But she does a play by play of the entire plot, in great detail, for each movie, and it is tedious.

Hilarious! I stopped and started over to read some of these out loud to my husband. The essay on Back to the Future is perfection.

This book is laugh out loud funny. It reviews many of the major movies of the 90s and 00s and also provides insight into why we have such messed up ideas about how the world works. I couldn't stop laughing while reading this. I think anyone would find it funny but especially if you grew up during that time period.

An incisive and hilarious look at blockbuster movies from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s through the lens of more modern sensibilities. West, sometimes lovingly and sometimes not so much, picks apart pop culture touchstones like FORREST GUMP, THE FUGITIVE, LOVE ACTUALLY, HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS, and many more. Often laugh out loud funny and accessible whether or not readers have seen every movie in the book.

I love Lindy West, the movie buff. You know, honest to goodness, the way that Lindy West writes is so hilarious but also mentally stimulating that her take on just about anything makes me feel giddy.

It’s a real treat to get to engage with her work.

I didn’t know how much she loved The Fugitive, I’ve never actually sat and watched The Fugitive in it’s entirety, but her love for it makes me wanna watch it.

Her take on Love Actually, makes me hate the movie even more. Honestly, I’m over the majority of these nonsensical white rom coms so, yeah her take on Love Actually just reaffirmed all the shit that I thought about it.

All in all I thought that this series was a great addition to her body of work.

I have loved everything that Lindy West has written thus far. This one was one of the most fun to read while also throwing some timely topics in there. I will say I skipped or skimmed some of the movies I've haven't seen like Face/off--but now i'm sort of interested in actually watching this because it sounded so absurd! I hysterically laughed out loud quite a few times reading this, especially during the Forrest Gump, Love, Actually, and The Notebook essays. I would pay her just to write movie reviews for me to read. I will definitely read anything she writes in the future. Below are just a few nuggets for your entertainment which cracked me up. (Listed out of context so may lose some of their hilarity!)
p. 21- When talking about Colin Firth's story in Love Actually "Also, who writes their novel on loose pages on a typewriter in an open-air shack next to a pond? Amelia Bedelia?"
p. 34 Forrest Gump ""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." Gold!
p. 41 also Forrest Gump "Lieutenant Dan, for some reason, is EXTREMELY SKEPTICAL that this dude who's already met 3 presidents, won a congressional Medal of Honor, wrote John Lennon's Imagine, blew the whistle on Watergate, and made tens of thousands of dollars PLAYING PINGPONG could possibly achieve the famously insurmountable dream of buying a medium-size boat in Alabama and riding around on it looking for shrimp....Dude he's the most successful man in the world! "
p.48 THE ENTIRE THE NOTEBOOK REVIEW.
I received an ARC of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Very rarely do I literally laugh out loud at books, but this had me in stitches. This felt like having a conversation with a friend.

Wish the author had chosen more inventively and a little further afield than the usual suspects of so-called movie canon (commercial hits) in keeping with her other efforts to expand the conversation about what we talk about in the culture. Still, I featured this title in the big annual Holiday Gift Books Guide (in print in the weekend edition Books section on November 28, 2020) in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper.

This book is WILDLY hilarious and absolutely perfect for 2020. I have seen most of these movies, but the ones I haven't, I'm going to ASAP! I burst out laughing too many times to count. Please read this.

This was hilarious and fun. If you ever read Television Without Pity tv recaps, this is like that but for the movies most millennials grew up watching. A couple of my favorites got skewered, but totally fairly. There were two or three movies I haven’t seen, and I got bored and skipped over those chapters, but that’s totally on me.

Hadn’t watched a lot of movies referenced but I always enjoy Lindy’s voice. I will always read what she writes! Would have connected more if I was more in the movie loop

SO. FUNNY. I was laughing so hard while reading this that my husband and my dog were giving me weird looks. Lindy West is a GEM and I love her.