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A Movie Making Nerd
James Rolfe is an independent filmmaker and creator of the Angry Video Game Nerd web series and feature film. A Movie Making Nerd is a personal account of his origins, starting with an early love of making home movies before the rise of the internet and digital video. Rolfe candidly details moments of triumph and failure in both life and filmmaking—from his time in special education school and struggles during adolescence and college, to personal relationships, finding employment, and raising children. Every recollection in A Movie Making Nerd, whether happy, funny, or painful, shows how one might turn a childhood hobby into a life-long calling.
335 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 13, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 80 reviews
November 19, 2022
Evidently, the manuscript had to be finished by 5:40 and there was NO TIME to find an editor or even do basic proofreading.
November 23, 2022
I really enjoyed this. I have been watching the AVGN videos for years, and I really enjoyed the AVGN movie. So, this memoir concept intrigued me. This AVGN guy wrote a memoir? Seriously?! I read it in just a few sittings and it really worked for me. Rolfe is intelligent, thoughtful, and incisive, and tells an intriguing tale. And it didn't hurt that he is around my age, is saturated in a similar 1980s/90s media landscape, and seems to share an absurdist humor similar to that of my friends and me while growing up (e.g. lots of over-the-top scatalogical profanity laced with layers of pop culture allusions). It was a pleasure to read because it was very real, relatable, and unpretentious. The prose style is unadorned, pretty straightforward, and contains few literary acrobatics except for a few well-placed sentence fragments. It was intriguing to read about Rolfe's life and compare and contrast my own personal nostalgia. For a comedian known for lowbrow humor, there were some really thoughtful and touching moments: e.g. reflections on losing loved ones, meditations on mental health, thoughts about parenting, and more. There does seem to be an inspiring and unifying message presented in a no-BS sort of way: if you can, why not keep doing what you're passionate about? Not for the money, or the fame, or the cultural capital, but for the thing itself. This is as much a love letter to independent film making as it is a personal memoir. Really pleased Rolfe wrote and published this. Great read.
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November 23, 2022James Rolfe is perhaps the most important content creator of my adolescence.
I still remember trying to watch his Angry Video Game Nerd videos on my computer, sweating bullets that my parents were hearing the barrage of obscenities blasting from my room. Good times. Some of the best memories of my childhood, in fact.
I, too, was a lonely kid; worrying about not fitting in, being uncool with people, worried about my looks, and wrestled with feelings of being lost and directionless. James’s videos were a fortress of solitude to me, allowing me to laugh my troubles away. But learning James dealt with the same feelings I did really shocked me. Reading how James used his passions for art—video games, filmmaking, or music—to overcome his struggles was inspiring.
While many of his content-making contemporaries have come and gone, and with the state of the Internet itself changing like the wind, James still remains a pioneer, a humble person, and a rebel with a loyal fanbase. And he more than deserves it. Reading this was like catching up with a old friend. Really enjoyed it.
I still remember trying to watch his Angry Video Game Nerd videos on my computer, sweating bullets that my parents were hearing the barrage of obscenities blasting from my room. Good times. Some of the best memories of my childhood, in fact.
I, too, was a lonely kid; worrying about not fitting in, being uncool with people, worried about my looks, and wrestled with feelings of being lost and directionless. James’s videos were a fortress of solitude to me, allowing me to laugh my troubles away. But learning James dealt with the same feelings I did really shocked me. Reading how James used his passions for art—video games, filmmaking, or music—to overcome his struggles was inspiring.
While many of his content-making contemporaries have come and gone, and with the state of the Internet itself changing like the wind, James still remains a pioneer, a humble person, and a rebel with a loyal fanbase. And he more than deserves it. Reading this was like catching up with a old friend. Really enjoyed it.
November 24, 2022
Solid read, this is one of those reads that makes me lose track of time and makes me feel all kinds of emotions in the process.
December 1, 2022
A few months ago a review from the "Angry Video Game Nerd" popped up in my YouTube recommendations, and I figured it must be an old video or a retrospective or something because I used to watch his funny reviews more than a decade before. But it turns out he's still at it. James Rolfe, the titular Nerd, is still, to this day, subjecting himself to retro video games until he loses his temper and literally beats the game cartridges into pieces (or burns them, or shoots them, or dumps fake poo or vomit on them, or sometimes all of these things). And he's thriving — he's got a huge audience and a semi-regular release schedule. I've always lumped this guy in with other mid-aughts internet sensations like Homestar Runner or Shockwave, so it was kinda wild to see that he's still going. He's been doing this for almost 20 years now.
I followed that YouTube recommendation, and then I watched some of his other recent episodes, and then I watched all of them, all 200+, the same way I would binge any other TV show. I play board games with a group of guys once a month and I remember explaining AVGN to them when I was knee-deep in his videos. I said, "You know, it's this guy, and he dresses like someone from an IT department, and he plays poorly made video games from the '80s and '90s, and he swears a lot and sometimes performs skits where one of the game's characters will show up in a cheap costume and they'll fight to the death. Sometimes he breaks the games with a hammer or uses a prosthetic rear end to—" And then I stopped because one guy at the table was looking at me like I was having a stroke. He said that sounded absolutely awful. He smiled and shook his head in disbelief and repeated himself.
And well, yeah, fine, I get that. If I hadn't seen AVGN videos when I was in my early 20s, present-day-late-30s me probably wouldn't have seen the appeal. But as a young adult I'd never seen something so irreverent, never seen anything so crude and silly. Someone cussing up a storm and fighting five-and-dime Bugs Bunnies was novel for the low-budget spectacle that it was. I can't even invoke that old trope where someone is caught reading a tawdry magazine and insists they just read it for the articles, because even though I've learned an awful lot of honest-to-God fascinating video-game-related history and trivia from AVGN, I can get all of that and more from watching The Gaming Historian. I try to explain the appeal to people sometimes but I end up sounding like an overgrown basement dweller. What can I say, it's a guilty pleasure. I like him. He makes me laugh.
What's really wild is that in the almost two decades he's been doing this, he's blown up (albeit in an underground sorta way). His videos have been organized into discreet seasons you can buy on DVD at Wal-Mart. Gilbert Gottfried made a cameo appearance in one episode. There are two real, genuine, bona fide video games starring James Rolfe as his Nerd persona fighting legendary game glitches and his made-up characters. Seriously, you can buy a physical, licensed Nintendo Switch cartridge with his face on it. Rolfe even raised money and made a feature-length AVGN film, with a limited theatrical release (!), where his character reviews E.T. for the Atari and unwittingly uncovers an Area-51-related conspiracy. He has merchandise, for crying out loud.
I have approximately zero interest in any of these things but I'm delighted that this guy has been able to cultivate such an audience and remain so relevant for so long.
There is also another video series by James Rolfe where he reviews movies, typically classic horror movies. It was the weirdest thing watching one of these reviews for the first time — his Nerd character is so consistent that I sometimes forget it's just a schtick. After seeing Rolfe dressed as a doofus for so many years, chugging beer and cursing and performing various bodily functions all over anything and everything, the idea of him in a t-shirt and jeans, calmly explaining why he enjoys Mel Brooks movies was almost its own form of comedy. It was like that gag from Wayne's World where Alice Cooper turns out to be a mild-mannered history buff. No antics, no prop comedy, just a mellow Rolfe talking about his favorite flicks. I hadn't seen this side of him before, this passionate film aficionado. It was fascinating and informative. The dude has clearly watched a ton of movies, and he really loves them.
This is mostly the tone of Rolfe's memoir, A Movie Making Nerd. Just a mellow film buff talking about home movies and the events that led to his internet popularity. Among the most interesting nuggets: He was in special education for most of his childhood (and returned to public high school as a sophomore without any academic issues), he was suspended from college because he and his roommates absolutely trashed their dorm over the course of his freshman year (though as he tells it, he never participated in the destruction, only filmed it), and he honed his craft creating workplace safety videos that, apparently, no one ever saw except for his boss. He created the first few AVGN episodes in between editing wedding videos, and they were just meant for him and his close friends, passed around on VHS tapes.
A large portion of the book focuses on his feature-length AVGN film. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, he temporarily moved to L.A. and did the whole Hollywood thing. If you've ever run a Kickstarter or something similar, you'll surely wince when you read that he received his funds near the end of the calendar year, before he had a chance to do anything with them. All that money he raised, therefore, was considered normal, taxable income, and a third of the budget went up in smoke. Poof. It put James in a different tax bracket. He ended up dumping his savings into the project.
His Hollywood experience was a disaster and sucked all the fun out of everything (though, spoiler alert, he obviously got his film made and he's happy with the result). His family camcorder and captive childhood cast had been replaced with a real cast and crew, a mountain of red tape and fees and L.A. phonies and crazies and swindlers. Nothing went according to plan, and chapter 5 is a genuinely entertaining, wacky, jaw-dropping account of what went down. Despite this he speaks highly of nearly everyone he worked with and goes out of his way to thank most of them by name. (For us normies, this means an avalanche of Mikes and Kyles and Kevins, none of whom you will remember.)
One of my favorite bits is when, on the last day of filming, with their money depleted, Rolfe is tied to a chair and he's barely managing to hold himself together. Stephen Mendel notices that Rolfe is down in the dumps and, in his wheelchair made to look like a tank, his arms made to look like they'd been ripped off, leans in close and whispers, "You know I was Splinter on Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation?" And it was so random that it cheered Rolfe right up. They finished filming and went home.
The final chapter focuses on his extended efforts to finish editing the film, its eventual release, and fatherhood. What he went through to wrap up post-production is worth the price of the book. His wife's birth story is BANANAS. And the film's long-awaited premier lifted his spirits into the stratosphere.
There is surprisingly little said about his AVGN series. In fact, I kinda got the impression it's just a means to an end for him. He seems delighted with the fandom and loves connecting with people but expresses some mild regret that AVGN has kept him from pursuing a traditional filmmaking career. It's just a job sometimes, not too dissimilar from workplace safety videos or wedding mementos. I was reminded of an episode of The X-Files that follows the elusive Cigarette Smoking Man as he tries, and fails, over the course of his career to get his short stories published in pulpy sci-fi magazines. It comes as a complete surprise very late in the series — he's a high ranking government official doing work most of us would kill for, but all he wants is a little slice of recognition and the freedom to chase his passion projects.
In the end he seems to gain a renewed enthusiasm for AVGN, just tempered by his responsibilities as a husband and father.
Rolfe does, admittedly, engage in a fair amount of preening throughout his memoir. In the first few pages he references King Kong and follows it up with the year 1933 in parentheses. I figured he did this to clarify which version of the film he watched, but then a few paragraphs later, he explains how it led him to record his first home movie, Escape from Monster Island, and he follows the title with "(1991)." And I laughed, thinking the year was some kind of gag, as if the reader needed any clarification. But he takes this stuff seriously. He counts it among his works the same way a famous painter might count whatever his parents pinned to the fridge in his childhood home. It would be like if I listed this review in my bibliography. Every story idea, every homegrown advancement in editing includes a moment where he steps back and admires what he's done. One of his films is a documentary about himself where he covers his first hundred films. "I felt like I was reaching awkwardly to pat myself on the back," he says. Years later, he modified that documentary to cover his first 200 films and re-released it.
This was jarring at first, perhaps a little silly, and the writing often straddles the fence between humble and self-absorbed. But his enthusiasm is infectious, and his stories are undeniably interesting. I didn't particularly enjoy any of his early home movies (any of which you can easily find by googling Cinemassacre + the title) but I sincerely enjoy his director commentary in this book. During his formative years he taught himself to make films with whatever resources he had, and he kind of stumbled into doing things the right way. He realized much later that he'd created a Foley and made story boards just by throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. It's a fun trip to go on.
In Dan Simmons's Hyperion, the poet Martin Silenus at one point frets over his new book and his agent compares it to Pilgrim's Progress. She says Martin's a famous poet and that it doesn't actually matter whether the book is good because it's basically just a decoration for the mantlepiece at home. It'll sell millions of copies but good heavens, no one is going to read it.
I initially viewed A Movie Making Nerd through a similarly cynical lens; that the target market was not necessarily “readers” but super-fans eager to have an AVGN-branded book for their coffee tables, where they would remain unread forever and ever and ever amen. The book is not particularly well written. It's often awkward and meandering (though mostly free of typos) and took so long to write that he had drafts of it stored on floppy disks. His writing style over this extended period is all over the place, and some chapters are better than others. But you don't need good prose to tell a good story, and thankfully James Rolfe is a good storyteller. And he’s funny. I laughed so much reading this book. He nails it every time, typically with a well-placed string of invective or self-deprecating reflection. After his wife's rather traumatic birth story, he wraps it up by saying of his newborn daughter, "I'd never been so happy to see a person puke sh*t." Either he’s funny or I’m a child.
Just a month ago he released a video where he reviews all the various Doom ports. He pops the disk into his Commodore 64 and the console tries so hard to load it but then just lets out this teeny-tiny little fart, and it made me laugh. He’s still got it.
Anyway, if you've ever watched one of his goofy videos and wondered what he's like, or how he got into this gig, then chances are you'll find a lot to love in his memoir. Don’t let the early Kindle reviews get you down; yes, it was bungled, but he fixed it with a less-bungled version, and soon after fixed that version with an almost completely un-bungled version. Reading the book honestly puts this very minor debacle in perspective, in a weird way. It turns out Rolfe often takes the long way around, even if the long way is covered with nails and broken glass. It's a great read.
I followed that YouTube recommendation, and then I watched some of his other recent episodes, and then I watched all of them, all 200+, the same way I would binge any other TV show. I play board games with a group of guys once a month and I remember explaining AVGN to them when I was knee-deep in his videos. I said, "You know, it's this guy, and he dresses like someone from an IT department, and he plays poorly made video games from the '80s and '90s, and he swears a lot and sometimes performs skits where one of the game's characters will show up in a cheap costume and they'll fight to the death. Sometimes he breaks the games with a hammer or uses a prosthetic rear end to—" And then I stopped because one guy at the table was looking at me like I was having a stroke. He said that sounded absolutely awful. He smiled and shook his head in disbelief and repeated himself.
And well, yeah, fine, I get that. If I hadn't seen AVGN videos when I was in my early 20s, present-day-late-30s me probably wouldn't have seen the appeal. But as a young adult I'd never seen something so irreverent, never seen anything so crude and silly. Someone cussing up a storm and fighting five-and-dime Bugs Bunnies was novel for the low-budget spectacle that it was. I can't even invoke that old trope where someone is caught reading a tawdry magazine and insists they just read it for the articles, because even though I've learned an awful lot of honest-to-God fascinating video-game-related history and trivia from AVGN, I can get all of that and more from watching The Gaming Historian. I try to explain the appeal to people sometimes but I end up sounding like an overgrown basement dweller. What can I say, it's a guilty pleasure. I like him. He makes me laugh.
What's really wild is that in the almost two decades he's been doing this, he's blown up (albeit in an underground sorta way). His videos have been organized into discreet seasons you can buy on DVD at Wal-Mart. Gilbert Gottfried made a cameo appearance in one episode. There are two real, genuine, bona fide video games starring James Rolfe as his Nerd persona fighting legendary game glitches and his made-up characters. Seriously, you can buy a physical, licensed Nintendo Switch cartridge with his face on it. Rolfe even raised money and made a feature-length AVGN film, with a limited theatrical release (!), where his character reviews E.T. for the Atari and unwittingly uncovers an Area-51-related conspiracy. He has merchandise, for crying out loud.
I have approximately zero interest in any of these things but I'm delighted that this guy has been able to cultivate such an audience and remain so relevant for so long.
There is also another video series by James Rolfe where he reviews movies, typically classic horror movies. It was the weirdest thing watching one of these reviews for the first time — his Nerd character is so consistent that I sometimes forget it's just a schtick. After seeing Rolfe dressed as a doofus for so many years, chugging beer and cursing and performing various bodily functions all over anything and everything, the idea of him in a t-shirt and jeans, calmly explaining why he enjoys Mel Brooks movies was almost its own form of comedy. It was like that gag from Wayne's World where Alice Cooper turns out to be a mild-mannered history buff. No antics, no prop comedy, just a mellow Rolfe talking about his favorite flicks. I hadn't seen this side of him before, this passionate film aficionado. It was fascinating and informative. The dude has clearly watched a ton of movies, and he really loves them.
This is mostly the tone of Rolfe's memoir, A Movie Making Nerd. Just a mellow film buff talking about home movies and the events that led to his internet popularity. Among the most interesting nuggets: He was in special education for most of his childhood (and returned to public high school as a sophomore without any academic issues), he was suspended from college because he and his roommates absolutely trashed their dorm over the course of his freshman year (though as he tells it, he never participated in the destruction, only filmed it), and he honed his craft creating workplace safety videos that, apparently, no one ever saw except for his boss. He created the first few AVGN episodes in between editing wedding videos, and they were just meant for him and his close friends, passed around on VHS tapes.
A large portion of the book focuses on his feature-length AVGN film. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, he temporarily moved to L.A. and did the whole Hollywood thing. If you've ever run a Kickstarter or something similar, you'll surely wince when you read that he received his funds near the end of the calendar year, before he had a chance to do anything with them. All that money he raised, therefore, was considered normal, taxable income, and a third of the budget went up in smoke. Poof. It put James in a different tax bracket. He ended up dumping his savings into the project.
His Hollywood experience was a disaster and sucked all the fun out of everything (though, spoiler alert, he obviously got his film made and he's happy with the result). His family camcorder and captive childhood cast had been replaced with a real cast and crew, a mountain of red tape and fees and L.A. phonies and crazies and swindlers. Nothing went according to plan, and chapter 5 is a genuinely entertaining, wacky, jaw-dropping account of what went down. Despite this he speaks highly of nearly everyone he worked with and goes out of his way to thank most of them by name. (For us normies, this means an avalanche of Mikes and Kyles and Kevins, none of whom you will remember.)
One of my favorite bits is when, on the last day of filming, with their money depleted, Rolfe is tied to a chair and he's barely managing to hold himself together. Stephen Mendel notices that Rolfe is down in the dumps and, in his wheelchair made to look like a tank, his arms made to look like they'd been ripped off, leans in close and whispers, "You know I was Splinter on Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation?" And it was so random that it cheered Rolfe right up. They finished filming and went home.
The final chapter focuses on his extended efforts to finish editing the film, its eventual release, and fatherhood. What he went through to wrap up post-production is worth the price of the book. His wife's birth story is BANANAS. And the film's long-awaited premier lifted his spirits into the stratosphere.
There is surprisingly little said about his AVGN series. In fact, I kinda got the impression it's just a means to an end for him. He seems delighted with the fandom and loves connecting with people but expresses some mild regret that AVGN has kept him from pursuing a traditional filmmaking career. It's just a job sometimes, not too dissimilar from workplace safety videos or wedding mementos. I was reminded of an episode of The X-Files that follows the elusive Cigarette Smoking Man as he tries, and fails, over the course of his career to get his short stories published in pulpy sci-fi magazines. It comes as a complete surprise very late in the series — he's a high ranking government official doing work most of us would kill for, but all he wants is a little slice of recognition and the freedom to chase his passion projects.
In the end he seems to gain a renewed enthusiasm for AVGN, just tempered by his responsibilities as a husband and father.
Rolfe does, admittedly, engage in a fair amount of preening throughout his memoir. In the first few pages he references King Kong and follows it up with the year 1933 in parentheses. I figured he did this to clarify which version of the film he watched, but then a few paragraphs later, he explains how it led him to record his first home movie, Escape from Monster Island, and he follows the title with "(1991)." And I laughed, thinking the year was some kind of gag, as if the reader needed any clarification. But he takes this stuff seriously. He counts it among his works the same way a famous painter might count whatever his parents pinned to the fridge in his childhood home. It would be like if I listed this review in my bibliography. Every story idea, every homegrown advancement in editing includes a moment where he steps back and admires what he's done. One of his films is a documentary about himself where he covers his first hundred films. "I felt like I was reaching awkwardly to pat myself on the back," he says. Years later, he modified that documentary to cover his first 200 films and re-released it.
This was jarring at first, perhaps a little silly, and the writing often straddles the fence between humble and self-absorbed. But his enthusiasm is infectious, and his stories are undeniably interesting. I didn't particularly enjoy any of his early home movies (any of which you can easily find by googling Cinemassacre + the title) but I sincerely enjoy his director commentary in this book. During his formative years he taught himself to make films with whatever resources he had, and he kind of stumbled into doing things the right way. He realized much later that he'd created a Foley and made story boards just by throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. It's a fun trip to go on.
In Dan Simmons's Hyperion, the poet Martin Silenus at one point frets over his new book and his agent compares it to Pilgrim's Progress. She says Martin's a famous poet and that it doesn't actually matter whether the book is good because it's basically just a decoration for the mantlepiece at home. It'll sell millions of copies but good heavens, no one is going to read it.
I initially viewed A Movie Making Nerd through a similarly cynical lens; that the target market was not necessarily “readers” but super-fans eager to have an AVGN-branded book for their coffee tables, where they would remain unread forever and ever and ever amen. The book is not particularly well written. It's often awkward and meandering (though mostly free of typos) and took so long to write that he had drafts of it stored on floppy disks. His writing style over this extended period is all over the place, and some chapters are better than others. But you don't need good prose to tell a good story, and thankfully James Rolfe is a good storyteller. And he’s funny. I laughed so much reading this book. He nails it every time, typically with a well-placed string of invective or self-deprecating reflection. After his wife's rather traumatic birth story, he wraps it up by saying of his newborn daughter, "I'd never been so happy to see a person puke sh*t." Either he’s funny or I’m a child.
Just a month ago he released a video where he reviews all the various Doom ports. He pops the disk into his Commodore 64 and the console tries so hard to load it but then just lets out this teeny-tiny little fart, and it made me laugh. He’s still got it.
Anyway, if you've ever watched one of his goofy videos and wondered what he's like, or how he got into this gig, then chances are you'll find a lot to love in his memoir. Don’t let the early Kindle reviews get you down; yes, it was bungled, but he fixed it with a less-bungled version, and soon after fixed that version with an almost completely un-bungled version. Reading the book honestly puts this very minor debacle in perspective, in a weird way. It turns out Rolfe often takes the long way around, even if the long way is covered with nails and broken glass. It's a great read.
June 14, 2023
Having been a fan of the Nerd for over a decade now and reading some other showbiz memoirs such as the excellent I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdey and the not-as-excellent Friends, Lovers and the Great Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry, I picked up A Movie Making Nerd in the hope of gaining insight into the life of James Rolfe and some behind-the-scenes introspection into how the show and character came to be and its effect on his life.
Unfortunately this book is so poorly written and edited that there is little, if nothing, of the sort to be found.
Unlike other memoirs which give a glimpse into how the author perceives events and their feelings at the time, A Movie Making Nerd is written as a matter-of-fact chronological series of events. 'This happened, then this happened, then this happened' and so on. There's no insight or nuance into how Rolfe felt about events other than the occasional 'can you imagine how that felt!?' We can't, so it would be nice if you would tell us. There are also moments where individuals essential to the origin and growth of Cinemassacre and the Nerd are mentioned once or twice with no context or importance given to their roles. For example, Mike Matei is mentioned once early on then again towards the end of the book with no character given to his personality or how he shaped the channel and character into what they are today. They are integral to Rolfe's success, yet they are relegated to a single line with no importance or gravitas required given to their introductions in the book as little more than people that Rolfe happened to meet. As such, the writing style comes off as secondary school level and leaves the reader wanting more context and analysis of events rather than just 'this is the sequence in which they happened'.
Rolfe also spends time elaborating on the wrong aspects of his life for this book. James is most widely known as The Angry Video Game Nerd and I purchased this book in the hopes that I would gain greater insight into the creation and production of the show, discovering tidbits about how it is made and the effect is has had on James' life. Instead we get a large focus on other, less idiosyncratic aspects of his life. Yes, it's endearing to hear James talk about learning to use his equipment and making silly movies with his friends as a child, but the amount of detail and analysis that he goes into regarding what is essentially messing around with his friends is unnecessary and repetitive.
A particularly egregious and infamous part of the book is the chapter dedicated to the time he was almost kicked out of college due to his 'roomgoers' at college. This section isn't particularly interesting in the slightest, yet a good portion of the book is dedicated to it. With how much detail Rolfe goes into things, you'd expect it to have a massive effect on his life and personality, but it turns out to be just another thing that happened in his life with no consequence further down the line. It's irrelevant and without it the book would have been a shorter, tighter read.
When we do get to the events that myself and undoubtably many others bought the book for i.e. creating the AVGN character, there is a disappointing lack of any personal insight and reflection to be found. What should have been the bulk of the book is instead relegated to a scant few chapters that again offer little other than 'here's what happened'. While there is a chapter on the creation of the movie, again it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of events as they happened. This section should have been an in-depth analysis of Rolfe's decision-making, why he chose to do what he did, the highlights and lowlights of making a film independently and some honest reflection on the outcomes of the film and how it affected his life after that. Instead we once again get 'here's what happened in this exact order, how wacky is that!?' A great opportunity to endear himself to both his fans and detractors was missed here and these chapters ultimately became as worthless as the ones preceding it.
The worthlessness of the book continues towards its conclusion. Rolfe brings up things that aren't relevant to this book. It's heartbreaking reading the story of his and his wife's struggles having children, but we don't need to know that he has cats. Working with Screenwave would have been an interesting addition to the book, but other than a perfunctory one line mention, nothing more is said of it and the book's narrative continues to fizzle out until it concludes.
What could have been an insightful exploration into the creation of an internet phenomenon and the effect it had on its creator is instead a turgid, poorly-edited sequence of events that are both boring and irrelevant to the creation of such an iconic character. If you're looking to learn more about AVGN, its creation and impact on society, you'd be better off looking to other sources: the creator of the character can only offer a boringly-written sequences of events that aren't relevant to anyone except for himself. This is perhaps the story that Rolfe wanted to tell, but not necessarily the ones that his fans want to hear.
Unfortunately this book is so poorly written and edited that there is little, if nothing, of the sort to be found.
Unlike other memoirs which give a glimpse into how the author perceives events and their feelings at the time, A Movie Making Nerd is written as a matter-of-fact chronological series of events. 'This happened, then this happened, then this happened' and so on. There's no insight or nuance into how Rolfe felt about events other than the occasional 'can you imagine how that felt!?' We can't, so it would be nice if you would tell us. There are also moments where individuals essential to the origin and growth of Cinemassacre and the Nerd are mentioned once or twice with no context or importance given to their roles. For example, Mike Matei is mentioned once early on then again towards the end of the book with no character given to his personality or how he shaped the channel and character into what they are today. They are integral to Rolfe's success, yet they are relegated to a single line with no importance or gravitas required given to their introductions in the book as little more than people that Rolfe happened to meet. As such, the writing style comes off as secondary school level and leaves the reader wanting more context and analysis of events rather than just 'this is the sequence in which they happened'.
Rolfe also spends time elaborating on the wrong aspects of his life for this book. James is most widely known as The Angry Video Game Nerd and I purchased this book in the hopes that I would gain greater insight into the creation and production of the show, discovering tidbits about how it is made and the effect is has had on James' life. Instead we get a large focus on other, less idiosyncratic aspects of his life. Yes, it's endearing to hear James talk about learning to use his equipment and making silly movies with his friends as a child, but the amount of detail and analysis that he goes into regarding what is essentially messing around with his friends is unnecessary and repetitive.
A particularly egregious and infamous part of the book is the chapter dedicated to the time he was almost kicked out of college due to his 'roomgoers' at college. This section isn't particularly interesting in the slightest, yet a good portion of the book is dedicated to it. With how much detail Rolfe goes into things, you'd expect it to have a massive effect on his life and personality, but it turns out to be just another thing that happened in his life with no consequence further down the line. It's irrelevant and without it the book would have been a shorter, tighter read.
When we do get to the events that myself and undoubtably many others bought the book for i.e. creating the AVGN character, there is a disappointing lack of any personal insight and reflection to be found. What should have been the bulk of the book is instead relegated to a scant few chapters that again offer little other than 'here's what happened'. While there is a chapter on the creation of the movie, again it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of events as they happened. This section should have been an in-depth analysis of Rolfe's decision-making, why he chose to do what he did, the highlights and lowlights of making a film independently and some honest reflection on the outcomes of the film and how it affected his life after that. Instead we once again get 'here's what happened in this exact order, how wacky is that!?' A great opportunity to endear himself to both his fans and detractors was missed here and these chapters ultimately became as worthless as the ones preceding it.
The worthlessness of the book continues towards its conclusion. Rolfe brings up things that aren't relevant to this book. It's heartbreaking reading the story of his and his wife's struggles having children, but we don't need to know that he has cats. Working with Screenwave would have been an interesting addition to the book, but other than a perfunctory one line mention, nothing more is said of it and the book's narrative continues to fizzle out until it concludes.
What could have been an insightful exploration into the creation of an internet phenomenon and the effect it had on its creator is instead a turgid, poorly-edited sequence of events that are both boring and irrelevant to the creation of such an iconic character. If you're looking to learn more about AVGN, its creation and impact on society, you'd be better off looking to other sources: the creator of the character can only offer a boringly-written sequences of events that aren't relevant to anyone except for himself. This is perhaps the story that Rolfe wanted to tell, but not necessarily the ones that his fans want to hear.
April 5, 2023
I was a big fan of AVGN back in the day, and even though I think the show has taken a dive in quality, as well as some controversy I wanted to buy this book as a show of support to James.
That being said I’m not sure I’d recommend it. James meanders a lot in his telling of his story, and there’s segments of this book that just seem included to pad out the length. At one point James lists all the “films” he created prior to the AVGN, which are basically just home movies. It’s wild to me James considers these part of his filmography as he counts his current number of films in the 200s
There’s also a decent amount of time dedicated to James college life in which he talks about an incident which was pretty impactful to his life. But in reading it the story felt really mundane, and didn’t exactly paint James in a good light. He claimed it was the inspiration to this book, and I’m not 100% sure what that says. I’m not even it needed to be included.
For those mainly interested in the AVGN you won’t hear anything about it until just over the 200 page mark. This seems like a missed opportunity as the last portion of the book is mostly spent on the movie, and the issues/stories about production, etc etc. For anything you can say about the current state of the channel James is really the grandfather to video essayists many of us have come to love today, and while I understand talking about the movie I think he could have gone a bit further.
I would have liked more time spent on those earlier days as the AVGN was first taking off, and how YouTube has changed over the years. I know the movie was a high point to James life, but considering the end-product was pretty forgettable for the average viewer I think more focus on his time spent collaborating with Mike and Bootsy and production facts about our favorite AVGN episodes would have been more appropriate. Don’t get me wrong some of that is in there, but it gets passed over very quickly.
So back to where I started. I wouldn’t really recommend this book, and I honestly think it closer to a 2 star than a 3. I noticed several grammatical errors as well. But ultimately I have nothing against James. It’s fun for some people to rag on him these days, but he’s accomplished a lot for just a guy with a camera, simple outfit, and a basement to film in. I wish him and the family the best. I probably won’t buy another one of his books if it’s published but I was happy to support this one.
Oh, and for the “truthers” who may read this James does not address any of the controversies that surrounded the channel from Mike’s tweet to present. Which is fine for me as I don’t blame James for not wanting to go into it. But may be disappointing for some
That being said I’m not sure I’d recommend it. James meanders a lot in his telling of his story, and there’s segments of this book that just seem included to pad out the length. At one point James lists all the “films” he created prior to the AVGN, which are basically just home movies. It’s wild to me James considers these part of his filmography as he counts his current number of films in the 200s
There’s also a decent amount of time dedicated to James college life in which he talks about an incident which was pretty impactful to his life. But in reading it the story felt really mundane, and didn’t exactly paint James in a good light. He claimed it was the inspiration to this book, and I’m not 100% sure what that says. I’m not even it needed to be included.
For those mainly interested in the AVGN you won’t hear anything about it until just over the 200 page mark. This seems like a missed opportunity as the last portion of the book is mostly spent on the movie, and the issues/stories about production, etc etc. For anything you can say about the current state of the channel James is really the grandfather to video essayists many of us have come to love today, and while I understand talking about the movie I think he could have gone a bit further.
I would have liked more time spent on those earlier days as the AVGN was first taking off, and how YouTube has changed over the years. I know the movie was a high point to James life, but considering the end-product was pretty forgettable for the average viewer I think more focus on his time spent collaborating with Mike and Bootsy and production facts about our favorite AVGN episodes would have been more appropriate. Don’t get me wrong some of that is in there, but it gets passed over very quickly.
So back to where I started. I wouldn’t really recommend this book, and I honestly think it closer to a 2 star than a 3. I noticed several grammatical errors as well. But ultimately I have nothing against James. It’s fun for some people to rag on him these days, but he’s accomplished a lot for just a guy with a camera, simple outfit, and a basement to film in. I wish him and the family the best. I probably won’t buy another one of his books if it’s published but I was happy to support this one.
Oh, and for the “truthers” who may read this James does not address any of the controversies that surrounded the channel from Mike’s tweet to present. Which is fine for me as I don’t blame James for not wanting to go into it. But may be disappointing for some
November 26, 2022
I've been a fan of James Rolfe since he was The Angry Nintendo Nerd. His was probably the first Youtube channel I subscribed to. I've enjoyed most of his work since then, from his movie reviews and documentaries to his Bored James series and beyond. He always seemed like a cool and genuine guy to me, so I was excited to hear that he had written a book.
He speaks open and honestly about his life, telling humorous, heart-warming and heartbreaking tales from his lifetime, speaking about the problems he had at school and the trouble he got into at college, getting to meet Ozzy, meeting girls, getting married...everything you'd expect from a biography.
Though the book is full of his life stories, he focuses mostly on his love of movie making. He goes into great detail about the films he made throughout his life, from shorts recorded with his school friends, up until his feature film, Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. He explains how he shot and edited his films, the hardships and obstacles he had to overcome, lessons learned, and the joys of finally showing the films to people.
Being a fan of James, I knew I'd enjoy the book, but I was pulled in deeper as I found parallels with my own life. We are both the same age, so we played all the same games and watched the same movies. I had to laugh at him editing with two VHS recorders because I used to do the same thing. We both discovered heavy metal around the same age. And I could sympathise a lot with his struggling to fit in at school and his issues with social anxiety.
The book is an uplifting and inspiring read. James comes across as a decent, calm, quiet and reserved fella from what he has written, unlike his Angry Video Game Nerd character. He comes across as grateful to all his friends and fans, and he harbours no hard feelings towards the people who have done him wrong, especially the guy who caused all the trouble on the AVGN movie set. I don't know how he didn't kick that dude's arse. Anyway, it's as open an honest as you can get for a biography, so I deffo recommend it.
He speaks open and honestly about his life, telling humorous, heart-warming and heartbreaking tales from his lifetime, speaking about the problems he had at school and the trouble he got into at college, getting to meet Ozzy, meeting girls, getting married...everything you'd expect from a biography.
Though the book is full of his life stories, he focuses mostly on his love of movie making. He goes into great detail about the films he made throughout his life, from shorts recorded with his school friends, up until his feature film, Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. He explains how he shot and edited his films, the hardships and obstacles he had to overcome, lessons learned, and the joys of finally showing the films to people.
Being a fan of James, I knew I'd enjoy the book, but I was pulled in deeper as I found parallels with my own life. We are both the same age, so we played all the same games and watched the same movies. I had to laugh at him editing with two VHS recorders because I used to do the same thing. We both discovered heavy metal around the same age. And I could sympathise a lot with his struggling to fit in at school and his issues with social anxiety.
The book is an uplifting and inspiring read. James comes across as a decent, calm, quiet and reserved fella from what he has written, unlike his Angry Video Game Nerd character. He comes across as grateful to all his friends and fans, and he harbours no hard feelings towards the people who have done him wrong, especially the guy who caused all the trouble on the AVGN movie set. I don't know how he didn't kick that dude's arse. Anyway, it's as open an honest as you can get for a biography, so I deffo recommend it.
November 20, 2022
He took me back to the past!
June 4, 2023
Decent read at the beginning, was waiting for him to the whole time to get to the part of his life where he made AVGN, which just so happened to be the part he glazed over. Very strange.
April 18, 2023
Like many millennial nerds, I watched AVGN a lot in my teens. I fell off around the time he started production on his movie, and by most accounts it seems it turned out terrible.
Still, Rolfe is a guy with a lot of passion and I thought his memoir might have some indie filmmaking nuggets in there, and there are a few toward the end. Mostly though it’s a tedious autobiography poorly-written by a pretty boring dude. Not offensive but in no way memorable.
2 out of 5
Diuretic Buffalos or Whatever
Still, Rolfe is a guy with a lot of passion and I thought his memoir might have some indie filmmaking nuggets in there, and there are a few toward the end. Mostly though it’s a tedious autobiography poorly-written by a pretty boring dude. Not offensive but in no way memorable.
2 out of 5
Diuretic Buffalos or Whatever
March 9, 2023
I have been following James Rolfe's work throughout his entire AVGN run, and only dabbled with his non-AVGN works which this memoir dedicates a huge amount to. I am not that big into the 'Universal-Monster' film era which James' films primarily deal in, but it was still fascinating hearing about how he made them and improved with experience, and using better equipment and props over the years.
There is a lot of new information to glean from this book about Rolfe's days in a gifted school, then switching to a public high school, to finally the trials and tribulations he endures through college, which was my favorite part of the memoir because of the depth of how Rolfe went into how he hit the lowest of lows and came back from some dark college days.
People going into this thinking this is just going to be strictly about Rolfe talking all about AVGN throughout should know that is not the case. A fair amount is dedicated to Rolfe's rise to Internet fame with his Angry Video Game Nerd character, and even more about making the AVGN movie and the many struggles it took the film to come to fruition. Part of me would have liked a little more insight to the behind-the-scenes aspects of the AVGN video days, but what is here will suffice, and Rolfe has had such a huge part of his career dedicated to making indie films and shorts that it would be doing a disservice to Rolfe to cut short those parts of his career.
I cannot recommend "A Movie Making Nerd" enough to any James Rolfe fan wanting to know more about his backstory!
There is a lot of new information to glean from this book about Rolfe's days in a gifted school, then switching to a public high school, to finally the trials and tribulations he endures through college, which was my favorite part of the memoir because of the depth of how Rolfe went into how he hit the lowest of lows and came back from some dark college days.
People going into this thinking this is just going to be strictly about Rolfe talking all about AVGN throughout should know that is not the case. A fair amount is dedicated to Rolfe's rise to Internet fame with his Angry Video Game Nerd character, and even more about making the AVGN movie and the many struggles it took the film to come to fruition. Part of me would have liked a little more insight to the behind-the-scenes aspects of the AVGN video days, but what is here will suffice, and Rolfe has had such a huge part of his career dedicated to making indie films and shorts that it would be doing a disservice to Rolfe to cut short those parts of his career.
I cannot recommend "A Movie Making Nerd" enough to any James Rolfe fan wanting to know more about his backstory!
November 27, 2022
I breezed through this book in a couple of days because it was so entertaining. It really reads like one of James' documentaries about his life. You can hear his soothing narration in your head thanks to his casual prose. Think Cinemasscre 200 but with even more detail. It covers bits of James' life we haven't had a chance to visit in depth, such as his college years, and what he was going through during the birth of his child. It's both interesting from a narrative standpoint and inspirational from a creative standpoint.
James, if you're reading this, when I was in 8th grade, a wrestling coach invited me to his house. He'd noticed I didn't have many friends and wanted to help me make some. I hung out with his kids, and he took me places like amusement parks and four wheeling. He once walked into the living room in the middle of the night and jokingly asked me if I wanted a blowjob.
Because I watched your videos, I swore like a sailor. His wife didn't like that and didn't want me teaching their kids cool new words. He ended up being exposed as a pedophile years later. If it wasn't for your videos, I could have been molested. It's incredibly fucked up but somehow funny at the same time. What a shitload of fuck.
James, if you're reading this, when I was in 8th grade, a wrestling coach invited me to his house. He'd noticed I didn't have many friends and wanted to help me make some. I hung out with his kids, and he took me places like amusement parks and four wheeling. He once walked into the living room in the middle of the night and jokingly asked me if I wanted a blowjob.
Because I watched your videos, I swore like a sailor. His wife didn't like that and didn't want me teaching their kids cool new words. He ended up being exposed as a pedophile years later. If it wasn't for your videos, I could have been molested. It's incredibly fucked up but somehow funny at the same time. What a shitload of fuck.
December 7, 2022
This review is a bit biased, because I have been a fan of James Rolfe and his content for over 10 years now. I also have been looking forward to this work for a few years ever since first hearing about it. For fans of the Angry Video Game Nerd, this will be an excellent read. For those who are not fans however, I will admit the prose is a bit off in places and you can tell that James is not an experienced writer with his sentence structures. Luckily it never gets so bad that it detracts from the experience. I devoured this book and read the whole thing in two days.
March 1, 2024
One of my more biased ratings since this probably won’t be very engaging at all if you didn’t watch this guys videos at the height of his popularity in the mid to late 00s but I enjoyed this. It’s paced very oddly with some of the things he recalls being in great detail as opposed to others being skimmed over as well as some very faint indications of narcissism. He’s fallen off a great deal both in quality and passion but he was very inspirational at an important age for me and I’m not sure I’d have the same level of love for filmmaking without this dude
February 20, 2023
No reason to read this if you're not an AVGN, Cinemassacre, or a James Rolfe fan in general. But if you are then this is a must-read. The only disappointment I have is I'd love to have more information about certain things he talks about.
Read
December 3, 2022SUPER MECHA DEATH CHRIST
December 19, 2022
This is a great book for fans of James Rolfe (AVGN, Board James, Monster Madness, etc.). I would recommend it to those folks without many reservations.
With that being said, there are things stated in the book that I feel are self congratulatory (e.g. volunteer VFX) and other minor gripes throughout the book.
If you're a fan, pick it up.
With that being said, there are things stated in the book that I feel are self congratulatory (e.g. volunteer VFX) and other minor gripes throughout the book.
If you're a fan, pick it up.
July 18, 2023
Is forty too young for an autobiography? Bruce Campbell wrote his at 44, so I guess it’s all right. But James Rolfe still seems so young. Maybe it’s because he’s in such a “hip and trendy” medium, being one of the first career YouTubers. I feel he still has more to do in his life, that his career has yet to reach its pinnacle. He won’t be the AVGN forever. And some studio is going to recognize his prowess and snatch him up.
The testament to his staying power is not his video game skill, not his penchant for spectacle, but the fact that he’s always been a filmmaker. And that’s what the book is about. And it’s very much in his voice. Close your eyes during an AVGN video and that’s his narrative voice. Kind of gen-X’y, kind of stilted, like someone with a short attention span with short choppy sentences. The style he uses for videos is the same one he uses for writing. Which is not a smooth transition.
Clearly, he wrote this without the help of an editor or professional services. I spotted quite a few typos and grammar mistakes. Not to mention, overall, it lacks deeper self-reflection. Why did Rolfe do these things? What was his motivation? Why was this a mistake and what would he have done differently? A biography should be as much self-analysis as it is a retelling of events. Maybe even a form of therapy. This book lacks that.
But for a guy who’s just a YouTuber, it has some pretty fascinating events. I’d say it’s on par with Lindsey Stirling’s memoir.
The testament to his staying power is not his video game skill, not his penchant for spectacle, but the fact that he’s always been a filmmaker. And that’s what the book is about. And it’s very much in his voice. Close your eyes during an AVGN video and that’s his narrative voice. Kind of gen-X’y, kind of stilted, like someone with a short attention span with short choppy sentences. The style he uses for videos is the same one he uses for writing. Which is not a smooth transition.
Clearly, he wrote this without the help of an editor or professional services. I spotted quite a few typos and grammar mistakes. Not to mention, overall, it lacks deeper self-reflection. Why did Rolfe do these things? What was his motivation? Why was this a mistake and what would he have done differently? A biography should be as much self-analysis as it is a retelling of events. Maybe even a form of therapy. This book lacks that.
But for a guy who’s just a YouTuber, it has some pretty fascinating events. I’d say it’s on par with Lindsey Stirling’s memoir.
January 5, 2023
A Movie Making Nerd is one of the most honest, for better or for worse, books I have ever read. James Rolfe has been talking about his autobiography for years, and after a surprise announcement on YouTube (followed by a swift order on Amazon) I could not wait to devour this book. James Rolfe, the Angry Video Game Nerd holds a special place in my heart, as watching his videos on YouTube is one of the best memories I have with one of my best friends, Jimmy.
I know the internet is full of rampant speculation and vitriol at the current state of James Rolfe, and his company, Cinemassacre. I’ll admit that I think the channel is waning a bit in quality. I have my theories and, unintentionally, I think, this book backed some of these up. It’s clear by a rather recent video that James is aware of the vitriol and went forward with his plans to publish regardless of what the internet is saying.
It takes a lot of courage to look at the loudest, angriest parts of the internet and be as honest as James is in this book. More than a cursory glance at some of the darker subreddits will result in constant speculation of disability, and the bandying of a certain R word. To have that exist, and then write a chapter about how James was diagnosed with a disability, and needed special education from a specific school is a courageous decision.
Biographies and autobiographies have never been my go-to for non-fiction. I typically find myself wondering if something is self-aggrandizing. Or wondering what was left out. Bias is a part of any non-fiction, the bias involved in an autobiography makes it hard for me to engage. Something about James makes me feel like the words on the page are as honest as possible. However, 300 or so pages is not enough for even the most mundane person’s autobiography, and I know there is a lot that has to have been left out.
Some of the complaints on the internet have been about how James only passingly talks about his decade-plus as the Angry Video Game Nerd. That is bad criticism. The book is called a Movie Making Nerd, and the description on the back of the book talks about how this is about James’ relation to making movies. It is literally written on the tin. Of course, he talks about AVGN for a little bit, but naturally, there was going to be a huge focus on the huge movie he created, as well as his time making movies with his neighborhood friends and going to film school.
A Movie Making Nerd is at its best when it talks about James’ life. His time in school, his experiences in college, and the birth of his children all ring with honesty. Not that other aspects reek of falsehood, but the more personal experiences, clearly what James feels as most affecting his life, have an earnestness to the storytelling. Other parts feel more like necessary stops to get to what he wants to talk about. Since this is about James’ relationship with film, his first corporate job, and the AVGN character are all necessary pitstops on the way to his experiences filming the movie.
All that being said, this is not a well-written book. In one video, James holds up a floppy disc that has the beginnings of this book. It is very clear in the writing style that this was written in segments and chunks over the years. I’m no editor, but I feel like a couple of line-by-lines could have tidied up everything. There is no good ending for an autobiography when the person is still alive, and in good health, but the final segments really feel tacked on. In a book that sets its sights on James’ relationship with film, and commits to that thesis, some content just doesn’t fit, which really shines the light on the lack of editing and piecemeal writing style.
I really enjoyed this book. It was great to get inside James’ head and I appreciate the honesty in what was shared. However, it is not the best-written thing ever. I’m sure James would be the first to say that he is not a writer, however, an editor would have been able to smooth some things over. In 1975 Leonard Nimoy wrote an autobiography called "I am Not Spock”. While there was an uproar from people who didn’t read the novel saying that Nimoy was not honoring the character that made him famous, that was not the point of the book. A Movie Making Nerd has that same stigma attached to it. This is a book about the man, not about the character, and people seem to be blindsided by that fact. There are flaws to be sure, but A Movie Making Nerd is exactly what the title says, a book about a nerd who makes movies. 3/5
I know the internet is full of rampant speculation and vitriol at the current state of James Rolfe, and his company, Cinemassacre. I’ll admit that I think the channel is waning a bit in quality. I have my theories and, unintentionally, I think, this book backed some of these up. It’s clear by a rather recent video that James is aware of the vitriol and went forward with his plans to publish regardless of what the internet is saying.
It takes a lot of courage to look at the loudest, angriest parts of the internet and be as honest as James is in this book. More than a cursory glance at some of the darker subreddits will result in constant speculation of disability, and the bandying of a certain R word. To have that exist, and then write a chapter about how James was diagnosed with a disability, and needed special education from a specific school is a courageous decision.
Biographies and autobiographies have never been my go-to for non-fiction. I typically find myself wondering if something is self-aggrandizing. Or wondering what was left out. Bias is a part of any non-fiction, the bias involved in an autobiography makes it hard for me to engage. Something about James makes me feel like the words on the page are as honest as possible. However, 300 or so pages is not enough for even the most mundane person’s autobiography, and I know there is a lot that has to have been left out.
Some of the complaints on the internet have been about how James only passingly talks about his decade-plus as the Angry Video Game Nerd. That is bad criticism. The book is called a Movie Making Nerd, and the description on the back of the book talks about how this is about James’ relation to making movies. It is literally written on the tin. Of course, he talks about AVGN for a little bit, but naturally, there was going to be a huge focus on the huge movie he created, as well as his time making movies with his neighborhood friends and going to film school.
A Movie Making Nerd is at its best when it talks about James’ life. His time in school, his experiences in college, and the birth of his children all ring with honesty. Not that other aspects reek of falsehood, but the more personal experiences, clearly what James feels as most affecting his life, have an earnestness to the storytelling. Other parts feel more like necessary stops to get to what he wants to talk about. Since this is about James’ relationship with film, his first corporate job, and the AVGN character are all necessary pitstops on the way to his experiences filming the movie.
All that being said, this is not a well-written book. In one video, James holds up a floppy disc that has the beginnings of this book. It is very clear in the writing style that this was written in segments and chunks over the years. I’m no editor, but I feel like a couple of line-by-lines could have tidied up everything. There is no good ending for an autobiography when the person is still alive, and in good health, but the final segments really feel tacked on. In a book that sets its sights on James’ relationship with film, and commits to that thesis, some content just doesn’t fit, which really shines the light on the lack of editing and piecemeal writing style.
I really enjoyed this book. It was great to get inside James’ head and I appreciate the honesty in what was shared. However, it is not the best-written thing ever. I’m sure James would be the first to say that he is not a writer, however, an editor would have been able to smooth some things over. In 1975 Leonard Nimoy wrote an autobiography called "I am Not Spock”. While there was an uproar from people who didn’t read the novel saying that Nimoy was not honoring the character that made him famous, that was not the point of the book. A Movie Making Nerd has that same stigma attached to it. This is a book about the man, not about the character, and people seem to be blindsided by that fact. There are flaws to be sure, but A Movie Making Nerd is exactly what the title says, a book about a nerd who makes movies. 3/5
October 10, 2023
A Movie Making Nerd is clearly James Rolfe's first book. Although Rolfe has written for both film and web media for decades at this point, the skills required to write a movie aren't the same skills required to write an autobiography and that is somewhat clear while reading. The book is lacking in polish, with many format and grammatical issues that while don't ruin the book by any means, do feel somewhat glaring and should have been caught during the proofreading phase. Strange, beginner errors like starting sentences with "But" for example are prevalent, and there are inconsistencies with referring to other pieces of media, such as referring to the film Aliens as "Aliens (1986)" but then turning around and referring to the video game Metroid as "Metroid (NES)" instead of "Metroid (1986)". None of these errors ruin the book by any means, and by and large, it was a very gripping and pleasant read. I just wish more time was spent proofreading, revising, and editing.
With that out of the way, A Movie Making Nerd is a very heartfelt, genuine, and surprisingly contemplative book from Rolfe. The book handles themes that hit quite hard for me, such as the loss of loved ones, the inescapable movement of time, and struggles connecting with people at a young age. I found Rolfe to be humble and very relatable. In fact, during one particular reading session, I found myself getting a little emotional when he described some of his college years, an event I am currently experiencing myself. It got me thinking of the legacy I'll leave behind, the emotions I'll feel throughout life, and whether all of that will matter when I'm dust. I suppose maybe I can write my own memoir when I'm his age. The book is paced well and moves by quickly and although it does have plenty of emotional moments, it is also regularly very funny. The chapters in which Rolfe describes his chaotic college years and the antics his roommates got up to is a tale I ended up relaying to many friends after the fact. The ultimate message of the book is that you should pursue your dreams at whatever opportunity you can. Not for money or success but for the passion itself. Rolfe is clearly a passionate person in every way, but he's not dishonest about the struggles that come with it. In fact, he's remarkably honest about his own failings. From the mental health pit that the education system left him in, to his unimaginably stressful experiences directing Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie to his downright terrifying experiences with childbirth, it appears to be an honest look at his life, served with a side of remarkable humility. I do wish he focused more on the making of the Angry Video Game Nerd web series because that does feel like it was glossed over as a transitional series of chapters between his early life and the production of the movie.
Even if it could have benefitted from some more time in the oven, A Movie Making Nerd is a well-paced, inspirational, and often funny autobiography. Sure, the formatting and grammatical errors are a bit annoying, but that doesn't take away from the genuine sensitivity and insight that Rolfe brings to the table. For all of its flaws, this will be a book that I want to pass down to my children in the hopes that it'll inspire them to follow their own passions and show them that it's okay to suffer from hardship. I encourage Rolfe to write more books, as this was a pleasant read and I'd love to hear more of his thoughts on different subjects. He does genuinely have writing talent when it comes to pacing and reflection. GoodReads doesn't allow for half-stars, so I'll just round up. I'd rate this book a 7/10.
With that out of the way, A Movie Making Nerd is a very heartfelt, genuine, and surprisingly contemplative book from Rolfe. The book handles themes that hit quite hard for me, such as the loss of loved ones, the inescapable movement of time, and struggles connecting with people at a young age. I found Rolfe to be humble and very relatable. In fact, during one particular reading session, I found myself getting a little emotional when he described some of his college years, an event I am currently experiencing myself. It got me thinking of the legacy I'll leave behind, the emotions I'll feel throughout life, and whether all of that will matter when I'm dust. I suppose maybe I can write my own memoir when I'm his age. The book is paced well and moves by quickly and although it does have plenty of emotional moments, it is also regularly very funny. The chapters in which Rolfe describes his chaotic college years and the antics his roommates got up to is a tale I ended up relaying to many friends after the fact. The ultimate message of the book is that you should pursue your dreams at whatever opportunity you can. Not for money or success but for the passion itself. Rolfe is clearly a passionate person in every way, but he's not dishonest about the struggles that come with it. In fact, he's remarkably honest about his own failings. From the mental health pit that the education system left him in, to his unimaginably stressful experiences directing Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie to his downright terrifying experiences with childbirth, it appears to be an honest look at his life, served with a side of remarkable humility. I do wish he focused more on the making of the Angry Video Game Nerd web series because that does feel like it was glossed over as a transitional series of chapters between his early life and the production of the movie.
Even if it could have benefitted from some more time in the oven, A Movie Making Nerd is a well-paced, inspirational, and often funny autobiography. Sure, the formatting and grammatical errors are a bit annoying, but that doesn't take away from the genuine sensitivity and insight that Rolfe brings to the table. For all of its flaws, this will be a book that I want to pass down to my children in the hopes that it'll inspire them to follow their own passions and show them that it's okay to suffer from hardship. I encourage Rolfe to write more books, as this was a pleasant read and I'd love to hear more of his thoughts on different subjects. He does genuinely have writing talent when it comes to pacing and reflection. GoodReads doesn't allow for half-stars, so I'll just round up. I'd rate this book a 7/10.
February 23, 2023
I don't have enough nice things to say about Rolfe. I have loved AVGN since a friend first introduced me to it in high school. We used to spend hours watching his reviews and the Monster Madness series. The overviews of these films gave us a great start to understanding the lineage of horror film and was a nice starter kit for film criticism.
His role as the titular nerd is legendary. He has so many classic videos and helped jumpstart the now obvious association with online video content and gaming. He's also cemented many games into classic status as spectacular duds. In this book he mentions that he's heard many times that when he reviews a game, local game stores get numerous requests for it, no matter how bad it is.
I love watching garbage movies, cringe-listening to bad music, and playing broken games. I think everyone gets some enjoyment from these things. Watching the old seasons of AVGN is a joy, and the amount of work Rolfe put into the series is spectacular. I would describe him as a true outsider artist, and this book confirmed this for me. It begins with a recollection of his childhood and his struggles with possible social/behavioral disorders. This was so illuminating for me. He talked about his time in special education and it really shed a lot of light on him beyond the Nerd persona.
He went into a good amount of detail about his dreams and interest in movies and went over several of his childhood productions he put together. It was great. He had a lot of anecdotes about adolescence and high school, and a lot about college. I love his DIY attitude and it's honestly inspiring how much work he put into it, plus, I live for no-budget mindsets when it comes to art.
The last half of the book lost me a bit as he went into great detail over the AVGN movie, which was widely seen as a big flop. It sounded like hell to make, and did not make for interesting reading content. The end of the book was very brief and edited poorly, unfortunately. It would've been great to hear more about the people he worked with over the years, especially Matei, although he has brought a great deal of negative attention to James over the years.
At any rate, I would definitely recommend this to any hardcore fans. It is very ernest and increased my admiration for Rolfe's artistic ability and work ethic. He is epic.
His role as the titular nerd is legendary. He has so many classic videos and helped jumpstart the now obvious association with online video content and gaming. He's also cemented many games into classic status as spectacular duds. In this book he mentions that he's heard many times that when he reviews a game, local game stores get numerous requests for it, no matter how bad it is.
I love watching garbage movies, cringe-listening to bad music, and playing broken games. I think everyone gets some enjoyment from these things. Watching the old seasons of AVGN is a joy, and the amount of work Rolfe put into the series is spectacular. I would describe him as a true outsider artist, and this book confirmed this for me. It begins with a recollection of his childhood and his struggles with possible social/behavioral disorders. This was so illuminating for me. He talked about his time in special education and it really shed a lot of light on him beyond the Nerd persona.
He went into a good amount of detail about his dreams and interest in movies and went over several of his childhood productions he put together. It was great. He had a lot of anecdotes about adolescence and high school, and a lot about college. I love his DIY attitude and it's honestly inspiring how much work he put into it, plus, I live for no-budget mindsets when it comes to art.
The last half of the book lost me a bit as he went into great detail over the AVGN movie, which was widely seen as a big flop. It sounded like hell to make, and did not make for interesting reading content. The end of the book was very brief and edited poorly, unfortunately. It would've been great to hear more about the people he worked with over the years, especially Matei, although he has brought a great deal of negative attention to James over the years.
At any rate, I would definitely recommend this to any hardcore fans. It is very ernest and increased my admiration for Rolfe's artistic ability and work ethic. He is epic.
March 27, 2023
Loved it.
I see a couple reviews on here bellyaching about proofing and editing and so on, and I always like to make a distinction between books that have a handful of style issues that aren't like I prefer and books that are a total fucking mess and are borderline unreadable.
To use the language of cinema, since this IS a book about movies: there are movies that are imperfect, a boom mic in frame here, some plot holes there, but they have more than enough of the basic movie structure in them, and they leave you entertained. They're an awesome use of a Sunday afternoon. And then there are movies where you can barely make out the dialog, you're not sure what you're supposed to be watching on the screen at any given time, and they're so difficult to follow that you have to read the Wikipedia entry after to see if you actually saw what you think you saw.
Some folks make out an indie book with a couple typos or comma splices to be the literary equivalent of the second kind of movie. And those folks really only out themselves as rarely picking up an indie or (gasp!) self-published book.
A Movie Making Nerd is a book that's got a couple technical flaws, and if you're unable to look past that, you're missing out. It's incredibly entertaining. It oozes enthusiasm, and I think that's what this book is really meant to do.
James Rolfe is an entertainer. While in film school, it seemed like he grew to dislike pretentious artsy stuff, and he'd take any opportunity to make an entertaining movie instead of a piece of artistic floof. That's the kind of person I really respect and tend to enjoy. I don't like filmmakers who make movies to please other filmmakers, I like filmmakers who make movies to please viewers.
I don't like writers who write books to please other writers. I like writers who write books to please other kinds of people.
The secret success of A Movie Making Nerd is that it's the kind of book that's going to convince people who normally don't read to pick up a book and tear through it this year, and I think that's one of the best things a book can do.
I see a couple reviews on here bellyaching about proofing and editing and so on, and I always like to make a distinction between books that have a handful of style issues that aren't like I prefer and books that are a total fucking mess and are borderline unreadable.
To use the language of cinema, since this IS a book about movies: there are movies that are imperfect, a boom mic in frame here, some plot holes there, but they have more than enough of the basic movie structure in them, and they leave you entertained. They're an awesome use of a Sunday afternoon. And then there are movies where you can barely make out the dialog, you're not sure what you're supposed to be watching on the screen at any given time, and they're so difficult to follow that you have to read the Wikipedia entry after to see if you actually saw what you think you saw.
Some folks make out an indie book with a couple typos or comma splices to be the literary equivalent of the second kind of movie. And those folks really only out themselves as rarely picking up an indie or (gasp!) self-published book.
A Movie Making Nerd is a book that's got a couple technical flaws, and if you're unable to look past that, you're missing out. It's incredibly entertaining. It oozes enthusiasm, and I think that's what this book is really meant to do.
James Rolfe is an entertainer. While in film school, it seemed like he grew to dislike pretentious artsy stuff, and he'd take any opportunity to make an entertaining movie instead of a piece of artistic floof. That's the kind of person I really respect and tend to enjoy. I don't like filmmakers who make movies to please other filmmakers, I like filmmakers who make movies to please viewers.
I don't like writers who write books to please other writers. I like writers who write books to please other kinds of people.
The secret success of A Movie Making Nerd is that it's the kind of book that's going to convince people who normally don't read to pick up a book and tear through it this year, and I think that's one of the best things a book can do.
December 9, 2022
I've been a fan of the Angry Video Game Nerd for years. It's a series i find myself endlessly rewatching through the Seasons videos on YouTube. Cinemasacre's Monster Madness got me into horror movies, a genre I mostly ignored growing up, and his documentary Rocky Jumped A Park Bench got me into the Rocky series. This is less a story on the Nerd and more about James's passion as a filmmaker, growing up, going to college, finding work, finding success with AVGN, and the behind-the-scenes story of Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, which I now feel compelled to watch again after learning about everything that went into it.
The book is surprisingly short, and each chapter is broken up into sections, so it's easy to get through, and it includes various photos. I will say after reading it that I don't envy him and all that he went through, from going through special education growing up to almost getting expelled from university to the stressful production of AVGN: The Movie while simultaneously preparing to become a father. He does have his good spots. He does get to make the movies he wants, and he finds his audience and success. He's able to turn AVGN into a living, get a good home, and support his family.
If you're looking for a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff for the AVGN series, you won't really find it here. There is The Making of an AVGN Episode, and he's covered his movie making stuff in other videos. In fact, he doesn't really talk about video games much except for when he first gets an NES and tries out Ghosts 'N Goblins and Castlevania, and a couple of other times here and there until he meets Mike Matei and starts down the road to AVGN. I'm also confused by his need to mention that the games he mentions are for the NES. If you're reading the book, I assume you're already familiar with the AVGN, and by extension, the classic NES library.
Ultimately though, there's so much more to James than AVGN, and this book is a look at that. I'm glad I took the time to read it and appreciate the stuff he does, and I'll have to check out the earlier stuff he made.
The book is surprisingly short, and each chapter is broken up into sections, so it's easy to get through, and it includes various photos. I will say after reading it that I don't envy him and all that he went through, from going through special education growing up to almost getting expelled from university to the stressful production of AVGN: The Movie while simultaneously preparing to become a father. He does have his good spots. He does get to make the movies he wants, and he finds his audience and success. He's able to turn AVGN into a living, get a good home, and support his family.
If you're looking for a ton of behind-the-scenes stuff for the AVGN series, you won't really find it here. There is The Making of an AVGN Episode, and he's covered his movie making stuff in other videos. In fact, he doesn't really talk about video games much except for when he first gets an NES and tries out Ghosts 'N Goblins and Castlevania, and a couple of other times here and there until he meets Mike Matei and starts down the road to AVGN. I'm also confused by his need to mention that the games he mentions are for the NES. If you're reading the book, I assume you're already familiar with the AVGN, and by extension, the classic NES library.
Ultimately though, there's so much more to James than AVGN, and this book is a look at that. I'm glad I took the time to read it and appreciate the stuff he does, and I'll have to check out the earlier stuff he made.
April 30, 2023
I really enjoy James Rolfe’s work on YouTube and find much of the criticism of his videos pretty damn unfair (aside from the monster madness plagiarism scandal, which is earned.) I picked up this book expecting insights into his life as well as his YouTube career. I didn’t expect amazing writing.
I was not prepared for the level of writing I got. If you had told me this book had not been edited at all, I would believe you. Unfortunately, this is far and away the most poorly written book I’ve ever purchased.
The first half of the book is genuinely interesting despite the grammar and spelling flaws. I really enjoyed hearing about the challenges and triumphs of James’ upbringing and he’s clearly worked hard to overcome many things.
Once James gets to college, an incredible amount of the book becomes about his freshman year living with a bunch of unsavory “roomgoers.” It’s unbelievable that more effort is giving describing a year of college than nearly 10 years of pre-movie Angry Video Game Nerd content.
It’s a shame James couldn’t have delivered this manuscript to a co-writer who could collaborate and constructively criticize the writing and challenge James to improve on a 2nd and 3rd draft. Someone needed to tell James that he ought to spend more time talking about the ultimate reason why he’s famous.
Ultimately, it’s his story and he can tell it however he wants to. But this feels like an incredible missed opportunity, and as he tells the reader he wants his film to inspire independent filmmakers to make movies outside the Hollywood system (the same movie he literally filmed and premiered in LA so he could be by Hollywood) I find myself feeling sad. It’s a bummer that he didn’t realize he’d already accomplished this influence with stuff like Board James and of course, AVGN. It reads like a guy with a lot of talent but not much self-awareness.
(I’m still glad I read the first half of the book or so. His story about his grandma’s passing was well-told and hit me pretty hard.)
I was not prepared for the level of writing I got. If you had told me this book had not been edited at all, I would believe you. Unfortunately, this is far and away the most poorly written book I’ve ever purchased.
The first half of the book is genuinely interesting despite the grammar and spelling flaws. I really enjoyed hearing about the challenges and triumphs of James’ upbringing and he’s clearly worked hard to overcome many things.
Once James gets to college, an incredible amount of the book becomes about his freshman year living with a bunch of unsavory “roomgoers.” It’s unbelievable that more effort is giving describing a year of college than nearly 10 years of pre-movie Angry Video Game Nerd content.
It’s a shame James couldn’t have delivered this manuscript to a co-writer who could collaborate and constructively criticize the writing and challenge James to improve on a 2nd and 3rd draft. Someone needed to tell James that he ought to spend more time talking about the ultimate reason why he’s famous.
Ultimately, it’s his story and he can tell it however he wants to. But this feels like an incredible missed opportunity, and as he tells the reader he wants his film to inspire independent filmmakers to make movies outside the Hollywood system (the same movie he literally filmed and premiered in LA so he could be by Hollywood) I find myself feeling sad. It’s a bummer that he didn’t realize he’d already accomplished this influence with stuff like Board James and of course, AVGN. It reads like a guy with a lot of talent but not much self-awareness.
(I’m still glad I read the first half of the book or so. His story about his grandma’s passing was well-told and hit me pretty hard.)
June 25, 2023
I've been an AVGN fan since 2010-2011, so I guess I am the target audience here; anybody else would probably not find these memoirs interesting. I never donated to the movie because I did not have my own money back then and neither did I have access to payment methods like PayPal, I watched it but did not particularly like it; in fact, I remember skipping the final part almost completely, but it was still a very refreshing thing to read about how it got made. James dispels the common ("common" among trolls and people who have no life, that is) myth\accusation that he pocketed the money people donated to him - a separate bank account was made to transfer the funds from IndieGoGo, and he never saw a cent of it; unfortunately, he ended up paying a PayPal fee for it and the amount of money he received still put him in a different tax bracket, which meant he had to pay taxes on top of it; he even had to touch his own savings in order to finish the movie, it's a miracle the movie got made at all. He even explains that he had to move to L.A. because of bad\uncertain weather on the East Coast, and not just because everyone filmed there, unlike what some internet trolls would have you believe. I also think the accusations of illiteracy some reviewers have made on here are pretty disingenuous, since I've been able to count only three or four mistakes, including the "infamous" "forward" at the beginning. To say that someone is illiterate because of three random mistakes is specious to say the least.
I definitely would have liked more words on his friendship with Mike Matei but all in all, this has been a very entertaining read, worth the money spent on it. If you stumbled upon this review by chance and are not a fan of AVGN, I recommend you watch the first 118 episodes of Angry Video Game Nerd; they are pure comedic gold. That said, I wish James and his family all the best and I certainly hope he continues to make new episodes of the Nerd.
I definitely would have liked more words on his friendship with Mike Matei but all in all, this has been a very entertaining read, worth the money spent on it. If you stumbled upon this review by chance and are not a fan of AVGN, I recommend you watch the first 118 episodes of Angry Video Game Nerd; they are pure comedic gold. That said, I wish James and his family all the best and I certainly hope he continues to make new episodes of the Nerd.
December 5, 2023
Just to make it clear: this review is sincere and supportive of James.
Obviously most people will read this book because they are (or were) a fan of the Angry Video Game Nerd. This isn't really a book about AVGN, though. This is a book about James Rolfe. I found it a funny, touching, inspiring autobiography of a neurodivergent boy and his enduring special interest, making movies, that eventually led to a successful career with the support and encouragement of people who cared about him. While Rolfe did not intend this book to be about autism or neurodivergence in general, and he explicitly only briefly mentions his childhood ADHD diagnosis, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand autism (or Asperger's syndrome) better from a first person perspective.
The book chronicles Rolfe's life from childhood onwards: his difficulties growing up, spending seven years in special education school before going to high school and eventually college, where he got in trouble hanging out with the wrong people and was suspended, his jobs before AVGN, and his family. He talks openly about his sensory issues as a child and the problems he has had with emotion regulation and social interaction. The book builds up to AVGN, of course, and the bittersweet experience of finally making a more professional film, the AVGN Movie, but again, this book really is more about Rolfe's life and before (and after) AVGN, and the passion and perseverance that led to the happy accident of AVGN.
I listened to the audiobook, which I'd suggest is the best way to go with this one, with James telling his story.
Obviously most people will read this book because they are (or were) a fan of the Angry Video Game Nerd. This isn't really a book about AVGN, though. This is a book about James Rolfe. I found it a funny, touching, inspiring autobiography of a neurodivergent boy and his enduring special interest, making movies, that eventually led to a successful career with the support and encouragement of people who cared about him. While Rolfe did not intend this book to be about autism or neurodivergence in general, and he explicitly only briefly mentions his childhood ADHD diagnosis, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand autism (or Asperger's syndrome) better from a first person perspective.
The book chronicles Rolfe's life from childhood onwards: his difficulties growing up, spending seven years in special education school before going to high school and eventually college, where he got in trouble hanging out with the wrong people and was suspended, his jobs before AVGN, and his family. He talks openly about his sensory issues as a child and the problems he has had with emotion regulation and social interaction. The book builds up to AVGN, of course, and the bittersweet experience of finally making a more professional film, the AVGN Movie, but again, this book really is more about Rolfe's life and before (and after) AVGN, and the passion and perseverance that led to the happy accident of AVGN.
I listened to the audiobook, which I'd suggest is the best way to go with this one, with James telling his story.
March 21, 2023
I've been following Rolfe for about 15 years now and have always appreciated that he seems relatively likable and engaging, with definitely his fair share of odd quirks. I can't recommend this to anyone who's NOT already a major fan, but as a deep dive on a person who doesn't always share too much about his personal life, I really enjoyed listening to this (I can't imagine reading this...it's not particularly well-written, but it's written in Rolfe's video narration voice, so the audiobook is the perfect way to engage with it).
Most of the book is an extremely detailed recounting of Rolfe's life before he did anything notable, and he admits later on that it was largely written back when it took place, when he was 20-25 or so. So you end up with an autobiography of just a regular dude written by a college-aged kid with no life experience, which is extremely un-notable, and occasionally horribly cringey, but in an oddly charming way that makes me feel like I know this guy even better.
The next major chunk of the book is the making of the AVGN movie, which is pretty interesting. It becomes clear as it goes on, that for the money he raised, he would have been way better off filming it in Philly on his home turf, but really the movie was more of an excuse to live out the lifelong fantasy of making a movie in Hollywood, so because he seems like a nice guy, I'm glad he did it that way to get the experience even though the final project suffered a little.
I did enjoy hearing about his family and his life, and in all, I'm glad I listened to this.
Most of the book is an extremely detailed recounting of Rolfe's life before he did anything notable, and he admits later on that it was largely written back when it took place, when he was 20-25 or so. So you end up with an autobiography of just a regular dude written by a college-aged kid with no life experience, which is extremely un-notable, and occasionally horribly cringey, but in an oddly charming way that makes me feel like I know this guy even better.
The next major chunk of the book is the making of the AVGN movie, which is pretty interesting. It becomes clear as it goes on, that for the money he raised, he would have been way better off filming it in Philly on his home turf, but really the movie was more of an excuse to live out the lifelong fantasy of making a movie in Hollywood, so because he seems like a nice guy, I'm glad he did it that way to get the experience even though the final project suffered a little.
I did enjoy hearing about his family and his life, and in all, I'm glad I listened to this.
January 1, 2024
The Angry Video Game Nerd is probably my favorite "internet celebrity." I've watched his channel for almost 20 years. Even if I don't know the game, I'm entertained by his videos. So, I was curious to read his story.
This has to be the first time I've read the memoirs of who grew up at the same time as me. I related to him not just because we played the same video games; like me, he also had trouble fitting in as a kid because of "nerdiness." Also, his fascination with making movies via VHS camcorder made me think about the fun I used to have with the family camcorder as a kid/teen, and editing videos by connecting two VCRs together. In thinking about it, our generation probably is the only one that would experience this as kids.
I was interested in how he developed as a filmmaker. From childhood on, he made many home films inspired by the B movie horror/sci films genre. His grand opus is his professional independent film starring his Video Game character, centered around the infamous Atari ET game. An ambitious project!
My takeaway from this fun read is a reminder of how much talent and drive it takes to make something that connects deeply with a community of people. I thought it was just some guy who filmed himself making fun of video games, not a serious filmmaker with a grasp of cinematic storytelling. It's too easy to underestimate the people who make things that stay with you.
This has to be the first time I've read the memoirs of who grew up at the same time as me. I related to him not just because we played the same video games; like me, he also had trouble fitting in as a kid because of "nerdiness." Also, his fascination with making movies via VHS camcorder made me think about the fun I used to have with the family camcorder as a kid/teen, and editing videos by connecting two VCRs together. In thinking about it, our generation probably is the only one that would experience this as kids.
I was interested in how he developed as a filmmaker. From childhood on, he made many home films inspired by the B movie horror/sci films genre. His grand opus is his professional independent film starring his Video Game character, centered around the infamous Atari ET game. An ambitious project!
My takeaway from this fun read is a reminder of how much talent and drive it takes to make something that connects deeply with a community of people. I thought it was just some guy who filmed himself making fun of video games, not a serious filmmaker with a grasp of cinematic storytelling. It's too easy to underestimate the people who make things that stay with you.
December 21, 2022
Glad I read this book as James represents the closest thing to a contemporary in a world of internet-based nostalgic entertainment that I’ve steeped myself in for over a decade and a half. Though this world isn’t my day job, I can heavily relate to a lot of his story and it was fun to a glimpse inside of his world. I will say that as a film memoir, it’s audience might be more on the niche side as his work is mainly shorts and low to micro budget work, but it’s an interesting story most definitely told in his own voice.
The book could use a bit more editing in terms of tightening the through line as he spends over half of the book on his youth and college experience (which though interesting, can be a bit of a slog with his “I did this/I then did this/I again did this” format that is very much the structure of a blog entry.) When he does get to the Angry Video Game Nerd era he leaves the minutia behind and sort of glosses over large stretches. It’s not until he discusses the AVGN Movie where the meat of the Filmmaking memoir really begins. Though at this point he kind of takes a different tone, one of slight aloofness (his switch in his story from being a regular dude to a “celebrity” is not really dug into and it’s abrupt.)
That said, I really enjoyed the read. Recommended if you dig zero budget filmmaking, internet culture or slightly nostalgic fare.
The book could use a bit more editing in terms of tightening the through line as he spends over half of the book on his youth and college experience (which though interesting, can be a bit of a slog with his “I did this/I then did this/I again did this” format that is very much the structure of a blog entry.) When he does get to the Angry Video Game Nerd era he leaves the minutia behind and sort of glosses over large stretches. It’s not until he discusses the AVGN Movie where the meat of the Filmmaking memoir really begins. Though at this point he kind of takes a different tone, one of slight aloofness (his switch in his story from being a regular dude to a “celebrity” is not really dug into and it’s abrupt.)
That said, I really enjoyed the read. Recommended if you dig zero budget filmmaking, internet culture or slightly nostalgic fare.
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