Patton Oswalt's fine memoir of movies and comedy

Silver Screen Fiend

By Patton Oswalt

Scribner. 222 pages. $25

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Sex addicts, alcoholics, drugheads - lost in their dependency, they struggle to put their life in order.

For Patton Oswalt, the jones was different, but no less consuming. For four years in the 1990s, the then-struggling comedian and actor slinked around Los Angeles, claiming his seat at the New Beverly Cinema and other dens of darkness, losing himself in classics (Casablanca, Vertigo) and shlock (Shotgun Freeway, The Vampire Lovers) and everything in between. Nearly 700 movies logged in his datebook, lodged in his mind.

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From An Addiction to Film is Oswalt's astute, acerbic, and footnote-crazy chronicle of life as a "movie freak mole man." A trigger-happy Twitterer with nearly two million followers, Oswalt is a true cinephiliac, equally appreciative of the artistry of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and Doris Wishman's Bad Girls Go to Hell.

But something happens when you spend your life immersed in rom-coms and screwball romps, westerns and sci-fi, Hitchcock, Welles, and Jerry Lewis: Your ability to hold a job, maintain relationships, even stock your fridge, is put into jeopardy.

Oswalt, of course, emerged from his half-decade obsession to star on TV's The King of Queens; as the voice of Remy in Pixar's Ratatouille; in indies and studio fare, and with comedy albums, HBO specials, live gigs.

   In conversational, confessional tones, Oswalt takes us not just through his moviegoing days, offering funny, trenchant observations (Gone With the Wind, "where humans more operatic than us found a way to make the South's defeat in the Civil War the sexiest calamity that ever crashed into history"), but through his stand-up struggles, getting knocked down, kicked around, and spending a week in Amsterdam opening for Louis CK, starting each day in the city's cannabis cafés.

And speaking of cafés, Patton details the epiphanies he's experienced, dubbing them "Night Cafés," after Vincent van Gogh's 1888 painting . The Night Café was the first work van Gogh painted not from observation, but memory. It was his buddy Gauguin's idea, and after that, Oswalt writes, van Gogh was transformed. "Masterpieces flew out of him like pigeons from a condemned cathedral."

And right there is another reason Silver Screen Fiend is such a trip: Oswalt's writing - whether he's reflecting on Harold and Maude, or Seinfeld, or van Gogh's madness - is full of smart, illuminating surprise.

Here's hoping Oswalt never kicks that habit.