My Year of Flops began as a column for the AV Club. Rabin creates case files with funny titles and then talks about a film that has failed both critically and at the box office. He often gives a historical perspective to the film. He gives a very specific accounting of how he views each work. Although many of these columns were originally published on the AV Club website, there are new pieces for the book. Rabin has also added additional interviews of key people involved in these projects that accompany some of these reviews. In each case, Rabin hands down a judgment: Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success. There's a great deal of humor involved in this work. There is also a lot of empathy. Rabin seems to sincerely want to figure out what went wrong, if anything. Sometimes he just concludes that it was a film ahead of its time and strongly encourages us to watch them now. Sometimes it's just an all out disaster. This is definitely a book that I would call a labor of love. It was really fun to read. It made me laugh out loud sometimes. I will definitely want to read more of his work.
