If You Ask Me by Libby Gelman-Waxner Review: A Wickedly Funny Film Criticism Collection

If You Ask Me is a collected humor column, not a conventional film criticism volume or memoir. The byline belongs to Libby Gelman-Waxner, a fictional persona invented by Paul Rudnick — the playwright and author of Jeffrey — for his regular column in Premiere magazine. The reprint edition, published by the Random House Publishing Group in June 1995, gathers columns spanning the years 1987 to 1992, making it a time capsule of early-nineties Hollywood as filtered through an outrageously comic suburban lens. Libby herself is a fully realized character: a married mother who navigates orthodontist appointments and family life while dispensing opinions on the biggest movies and stars of her era — Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, and many others all fall under her gaze.

The genius of Rudnick's conceit is that Libby's domestic vantage point — her husband Josh, her children, her friend Stacy Schiff, her mother, her grandmother — is never mere backdrop. It is the engine of the satire itself. By routing film commentary through the concerns of a woman who notes that "world literature — I love it, but with a career, two kids, and my roots staring me in the face, who has the time?" Rudnick exposes how Hollywood packages fantasy for exactly this audience while simultaneously condescending to it. A quip like "Movies have become so much better lately, now that they've become more like car commercials on TV" lands as both a character joke and a genuine critical observation. The book also includes recurring features such as the "Libby Awards," reinforcing the sense that this is a fully constructed comedic world rather than a simple anthology of standalone pieces.

Within the niche of humor writing about film, If You Ask Me occupies a singular position. Readers on Thriftbooks have called it "the funniest film review collection ever written," and the enthusiasm at that site across multiple reviews is consistent and effusive — one reader declared that Rudnick "is flat out hysterical" and that the book is returned to repeatedly. That kind of sustained reader devotion over the decades since the 1995 reprint speaks to the durability of Rudnick's comic voice. The columns range, as one source notes, "from the superficial to the profound," which is itself part of the joke: Libby can pivot from fixating on Patrick Swayze's appeal to landing an unexpectedly sharp insight about cinematic representation, often in the same paragraph.

The book's most durable strength is its comic architecture. Rudnick does not simply pile up one-liners; he builds Libby as a consistent, fully inhabited character whose relationships — with Josh, with Stacy Schiff, with her own self-image — provide a running narrative thread that gives individual columns emotional continuity. The period covered, 1987–1992, was a fertile era for Hollywood blockbusters and prestige pictures alike, giving Rudnick a rich target range: films featuring Dennis Quaid, Holly Hunter, Mickey Rourke, William Hurt, Madonna, Woody Allen, and many more all receive the Gelman-Waxner treatment. The columns' original publication in Premiere, one of the era's leading mainstream film magazines, also means they were written with a broad, engaged readership in mind — the humor is inclusive rather than insider-exclusive.

The book's tight historical focus is both its strength and its natural boundary. Readers coming to it without familiarity with early-nineties Hollywood releases — the specific films, stars, and cultural conversations Libby is riffing on — will find some of the comedy less immediate than it was for its original audience. The satirical persona is also unrelenting: the entire collection is filtered through Libby's voice, and readers who prefer their film criticism delivered with analytical distance rather than comic exaggeration will find this book is simply not designed for them. As a reprint of columns rather than a newly structured work, there is also an inherent episodic quality; the book rewards browsing and dipping as much as linear reading from cover to cover.