Vulture has the clip where Frey talks about being “ambushed. You know, I made a mistake, and at a certain time, it came time to pay for it, and I paid for it.”įrey also appears on Tuesday’s Oprah. … At the end of it, it didn’t matter what happened on that show because in some ways I deserved it. I think even had I known what I was walking into, I probably still would have walked into it. “I thought I got ambushed, absolutely,” he replied.

Winfrey interjected: “What did you think about the way it was conducted, your impression of it?” Metacritic TV Episode Reviews, James Frey and the A Million Little Pieces Controversy, After all the controversy undercovered by, Oprah. “I thought it was within your rights to conduct the show however you wanted to,” Frey responded. On Monday’s show, she asked Frey how he had felt: “Did you think that I had taken you out to the whipping post, or did you think at the time I was too hard on you?” Yet nothing on screen is as electrifying or surprising as it was on the page, as semi-fictionally enhanced as the writing was.Īrriving more than a decade after Winfrey dressed down Frey on her show, this straightforward and earnest adaptation doesn’t even touch the semi-fictional of it all, which feels like only half of the picture when it comes to this yarn.At the time, Winfrey disagreed with Williamson’s evaluation, but she soon began seeing comments that were critical of her handling of the interview. They eschew most of the wild walkabouts for something that slots neatly into the rehab cinematic canon, with our wild card anti-hero, some tough-loving supporting characters (Billy Bob Thornton, Charlie Hunnam and Dash Mihok are warm and welcome presences), and a therapist (Juliette Lewis).

However, there was something strangely profound in all of that desperation and gore.īut the Taylor-Johnsons keep their film adaptation fairly tame, save for an opening sequence of crack-induced bum-baring mayhem, and a brutal, whiskey-reeking plane trip. Director/co-writer Sam Taylor-Johnson and co-writer/star Aaron Taylor-Johnson have done the impossible with their adaptation of James Frey’s disgraced rehab memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” They’ve managed to take the Grand Guignol body horror of Frey’s 2003 book (later marketed as a “semi-fictional novel” after a much publicized confession of embellishment to Oprah Winfrey) and render it utterly dull.įrey’s book was gripping for its gross-out descriptions of a body whipsawing between detox and extreme tox, as the protagonist and his rehab girlfriend swing wildly on the pendulum of relapse and sobriety.

Oprah and a million little pieces