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The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg by William Beard
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Grindhouse: The Sleaze-Filled Saga of an Exploitation Double Feature
Quentin Tarantino - 2007
Together with cast and crew, Tarantino and Rodriguez chronicle the making of not one but two motion pictures: Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror. Compiling never-before-seen production artwork, hundreds of behind-the-scenes photos, exclusive interviews and enough blood, flesh and gore for two books, Grindhouse: The Sleaze-Filled Saga Of An Exploitation Double Feature offers fans the definitive insider's guide to the world of Grindhouse!
The Age of Movies: Selected Writings
Pauline Kael - 2011
Kael called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. To read The Age of Movies, the first new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist-an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman-or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here in this career spanning collection are her appraisals of the films that defined an era-among them Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville-along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.
The Big Sleep
David Thomson - 1997
This text shows how The Big Sleep signalled a change in the nature of Hollywood cinema, as the director Howard Hawks shot extra scenes, "fun" scenes, to replace the ones in which the murders are explained, and in so doing left the plot unresolved.
Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters
Marjorie Perloff - 1977
Perloff traces the poet's development through his early years at Harvard and his interest in French Dadaism and Surrealism to his later poems that fuse literary influence with elements from Abstract Expressionist painting, atonal music, and contemporary film. This edition contains a new Introduction addressing O'Hara's homosexuality, his attitudes toward racism, and changes in poetic climate cover the past few decades. "A groundbreaking study. [This book] is a genuine work of criticism. . . . Through Marjorie Perloff's book we see an O'Hara perhaps only his closer associates saw before: a poet fully aware of the traditions and techniques of his craft who, in a life tragically foreshortened, produced an adventurous if somewhat erratic body of American verse."—David Lenson, Chronicle of Higher Education"Perloff is a reliable, well-informed, discreet, sensitive . . . guide. . . . She is impressive in the way she deals with O'Hara's relationship to painters and paintings, and she does give first-rate readings of four major poems."—Jonathan Cott, New York Times Book Review
Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties
Bill Warren - 1982
With new entries on several films, it also revisits, revises and expands the commentary on every film in the 1982 and 1986 two-volume edition. In addition to a detailed plot synopsis, cast and credit listings, and an overview of each film's critical reception, Warren delivers richly informative assessments of the films and a wealth of insights and anecdotes about their making, often drawing on remarks by the filmmakers that have emerged in the quarter century since the original edition. The book is arranged by film title, contains 273 photographs (many rare, some in color), has seven useful appendices, and concludes with an enormous index.
Tarantino: A Retrospective
Tom Shone - 2017
The script for his first movie took him four years to complete: My Best Friend’s Birthday, a seventy-minute film in which he both acted and directed. The script for his second film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), took him just under four weeks to complete. When it debuted, he was immediately hailed as one of the most exciting new directors in the industry. Known for his highly cinematic visual style, out-of-sequence storytelling, and grandiose violence, Tarantino’s films have provoked both praise and criticism over the course of his career. They’ve also won him a host of awards—including Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards—usually for his original screenplays. His oeuvre includes the cult classic Pulp Fiction, bloody revenge saga Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and historical epics Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight . This stunning retrospective catalogs each of Quentin Tarantino’s movies in detail, from My Best Friend’s Birthday to The Hateful Eight. The book is a tribute to a unique directing and writing talent, celebrating an uncompromising, passionate director’s enthralling career at the heart of cult filmmaking.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Peter Krämer - 2010
It has been celebrated for its beauty and mystery, its realistic depiction of space travel and dazzling display of visual effects, the breathtaking scope of its story, which reaches across millions of years, and the thought-provoking depth of its meditation on evolution, technology and humanity's encounters with the unknown. 2001 has been described as the most expensive avant-garde movie ever made and as a psychedelic trip, a unique expression of the spirit of the 1960s and as a timeless masterpiece. Peter Krämer's insightful study explores the complex origins of the film, the unique shape it took and the extraordinary impact it made on contemporary audiences. Drawing on new research in the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, Krämer challenges many of the widely-held assumptions about the film. He argues that 2001 was Kubrick's attempt to counter the deep pessimism of his previous film, Dr Strangelove (1964), which culminates in the explosion of a nuclear 'doomsday' device, with a more hopeful vision of humanity's future, facilitated by the intervention of mysterious extra-terrestrial artifacts. This study traces the project's development from the first letter Kubrick wrote to his future collaborator Arthur C. Clarke in March 1964 all the way to the dramatic changes Kubrick made to the film shortly before its release by MGM in April 1968. Krämer shows that, despite – or, perhaps, because of – Kubrick's daring last-minute decision to turn the film itself into a mysterious artifact, 2001 was an instant success with both critics and general audiences, and has exerted enormous influence over Hollywood's output of science fiction movies ever since. The book argues that 2001 invites us to enjoy and contemplate its sounds and images over and over again, and, if we are so inclined, to take away from it an important message of hope.
A.R. Rahman: The Spirit Of Music (Free Music Cd)
Nasreen Munni Kabir - 2011
Rahman's first film Roja was released in 1992, his astonishing music with its other-worldly melodies, tonal texture, pulsating rhythms made an instant impact in India. His abundantly flowing talent has given life to the score of over a hundred films, including Dil Se, Bombay, Lagaan, Warriors of Heaven and Earth, 127 Hours and Jodhaa Akbar. According to a recent estimate by the BBC, 150 million Copies of his albums have sold worldwide. A.R. Rahman has won a host of awards, together with a Golden Globe, a Bafta, two Oscars and two Grammys for his score in Slumdog Millionaire. In 2010, he received the Padma Bhusan, the third civilian honour, awarded by the Government of India. Despite all his great success, Rahman remains a deeply private person, shying away from the glitz and glamour of show business. A.R. Rahman, The Spirit of Music is in the form of biographical conversations between the composer and Nasreen Munni Kabir in which we hear of Rahman's amazing journey from modest beginning to an assured place in world music history.
Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho
Stephen Rebello - 1990
Rebello takes us behind the scenes for every step in the creation of this cinematic masterpiece-from the story's original inspiration to the controversy surrounding the creation of the famous shower scene. Drawing on new in-depth interviews as well as Hitchcock's private files, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is an eye-opening portrait of the artist at work.
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
David J. Skal - 1993
Skal chronicles one of our most popular and pervasive modes of cultural expression. He explores the disguised form in which Hollywood's classic horror movies played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control catalyzed by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in visceral, transformative special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the AIDS epidemic and the current fascination with vampires; and much more. Now with a new Afterword by the author that looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, The Monster Show is a compulsively readable, thought-provoking inquiry into America's obsession with the macabre.
Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike
Tom Mes - 2004
This edition features a new and expanded colour section, completely updated DVD information, and several brand new reviews of Takashi Miike films that were unavailable for coverage at the time of the book's initial production.
Cautionary Tales
Stephen Tobolowsky - 2011
He has played everyone from Ned Ryerson in "Groundhog Day" to Sandy Ryerson in "Glee." He has amused thousands with his true stories on "The Tobolowsky Files" at Slashfilm.com. Here he shares some homespun philosophy and more true stories that prove tales of sex, drugs, and rock and roll are often the most humiliating and almost always the most enjoyable.
Step Right Up!: I'm Gonna Scare The Pants Off America
William Castle - 1976
Here are the outrageous memoirs of an American original whose life was every bit as outlandish as his movies. Photographs. Filmography.
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
Kim Newman - 2011
In this new edition, Kim Newman brings his seminal work completely up-to-date, both reassessing his earlier evaluations and adding a second part that assess the last two decades of horror films with all the wit, intelligence and insight for which he is known. Since the publication of the first edition, horror has been on a gradual upswing, and taken a new and stronger hold over the film industry.Newman negotiates his way through a vast back-catalogue of horror, charting the on-screen progress of our collective fears and bogeymen from the low budget slasher movies of the 60s, through to the slick releases of the 2000s, in a critical appraisal that doubles up as a genealogical study of contemporary horror and its forebears. Newman invokes the figures that fuel the ongoing demand for horror - the serial killer; the vampire; the werewolf; the zombie - and draws on his remarkable knowledge of the genre to give us a comprehensive overview of the modern myths that have shaped the imagination of multiple generations of cinema-goers.Nightmare Movies is an invaluable companion that not only provides a newly updated history of the darker side of film but a truly entertaining guide with which to discover the less well-trodden paths of horror, and re-discover the classics with a newly instructed eye.
The Birds
Camille Paglia - 1998
Camille Paglia draws together in this text the aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), and analyzes its depiction of gender and familial relations.