Showing titles in History & Criticism

Upon its release in 2008, Matt Reeves's Cloverfield revitalized the giant creature, a cinematic trope that had languished for over a decade. The film addressed the attacks of September 11, 2001, trading the jingoistic rhetoric of retributive military aggression for serious engagement with personal and collective trauma. It applied the horror genre's fascination with personal stories captured by found footage to the grand violence of history. Innovative and intense, Cloverfield represented blockbuster filmmaking at its best.

For the first time in English print, the complete story of the making of one of the most significant and influential films of the 20th Century. Originally intended to cash-in on the then current trend of American monster movies, what resulted instead was the cinema's first anti-nuclear treatise to reach an international audience. Gathered from previously unpublished sources, rare photographs, personal interviews and with shot-for-shot descriptions of both the Japanese and American versions, "Atomic Dreams and the Nuclear Nightmare" is a tribute to the greatest monster movie of them all.

In the Sixties there emerged a cycle towards rural situation comedies on American network television. These were comedies set in either small towns or the country, or featured characters from rural areas. Some of them would rank among the most successful television shows of all time. Country Comedies is a brief look at the many rural sitcoms that aired in the Sixties.

While every new TV series has to face some problems, no show had to overcome greater obstacles than Gilligan's Island. In spite of that, no series has achieved greater success, as measured by the fact that Gilligan's Island has given rise to three TV movies, two animated series, and is the most rerun program in the entire history of television.

The decade of the 1950s was one of the most fascinating in the history of the cinema. Regarded as "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Films," it was a genre populated by giant bugs, alien invaders, resurrected dinosaurs and outer space adventures produced during a time of drive-ins and drop-drills. Yet behind the imaginative storylines and astounding effects were often subliminal messages regarding the general paranoia affecting so much of the nation, be it atomic age anxieties, social reorder, working women, environmental concerns, and The Red Scare. In Suspending My Disbelief the author ...

Everyone has an idea of what Star Trek represents, but all such ideas now have fifty years and several television series and movies influencing them. But what was it like at the beginning, when the first Star Trek series was just getting started, when the Enterprise was only on the verge of going where no man had gone before? Along with valuable introductory material to place the story in its original historical context, Star Trek Genesis takes you step by step through all 78 Star Trek Original Series episodes in the order they originally appeared to trace how it all began.

David Keyes began writing about the movies at age 17 in the summer of 1998, and was one of the first voices of online film criticism when the concept was still very much a novelty. Now, after the extended hiatus of recent years, he is back in full swing with the practice. This volume collects all 77 articles and film reviews published between June and December of 2013 on his web site Cinemaphile.org, and though the material covered ranges from current releases to very old silent pictures, the passion and perspective are now more insightful than ever.

The FORGOTTEN HORRORS series of film-commentary books taps author Michael H. Price's backlog of monographs, magazine columns and articles, and film-festival curatorial notes for a whopping 360-page anthology of materials long out-of-print. Centerpieces include surveys of Val Lewton's acclaimed chillers of the 1940s, of Universal Pictures' less noticeable chillers and offbeat oddities, and of Western movies indebted to the great frontier painters. The book also veers away at strategic points from the more rigidly defined horror movies to consider a wealth of art-museum topics, of comic-book ...

In A Good Bad Boy, Margaret Wappler attempts to understand who Perry was and why he was unique among his Hollywood peers. To do so, she uses an inventive hybrid narrative. She speaks with dozens who knew Perry personally and professionally. They share insightful anecdotes: how he kept connected to his Ohio upbringing; nearly blew his 90210 audition; tried to shed his heartthrob image by joining the HBO prison drama Oz; and in the last year of his life, sought to set up two of his newly divorced friends.

Cult writer, author, podcaster and preeminent “Weird Al” Yankovic historian Nathan Rabin loves the objectively terrible. He's spent the last quarter century celebrating the spectacular garbage that makes life worth living. Rabin began his obsession with the abysmal at the The A.V. Club in 1996, where he worked for eighteen years, primarily as the site’s head writer. Rabin left The A.V. Club in 2013 to become a staff writer for the short-lived but much loved film website The Dissolve before starting Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place in 2017. The Joy of Trash collects the best pieces from ...

Bela Lugosi is a true screen icon forever memorialized for his performance as Dracula in the legendary 1931 film, and it is as that supernatural creature he is best remembered. Yet Lugosi's talents went far-beyond the blood-sucking count, mad doctors and voodoo masters. In this book, long-time Lugosi fan Peter H. Brothers examines the actor's screen performances from diabolical villains such as Dr. Mirakle in "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and Dr. Richard Vollin in the 1935 "The Raven" to unexpected comedic turns in "Broadminded" and "International House." A perfectionist, Lugosi was also a ...

The "Sons of Godzilla" covers the Godzilla film sequels (not including those directed by Ishiro Honda which the author covered in "Mushroom Clouds and Mushroom Men") from 1955 - 1995. During that time Godzilla transformed from a metaphor for Japan's atomic devastation to a protector of that same country and a friend of children until ultimately returning to the role of a villain in the 1980s. Author Peter H. Brothers covers this amazing period involving everything from super-hero robots, smog monsters, and tag-team wrestling battles. Brothers covers the juvenile films made for kids where ...

James J. Caterino, the author of Pop Culture Musings and other Stuff, and over forty novels and short stories, returns with his second non-fiction book, this one focused on movies.Among the films covered in this entertaining, insightful book of essays, are classics such as E.T. (1982), and Enchanted (2007), vintage blockbusters like Total Recall (1990) and T2 (1991), cult movies such as Billy Jack (1971), Videodrome (1983), Dirty Dancing (1987), Wall Street (1987), True Romance (1993), and Exotica (1994), underrated gems such as The Fury (1978), Explorers (1985), The Age of Adeline (2015), ...

Some movies are iconic. Others are merely entertaining. In Rewind: A Half-Century of Classics, Cult Hits, and Other Must-See Movies, veteran journalist and longtime film buff Rick Anderson reflects on fifty classic films created within a fifty-year period, from 1945-1995. This book provides a historical perspective on these films and the people who made them. Why do these movies work? Or, in some cases, why didn't they work better? The author looks back at well-known films such as Rear Window, The Third Man, Apollo 13, and Sounder. And many other popular but less-renowned works also are ...

Der große Erzähler Werner Herzog fragt nach der seltsamsten aller Erzählungen: der von der Wahrheit. Was ist wahr? In einer Welt, die durch Fake News, politische Manipulation und künstliche Intelligenz verunsichert ist, die auf kalte Fakten setzt und doch die Poesie und den Film erfunden hat, muss Wahrheit mehr als bloß stumpfe Empirie bedeuten. Von einem erfundenen Schlachtensieg des Pharao Ramses bis zum modernen Mythos der Entführung durch Außerirdische, von ekstatischen Momenten am Filmset bis zu seinen Begegnungen mit der Wirklichkeit durch tagelanges Gehen reiht Werner Herzog auf einmalige Weise faszinierende Überlegungen und Erinnerungen aneinander. Ein Hörbuch für alle, die sich wundern können.

There's no business like show business! In 1912, long before Hollywood had a foothold in the world of movies, Flying A Studios opened its doors in downtown Santa Barbara. As one of the earliest studios on the West Coast, Flying A Studios produced more than 1,000 films, which put Santa Barbara on the map as a prominent center for movie magic. The movie business evolved quickly. A decade later Hollywood had become the new center of international film production, but Santa Barbara never lost its celebrity allure. Since those early days, the area has continued to attract a wide range of ...

From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. The play transpires over one long, boozy night, laying bare the lies, compromises, and scalding love that have sustained a middle-aged couple through decades of marriage. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn’t be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the I Love Lucy 1950s.

Considered by many to be unadaptable due to its length and complexity, Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune has made it to the screen about every two decades.

Ride Lonesome, the fifth film in the "Ranown cycle," is both the best and most representative of the whole series, which has been called "the most remarkable convergence of artistic achievement in the history of low-budget moviemaking." Director Bud Boetticher captures the alienation and loneliness of an America faced with the Cold War and the daily threat of nuclear annihilation. Shot in seventeen days for under a half-million dollars, Ride Lonesome is a masterpiece of cinematic minimalism.

Wayne Clingman and Douglas Hess explore the seedy relationship between the Mafia and Hollywood, beginning with the Pre-code era up through the filming of Deep Throat and beyond. Clingman and Hess unearth stories about notorious personages like Abner Zwillman, Gus Greenbaum, and Al Capone, and reveal the effect they had on movie-making, both by reputation and by direct interactions.