Intolerable Cruelty thoughtfully explores key issues in modern Chinese history, including state-society relations, social transformation, and gender relations in the context of the Republican Chinese experiment with liberal modernity. Investigating both the codification process and the subsequent implementation of the Republican Civil Code of 1929–1930, Margaret Kuo reconsiders the dominant narratives of the 1930s and 1940s as “dark years” for Chinese women. Instead, she convincingly recasts the history of these years from the perspective of women who actively and successfully engaged the law to improve their lives.
The Brothers Grim examines the inner workings of the Coens' body of work, discussing a movie in terms of its primary themes, social and political contexts, narrative techniques, influences, relationship to their other films, and the Coens' referential modus operandi that retreads cinema, literature, history, philosophy, and art to amplify their films' themes.
At the outset of the Nanjing decade (1928-1937), a small group of Chinese legal elites worked to codify the terms that would bring the institutions of marriage and family into the modern world. Their deliberations produced the Republican Civil Code of 1929-1930, the first Chinese law code endowed with the principle of individual rights and gender equality. In the decades that followed, hundreds of thousands of women and men adopted the new marriage laws and brought myriad domestic grievances before the courts. Intolerable Cruelty thoughtfully explores key issues in modern Chinese history, including state-society relations, social transformation, and gender relations in the context of the Republican Chinese experiment with liberal modernity. Investigating both the codification process and the subsequent implementation of the Code, Margaret Kuo deftly challenges arguments that discount Republican law as an elite pursuit that failed to exert much influence beyond modernized urban households. She reconsiders the dominant narratives of the 1930s and 1940s as "dark years" for Chinese women. Instead, she convincingly recasts the history of these years from the perspective of women who actively and successfully engaged the law to improve their lives.
Presents the screenplay for the romantic comedy about a crafty divorce lawyer and a woman attempting to make her fortune through a series of wealthy marriages.
This examination of the distinctive cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen explores the theme of violence in their wide-ranging body of work. The Brothers Coen: Unique Characters of Violence spans the career of the two-time Oscar-winning producer/director team, exploring the theme of violence that runs through a genre-spanning body of work, from the neo-noir of Blood Simple to the brutal comedy Burn After Reading (2008). In chapters focusing on major characters, Ryan Doom looks at the chaotic cinematic universe of the Coens, where violent acts inevitably have devastating, unintended consequences. The remarkable gallery of Coen characters are all here: hardboiled gangster Tom Regan from Miller's Crossing (1990), overmatched amateur kidnapper Jerry Lundergaard from Fargo (1996), accidental private eye "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski (1998), psychopathic assassin-for-hire Anton Chigurh from the 2007 Academy Award winner No Country for Old Men, and more.
DIVWhether contending with nihilists, botching a kidnapping pay-off, watching as his beloved rug is micturated upon, or simply bowling and drinking Caucasians, the Dude—or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing—abides. As embodied by Jeff Bridges, the main character of the 1998 Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski is a modern hero who has inspired festivals, burlesque interpretations, and even a religion (Dudeism). In time for the fifteenth anniversary of The Big Lebowski, film author and curator Jenny M. Jones tells the full story of the Dude, from how the Coen brothers came up with the idea for a modern LA noir to never-been-told anecdotes about the film’s production, its critical and commercial reception, and, finally, how it came to be such an international cult hit. Achievers, as Lebowski fans call themselves, will discover many hidden truths, including why it is that Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) is so obsessed with Vietnam, what makes Theodore Donald “Donny� Kerabatsos (Steve Buscemi) so confused all the time, how the film defies genre, and what unexpected surprise Bridges got during filming of the Gutterballs dream sequence. (Hint: it involved curly wigs and a gurney.) Interspersed throughout are sidebars, interviews with members of the film’s cast and crew, scene breakdowns, guest essays by prominent experts on Lebowski language, music, filmmaking techniques, and more, and hundreds of photographs—including many of artwork inspired by the film./div
