The alternative life raft in a sea of similarity, VideoHound competes on content, categories, and indexing, but the dramatic difference is the attitude. Irreverent, slightly tongue-in-cheek, the Hound never takes himself too seriously. The 1997 edition, fully expanded and updated with 1,000 new entries, provides information and opinions on 22,000-plus videos--more than any other guide on the market--including documentaties, made-for-TV movies, and animated features. Includes Web site entertainment directory.
The creators of VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever present another winner--the ultimate guide to more than 3,000 of the best movies of all time. Extensive indexes of stars, directors, and over 325 wildly original categories, from Adolescence and Airborne Disasters to Wedding Bells and Wrong Side of the Tracks make it easy to hone in the perfect movie for any mood or occasion. Line drawings.
No other movie guide offers you 24,000 movie reviews (1,000 more than last year) or in-depth indexes--sure to help you settle that office bet, complete the crossword, experience find-the-movie serendipity, or impress friends, family and complete strangers with your fountain of movie trivia. We make our book (the big orange one you presumably have in your hands right now) easy to find and easy to use for a reason--your movie-watching enjoyment is one thing we take seriously. Book jacket.
Containing the most extensive listing of movies available on video and a multitude of cross-referencing within its 10 primary indexes, this new edition includes 1,000 new movies (23,000 in all), expanded indexing, a fresh new introduction and more of the beloved categories.
On 4 July, 1910, in 100-degree heat at an outdoor boxing ring near Reno, Nevada, film cameras recorded-and thousands of fans witnessed-former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries' reluctant return from retirement to fight Jack Johnson, a black man. After 14 grueling rounds, Johnson knocked out Jeffries and for the first time in history, there was a black heavyweight champion of the world. At least 10 people lost their lives because of Johnson's victory and hundreds more were injured due to white retaliation and wild celebrations in the streets. Public screenings received instantaneous protests and hundreds of cities barred the film from being shown. Congress even passed a law making it a federal offense to transport moving pictures of prizefights across state lines, and thus the most powerful portrayal of a black man ever recorded on film was made virtually invisible. This is but one of the hundreds of films covered in The A to Z of African American Cinema, which includes everything from The Birth of a Nation to Crash. In addition to the films, brief biographies of African American actors and actresses such as Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Halle Berry, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Denzel Washington, and Jamie Foxx can be found in this reference. Through a chronology, a list of acronyms and abbreviations, an introductory essay, a bibliography, appendixes, black-&-white photos, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, film credits, and terminology, this book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history.
Videoland offers a comprehensive view of the "tangible phase" of consumer video, when Americans largely accessed movies as material commodities at video rental stores. Video stores served as a vital locus of movie culture from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, changing the way Americans socialized around movies and collectively made movies meaningful. When films became tangible as magnetic tapes and plastic discs, movie culture flowed out from the theater and the living room, entered the public retail space, and became conflated with shopping and salesmanship. In this process, video stores served as a crucial embodiment of movie culture’s historical move toward increased flexibility, adaptability, and customization. In addition to charting the historical rise and fall of the rental industry, Herbert explores the architectural design of video stores, the social dynamics of retail encounters, the video distribution industry, the proliferation of video recommendation guides, and the often surprising persistence of the video store as an adaptable social space of consumer culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, cultural geography, and archival research, Videoland provides a wide-ranging exploration of the pivotal role video stores played in the history of motion pictures, and is a must-read for students and scholars of media history.
As early as 1909, African Americans were utilizing the new medium of cinema to catalogue the world around them, using the film camera as a device to capture their lives and their history. The daunting subject of race and ethnicity permeated life in America at the turn of the twentieth century and due to the effect of certain early films, specific television images, and an often-biased news media, it still plagues us today. As new technologies bring the power of the moving image to the masses, African Americans will shoot and edit on laptop computers and share their stories with a global audience via the World Wide Web. These independently produced visions will add to the diverse cache of African American images being displayed on an ever-expanding silver screen. This wide range of stories, topics, views, and genres will finally give the world a glimpse of African American life that has long been ignored and has yet to be seen. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of African American Cinema covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1400 cross-referenced entries on actors, actresses, movies, producers, organizations, awards, and terminology, this book provides a better understanding of the role African Americans played in film history. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about African American cinema.
As a screenwriter, novelist, and political activist, Dalton Trumbo stands among the key American literary figures of the 20th century--he wrote the classic antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, and his credits for Spartacus and Exodus broke the anticommunist blacklist that infected the movie industry for more than a decade. By defining connections between Trumbo's most highly acclaimed films (including Kitty Foyle, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and Roman Holiday) and his important but lesser-known movies (The Remarkable Andrew, He Ran All the Way, and The Boss), the author identifies how for nearly four decades Trumbo used the archetype of the rebel hero to inject social consciousness into mainstream films. This new critical survey--the first book-length work on Trumbo's screenwriting career--examines the scores of films on which Trumbo worked and explores the techniques that made him, at the time he was blacklisted in 1947, Hollywood's highest-paid writer. Hanson reveals how Trumbo dealt with major themes including rebellion, radical politics, and individualism--while also detailing lesser-known areas of Trumbo's screenwriting, such as his troubling portrayal of women, the dichotomy between his proletarian attitude and bourgeois lifestyle, and the almost surreptitious manner in which he included antiestablishment rhetoric in seemingly innocuous scripts. An extensive filmography is included.
Paul "Mousie" Garner's career as a stooge (a "fall guy" or "assistant" to the head clown) began in vaudeville, when he and his partner were firing off jokes and one-liners, as well as leaping over oil-drums. Another part of the act, which could run as often as five times a day, involved Garner getting smashed over the head with plastic ukuleles. Garner's big break came when, across town, funnyman Ted Healy parted ways with his sidekicks, who went on to greater fame as The Three Stooges. Garner was then hired as a replacement stooge-and soon learned that Healy, unlike other slapstick comedians, actually slapped his partners in the face instead of just pretending. Thus was Garner given his first real lesson in the fine arts of stooging, which demanded quick reflexes and perfect timing. In fact, it was Healy who came up with the nickname "Mousie" because Garner was always so jumpy, nervous and quick. Needless to say the name stuck; and Mousie Garner would go on to form "The Rollicking Mousie Garner Trio," join the touring "New Stooges," and work steadily in radio, television, theater, clubs and movies.
The first in-depth study of its subject, this book seeks to account for a type of modernist film that revolves around bereavement. Identifying the roots of the genre in classical melodrama and horror cinema, and tracing perennial themes and aesthetic devices through to the European and American "intellectual melodramas" of the postwar decades, the book provides a taxonomy of characteristics. In the course of detailed case studies, the book deploys the film theory of Gilles Deleuze and Daniel Frampton while making use of Freudian psychoanalysis and present-day grief counseling theory. In making its case for the new genre, the book reflects upon the ways in which the very notion of genre has, in the post-classical period, responded to changing exhibition patterns, the rise of domestic spectatorship and the proliferation of Web-based film literature.
