A movie director has offered Maria a part in his new movie, but she develops stage fright when the script calls for a major on-screen kiss with super-hunk movie star Brad Marshall. Can she do it and help the Unicorns save the kids day-care center?
The book focuses on individuals writing in the '90s, but also includes 12 classic authors (e.g., Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, J.R.R. Tolkien) who are still widely read by teens. It also covers some authors known primarily for adult literature (e.g., Stephen King) and some who write mainly for middle readers but are also popular among young adults (e.g., Betsy Byars). An affordable alternative to multivolume publications, this book makes a great collection development tool and resource for author studies. It will also help readers find other books by and about their favorite writers.
The members of the Saddle Club spend their winter break at the Bar None Ranch, where each member of the club has an experience that teaches them all an unforgettable lesson about the true meaning of the holiday season.
The flashback is a crucial moment in a film narrative, one that captures the cinematic expression of memory, and history. This author’s wide-ranging account of this single device reveals it to be an important way of creating cinematic meaning. Taking as her subject all of film history, the author traces out the history of the flashback, illuminating that history through structuralist narrative theory, psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, and theories of ideology. From the American silent film era and the European and Japanese avant-garde of the twenties, from film noir and the psychological melodrama of the forties and fifties to 1980s art and Third World cinema, the flashback has interrogated time and memory, making it a nexus for ideology, representations of the psyche, and shifting cultural attitudes.
How were femininity and motherhood understood in Mexican cinema from the 1940s to the early 1990s? Film analysis, interviews with filmmakers, academic articles and film reviews from newspapers are used to answer the question and trace the changes in such depictions. Images of mothers in films by so-called third-wave filmmakers (Busi Cortes, Maria Novaro, Dana Rotberg and Marisa Sistach) are contrasted with those in Mexican classical films (1935-1950) and films from the 1970s and 1980s. There are some surprising conclusions. The most important restrictions in the depiction of mothers in classical cinema came not from the strict sexual norms of the 1940s but in reactions to women shown as having autonomous identities. Also, in contrast to classical films, third-wave films show a woman's problems within a social dimension, making motherhood political--in relation not to militancy within the left but to women's issues. Third-wave films approach the problems of Latin American society as those of individuals differentiated by gender, sexuality and ethnicity; in such films mothers are citizens directly affected by laws, economic policies and cultural beliefs.
This book is the first scholarly analysis that considers the specificity of situated experiences of the maternal from a variety of theoretical perspectives. From “Fertility Day” to “Family Day,” the concept of motherhood has been at the center of the public debate in contemporary Italy, partly in response to the perceived crisis of the family, the economic crisis, and the crisis of national identity, provoked by the forces of globalization and migration, secularization, and the instability of labor markets. Through essays by an international cohort of established and emerging scholars, this volume aims to read these shifts in cinematic terms. How does Italian cinema represent, negotiate, and elaborate changing definitions of motherhood in narrative, formal, and stylistic terms? The essays in this volume focus on the figures of working mothers, women who opt for a child-free adulthood, single mothers, ambivalent mothers, lost mothers, or imperfect mothers, who populate contemporary screen narratives.
The story of Marlene Dietrich's life is the story of the 20th century. Author David Stuart Ryan who wrote the bestselling biography 'John Lennon's Secret' explores the amazing and circuitous route that took her to Hollywood and riches. But to understand the essential Marlene it is necessary to go right back in time to the era of La Belle Epoque when a very feudal and settled order still existed in Europe. 'The Blue Angel' transports you to a glittering world that is all about to disappear in the maelstrom of world war. What emerges from the conflict is a feverish gaiety that seeks to put behind it all the suffering that has taken place. You are entering the Jazz Age and a Berlin that having suffered hyperinflation decides anything goes. The Berliner Luft - the Berlin air - is what the locals call it. This madcap atmosphere was to be recreated by a young journalist - Billy Wilder - when he made the journey to Hollywood. Indeed, the plot for his greatest film, 'Some Like It Hot', drew on his experiences in Berlin, and Billy Wilder was one of the respondents to the author when he came to write Marlene's story. Marlene's big break came when she played a vampish nightclub singer of dubious morals, not a million miles away from her own background trying to survive in a world turned upside down. 'The Blue Angel' took her to America and a carefully constructed film star image which embodies all the dazzling wealth and influence of Hollywood at its most powerful and hypnotic. Yet the more you get into the life of Marlene Dietrich, the greater the mystery becomes. Who was she really? Only now can the expert analysis of David Stuart Ryan reveal the true Marlene Dietrich, the person behind the image, the human being behind the facade. Was she indeed the blue angel?