Here, in his own colorful, slangy words, is the true American Dream saga of a self-proclaimed "film geek," with five intense years working in a video store, who became one of the most popular, recognizable, and imitated of all filmmakers. His dazzling, movie-informed work makes Quentin Tarantino's reputation, from his breakout film, "Reservoir Dogs" (1992), through "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" (2003) and "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" (2004), his enchanted homages to Asian action cinema, to his rousing tribute to guys-on-a-mission World War II movie, "Inglourious Basterds" (2009). For those who prefer a more mature, contemplative cinema, Tarantino provided the tender, very touching "Jackie Brown" (1997). A masterpiece--"Pulp Fiction" (1994). A delightful mash of unabashed exploitation and felt social consciousness--his latest opus, "Django Unchained" (2012).

From the beginning, Tarantino (b. 1963)--affable, open, and enthusiastic about sharing his adoration of movies--has been a journalist's dream. "Quentin Tarantino: Interviews," revised and updated with twelve new interviews, is a joy to read cover to cover because its subject has so much interesting and provocative to say about his own movies and about cinema in general, and also about his unusual life. He is frank and revealing about growing up in Los Angeles with a single, half-Cherokee mother, and dropping out of ninth grade to take acting classes. Lost and confused, he still managed a gutsy ambition: young Quentin decided he would be a filmmaker.

Tarantino has conceded that Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), the homicidal African American con man in "Jackie Brown," is an autobiographical portrait. "If I hadn't wanted to make movies, I would have ended up as Ordell," Tarantino has explained. "I wouldn't have been a postman or worked at the phone company. . . . I would have gone to jail."

How do we identify the "queer auteur" and their queer imaginings? Is it possible to account for such a figure when the very terms "queer" and "auteur" invoke aesthetic surprises and disorientations, disconcerting ironies and paradoxes, and biographical deceits and ambiguities? In eighteen eloquent chapters, David A. Gerstner traces a history of ideas that spotlight an ever-shifting terrain associated with auteur theory and, in particular, queer-auteur theory. Engaging with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, Jean Louis Baudry, Linda Nochlin, Jane Gallop, Cael Keegan, Luce Irigaray, and other prominent critical thinkers, Gerstner contemplates how the queer auteur in film theory might open us to the work of desire. Queer Imaginings argues for a queer-auteur in which critical theory is reenabled to reconceptualize the auteur in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and desire. Gerstner succinctly defines the contours of a history and the ongoing discussions that situate queer and auteur theories in film studies. Ultimately, Queer Imaginings is a journey in shared pleasures in which writing for and about cinema makes way for unanticipated cinematic friendships.

Steven Spielberg is hailed as one of the most influential and commercially successful film directors in motion picture history. Through his role in developing, directing, and driving the special effects of many of the biggest blockbusters in movie history, includingJaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, and Minority Report, Spielberg changed the way movies are made and left an indelible mark on popular culture. This biography traces his rise from shooting films as a shy young boy with the family's 8 mm camera to his first unpaid job at Universal Studios, to the rise of DreamWorks, the studio Spielberg founded and quickly turned into a filmmaking powerhouse. While Spielberg's best work may lie ahead, this compelling biography puts his legendary career and work to date into perspective by offering analysis and commentary from fans and critics alike. Whether about an alien lost in suburbia or the battles of World War II, Spielberg has directed and produced many of the most talked about movies of the past 30 years. Students interested in the history of film and the filmmaking industry will find this biography endlessly fascinating. A timeline of significant events, a bibliography of print and electronic resources, and photographs round out this biography.

This volume looks at how the new capabilities of Web 2.0 are changing the worlds of celebrity fandom and gossip. With Ashton Kutcher's record-breaking "tweeting" more famous than his films, and Perez Hilton actually getting more attention than Paris, the actress often covered in his blog, the worlds of celebrity celebration and online social networking are pushing the public's crush on the famous and infamous into overdrive. Celeb 2.0: How Social Media Foster Our Fascination with Popular Culture explores this phenomenon. Celeb 2.0 looks at how blogs, video sharing sites, user-news sites, social networks, and message boards are fueling America's already voracious consumption of pop culture. Full of fascinating insights and interviews, the book looks at how celebrities use blogs, Twitter, and other tools, how YouTube and other sites create celebrity, how Web 2.0 shortens the distance between fans and stars, and how the new social media influences news reporting and series television. Chronologies chart the rise of celebrity entertainment reporting, celebrity journalists, reality television, and mash-up culture Includes an index of key terms related to social networking as well as key players in social media development and social media celebrities

While scholars recognize both museums and films as sites where historical knowledge and cultural memory are created, the convergence between their methods of constructing the past has only recently been acknowledged. The essays in Exhibiting the German Past examine a range of films, museums, and experiences which blend the two, considering how authentic objects and cinematic techniques are increasingly used in similar ways by both visual media and museums. This is the first collection to focus on the museum-film connection in German-language culture and the first to approach the issue using the concept of "musealization," a process that, because it engages the cultural destruction wrought by modernization, offers new means of constructing historical knowledge and shaping collective memory within and beyond the museum's walls. Featuring a wide range of valuable case studies, Exhibiting the German Past offers a unique perspective on the developing relationship between museums and visual media.

Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics. Catherine Russell's highly accessible book approaches Japanese cinema as an industry closely modeled on Hollywood, focusing on the classical period - those years in which the studio system dominated all film production in Japan, from roughly 1930 to 1960. Respectful and thoroughly informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the Japanese canon, Russell is also critical of some of its ideological tendencies, and her analyses provide new insights on class and gender dynamics. Russell demonstrates how Japanese classical cinema has had enormous influence on other Asian cinemas, especially in TV broadcast form, and she highlights the importance of the accounting for the industrial production context when discussing these films. Including studies of landmark films by Ozu, Kurosawa and other directors, this book provides a perfect introduction to a crucial and often misunderstood Japanese cultural output. With a critical approach that highlights the "everydayness" of Japanese studio-era cinema, Catherine Russell demystifies the canon of great Japanese cinema, treating it with fewer auteurist and Orientalist assumptions than many other scholars and critics.

Comedy has been a feature of cinema since its inception. From mickey-moused accompaniments to slapstick scenes, ironic musical statements, clever musical allusions and jokes, well-worn sound effects, and even laugh tracks, sound has been integral to the development of the comedy on screen. This volume covers all aspects of sound (including dialogue) and music as they have been utilised in comedy film. The volume looks at various subsets of the 'comedy film' from the post-War period, including black comedy, romantic comedy, slapstick, dialogue comedy, parody and spoofs. This volume aims to explore the way in which music and sound articulate humour, create comedic situations and direct comedic identifications for viewer/listeners.

This is a sweeping study of world cinema, illustrating how its creative peaks stem from the urge to reveal otherwise hidden political and social dimensions of reality. "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" is a highly original study. It breaks away from the binary divisions which underpin most of film theory, and challenges traditional views of cinematic realism, drawing instead on the filmmaker's commitment to truth and to film's material bond with the real. Nagib conducts comparative case studies drawn from a wide range of realist trends, including the Japanese New Wave, the nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Inuit Indigenous Cinema, the Taiwan New Cinema and the New Brazilian Cinema. She reveals that these creative peaks are animated by the desire to reveal concealed or unknown political, social, psychological or mystical dimensions of reality - as observed in the various cycles of new waves and new cinemas across film history and geography. "World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism" is groundbreaking scholarship that surveys and defines World Cinema not as the opposite of Hollywood, but in positive terms; and draws upon the work of Badiou and Ranciere to take film theory in a bold new direction.

Although female communication networks abound in many contexts and have received a good measure of critical scrutiny, no study has addressed their unique significance within narrative culture writ large. Filling this conspicuous gap, Ned Schantz presents a lively exploration of the phenomenon, resituating novelistic culture as central even as he ranges across media and the myriad technologies that attend them.
Charting the emergence of female networks via the most prominent modes of communication--gossip, letters, and phones--Schantz brings his study to life with unconventional interpretations of classic British novels and popular Hollywood films spanning multiple genres and time periods. With incisive readings of Clarissa, Emma, and Evelina, Schantz shows how gossip both draws sympathy and is repressed by dominant male culture in a recurrent pattern of avowal and disavowal. The epistolary novel added a rhythm to communication that was generative of fantasy, which in turn informed "telephonic film," a development depicted in analyses of movies such as Sorry, Wrong Number; Vertigo; Terminator; and You've Got Mail. Schantz highlights the way the telephone works as a structuring device, not merely a prop, one that shapes the plot and suggests provocative formal implications.
While this study traverses an uncanny realm of lost messages and false suitors, telepathy and artificial intelligence, locked rooms and time-traveling stalkers, these occult concerns only confirm the importance of female communication at its most basic level. Illuminating and accessible--Gossip, Letters, Phones reveals female networks as one of narrative's most supple and persistent elements in literature andcinema.

For forty years, Jackie Frame stood at the center of business, entertainment, and publicity in Classic Hollywood. This stunning collection of never before told vignettes reveals that lost world in all its splendor and with all its quirks. No scholar of the period will be able to reconstruct its dynamics, and no fan will be able to appreciate the film and music of those exciting times, without a careful consideration of these scintillating and revelatory memoirs by a true Hollywood insider. Jackie Frame's journey from suburban England to the entertainment capital of the world is itself a truly remarkable twentieth-century tale.

Hip Hop literature, also known as urban fiction or street lit, is a type of writing evocative of the harsh realities of life in the inner city. Beginning with seminal works by such writers as Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim and culminating in contemporary fiction, autobiography, and poetry, Hip Hop literature is exerting the same kind of influence as Hip Hop music, fashion, and culture. This encyclopedia defines the world of Hip Hop literature for students and general readers. Included are more than 180 alphabetically entries on authors, genres, and works, as well as on the musical artists, fashion designers, directors, and other figures who make up the context of Hip Hop literature. Among the topics covered are: Beat Street Between God and Gangsta Rap Black Popular Culture Blaxploitation Bullet Proof Children's Literature Cupcake Brown Deconstructing Tyrone Fly Girl Graphic Novels Hip Hop Music Horror Fiction Walter Dean Myers Teri Woods And many more. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia concludes with a selected, general bibliography. Students in literature classes will value this guide to an increasingly popular body of literature, while students in social studies classes will welcome its illumination of American cultural diversity.

Another in the popular line of Studio Ghibli artbooks, which include interviews with and concept sketches by the director of classics such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, as well as finished animation cels from the movie. Princess Mononoke was the first Hayao Miyazaki film to break out into the mainstream. The journey from initial idea to the big screen is captured here, in the hundreds of images from preliminary sketches to dynamic animation cels.

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aA groundbreaking book, highly original in concept and persuasive in its execution. Johnson elegantly rewrites the history of American television with an eye to its geographical imaginary.a
--Anna McCarthy, New York University

"Network chieftains, advertising executives, and primetime performers generally fly over the heartland with barely a glance, but itas never far from their thoughts, or ours. In this remarkable analysis of American television, Victoria Johnson cogently explains why Middle America matters: on the screen, in the home, and in public life."
--Michael Curtin, author of "Playing to the Worldas Biggest Audience"

The Midwest of popular imagination is a aHeartlanda characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively -- as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American -- or negatively -- as backward, narrowminded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch -- the myth of the Heartland endures.

Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to televisionas promotion and development, programming and marketing appeals, and public debates over the mediumas and its audienceas cultural worth. Victoria E. Johnson investigates how the asquarea image of the heartland has been ritually recuperated on prime time television, from "The Lawrence Welk Show" in the 1950s, to documentary specials in the 1960s, to "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the 1970s, to "Ellen" in the 1990s. She also examines news specials on the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal how that city has been inscribed as the epitome of a timeless, pastoral heartland, and concludes with ananalysis of network branding practices and appeals to an imagined ared statea audience.

Johnson argues that non-white, queer, and urban culture is consistently erased from depictions of the Midwest in order to reinforce its areassuringa image as white and straight. Through analyses of policy, industry discourse, and case studies of specific shows, Heartland TV exposes the cultural function of the Midwest as a site of national transference and disavowal with regard to race, sexuality, and citizenship ideals.

This book brings film adaptation of literature to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of progress continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior "master race" to "uplift" its colonized populations-morally, socially, and economically. This book argues that, on the one hand, film adaptations of nineteenth-century novels reveal the arrogance and coercive intentions that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity-improvement's post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the book also argues that the films use their nineteenth-century source texts to criticize these same legacies of imperialism. By bringing together film adaptation, postcolonial theory, and literary studies, the book demonstrates that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a way to engage with the baggage of ideological heritage in our contemporary global media environment.