Culinary imagery, much like sexual and violent imagery, is a key cinematic device used to elicit a sensory response from an audience. In many films, culinary imagery is central enough to define a new subgenre, defined by films in which food production, preparation, service and consumption play a major part in the development of character, structure or theme. This book defines the food film genre, and analyzes the relationship between cinematic food imagery and various cultural constructs, including politics, family, identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion. Chapters examine these themes in several well-known food films, such as ""The Cook"", ""The Thief"", ""His Wife and Her Lover"", ""Chocolat"", ""Babette's Feast"", and ""Eat Drink Man Woman"", and lesser-known productions, including ""Felicia's Journey"", ""Kitchen Stories"", ""Magic Kitchen"", and ""Chinese Feast"". The work includes a filmography of movies within the food genre.

This work examines the symbolism of fantasy fiction, literal and figurative representation in fantastic film adaptations, and the imaginative differences between page and screen. Essays focus on movies adapted from various types of fantasy fiction - novels, short stories and graphic novels - and study the transformation and literal translation from text to film in the ""Lord of the Rings"" series, ""The Chronicles of Narnia"", ""Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"", ""Howl's Moving Castle"", ""Finding Neverland"", ""The Wizard of Oz and the Broadway Adaptation Wicked"", and ""Practical Magic"".

In the past two decades, Othello has tried out for the basketball team, Macbeth has taken over a fast food joint, and King Lear has moved to an lowa farm - Shakespeare is everywhere in popular culture. This collection of essays addresses the use of Shakespearean narratives, themes, imagery, and characterizations in non-Shakespearian cinema. The essays explore how Shakespeare and his work are manipulated within the popular media and explore topics such as racism, jealousy, misogyny and nationality. The question of whether a contemporary production is influenced by Shakespeare or by an earlier piece that influenced Shakespeare is also addressed. The submissions concentrate on film and television programs that are adaptations of Shakespearean plays, including My Own Private Idaho, CSI-Miami, A Thousand Acres, Prospero's Books, O, 10 Things I Hate About You, Withnail and I, Get Over It, and The West Wing. Each chapter includes notes and a list of works cited. A full bibliography completes the work; it is divided into bibliographies and filmographies, general studies and essays, derivatives based on a single play, derivatives based on several, and derivatives based on Shakespeare as a character.

No American television show of the past decade has been vilified as has ""Comedy Central's South Park"". This is the show that has featured, in turn, a nine-year-old boy enmeshed in an affair with Ben Affleck, a maniacal Mel Gibson smearing feces everywhere, and the misadventures of Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, a talking, bouncing, singing piece of poop. While it's not always an exercise in good taste, ""South Park"" is a socially significant satire that has also devoted entire episodes to interpretations of ""Great Expectations"", Ken Burns' ""Civil War"", and ""Hamlet"". This volume explores the popularity and cultural relevance of ""South Park"" and its place as an artistically and politically worthy satire. Among the topics explored are the show's parody of the processes of manufacturing political consent; its treatments of Shakespeare's plays; the interrogation of anti-tobacco legislation; and the show's creators' seemingly irreverent and dismissive treatment of environmentalism.

From the vampires Lestat and Louis to a sexually liberated Sleeping Beauty, novelist Anne Rice has created a host of characters who are notable for their paradoxical combinations of the deviant and the conventional. Exit to Eden, for example, ends with the sado-masochistic protagonists embarking on a traditional monogamous heterosexual relationship, while the vampires often long to exchange their erotic immortality for "ordinary" mortal lives and loves. This scholarly analysis of the seemingly incompatible elements of the subversive and the socially acceptable in Rice's early work covers her career from the landmark Interview with the Vampire (1976) to Lasher (1993). Each chapter tackles a different aspect of Rice's conflicting portrayals of sexual issues, including homophobia, pedophilia, castration anxiety, and the vast array of gender stereotypes and roles that her novels so often interpret and exploit. This study is appropriate both for readers of Rice's writing and those intrigued by issues of sexual politics and the ways in which a popular author both embraces and repudiates some of the most shocking concepts of sexuality. An index and bibliography are included to aid research.

The 2005 James McTeigue and Wachowski Brothers' film ""V for Vendetta"" represents a postmodern pastiche, a collection of fragments pasted together from the original Moore and Lloyd graphic novel of the same name, along with numerous allusions to literature, history, cinema, music, art, politics, and medicine. Since it is based upon a graphic novel, the film is from its very inception intertextual, paralleling the text from which it was derived while at the same time representing the authorial contributions of the many people and outside elements that played a significant role in shaping the film.This work identifies and examines the intersecting texts of ""V for Vendetta"", with individual chapters providing localized readings of the story's specific intertextual components. The subjects covered include the alternative dimensions of the cinematic narrative, represented in the film's conspicuous placement of John William Waterhouse's canvas ""The Lady of Shalott in V's Home""; the film's overt allusions to the AIDS panic of the 1980s; and the ways in which antecedent narratives such as Terry Gilliam's ""Brazil"", Huxley's ""Brave New World"", and Bradbury's ""Fahrenheit 451"" represent shadow texts that frequently cross through the overall ""V for Vendetta"" narrative.