Author Archive for: ‘David Sanjek’

Murray Pomerance (ed.), Cinema and Modernity. Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. ISBN: 0 8135 3816 5 US$24.95 (pb) 373pp (Review copy supplied by Rutgers University Press) Edited collections of essays are a sticky proposition. No matter how many such volumes pervade the marketplace, my experience has been that most editors bristle like a wet dog when you mention the …

Annalee Newitz, Pretend we’re Dead. Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 8223 3745 2 US$21.95 (pb) 223pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Remember when intelligent commentary on horror movies was virtually an oxymoron. When mainstream reviewers routinely rejected virtually every release and treated the genre like some kind of failure of …

Stuart Klawans, Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order. London/New York, Cassell, 1999. ISBN 0 3047005 41 188 pp. US$19.95 (paper) Uploaded 12 November 1999 There are occasions when the composition of film history seems governed by the principles of Social Darwinism. The speed and frequency with which the reputations of individual films, their stars or their makers rise and …

Kevin Jackson, Withnail & I. (BFI Modern Classics). London: BFI Publishing, 2004. ISBN: 1 84457 035 5 96pp (Book supplied by BFI Publishing) What is one to say about a film whose very author-director treats it in a somewhat dismissive fashion? Who freely states that he informed the crew on the first day of shooting that he had no idea …

Rebecca Coyle (ed). Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian film music Sydney: AFTRS 1998. ISBN: 1 876351 00 4 Uploaded 18 December 1998 Despite a growing body of scholarship on the broad subject of film music, much of it talks about the subject in the trans-national sense. Little addresses the matter of individual nations and individual national cinemas, unless those …