A challenging but illuminating critique of female action heroes.
Debut author Fussfeld Cohen examines the rise of the female action hero in the digital age in this work of film criticism.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, video games and Hollywood movies began offering viewers something that they had not often seen before: female action heroes who behaved a lot like their male counterparts. (Think: Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Kill Bill.) Fussfeld Cohen argues that the primary reason for this trend was the newly available digital technology that allowed female characters to suddenly perform outside the physical constraints of the actresses portraying them. “By avoiding material limitations,” writes Fussfeld Cohen in the book’s preface, “the digital woman embodies a postgender reflection and articulates a new potential for a cultural change in a cybersociety that embraces digital technologies as a central means of expression.” By tracing the evolution of female heroes from the 1970s exploitation era (Foxy Brown, Charlie’s Angels) to contemporary depictions in works like The Hunger Games, Westworld, and Mass Effect, Fussfeld Cohen explores the various ways that female action protagonists have eroded, undermined, and upheld traditional understandings of womanhood. What’s more, Fussfeld Cohen uses these female characters as a lens to analyze the ways that digital technology has affected Western culture and the narratives we consume. The book is an outgrowth of Fussfeld Cohen’s doctoral research, and it reads as such, reflecting the specialized language of academic theory: “While forced to use hegemonic languages, the new diasporic cinema is regarded as creating hybrid combinations of images that express the disjunction between the visual and the verbal.” General readers might be turned off before they make it out of the introduction, but those who stick with it will find that Fussfeld Cohen has constructed a comprehensive study of this particular archetype. More interestingly, she has shown that the digital revolution has changed popular entertainment in more ways than simply allowing for more convincing green screen environments and better video game graphics. It has altered the way we consider gender, beauty, and the human body (for better and for worse). Suffice it to say, readers will go into their next summer blockbuster with a new perspective.
A challenging but illuminating critique of female action heroes.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-978336-18-6
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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