A must for special-effects aficionados and geeky fantasy addicts everywhere.
The king of stop-motion animation lays out his varied career.
Like many kids, Harryhausen was enraptured by the incredible special-effects work he saw in King Kong (1933); unlike most kids, he turned that rapture into a lifelong calling. Back in the dark ages before computer-generated imaging made possible films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park (at which Harryhausen takes a mild jab here), the best way to make monsters come to life on film was through the stop-motion animation, a complex, painstaking process involving small, incredibly detailed models, rear-projection filming, and matte shots that merged the models into shots with live actors. In this combination of coffee-table book and career summation, Harryhausen describes how he moved from watching King Kong to actually working with that movie’s stop-motion master, Willis O’Brien, on another ape-gone-amok drama Mighty Joe Young (1950), and then to essentially taking O’Brien’s spot in Hollywood. For the first part of his career, Harryhausen specialized in effects for films about rampaging monsters like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1952) and It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), pioneering examples of shlocky B-movie magic still enjoyed today. But he’s best known for such films as Jason and the Argonauts (1963) and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which mix and match elements from Greek mythology and Arabian Nights. (A scene showing the Argonauts clashing swords with reanimated skeletons is a Saturday-afternoon TV staple.) Harryhausen is not the most engaging writer; he tends to pull out reviews to attest to his films’ success like an aged movie star mulling over yellowing clippings. But his body of work is interesting enough to justify a thorough read, and his descriptions of unrealized projects offer tantalizing glimpses of what could have been.
A must for special-effects aficionados and geeky fantasy addicts everywhere.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8230-8402-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.
A brisk study of 20 of the Bard’s plays, focused on stripping off four centuries of overcooked analysis and tangled reinterpretations.
“I don’t really care what he might have meant, nor should you,” writes Smith (Shakespeare Studies/Oxford Univ.; Shakespeare’s First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, 2016, etc.) in the introduction to this collection. Noting the “gappy” quality of many of his plays—i.e., the dearth of stage directions, the odd tonal and plot twists—the author strives to fill those gaps not with psychological analyses but rather historical context for the ambiguities. She’s less concerned, for instance, with whether Hamlet represents the first flower of the modern mind and instead keys into how the melancholy Dane and his father share a name, making it a study of “cumulative nostalgia” and our difficulty in escaping our pasts. Falstaff’s repeated appearances in multiple plays speak to Shakespeare’s crowd-pleasing tendencies. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a bawdier and darker exploration of marriage than its teen-friendly interpretations suggest. Smith’s strict-constructionist analyses of the plays can be illuminating: Her understanding of British mores and theater culture in the Elizabethan era explains why Richard III only half-heartedly abandons its charismatic title character, and she is insightful in her discussion of how Twelfth Night labors to return to heterosexual convention after introducing a host of queer tropes. Smith's Shakespeare is eminently fallible, collaborative, and innovative, deliberately warping play structures and then sorting out how much he needs to un-warp them. Yet the book is neither scholarly nor as patiently introductory as works by experts like Stephen Greenblatt. Attempts to goose the language with hipper references—Much Ado About Nothing highlights the “ ‘bros before hoes’ ethic of the military,” and Falstaff is likened to Homer Simpson—mostly fall flat.
A brief but sometimes knotty and earnest set of studies best suited for Shakespeare enthusiasts.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4854-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.
Frey’s lacerating, intimate debut chronicles his recovery from multiple addictions with adrenal rage and sprawling prose.
After ten years of alcoholism and three years of crack addiction, the 23-year-old author awakens from a blackout aboard a Chicago-bound airplane, “covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.” While intoxicated, he learns, he had fallen from a fire escape and damaged his teeth and face. His family persuades him to enter a Minnesota clinic, described as “the oldest Residential Drug and Alcohol Facility in the World.” Frey’s enormous alcohol habit, combined with his use of “Cocaine . . . Pills, acid, mushrooms, meth, PCP and glue,” make this a very rough ride, with the DTs quickly setting in: “The bugs crawl onto my skin and they start biting me and I try to kill them.” Frey captures with often discomforting acuity the daily grind and painful reacquaintance with human sensation that occur in long-term detox; for example, he must undergo reconstructive dental surgery without anesthetic, an ordeal rendered in excruciating detail. Very gradually, he confronts the “demons” that compelled him towards epic chemical abuse, although it takes him longer to recognize his own culpability in self-destructive acts. He effectively portrays the volatile yet loyal relationships of people in recovery as he forms bonds with a damaged young woman, an addicted mobster, and an alcoholic judge. Although he rejects the familiar 12-step program of AA, he finds strength in the principles of Taoism and (somewhat to his surprise) in the unflinching support of family, friends, and therapists, who help him avoid a relapse. Our acerbic narrator conveys urgency and youthful spirit with an angry, clinical tone and some initially off-putting prose tics—irregular paragraph breaks, unpunctuated dialogue, scattered capitalization, few commas—that ultimately create striking accruals of verisimilitude and plausible human portraits.
Startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking: The Lost Weekend for the under-25 set.Pub Date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50775-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
4 Book Adaptations to Check Out In December
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