Waxman’s grasp of the interior of the studio world, and her ability to make the workings of closed-door deals...
New York Times Hollywood correspondent Waxman examines the trajectory of the independent feature film in the 1990s as exemplified by the work of six Tinsel Town outsiders.
In the early 1990s, Hollywood corporate mergers and their resultant focus on the bottom line resulted in a bumper crop of sequels, remakes, and other dependable moneymakers inoffensive to anything but taste. Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction blazed across this dull background with all the shock of an incendiary device, decimating expectations about the kinds of movies people would pay to see and forcing the studio conglomerates to create independent divisions with the mission of funding Tarantino-esque films. Waxman takes a chronological look at the movies that preceded and followed Tarantino’s master work, examining the men (indies are as gender-biased as the rest of the film industry) who had the drive to steer their work through the always-treacherous studio system. Among the films considered are Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, made in 1989, and David O. Russell's incest dramedy, Spanking the Monkey. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights was another risk-taker, and Spike Jonze’s absurdist Being John Malkovich could win an award for the film least likely ever to be made. Waxman’s accounts of the ins and outs of the Hollywood machine are as arresting as any of the indy scripts, with cliffhangers, villains, and blunders galore. Russell’s Three Kings, widely noted as a triumph, was ignored by the Oscar committee, and watching Soderbergh’s Traffic, a movie about illegal drugs, struggle and fight its way into existence is a real nailbiter—even though we know it would end up with five Academy Award nominations.
Waxman’s grasp of the interior of the studio world, and her ability to make the workings of closed-door deals comprehensible, raise her work from textbook to something truly absorbing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-054017-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
