by Tom Shone ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 7, 2004
One of those rare film books that walks the fine line between populist tub-thumping and sky-is-falling, Sontag-esque screed.
The lowdown on a word beloved by film executives, loathed by film critics, and not quite understood by anybody.
Adding to the prodigious shelf of recent general-interest Hollywood titles, British-born critic Shone’s first book traces the history of the modern event movie from its widely acknowledged beginnings in the long summers of 1975 and 1977, when Jaws and Star Wars were seen multiple times by most Americans, to the moment last February when Steven Spielberg announced the Best Film Oscar for The Return of the King. The author follows the Biskind/Bart model, mixing trenchant film analysis and history with a practical understanding of the industry itself. What makes Shone’s text so much more approachable and enlightening is that he doesn’t pretend to be able to apply a grand unifying theory to the whole chaotic, gazillion-dollar business (à la Variety editor Peter Bart). Nor does he pass over the intervening blockbusters between Jaws and The Return of the King in order to focus (à la Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 1998) on the ways in which Spielberg and George Lucas supposedly almost destroyed the more intimate, avant-garde work of 1970s auteurs like Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Coppola, consigning movie audiences to decades of Bang! Pow! Boom! Shone sketches a more complicated scenario, arguing that the ’70s auteurs had already run out of steam by the time Spielberg/Lucas showed up, and that audiences were sick of “all those unhappy endings, fractured narratives, and scuzzy exterior shoots.” Indeed, the author’s running counterattack on Biskind’s pro-auteur thesis gives a nice sting to this impressively learned narrative. Shone evinces an intuitive knowledge of what makes audiences respond, but he also admits that there’s an exception to every rule, and no sooner is an industry trend started, than something turns it on its head. In a word, nobody could ever replicate Titanic.
One of those rare film books that walks the fine line between populist tub-thumping and sky-is-falling, Sontag-esque screed.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3568-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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by Sherill Tippins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2013
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee
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by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton
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