While there are now fewer recent books on famous Hollywood directors – probably because criticism by now has covered almost any aspect of their work – new publications on, so far, underrated and ignored directors are being published more often. Peter A. Yacavone’s Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist is one of those books. It centers on […]
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Author: Shelf Administrator
Superevil: Villains in Silver Age Superhero Comics by Anke Marie Bock (2023)
Any comic book fan probably can easily name more than a handful of superheroes of the Silver Age, the time from roughly the mid-1950s until the early 1970s. And to know the superheroes also means to know their antagonists, featured in the endless battles of Batman/The Joker, Thor/Loki, The Flash/Po-Siden, or Spiderman/Green Goblin where the […]
Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style by Sheri Chinen Biesen (2024)
Film noir productions generally are associated with dark settings, either because action takes place at night or in unlit rooms, where street light creeps through Venetian blinds and struggles all the way to hit the protagonists on the set. Originally, such an outcome on the set in part was caused by filming conditions during wartime, […]
Music Films: Documentaries, Concert Films and Other Cinematic … by Neil Fox (2024)
Today, we can identify a whole repertoire of music films, ranging from straightforward documentaries, concert films (mostly heavily edited), works directly connected to the music industry to promote sales and also the mockumentary, a parody of some of the aforementioned types of movies. But there are distinct features of the music film, depending on the […]
Extraordinary Records by Giorgio Moroder and Alessandro Benedetti (2024)
The fascination with music on vinyl has never really died, although in the 1980s and 1990s, seemingly the CD and variations of it would take over markets, and finally lead to the replacement of heavy LP shelves in apartments with much smaller and lighter CD shelves. Even though the mastering and audio quality of the […]
Copyright Vigilantes: Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero by Ezra Claverie (2024)
A typical feature of the many (recent) blockbuster superhero movies is the concept they all share; they are not simply a continuation or reinterpretation of stories from comic books published decades ago. But there is more than meets the eye, according to author Ezra Claverie, a writer who for some years has published in Journal […]
Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur by Leon Hunt (2023)
One of the big names of Italian movie art, or in this case the horror and crime movie genre, Mario Bava (1914-1980) is the subject of this study on European “auteur-cinema” of the 1960s and 1970s. Without Bava, there would be no such genre masterpieces as Danger: Diabolik (1968), Kill Baby … Kill (1966), Baron […]
Out of the Blue: Life on the Road with Muddy Waters by Brian Bisesi (2024)
Brian Bisesi, an Italian-American guitar player from New Jersey who was part of the Muddy Waters Band from 1978 to 1980 in Out of the Blue shares a very vivid and often rough but real portrait of how life was when on tour with this blues master. Bisesi, today still a musician and a music […]
To Boldly Go. Marketing the Myth of Star Trek by Djoymi Baker (2023)
The stories, myths, and colossal spheres and regions (and timelines) the Star Trek franchise has generated so far, to a large extent, are based on the show’s clever usage and reinterpretation of ancient Greek myths, epic stories of exploration, warfare, politics, and adventure often already familiar to audiences from (classic) storytelling or archaic tales. It […]