With the possible exception of the Western movie and Film Noir, the American screwball comedy, that hilarious, often chaotic and highly witty style of making excellent and funny entertainment, probably is the third best liked or popular genre associated with movies made in 1940s US. It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) is very likely […]
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Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story by Caroline and David Stafford (2023)
Authors Catherine and David Stafford’s new title on one of Britain’s most important bass players, Ronnie Lane (1946-1997), successfully fills some information gaps rock music lovers may have encountered, concerning show biz and London’s music scene of the 1960s and 70s. Their Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story tells of his humble beginnings as […]
Marvel Comics Library. X-Men. Vol. 1. 1963–1966 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Fabian Nic
With the fourth installment of the Marvel superheroes edition in XXL size, another one of Stan Lee’s impressive lines of comics is available now: Marvel’s “The X-Men.” A name related to the eXtraordinary or simply X-tra powers the protagonists at hand possessed; without the help of lab accidents, misdirected sun rays or cosmic powers of […]
Funkiest Man Alive: Rufus Thomas and Memphis Soul by Matthew Ruddick (2023)
Memphis, Tennessee, will always stand out as a city important for popular American music. Here W.C. Handy was a work here, later music history was written by quite a few local musicians who excelled in blues, rock’n’roll, soul and funk. One of them was singer/songwriter and master entertainer Rufus Thomas (1917-2001) who now with this […]
American Film Noir Genres, Characters, and Settings by Harold Hellwig (2023)
Strongly influenced by domestic hard-boiled novels of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most American film genres, film noir, had its boom time in the 1940s. Generally believed to have mostly vanished from studios and theaters by the late 1950s, the genre briefly resurfaces every few years in the so-called “neo noirs” of various […]
The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records: A Great Migration Story, 1917–1932 by Scott Blackwood (2023)
One of the greatest but least researched American record labels, Paramount from Grafton, Wisconsin, is the subject of Scott Blackwood’s title at hand, that introduces itself as a blend of solid historical research, good artist presentation and a bit of fiction. Maybe it has to do with Blackwoods’s first calling as a writer of novels, […]
The Transformative Cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky by George Melnyk (2023)
Few other artists connected with auteur cinema have left such a record of often disturbing, mythical, surreal, and sometimes more or less incomprehensible movies as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean director extraordinaire, born in 1929. If the label “cult director” can be applied to just a few artists, he definitely is in that league. “Jodorwsky has invested […]
domus 1940-1949, 1950-1959, 1960-1969 by Charlotte & Peter Fiell (eds.) (2023)
Often reverently labeled the ultimate magazine or record of architecture and contemporary design, the Italian publication domus made history as the spectacular diary of modern and future ideas in design and architecture. Ever since 1928, when legendary Italian designer and Professor of architecture Giovanni (Gio) Ponti presented the first edition. For most of his life, […]
Perplexing Plots. Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder by David Bordwell (2023)
Generally, storytelling, narratives, modes of presentation and the story behind it, define most works of fiction and movie plots alike. As those techniques changed over the decades (as did audiences who step by step were introduced to this), new and exiting ways of shooting film and presenting characters entered popular forms of entertainment. The simple, […]