The Star Wars universe, presented in nine movies and several spin-offs so far, animated TV series, comic books, novels and other media is a fantastic location. What the first three episodes, Episode IV: A New Hope, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (that are still held in high […]
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Category: B. R. Film
America Goes Hawaiian. The Influence of Pacific Island Culture on the Mainland by Geoff Alexander (2...
What began on the American mainland in the 1850s, when the first hula dancers were presented to the public and what was promoted by Hawaiian music only a few years later – the promise of paradise on earth, an Eden in endless summer – the Hawaiian way of life, for the vast majority of Americans […]
The Road to Wicked: The Marketing and Consumption of Oz … by K. Drummond, S. Aronstein, T. L. Ritten
If the phrase “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” sounds very familiar to you, it could be you are one of the many millions of fans and admirers of either the books by L. Frank Baum or the many products that continued the tales of Oz. For nearly 120 years, the world […]
From Flappers to Rappers: The Origins, Evolution, and Demise of Youth Culture by Marcel Danesi (2018...
Even if there already are some titles informing about this “feature” of modernity (youth cultures), the title at hand by Marcel Danesi convinces with a solid introduction of what “the youth,” (“a youth,” “a teenager,” or a person in its “adolescence”) actually is and how the “species” was first, well, discovered by sociologists and how, […]
Cowboy Politics: Myths and Discourses in Popular Westerns … by John S. Nelson (2018)
The popularity of the American western is still unbroken. This has to do with the story lines, great landscapes, good soundtracks and mostly with the deeds of some heroic men (and sometimes women) who did “the right thing” in times of distress and usually in very rough and dangerous times. However, Cowboy Politics is not […]
Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo by Alexander C. T. Geppert (ed.) (2018)
Introducing the second volume of the European view on space programs and the sociocultural effects of current and future space travel and planet colonization plans, Limiting Outer Space continues the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series. The title is strongly linked to Vol. 1 Imagining Outer Space: European Astroculture in the […]
Terrifying Texts. Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror … by C. J. Miller and A. B. Van Riper (
There is hardly a book more popular with occultists or the genre of horror movies than the Necronomicon. It is filled with spells, runes and various texts to summon demons, spirits and otherworldly creatures (what actually makes it a so-called “grimoire”). The tales surrounding this fabricated text – that only was published as a joke […]
Youth Subcultures in Fiction, Film and Other Media… by N. Bentley, B. Johnson and A. Zieleniec (eds.
With emphasis on “Teenage Dreams,” three loosely designed subdivisions – literary fictions, representations on screen, critical theory and representations in other media – approach the huge body of demonstrations of subcultures in popular culture in the title at hand. Already the very idea of subcultures is strongly connected to modes of narration: “One of the […]
Urban Noir: New York and Los Angeles in Shadow and Light by James J. Ward and Cynthia J. Miller (eds...
Both Los Angeles and New York City have been of particular interest to movie producers, especially to those who shot drama that was later called film noir. The authors want to dig deeper to unearth the reasons for those two locations, since the ”… inescapable question, then, is: Why this animosity toward the two cities […]