Joe Dante Austrian Film Museum Books

In the often dreary landscape of Hollywood's blockbuster era, the cinema of Joe Dante has always stood out as a rare beacon of fearless originality. Blending humor with terror and trenchant political satire with sincere tributes to the moviegoing act itself, the "Dante touch" is best described as a free-for-all orgy of movies, memories and mischief. For the first time, this colourful universe--from Hollywood Boulevard to Gremlins to Small Soldiers and beyond--is comprehensively explored in an English language volume featuring a career-encompassing interview, new essays by Michael Almereyda, Jim Hoberman, Christoph Huber, Gabe Klinger, Violeta Kovacsics, Bill Krohn, Dusan Rebolj, John Sayles, and Mark Cotta Vaz, as well as a treasure trove of never-before-seen documents and illustrations.

Saggi - saggio (95 pagine) - Joe Dante, formatosi nella bottega del leggendario Roger Corman, è tra i registi hollywoodiani del fantastico più significativi degli anni Ottanta. Il grande regista Joe Dante è un appassionato esploratore del cinema, protagonista di grandi successi commerciali e abilissimo nel cucire film a basso costo. Un artista umano e spiritoso, nelle fantasie come nella morale, capace insieme di ferocia, di tenerezza e di satira morale. Un artigiano che maschera abilmente una cultura alta sotto i modelli dei generi popolari e gli effetti da film di serie B in un intelligente omaggio alle meraviglie di un cinema perduto. Joe Dante – Master of Horror è un saggio a cura di Luigi Boccia, scritto da Mario Rumor, Joe Godoy Gonzalez, Emanuele Crivello, Giuseppe Carradori, Lorenzo Ricciardi e Anna Silvia Armenise. La cover è di Giorgio Finamore. Luigi Boccia, scrittore, sceneggiatore e regista, ha lavorato per diverse case di produzione cinematografica tra le quali la Eagle Picture, La 7 e Rai. Tra i suoi libri La Janara (2007), Leonardo da Vinci e la finestra sul tempo (2014), La Notte chiama (2016), Scarescrow (2018). Ha curato diverse antologie e volumi per vari editori, ed è autore di saggi, tra i quali Licantropi e Chi è Pennywise?, Scrivere l’horror nel cinema e nella televisione. Per la Star Comics ha ideato con Sergio Stivaletti la serie a fumetti Factor-V. Per Delos Digital cura la collana Horror Story. È il fondatore del marchio editoriale Weird Book.

"[A] well-plotted survey." Total Film In 100 American Horror Films, Barry Keith Grant presents entries on 100 films from one of American cinema's longest-standing, most diverse and most popular genres, representing its rich history from the silent era - D.W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience of 1915 - to contemporary productions - Jordan Peele's 2017 Get Out. In his introduction, Grant provides an overview of the genre's history, a context for the films addressed in the individual entries, and discusses the specific relations between American culture and horror. All of the entries are informed by the question of what makes the specific film being discussed a horror film, the importance of its place within the history of the genre, and, where relevant, the film is also contextualized within specifically American culture and history. Each entry also considers the film's most salient textual features, provides important insight into its production, and offers both established and original critical insight and interpretation. The 100 films selected for inclusion represent the broadest historical range, and are drawn from every decade of American film-making, movies from major and minor studios, examples of the different types or subgenres of horror, such as psychological thriller, monster terror, gothic horror, home invasion, torture porn, and parody, as well as the different types of horror monsters, including werewolves, vampires, zombies, mummies, mutants, ghosts, and serial killers.

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times "Singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope." —Rolling Stone Acclaimed media critic J. Hoberman's masterful and majestic exploration of the Reagan years as seen through the unforgettable movies of the era The third book in a brilliant and ambitious trilogy, celebrated cultural and film critic J. Hoberman's Make My Day is a major new work of film and pop culture history. In it he chronicles the Reagan years, from the waning days of the Watergate scandal when disaster films like Earthquake ruled the box office to the nostalgia of feel-good movies like Rocky and Star Wars, and the delirium of the 1984 presidential campaign and beyond. Bookended by the Bicentennial celebrations and the Iran-Contra affair, the period of Reagan's ascendance brought such movie events as Jaws, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Ghostbusters, Blue Velvet, and Back to the Future, as well as the birth of MTV, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the Second Cold War. An exploration of the synergy between American politics and popular culture, Make My Day is the concluding volume of Hoberman's Found Illusions trilogy; the first volume, The Dream Life, was described by Slate's David Edelstein as "one of the most vital cultural histories I've ever read"; Film Comment called the second, An Army of Phantoms, "utterly compulsive reading." Reagan, a supporting player in Hoberman's previous volumes, here takes center stage as the peer of Indiana Jones and John Rambo, the embodiment of a Hollywood that, even then, no longer existed.

An important analysis of business cycle theory, what causes economic booms and busts and what options are available to combat them.

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route to the East via the West and thus fortuitously "discovering" America. The fictions that grew up around the cults of the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar were the result of a letter from a mysterious "Prester John"—undoubtedly a hoax—that provided fertile ground for a series of delusions and conspiracy theories based on religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices. While some false tales produce new knowledge (like Columbus's discovery of America) and others create nothing but horror and shame (the Rosicrucian story wound up fueling European anti-Semitism) they are all powerfully persuasive. In a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, Eco shows us how serendipities—unanticipated truths—often spring from mistaken ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Eco tours the labyrinth of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange. Eco uncovers a rich history of linguistic endeavor—much of it ill-conceived—that sought to "heal the wound of Babel." Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian were alternately proclaimed as the first language that God gave to Adam, while—in keeping with the colonial climate of the time—the complex language of the Amerindians in Mexico was viewed as crude and diabolical. In closing, Eco considers the erroneous notion of linguistic perfection and shrewdly observes that the dangers we face lie not in the rules we use to interpret other cultures but in our insistence on making these rules absolute. With the startling combination of erudition and wit, bewildering anecdotes and scholarly rigor that are Eco's hallmarks, Serendipities is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.