The Player ; The Rapture ; The New Age


Book Description

Michael Tolkin is one of Hollywood's hottest new players, a screenwriter and director who has created films that are intellectually uncompromising, provocative, hilarious, sexy, and brilliantly contemporary. The Player, the award-winning movie sensation about the twisted world of Hollywood, was directed by Robert Altman and starred Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi. It has been hailed as "a masterpiece! One of the smartest, funniest, most penetrating movies about moviemaking ever made" (Vanity Fair). The Rapture explores the emotionally intense, surreal world of Christian fundamentalism. The Los Angeles Times called it "a nervy, unsettling, edgy piece of work, that most audacious of cinematic ventures, a film of theological ideas, intent on looking into what we believe and why we believe it, determined, even eager, to explore the issues of heaven, hell, and the hereafter." The New Age, a film sure to become an archetype for the post-1980's era, tells the story of a young couple's fall from financial grace and their quest for spirituality in a world defined by materialism. These screenplays not only represent some of the finest and most challenging work being done in Hollywood today but present, collectively, breadth, and feeling to that created by any of our time's most talented artists, whatever the medium.




Feminism's New Age


Book Description

Finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year in the Women's Issues Category Crystals, Reiki, Tarot, Goddess worship—why do these New Age tokens and practices capture the imagination of so many women? How has New Age culture become even more appealing than feminism? And are the two mutually exclusive? By examining New Age practices from macrobiotics to goddess worship to Native rituals, Feminism's New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism seeks to answer these questions by examining white women's participation in this hugely popular spiritual movement. While most feminist approaches to the New Age phenomenon have simply dismissed its adherents for their politically problematic racial appropriation practices, Karyln Crowley looks honestly at the political shortcomings of New Age beliefs and practices while simultaneously reckoning with the affective, political, and cultural motivations which have prompted New Age women's individual and collective spiritualities. New Age spirituality is in fact the dynamic outgrowth of a long-standing tradition of women's social and political power expressed through religious writings, art, and public discourse, and is key to understanding contemporary women's history and religion's role in modern American culture alike. Crowley offers a new and provocative assessment of the significance of the New Age movement, seen through a feminist and critical race studies lens.




Writing the Rapture


Book Description

Here, Crawford Gribben offers a history, description, and analysis of the rapture-novel genre. The late 1980s culminated in the creation of the Left Behind series. The novels in this series, Gribben shows, are derivative - borrowing entire characters and significant incidents from earlier books.







The Player


Book Description

The “shrewd, entertainingly dark Hollywood novel” that inspired the award-winning Robert Altman film (The New York Times Book Review). Hollywood insider Michael Tolkin perfectly skewers the movie-making business through the mind of Griffin Mill, senior vice president of production at a major Hollywood studio. Ruthlessly ambitious, Mill is driven to control the levers of America’s dream-making machinery. He listens to writers pitch him stories all day, sitting in judgment of their fantasies, their lives. But now one writer whose pitch he responded to so glibly is sending him mortally threatening postcards. Squeezed between the threat to his life and the threat to his job, Mill’s deliberate and horrifying response spins him into a nightmare. Then he meets the sad and beautiful June Mercator and his obsession for her threatens to destroy them both. “One of the most wounding and satirical of all Hollywood exposes.” —Los Angeles Times “In its wry, acerbic description of life behind the studio gates Tolkin’s book recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald . . . and the vengeful comedy of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer




The Return of the Player


Book Description

This follow-up to the classic black comedy about the film industry is “a wicked fever dream of a novel” (San Francisco Chronicle). In The Player, the Hollywood novel that was adapted into the celebrated movie by Robert Altman, film executive Griffin Mill got away with murder. Now Mill is back, down to his last six million dollars, i.e., broke. His second wife wants to leave him. His first wife still loves him. His children hate him. And, believing that the end of the world is happening, he wants to save them all with one last desperate plan: quit the studio and convince an almost-billionaire that he has the road map and the mettle to make them both achieve savage wealth. In The Return of the Player, Tolkin again delivers a brilliant, incisive portrait of power, money, and family in a society out of control with greed and excess. “A powerful dark comedy that transcends the shopworn genre of Hollywood satire.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Both truly outrageous and actually endearing.”—New York Daily News




Encyclopedia of Religion and Film


Book Description

Comprising 91 A–Z entries, this encyclopedia provides a broad and comprehensive introduction to the topic of religion within film. Technology has enabled films to reach much wider audiences, enabling today's viewers to access a dizzying number of films that employ diverse symbolism and communicate a vast array of viewpoints. Encyclopedia of Religion and Film will provide such an audience with the tools to begin their own exploration of the deeper meanings of these films and grasp the religious significance within. Organized alphabetically, this encyclopedia provides more than 90 entries on the larger religious traditions, the major film-producing regions of the globe, the films that have stirred controversy, the most significant religious symbols, and the more important filmmakers. The included topics provide substantially more information on the intersection of religion and film than any of the similar volumes currently available. While the emphasis is on the English-speaking world and the films produced therein, there is also substantial representation of non-English, non-Western film and filmmakers, providing significant intercultural coverage to the topic.




Film/Genre


Book Description

Film/Genre revises our notions of film genre and connects the roles played by industry critics and audiences in making and re-making genre. Altman reveals the conflicting stakes for which the genre game has been played and recognises that the term 'genre' has different meanings for different groups, basing his new genre theory on the uneasy competitive yet complimentary relationship among genre users and discussing a huge range of films from The Great Train Robbery to Star Wars and from The Jazz Singer to The Player.




Second Takes


Book Description

Second Takes presents the history of English language cinema by focusing on cinematic remakes and on how cinema has been replaced by new forms of "media." Remakes, with their innate plurality, offer the most substance for concentrated cultural analysis of how movies reflect and shape American culture. Analyzing the archetypes that recur in this culture reveals how movies are an increasingly dangerous surrogate for the actual. Close readings are presented of such works as popular favorites as Cronenberg's Crash, Disney's The Parent Trap, Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, Hitchcock's Psycho, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Lynch's Twin Peaks (the film) and Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, while unearthing pictures ripe for rediscovery such as One More Tomorrow, Strange Illusion and Andy Warhol's Vinyl. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.




Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality


Book Description

With his complex and unconventional films, Robert Altman often draws an impassioned response from critics but bafflement and indifference from the general public. Some audiences have dismissed his movies as insignificant, unsatisfying, and unreadable. Ironically, Altman might agree: he makes films in order to challenge filmgoers' expectations of straightforward narratives and easily understood endings. In Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality, Robert T. Self sheds light on Altman's work and provides the most comprehensive analysis of his films to date. With close readings of classics like MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, as well as the more recent films The Player, Short Cuts, and Cookie's Fortune, Self asserts the value of Altman's work not only to film theory and the entertainment industry but to American culture. Book jacket.