Jon Towlson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781911325543
- eISBN:
- 9781800342347
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781911325543.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
When Candyman was released in 1992, Roger Ebert gave it his thumbs up, remarking that the film was “scaring him with ideas and gore, rather than just gore.” Indeed, Candyman is almost unique in 1990s ...
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When Candyman was released in 1992, Roger Ebert gave it his thumbs up, remarking that the film was “scaring him with ideas and gore, rather than just gore.” Indeed, Candyman is almost unique in 1990s horror cinema in that it tackles its sociopolitical themes head on. As critic Kirsten Moana Thompson has remarked, Candyman is “the return of the repressed as national allegory”: the film's hook-handed killer of urban legend embodies a history of racism, miscegenation, lynching, and slavery, “the taboo secrets of America's past and present.” This book considers how Candyman might be read both as a “return of the repressed” during the George H. W. Bush era, and as an example of 1990s neoconservative horror. It traces the project's development from its origins as a Clive Barker short story (The Forbidden); discusses the importance of its gritty real-life Cabrini-Green setting; and analyzes the film's appropriation (and interrogation) of urban myth. The two official sequels (Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh [1995] and Candyman: Day of the Dead [1999]) are also considered, plus a number of other urban myth-inspired horror movies such as Bloody Mary (2006) and films in the Urban Legend franchise. The book features an in-depth interview with Candyman's writer-director Bernard Rose.Less
When Candyman was released in 1992, Roger Ebert gave it his thumbs up, remarking that the film was “scaring him with ideas and gore, rather than just gore.” Indeed, Candyman is almost unique in 1990s horror cinema in that it tackles its sociopolitical themes head on. As critic Kirsten Moana Thompson has remarked, Candyman is “the return of the repressed as national allegory”: the film's hook-handed killer of urban legend embodies a history of racism, miscegenation, lynching, and slavery, “the taboo secrets of America's past and present.” This book considers how Candyman might be read both as a “return of the repressed” during the George H. W. Bush era, and as an example of 1990s neoconservative horror. It traces the project's development from its origins as a Clive Barker short story (The Forbidden); discusses the importance of its gritty real-life Cabrini-Green setting; and analyzes the film's appropriation (and interrogation) of urban myth. The two official sequels (Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh [1995] and Candyman: Day of the Dead [1999]) are also considered, plus a number of other urban myth-inspired horror movies such as Bloody Mary (2006) and films in the Urban Legend franchise. The book features an in-depth interview with Candyman's writer-director Bernard Rose.
Ray Zone
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813136110
- eISBN:
- 9780813141183
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813136110.003.0022
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The making of two 3D films by Robert Rodriguez, Spy Kids 3-D and Shark Boy and Lava Girl 3D, is discussed. Their performance at the theatrical box office and their place in the history of the ...
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The making of two 3D films by Robert Rodriguez, Spy Kids 3-D and Shark Boy and Lava Girl 3D, is discussed. Their performance at the theatrical box office and their place in the history of the anaglyph 3D movie is examined.Less
The making of two 3D films by Robert Rodriguez, Spy Kids 3-D and Shark Boy and Lava Girl 3D, is discussed. Their performance at the theatrical box office and their place in the history of the anaglyph 3D movie is examined.
David Bordwell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226352176
- eISBN:
- 9780226352343
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226352343.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
During the 1960s and 1970s, film criticism became a respected form of arts journalism, with Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris emerging as major tastemakers. As American cinema broke with its studio ...
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During the 1960s and 1970s, film criticism became a respected form of arts journalism, with Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris emerging as major tastemakers. As American cinema broke with its studio heritage and as foreign films commanded intellectuals’ attention, film critics gained new stature. Audiences who found Bergman and Fellini to be masters were ready to take critics seriously too. These writers, however, now stood revealed as the inheritors of a tradition that had begun in the 1940s with reviewers who established a new tenor for American film criticism. Those reviewers—most famously James Agee but also Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—provided new ways to think and write about popular cinema.Less
During the 1960s and 1970s, film criticism became a respected form of arts journalism, with Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris emerging as major tastemakers. As American cinema broke with its studio heritage and as foreign films commanded intellectuals’ attention, film critics gained new stature. Audiences who found Bergman and Fellini to be masters were ready to take critics seriously too. These writers, however, now stood revealed as the inheritors of a tradition that had begun in the 1940s with reviewers who established a new tenor for American film criticism. Those reviewers—most famously James Agee but also Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler—provided new ways to think and write about popular cinema.
Peter J. Bailey
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780813167190
- eISBN:
- 9780813167862
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Kentucky
- DOI:
- 10.5810/kentucky/9780813167190.003.0019
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
If art in Deconstructing Harry is too much the product of a reprobate to be anything other than corrupt, the bitter cultural satire of Celebrity hardly allows for the existence of art at all. Lee ...
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If art in Deconstructing Harry is too much the product of a reprobate to be anything other than corrupt, the bitter cultural satire of Celebrity hardly allows for the existence of art at all. Lee Simon wants to believe in his genuineness and the honesty of his autobiographical novel, but he’s too much attracted to the hollow, media-crazed world he abhors to remain committed to his art, which a jilted lover ultimately scatters over the Hudson River. Marion Post of Another Womanknows she must change her life from its philosophical deep freeze, and she finds her transformation depicted in the novel of an ex-lover who characterizes the woman modeled on her as “capable of deep passion.” Both Simon and Post, these movies suggest, are guilty of confounding art and life for the purposes of self-gratification and self-aggrandizement.Less
If art in Deconstructing Harry is too much the product of a reprobate to be anything other than corrupt, the bitter cultural satire of Celebrity hardly allows for the existence of art at all. Lee Simon wants to believe in his genuineness and the honesty of his autobiographical novel, but he’s too much attracted to the hollow, media-crazed world he abhors to remain committed to his art, which a jilted lover ultimately scatters over the Hudson River. Marion Post of Another Womanknows she must change her life from its philosophical deep freeze, and she finds her transformation depicted in the novel of an ex-lover who characterizes the woman modeled on her as “capable of deep passion.” Both Simon and Post, these movies suggest, are guilty of confounding art and life for the purposes of self-gratification and self-aggrandizement.
