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The boy who comes back from a war far away in a wooden box is glorified and called a hero. As the funeral plans are made in a small Kent town, his siblings squabble over who he was. Maybe the fanfare isn't needed for this heroic martyr. Vera Vera Vera is a blackly comic play about what we are willing to fight for. Her first work for the theatre, Hayley Squires is a bracing new voice, clear eyed and loud, looking at violence, neglect and apathy. Depicting a gritty slice of social realism, Vera Vera Vera portrays the disjunction between the lives of the surviving family against the memories and patriotic commemoration for the dead. Looking at drug addiction, crime, verbal and domestic abuse, engrained racism, the characters' downtrodden and trapped lives are exposed with honesty and verve. This brave and uncompromising play questions both the validity of the myth of the martyred soldier and the true worth of survival for those left behind.
The Pitchfork Disney heralded the arrival of a unique and disturbing voice in the world of contemporary drama. Manifesting Ridley's vivid and visionary imagination and the dark beauty of his outlook, the play resonates with his trademark themes: East London, storytelling, moments of shocking violence, memories of the past, fantastical monologues, and that strange mix of the barbaric and the beautiful he has made all his own. The Pitchfork Disney was Ridley's first play and is now seen as launching a new generation of playwrights who were unafraid to shock and court controversy. This unsettling, dreamlike piece has surreal undertones and thematically explores fear, dreams and story-telling. First produced in 1991, it has gone on to be recognised as the annunciation of Ridley's dark and seductive world.
Simplify and planet-proof your beauty routine and dresser with Sustainable Beauty. Featuring all the eco-friendly practical information and guidance you need, plus over 20 step-by-step projects and tutorials to start making your own zero-waste beauty products. Written by leading authority and make up artist to the stars Justine Jenkins.
This book analyses the representation of North-East England in film and television. It is a response to the way a number of important British films and programmes—for example, Get Carter (1971), Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (1973-74), Our Friends in the North (1996) and Billy Elliot (2000)—have used this particular setting to explore questions of class, identity and history. It argues for the significance and coherence of a North-East corpus of film and television through a series of case studies relating to specific eras or types of representation. These include regional writers working for television in the 1970s, the achievements of the workshop movement in the 1980s and works produced within the genres of documentary, crime drama, comedy, period drama and reality television. The book discusses how the communities and landscapes of the region have been used to explore processes of cultural change, and legacies of de-industrialisation.
How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction brings cinema studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis into novel configuration around the concept of negative life, a sundering of human and nonhuman relations. Engaging a philosophical and cinematic corpus that rejects the pastoralism of “entanglement” or “enmeshment,” Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay counter ecocritical pieties and cut a new path for theory. They examine films by Julian Pölsler, Kelly Reichardt, Lee Isaac Chung, Mahesh Mathai, Paul Schrader, and others that exemplify the existential contradictions currently intensifying amid the sixth mass extinction. Each case study testifies formally and thematically to negative life as a structural condition of thought and film. Together, the cases reveal the unlivable dimension of life and art, where form, desire, and nonbelonging tarry with the future-oriented promise of ecostudies—where all that lives connects. Negative Life militates against this promise, showing that faith in connection is a dead end.
This collection assembles a wide range of scholarship addressing the intersections, influences, and impacts of the horror genre’s proliferation across multiple forms of media. Covering film, television, websites, video games, tabletop and role-playing games, and social media, the volume highlights works from marginalized voices or from less scrutinized media. Building off one of Horror Studies’ traditional homes in film, the volume first features approaches to previously ignored innovations and offshoots related to cinematic and televisual horror, before moving to discuss how horror film conventions inform horror video and tabletop games and how games have started to influence film. Finally, the collection departs the world of film to examine online and non-academic multimodal/cultural discourses about horror, from popular movie reviewers to interactive online marketing and film promotions. This volume will interest scholars and students not only of Horror Studies and genre but also of film, media and television studies, digital media and video games, and transmedia studies.
Folk Gothic begins with the assertion that a significant part of what has been categorised as folk horror is more accurately and usefully labelled as Folk Gothic. Through the modifier 'folk', Folk Gothic obviously shares with folk horror its deployment (and frequent fabrication) of diegetic folklore. Folk Gothic does not share, however, folk horror's incarnate monsters, its forward impetus across spatial and ontological boundaries and the shock and repulsion elicited through its bodily violence. The author argues that the Folk Gothic as a literary, televisual and cinematic formation is defined by particular temporal and spatial structures that serve to forge distinctly nonhuman stories. In emphasising these temporal and spatial structures – not literal 'folk' and 'monsters' – the Folk Gothic tells stories that foreground land and 'things', consequently loosening the grip of anthropocentrism.
Do you love cinema and want to know more about its history? Are you a film fan looking for an informative yet light-hearted review of the last one hundred and thirty years of the silver screen? If so, you've found what you're looking for! In this book, TV and movie star David Barry takes us on a journey through the history of cinema, from the silent movies at the time of the birth of the industry all the way up to today's CGI-fuelled blockbusters. The author guides us through this huge subject in an easy-to-follow fashion, with amusing facts and hilarious anecdotes peppered throughout the book. Quotes from some of the movie world's best-known lines of dialogue are used to illustrate the narrative, and some amazing trivia is supplied, enabling the reader to impress their friends and acquaintances with little-known geek-level movie facts. With something here for everyone, you'll never be at a loss when answering - or even setting - quiz questions! Whether you're already a movie-buff with plenty of knowledge, or a film fan seeking an understanding of how we got to where we are today, this is the perfect book for you.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award. An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of African Americans north, and transformed American society and politics forever. The flood brought with it a human storm: white and black collided, honor and money collided, regional and national powers collided. New Orleans’s el...