Thoroughly revised and updated for 2005! Includes a new chapter on the best special edition DVDs and a new chapter on finding hidden easter egg features.

Big Night (1996), Ratatouille (2007), and Julie and Julia (2009) are more than films about food—they serve a political purpose. In the kitchen, around the table, and in the dining room, these films use cooking and eating to explore such themes as ideological pluralism, ethnic and racial acceptance, gender equality, and class flexibility—but not as progressively as you might think. Feasting Our Eyes takes a second look at these and other modern American food films to emphasize their conventional approaches to nation, gender, race, sexuality, and social status. Devoured visually and emotionally, these films are particularly effective defenders of the status quo. Feasting Our Eyes looks at Hollywood films and independent cinema, documentaries and docufictions, from the 1990s to today and frankly assesses their commitment to racial diversity, tolerance, and liberal political ideas. Laura Lindenfeld and Fabio Parasecoli find women and people of color continue to be treated as objects of consumption even in these modern works and, despite their progressive veneer, American food films often mask a conservative politics that makes commercial success more likely. A major force in mainstream entertainment, American food films shape our sense of who belongs, who has a voice, and who has opportunities in American society. They facilitate the virtual consumption of traditional notions of identity and citizenship, reworking and reinforcing ingrained ideas of power.

The films of Ethan and Joel Coen have been embraced by mainstream audiences, but also have been subject to intense scrutiny by critics and cinema scholars. Movies such as Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Raising Arizona represent the filmmakers’ postmodern tendencies, a subject many academics have written about at length. But is it enough to reduce their features as expressions of postmodernism or are there other ways of viewing their work—not only their individual films but their entire output as a collective whole? In Constructing the Coens: From Blood Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis, Allen H. Redmon looks beyond the postmodern sensibilities of every film written and directed by the Coens to find an unexpected range of recurring ideas expressed in and about contemporary film. In this volume, Redmon tackles all of the films in the Coen brothers’ canon by examining—among other topics—narrative coherence in The Man Who Wasn’t There, intertextuality in No Country for Old Men, and sexuality in Burn after Reading and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Additional chapters look at their films through the prisms of gender studies, adaptation studies, and a constructivist sensibility weaved throughout their work. Considering the whole of the Coens’ output, as well as many of the topics being discussed in contemporary film studies, this book challenges viewers to reexamine their initial responses to these movies. By engaging both the familiar and foreign elements in each film, Constructing the Coens will appeal to fans of the brothers’ cinema, but also to students and scholars of film theory, adaptation studies, queer theory, and gender studies.

"A biography of American actress Scarlett Johansson"--Provided by publisher.

From his first comic-book appearance in 1939 through his many incarnations on the big screen, the archetypal superhero known as The Batman has never been far from the American consciousness. The character shaped the way we read comics and graphic novels, view motion pictures, and analyze the motifs of the Hero, the Anti-Hero and the Villain. He has also captured the scholarly imagination, telling us much about our society and ourselves. These essays examine how Batman is both the canvas on which our cultural identity is painted, and the Eternal Other that informs our own journeys of understanding. Questions relating to a wide range of disciplines--philosophy, literature, psychology, pop culture, and more--are thoroughly and entertainingly explored, in a manner that will appeal both to scholars and to fans of the Caped Crusader alike.

Serving as the sequel to Gene Roddenberry's original television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation pushed the boundaries of the "final frontier." At the same time, the show continued the franchise's celebrated exploration of the human experience, reflecting current social and political events. ST:TNG became immensely successful, spawning four feature films and several television spin-offs. This collection of new essays explores both the series' characters and its themes. Topics include the Federation's philosophy concerning technocracy, sexuality and biopolitics; foreign policy shifts in the Prime Directive; key characters including Jean-Luc Picard, Data, Deanna Troi, Tasha Yar; and Klingon martial arts, music, and history.

Contemporary myths, particularly science fiction and fantasy texts, can provide commentary on who we are as a culture, what we have created, and where we are going. These nine essays from a variety of disciplines expand upon the writings of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey. Modern examples of myths from various sources such as Planet of the Apes, Wicked, Pan's Labyrinth, and Spirited Away; the Harry Potter series; and Second Life are analyzed as creative mythology and a representation of contemporary culture and emerging technology.

For ten years Jack Nicholson toiled in low-budget films and guest spots in such television shows as Dr. Kildare and The Andy Griffith Show before his breakout performance in Easy Rider. Despite “retiring” in 2010, Nicholson remains one of the most revered actors of the last half century. Nominated for twelve Academy Awards—the most of any male actor—Nicholson has received three Oscars and countless other honors. The Essential Jack Nicholson looks at the key films in the career of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. After a brief profile of the actor, James L. Neibaur highlights each of Nicholson’s most important works, explaining why his performances are essential viewing. In addition to Easy Rider, the films discussed include Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Prizzi’s Honor, Ironweed, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, and The Departed. Neibaur also provides details about each film’s production, critical reaction, commercial reception, major nominations, and awards. A filmography of all of Nicholson’s movie roles (and select television performances) is also included. The Essential Jack Nicholson is a valuable source of information for fans of this iconic star and his films.

Increasingly over the past decade, fan credentials on the part of writers, directors, and producers have come to be seen as a guarantee of quality media making—the “fanboy auteur.” Figures like Joss Whedon are both one of “us” and one of “them.” This is a strategy of marketing and branding—it is a claim from the auteur himself or industry PR machines that the presence of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling the fan auteur. In A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises, authors Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill examine this phenomenon through a series of case studies featuring fanboys. The volume discusses both popular fanboys, such as J. J. Abrams, Kevin Smith, and Joss Whedon, as well as fangirls like J. K. Rowling, E L James, and Patty Jenkins, and dissects how the fanboy-fangirl auteur dichotomy is constructed and defended by popular media and fans in online spaces, and how this discourse has played in maintaining the exclusionary status quo of geek culture. This book is particularly timely given current discourse, including such incidents as the controversy surrounding Joss Whedon’s so-called feminism, the publication of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and contestation over authorial voices in the DC cinematic universe, as well as broader conversations about toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in Hollywood.

Throughout his directorial career, Clint Eastwood's movies have presented sympathetic narratives of characters enduring personal trauma as they turn to violence to survive calamity or sustain social order--a choice that leaves them marginalized rather than redeemed. In this collection of new essays, contributors examine his films--from The Outlaw Josey Wales to Sully--as studies on PTSD that expose the social conditions that tolerate or trigger traumatization and (in his more recent work) imagine a way through individual and collective trauma.