Picture yourself in a darkened movie theater, or soothed by the pleasing glow of a television screen. You are watching as a history of the moving image unfolds onscreen, but this history will not take note of D.W. Griffith or Jean Renoir, nor will King Kong or Jaws make an appearance. As the images flicker past - of four ebullient Britishmen turning cartwheels in an open field, a man tap-dancing on an urban sidewalk, a wedding party in a rainstorm, a tragedy in a school classroom - they wax more familiar, the theme growing more coherent, more stable. They keep coming, though,...
Picture yourself in a darkened movie theater, or soothed by the pleasing glow of a television screen. You are watching as a history of the moving i...
Charlie Chaplin.Buster Keaton.The Marx Brothers.Billy Wilder.Woody Allen.The Coen brothers.Where would the American film be without them?Yet the cinematic genre these artists represent--comedy--has perennially received short shrift from critics, film buffs, and the Academy Awards.Saul Austerlitz s "Another Fine Mess" is an attempt to right that wrong.Running the gamut of film history from "City Lights" to "Knocked Up," "Another Fine Mess" retells the story of American film from the perspective of its unwanted stepbrother--the comedy.In 30 long chapters and 100 shorter entries, each devoted...
Charlie Chaplin.Buster Keaton.The Marx Brothers.Billy Wilder.Woody Allen.The Coen brothers.Where would the American film be without them?Yet the cinem...
A carefully curated tour through TV comedy series, this mixtape of fondly remembered shows surveys the genealogy of the form, the larger trends in its history, the best of what the genre has accomplished, and the most standard of its works. From "I Love""Lucy," "The Phil Silvers Show," and "M*A*S*H" to "Taxi," "The Larry Sanders Show," and "30 Rock," this guide presents the sitcom as a capsule version of the 20th-century arts--realism giving way to modernism and then to postmodernism, all between the hours of 8 and 10pm on weeknights. Each chapter springs from an individual representative...
A carefully curated tour through TV comedy series, this mixtape of fondly remembered shows surveys the genealogy of the form, the larger trends in its...
