Provides a deep look into the varied work and common bonds of a group of young American directors including Wes Anderson, P. T. Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Richard Kelly, Richard Linklater, and David O. Russell.
Jesse Fox Mayshark is a staff editor for the New York Times News Service, a contributing editor to No Depression magazine, and a journalist with 13 years of experience working for daily and weekly newspapers, covering subjects from pop music to welfare reform.
"Mayshark, an experienced staff editor for the New York Times News
Service, has written perhaps the first in-depth study of the major
contributors to the culturally and cinematically aware, accessibly
eccentric "post-pop cinema." Mayshark interprets the creative
output of directors from Wes Anderson to David O. Russell to Sofia
Coppola, among others, who deal so originally and truthfully with
their characters' struggles for individuality and clarity. His
study of Todd Haynes in particular, covering films such as
&ISafe, Far from Heaven, and the controversial Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story, reveals a genuine understanding of the
director's attempts to combine cinematic artistry with complex and
often tragic characterizations. Mayshark illustrates that even as
this period in American filmmaking creates new ways of
storytelling, the seed of it all remains the difficult joy and
madness of finding one's place in the world. This is a highly
engaging and informative study of a sensibility more than a genre;
recommended for all academic and public libraries."-Library
Journal
"While he considers the 10 American directors (and one
screenwriter) discussed here all members of a "post-pop" or
"post-post modernism" school, Mayshark is wary of bunching them
together for the fact that their most uniting trait is actually
their overt individualism. Nonetheless he finds ample similarities
in the "chinstroking" and "anarchic" works of P.T. and Wes Anderson
(not related), David O. Russell, Todd Haynes, and Charlie Kaufman
with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, because they all tread the line
between irony and sentiment and address questions of alienation and
morality with a non- moralizing tone. The author offers analysis of
this group's major films and of its major critics, and in the final
chapter introduces three less prolific but promising American
post-pop visionaries the directors of Fight Club, Lost in
Translation, and Donnie Darko."-Reference & Research Book News
?While he considers the 10 American directors (and one
screenwriter) discussed here all members of a "post-pop" or
"post-post modernism" school, Mayshark is wary of bunching them
together for the fact that their most uniting trait is actually
their overt individualism. Nonetheless he finds ample similarities
in the "chinstroking" and "anarchic" works of P.T. and Wes Anderson
(not related), David O. Russell, Todd Haynes, and Charlie Kaufman
with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, because they all tread the line
between irony and sentiment and address questions of alienation and
morality with a non- moralizing tone. The author offers analysis of
this group's major films and of its major critics, and in the final
chapter introduces three less prolific but promising American
post-pop visionaries the directors of Fight Club, Lost in
Translation, and Donnie Darko.?-Reference & Research Book News
?Mayshark, an experienced staff editor for the New York Times News
Service, has written perhaps the first in-depth study of the major
contributors to the culturally and cinematically aware, accessibly
eccentric "post-pop cinema." Mayshark interprets the creative
output of directors from Wes Anderson to David O. Russell to Sofia
Coppola, among others, who deal so originally and truthfully with
their characters' struggles for individuality and clarity. His
study of Todd Haynes in particular, covering films such as
&ISafe, Far from Heaven, and the controversial Superstar: The
Karen Carpenter Story, reveals a genuine understanding of the
director's attempts to combine cinematic artistry with complex and
often tragic characterizations. Mayshark illustrates that even as
this period in American filmmaking creates new ways of
storytelling, the seed of it all remains the difficult joy and
madness of finding one's place in the world. This is a highly
engaging and informative study of a sensibility more than a genre;
recommended for all academic and public libraries.?-Library Journal
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