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The ritual of list making in our entertainment media has yielded few definitive surveys, but The A List is the genuine article. Written with conviction, authority, and a refreshing diversity of styles by 41 members of the esteemed National Society of Film Critics, this compilation of 100 mini-essays endeavors to explain why these 107 films (accounting for a few appropriate couplings and trilogies) are required viewing for anyone to be "film literate." Debate is inevitable (Enter the Dragon and Jailhouse Rock created Bruce Lee and Elvis as icons--does that make them "essential" films?), but the inclusions are eloquently justified through personal anecdote, engaging analysis, and astute reassessment. International scope (the rise of Iranian cinema) and historical breadth (from Birth of a Nation to L.A. Confidential) prevent esoteric favoritism, but this enlightening collection remains idiosyncratic and, yes, essential. Reading these essays before and after seeing each film is encouraged; having them around for future reference is nothing less than a privilege. --Jeff Shannon
Book Description
The 100 essential films of all time (you might be surprised what they are) and why they matter (you might be surprised about that, too).
People love movies. People love lists. So The A-List is a natural. While there are plenty of encyclopedic lists of films, this compulsively readable book of 100 essays-most written expressly for this volume-flags the best of the best as chosen by a consensus of the National Society of Film Critics. The Society is a world-renowned, marquee- name organization embracing some of America's most distinguished critics, more than forty writers who have followings nationally as well as devoted local constituencies in such major cities as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Minneapolis. But make no mistake about it: this isn't a collection of esoteric "critic's choice" movies. The Society has made its selections based on a film's intrinsic merits, its role in the development of the motion-picture art, and its impact on culture and society. Some of the choices will be controversial. So will some of the omissions. It will be a jumping-off point for discussions for years to come-and since the volume will span all films internationally from the very beginning, it will act as a balance to recent guides dominated by films of the last two decades (hardly film's golden age). Here is a book that is definitely ready for its close-up.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent source for exploring great films.......2006-06-04
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I am not the least bit inspired to venture into theatres to see the formulaic schlock Hollywood is putting out these days. However, I do enjoy interesting films. That's where this little book comes so in handy. This is a terrific guide for exploring innovative and interesting films made around the world from the silent era through the year 1997, the last year in which a film recommended in this book ("L.A. Confidential") is made. There are lots of films you would expect - "2001", "The Graduate", "Frankenstein", "Star Wars" - and some films you might not expect or even have heard of such as "Battleship Potemkin", which is a silent film made in Russia in 1925, controversial in its time for its graphic violence and revolutionary zeal. In some cases, the reviewer makes some unexpected comparisons. For example, in the case of "Frankenstein" the reviewer points out some of the nonsense that is going on in the film, such as nonsensical soliloquies by seemingly irrelevant and over-stereotyped characters and people running upstairs in fear and somehow ending up in the basement. This leads the reviewer to the conclusion that the sequel "Bride of Frankenstein" was a superior film compared to its predecessor.
In the case of each film mentioned, the reviewer discusses what it is about the film that he or she thinks makes it one of the great films of all time and gives insights into what was their own viewing experience. I will have to say the one film absent from the list that surprised me was "Forrest Gump". However, given that no individual is going to completely agree with another individual's "A list" of films, I highly recommend it.
Many hours of mind challenging fun.......2004-10-30
As a self professed film fan, I bought this book browsing though a store's shelves. I am so lucky to have picked it because this book (along with a subscription to Netflix) has brought me hours of mind challenging enjoyment. I can't think of a better way to explore the history of film outisde of a classroom setting.
Very Happy.......2004-07-10
Being a major film fan of all styles & an emerging film critic, this "Best Of" book immediately caught my attention. Such an eclectic collection of films, it makes for riveting reading. Any book of essays regarding great films that includes "Happy Together" is, in my opinion definitely worth a look......Film Fans Rejoice!!!!!!!!!!!
Discover Great Films.......2003-09-15
There can never be a definitive list of the 100 greatest movies ever made that satisfies everyone, but this particular list has a lot going for it. Each film is alloted about three pages of commentary that deals with the origins of the film, why critics love it, why it has endeared itself to the general public, what is so significant about it in the context of film history. All the essays are great fun to read before and after watching a particular film. I have made it an ambition to watch as many of these films as are available on VHS and DVD. (I have so far seen about 60+ movies on the list). The list is commendably broad-based, with a fair number of Asian and European films. Yes, the usual suspects are there (Citizen Kane, Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia), but, if for nothing else, I must thank this book for having introduced me, someone who is not a student of film, to films and film-makers I hadn't even heard of before, but who have since established a place in my heart. It was here that I discovered Carl Dreyers' powerful film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story, which is the most sublimely beautiful movie I have ever seen. Surprisingly, the critics have steered clear of being too arcane in their choices; there are nods here to B-movies, Hollywood musicals, Hong Kong martial arts flicks, summer blockbusters, westerns, science fiction. Rather than being a list of the GREATEST (Enter the Dragon! Jailhouse Rock!), this is really a list of the most INFLUENTIAL films across a range of genres. So you will find one or two representatives of German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, Russian montage, film-noir, etc., but you can easily think of many films that, aesthetically, are greater than some of the movies on this list but have not been included because they are not considered as influential. How else can you explain the inclusion of ,say, Close Encounters of the Third Kind but not Apocalypse Now? Perhaps the latter was left out because Coppola already has Godfather on the list. (But Federico Fellini has three of his films included, Spielberg and Kurosawa two each.) I would have liked to see a Jacques Tati film represented, and also one from Indian Bollywood. Overall, if you treat this as a guide that leads you to discover more films that are not on the list, then you will open up before you a wonderful world of films not restricted to just Hollywood.
Great.......2003-03-27
I love this book. I got it a couple years ago, and it never stays on my shelf. Every few weeks I pull it down to read the essay on a movie I've just seen or to get ideas for another movie to rent. I admire the National Society of Film critics for picking some unusual choices. Some so unusual that it's hard to find the films.
I recommend this book to any film buff, or to anyone that wants to become a film buff. It's a great place to start.
Book Description
Mother's Taxi is a detailed study of how women facilitate and service the sport played by others, particularly their immediate family members. It illustrates how domestic labor and childcare done by women provides the space for others to participate in sport, contributing directly to individual sporting careers and generally servicing sport as an institution. It offers important considerations for studies of sport, leisure, and gender relations by highlighting an aspect of women's relationships to sport which has been largely ignored.
Customer Reviews:
Exposing women's work.......2000-03-29
Mother's Taxi focuses on how women support and facilitate sport played by others. Thompson's study, which is presented in the book, is an area of research that not many social scientists have yet explored. Her book was easy to read, with several stories told by mothers of athletes, wives of athletes, and female athletes. Men's roles are briefly discussed, but Thompson wanted her primary focus to be on women, an area of very little research. Much of the work done by women to facilitate sport is done privately. This book recognizes their efforts and attempts to make it known to the public eye.
Book Description
Entertainment-Education and Social Change introduces readers to entertainment-education (E-E) literature from multiple perspectives. This distinctive collection covers the history of entertainment-education, its applications in the United States and throughout the world, the multiple communication theories that bear on E-E, and a range of research methods for studying the effects of E-E interventions. The editors include commentary and insights from prominent E-E theoreticians, practitioners, activists, and researchers, representing a wide range of nationalities and theoretical orientations.
Examples of effective E-E designs and applications, as well as an agenda for future E-E initiatives and campaigns, make this work a useful volume for scholars, educators, and practitioners in entertainment media studies, behavior change communications, public health, psychology, social work, and other arenas concerned with strategies for social change. It will be an invaluable resource book for members of governmental and non-profit agencies, public health and development professionals, and social activists.
Book Description
China Pop is a highly original and lively look at the ways that contemporary China is changing. Jianying Zha, hailed by The Nation as "incisive, witty and eloquent all at once," examines a wide range of developments largely unknown to Western readers: the careful planning of television soap operas to placate popular unrest after Tiananmen, the growth of the sex tabloid and pornography industries, and the politics of censorship and commercial success of the film directors Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern).
Customer Reviews:
Insights into New China's media biz.......2005-03-01
Written more than 12 years ago, Ms Zha, at 34, wrote one of the first books on the effects of popular media in the New New China. Written by a native who later emigrated to the US in her mid-20s for graduate school in Lit, the reader should look at is what is said and just as important what is not said. She emigrated right after Tiananmen incident, which had a great impact on her while attending Beijing U. Her arguments with her father, a researcher at one of the China Academies in BJ, caused a great dichotomy in the family. She believes that "...culture will save China, I (father) believe the economy will (p14)."
As most American readers, we have to filter the official mouthpieces of China Daily, Xinhua, and People's Daily, which are approved newsources of the China Gov't. And there are different editions, for Chinese and English consumption. We have to evaluate their points of view for any hidden agenda. And so it goes in the US too, such as the Epoch Times newspaper published in Chinese in NYC publishes a slant critical of the China Gov't, pro Falun Gong.
Now 46, with a 2003 Guggenheim fellowship under her belt, she has returned to BJ to write more fiction, perhaps break into the movie / TV biz and write a sequel to this book. Her husband, Benjamin Lee, a PhD who has been recently been appointed Graduate Dean of Social Research at The New University, NYC, a 1st gen Chinese anthropologist is also joining her as a mentor and confidant in BJ. His topic of social research is in the field of speculative finance.
Her book, which reads like a novel and easy-to-read multi-layered one like a Tom Clancy novel. Enticingly it gives pomp and circumstance, before delivering a B-school reader in disguise. This book is less about modern Chinese culture as it is about the business of culture. It belies the fact that this serious book is used as required readings at her alma maters, USC, Rice, Chicago, Columbia Chinese culture courses. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an index to locate people, books, films, and SOEs and there is no bibliography or pixs.
The great thing is that her perspective is part BJ native and part BJ expat that is proper for writing books and giving a more dispassionate view on the evolution of the national media. Shunning the myopic view that changes at first glance at warp speed, she gives an insiders view as case studies, to the three major mass-media venues, TV soaps (Chap 2), movies (Chap 4), pulp fiction (Chap 6), and lastly the media impact from Hong Kong (Chap 7) before its 97 repatriation. Lots of research into the insider interviews by the movers and shakers themselves.
In Chap 2, she profiles the creation of a new TV media, soap operas, and how the National TV propaganda machine changed its tune after seeing the popularity of foreign movies on TV. They needed to popularize the social realities of the New China and give a feminist's twist to make sure it appeals to the older generation of retired women too. As in all new and risky endeavors, Zha writes about the key five people involve in bringing out a weekly evening soap, Yearning. The sweatshop mentality, impossible deadlines, dedication at low pay, and eventual burnout. And the series viewership exceeded their wildest dreams. Definitely a close-up of a saga that portends the future of Central Chinese TV.
In Chap 3, she profiles the changes in Beijing's skyline from an architectural viewpoint. She writes about four architects and their futile efforts in instilling cultural preservation and retaining a dignified city. In over 24 pages, she discusses how walls and courtyards previously defined the Chinese family culture and neighborhoods, came down during the Soviet-inspired model city era and the wanton reconstruction of the 80s. And that modern Chinese architecture is now defined in the new Olympic village in northern outskirts of BJ, with the few remaining relics of history left abandoned by modern BJers.
In Chap 4, she profiles two movie-making directors by contrasting their styles and techniques, Chen Kaige (Yellow Earth, Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern). Over 25 pages, she mainly talks about the insider's stories on ego involvement where together they are greater than in competition with each other. She also shows that these expensive cultural epics also drained the State Film industry coffers, such that the succeeding 6th generation of filmmakers had little if any State support for their craft. Fairly shallow discussion on the emerging domestic film industry.
In Chap 6, Ms Zha writes about the insatiable demand for Jia Pingwa's "The Abandoned Capital," pulp-fiction for the masses. In 35 pgs, she shows that after Mao there was such a dirth of sex education, that this type of literature was needed in the city by the politburo, scholars, as well as factory workers. She interviews the author, sex pathology MDs, and Chinese feminists.
In Chap 7, she profiles the CIM (Zhicai) Corp Div of Ming Bao, a HK media mogul, which plans and executes a strategy in expansion into mainland China. In over 30 pages, this is a classical B-school analysis of the triumphs, pitfalls, and personnel intrigue of an OEChinese penetrating into the entrenched Chinese apparatchik. Any new American media mogul contemplating the Chinese market should read this chapter carefully.
Throughout this book, Ms Zha emphasizes that the people who can get things done have to do it with Chinese characteristics, one has to know lots of influential people, be crafty and wily as a fox, and know where the trapdoors and loopholes within the system. Outsiders and individualists are clueless.
Chinese urban pop culture explored.......2001-02-03
Zha Jianying. 1996. _China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture_. New York: The New Press. Pp. 210. ISBN 1565842502 (pbk).
Zha Jianying captures in this book the ferment - intellectual, artistic and commercial - of China's post-Tiananmen urban culture industry. She presents a lively mix of reportage, personal revelation, personality profile and ethnographic insight centered on pop culture events and trends in the People's Republic. Through her focus on creators and consumers, _China Pop_ illustrates people who have "...shed their old skins and picked up new lives." (p. 7).
China's developing pop culture industry is media-driven; like its Western counterparts, the industry spans TV, movies, literature, journalism, music, art and more. Zha looks at a hugely successful TV melodrama, Yearnings, and traces how the show was conceived, written and produced (chapter 2). She lays out repercussions the show had on its writers' and producers' lives and careers and its effect on China's TV industry. In "The Whopper" (chapter 5), she shows how money and business combine to corrupt journalists; corruption is so severe, she thinks, that "...most of what the Chinese read in the paper or see on television as 'news' these days is little more than paid advertising." (p. 117). She tackles developments in the movies by contrasting the career trajectories, personalities and works of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, China's leading directors in the 1990s (chapter 7). Chen directed the 1993 Cannes winner Farewell My Concubine; Zhang is perhaps known best in the west for his Red Sorghum (1987). Zha explores the sensation over author Jia Pingwa's ribald novel The Abandoned Capital (1993), and describes how readers, critics and state censors responded to it (chapter 6). (Beijing banned the book in 1994 only after sales cooled, pp. 127-8). Her account of the CIM Company, an investment outfit that "...is the first major Hong Kong company that has stepped into the tricky waters of joint venture media and cultural productions with China." (p. 165), is a tutorial on doing business in China as well as a close look at marketing hot pop performers. Chan Koon-Chung, a former avant-garde Hong Kong publisher who for a time was the CIM point man in Beijing, makes a telling comment: "Both economically and culturally, China looks similar to the Hong Kong of the seventies_so I can see clearly where the market is heading, where China is going to end up. We know exactly what to do and what will work. It's a huge market and this is an exciting time to be here" (p. 171).
Zha's book succeeds on several fronts. It is an artfully written commentary on changes sweeping China's media. The nation is developing a culture of mass consumerism, and the media market and propagate this culture. _China Pop_ documents this. Second, Zha ties her observations and interviews together using a keen sense of what being an urban, hip Chinese in post-Tiananmen China means. Her viewpoint moves adroitly between insider (native Chinese) and outsider (overseas Chinese or huaqiao); the book can be read as an ethnography minus overt theorizing. _China Pop_ is well worth reading as an accessible, intelligent commentary on urban cultural change in the People's Republic.
Getting a clue about China.......1999-12-13
Face it. When it comes to China, most Westerners -- especially those of us in the United States -- are clueless. That is why ''China Pop'' is such an important book, even if it seems, at first glance, to be about a frivolous subject.
Even as many in the US are, for political reasons, demonizing ''Red'' China, China is opening up to a greater extent than it has in centuries. (Yes, it still has a long way to go, but it has come a long way from the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.)
''China Pop'' is a helpful study of one result of China's slow opening: the rise of an increasingly Westernized and increasingly commercial popular culture.
The Chinese are already embracing economic freedom. After reading ''China Pop'' I have little doubt that freedom of expression is only a generation away.
A witty read for the intellectuals.......1998-07-17
This book will probably not get as large an audience as it would otherwise because it's aimed at intellectuals. However, those who venture to read it will enjoy an amusing look at what many Chinese intellectuals are thinking these days.
western influences on chinese pop culture.......1996-12-25
a really good read, short, but it gets a lot of information
accross. really covers everything from soap operas to
movies to mtv, it puts forth some very interesting views
on subjects that most books on china do not even cover.
Book Description
Arvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers have developed this unique volume focused on the history and development of entertainment-education. This approach to communication is the process of designing and implementing a media message to both entertain and educate to increase audience members' knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior. It uses the universal appeal of entertainment to show individuals how they can live safer, healthier, and happier lives. Entertainment formats such as soap operas, rock music, feature films, talk shows, cartoons, comics, and theater are utilized in various countries to promote messages about educational issues. This book presents a balanced picture of the entertainment-education strategy, identifying ethical and other problems that accompany efforts to bring about social change.
Customer Reviews:
Entertainment Education: A Communication Strategy for Social.......2002-11-02
Soap operas are the most popular genre in the world. This book shows how they can be used to promote worthy values in society. A must read for anyone wishing to use radio or television as positive forces in society.
An excellent resource which outlines the methodology of combining radio and television dramatic story-telling entertainment with pro-social educational goals. Documents several successful campaigns carried out in various countries which promoted safe sex, lower birth rates, and higher status of women. Other projects introduced agricultural techniques and other topics.
Average customer rating:
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Soap Operas for Social Change: Toward a Methodology for Entertainment-Education Television (Media and Society Series)
Heidi Noel Nariman
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
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Book Description
In 1975, the Mexican network Televisa broadcast the first "entertainment-education" soap opera, which was written and produced by Miguel Sabido according to his own theory-based research formula. The soap opera, called "Ven Conmigo" ("Come with Me"), promoted a government-sponsored adult literacy program, and its commercial and social success prompted Televisa to produce, broadcast, and research the audience effects of five other Sabido-designed soaps. Development themes treated in these shows included family planning, women's rights, responsible parenthood, and adolescent sexual education. Each of the six entertainment-education soap operas was exported for broadcast in other Latin American nations and achieved high ratings consistent with the ratings of conventional soaps. Subsequent evaluation research indicated that these educational soaps did successfully increase viewers' awareness and acceptance of their respective messages. Nariman examines Sabido's model with particular attention given to communication and behavioral theories that constitute parts of the formula: the hierarchy of effects model by William McGuire, the social learning theory developed by Albert Bandura, the dramatic theory proposed by Eric Bentley, the two-step-flow theory of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and opinion leadership as articulated by Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet. Nariman details the historical, social, and political context within which Sabido's formula emerged in Mexico, and discusses the research and application of the research data in actual soap opera design and production. Nariman discusses results of these evaluations conducted in Latin America, then provides an overview of the diffusion of the Sabido formula to other countries and media in India, Kenya, Zaire, Pakistan, and other developing countries. Each chapter includes lively examples from Sabido's soap operas that are highlighted by sample dialogue, plots, and character profiles. The volume takes an important step towards breaking down the traditional concept of informational or educational campaigns as mutually exclusive from commercial mass media entertainment.
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