Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem (Expedition Series)

Book Description

Baltimore Sun movie critic Stephen Hunter takes aim at 13 years (1981-94) of popular movies, from film noir to teenage slashers, gangster flicks to sci-fi pics, and examines the current, and often violent, culture of modern cinema. Organized by topic, this book is a fascinating chronicle of today's increasingly violent and alienating culture.

Customer Reviews:

A favorite author of thrillers is a movie critic.......2004-11-10

I've read many of Stephen Hunter's novels, and have some more yet to read. This book, Violent Screen, intrigued me by its title because I have long noted that Hollywood, populated as it is with a preponderance of liberal, anti-gun, anti-violence sob sisters, cannot seem to make a movie without featuring gun violence, homicidal car chases, and other socially unacceptable action on a grand scale.

The average citizen of the United States has never, WILL never, in a normal lifetime, be witness, even once, to most of the violent acts that, if you judge our society by what Hollywood portrays, is a normal daily occurrence on our streets.

The so-called "Wild West," for example, depicted by Hollywood, with its stand-up quick-draw shoot-outs, is the product of the fevered imaginations of screenwriters and Eastern pulp fiction purveyors. If the truth were known, Eastern cities were far more violent than the Western villages of the nineteenth century.

But, Stephen Hunter is not judgmental about such things. His appreciation for their product goes beyond such judgments. His criticism is of their craft, not their agenda. Perhaps that is as it should be.

Despite the fact that his novels show evidence of a writer with encyclopedic knowledge of firearms, and it is evident that he is a shooter, which he himself confesses, his movie reviews show a different man: one who is sensitive to the feminist cause, and a sensitive portrayal of the "alternate life-style." While his novels, particularly the Bob Lee Swagger series, are filled with violence, crude language, torture, and denigrating racial depictions, in Violent Screen another writer emerges: a thoughtful, careful thinker whose sensitivities are subtle and nuanced.

There is no doubt that Stephen Hunter is a skilled writer, with an extraordinary vocabulary, and a wonderful ability to tell a story that holds you entranced. What this book shows me is that he is also a man I'd like to know. He is a critical thinker of the first rank, whose opinions I can respect.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)
author of Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books

the thinking person's action-movie guide.......2004-07-15

Hunter's capsule reviews of several dozen violent movies of various genres is a great read for the film fanatic. Like Roger Ebert, you often find yourself recognizing the truth of what he is saying even as he is bashing some of your favorite films. Hunter is a perceptive critic who can provide great insight into specific films, yet somehow the scope of the book seems too narrow, despite several broader articles about films interspersed between the reviews; THE DEER HUNTER, for instance, is dismissed as a minor and flawed piece of film-making in just a few lines without going in-depth into why he feels this way. It is frustrating little things like this which prevent me from giving it five stars. Still, this book provides much food for thought for the film buff.

Insightful? I think not.......2003-06-09

Stephen Hunter's book first attracted me because of the blunt manner in which he confronts America's obsession with violence, as characterized by the movies we love. This initial fondness for his boldness soon drifts away, as I read his various selections on individual movies.
I think Hunter misses the point; he does not understand the contradictions he forms in his numerous, faulty reviews. He criticizes such films that deal with cruel portayals of violence, yet he seems utterly captivated with documentaries of real-life American crime.
His harsh undermining of "Unforgiven" leaves me with several questions. How can someone so opionated with violence on-screen by so opposed to a movie that is so blatantly a cry against violence? Did Hunter miss the point? Does he think Eastwood's character is supposed to be likeable?
Hunter nearly ruins his book in one line: "it wasn't even a good picture" (referring to "The Deer Hunter"). He claims that it was a horrible portrayal of racism and an ultimate "technical blunder." Yet, Hunter deals with this movie in a mere four lines, while giving the gun selection of the cast in "The Wild Bunch" several pages.
The one highlight of the book is the epilogue, a haunting look at Hunter's father. This portrayal of a "Father of Darkness" is where Hunter's talent as a writer truly shows through. It is a shame, then, to remember the precedeing 380 pages after reading this troubling portrait.

Sleaze and evil on screen.......2003-03-21

This book gives a a short look at some of the most controversial movies Hollywood has made. It separates movies into different categories like action-adventure, film noir, horr, war, etc., so you can expect what you are about to read. Finally, it asks a question: If our nation is against violence so much, why are we supporting movies that contain so much of it?
I enjoyed reading Violent Screen somewhat. It showcased a few of my favorite movies such as Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dongs, and my all-time favorite, True Romance, all directed by Quentin Tarintono. But I got bored by reading about movies I can't stand like Born on the Fourth of July and Scarface. Author Steven Hunter also included reviews of movies like Thelma and Louise; that confused me. I didn't feel that it was violent or controversial enough to be featured in this book. Atfer reading other reviews, such as that of Romeo Is Bleeding, I wanted to see the movie as soon as possible.
Overall, I found Violent Screen a mediocre book. I enjoyed reading about some of my favorite movies, but flipped the pages of the ones that bored me. There were a few movies that made me wonder why they were even in the book. I enjoyed reading Hunter's opinions. Part of the "fun" of this book was seeing what he thought about my favorite movies. I agreed with the author about half of the time, but you are not always supposed to agree with a movie review. Also, I found the book to be a bit too long. If I were to recommend this book to someone, it would be to a person who likes violent movies. Anyone else should stay as far away as possible.

Short bursts in this book........2002-02-26

America is often seen by the world as a society that glorifies violence, as demonstrated by our movies. This book takes on that topic head on. The reviews themselves are very helpful. Some movies receive praise, others the opposite. Violent movies expose our flaws and show our conscience. Read this book if you are interested in good movies.

Book Description

Holden Caulfield, the beat writers, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and James Dean—these and other avatars of youthful rebellion were much more than entertainment. As Leerom Medovoi shows, they were often embraced and hotly debated at the dawn of the Cold War era because they stood for dissent and defiance at a time when the ideological production of the United States as leader of the “free world” required emancipatory figures who could represent America’s geopolitical claims. Medovoi argues that the “bad boy” became a guarantor of the country’s anti-authoritarian, democratic self-image: a kindred spirit to the freedom-seeking nations of the rapidly decolonizing third world and a counterpoint to the repressive conformity attributed to both the Soviet Union abroad and America’s burgeoning suburbs at home.

Alongside the young rebel, the contemporary concept of identity emerged in the 1950s. It was in that decade that “identity” was first used to define collective selves in the politicized manner that is recognizable today: in terms such as “national identity” and “racial identity.” Medovoi traces the rapid absorption of identity themes across many facets of postwar American culture, including beat literature, the young adult novel, the Hollywood teen film, early rock ‘n’ roll, black drama, and “bad girl” narratives. He demonstrates that youth culture especially began to exhibit telltale motifs of teen, racial, sexual, gender, and generational revolt that would burst into political prominence during the ensuing decades, bequeathing to the progressive wing of contemporary American political culture a potent but ambiguous legacy of identity politics.

Book Description

This book shows you how to use two Unix utilities, lex and yacc, in program development. These tools help programmers build compilers and interpreters, but they also have a wider range of applications. The second edition contains completely revised tutorial sections for novice users and reference sections for advanced users. This edition is twice the size of the first and has an expanded index. The following material has been added:

Each utility is explained in a chapter that covers basic usage and simple, stand-alone applications
How to implement a full SQL grammar, with full sample code
Major MS-DOS and Unix versions of lex and yacc are explored in depth, including AT&T lex and yacc, Berkeley yacc, Berkeley/GNU Flex, GNU Bison, MKS lex and yacc, and Abraxas PCYACC

Customer Reviews:

A good book to have when using lex & yacc.......2006-12-14

I like this book because it is a good compromise between lex & yacc man pages and the theory found in books such as the Dragon book. You will get valuable information about the how and why of the tools that will help you to produce a quality grammar without being overwhelmed by details.

Not a Mind Meld.......2006-08-23

To me a great book flows into your mind, magically providing the information in the order you need it. Of course it depends on whose reading it, but this book, though well worth the 96 cents bargain bin price I paid for it, does not build the constructs in my head the way I'd like.

Authors should always proofread their books with novices, not the experts. Experts fill in the gaps as they read and don't notice if the logic is missing a link. In chap 2, "Using Lex", there is the sentence: "Lex itself doesn't produce an executable program; instead it translates the lex specification into a file containing a C routine called yylex(). Your program calls yylex() to run the lexer."

I waited with baited breath for what it means to "run the lexer". Does it return a token each time you call it? Does it analyze all the input then return? The text ignores this detail and merrily goes on into other details. The chapter is called "Using Lex", but the authors omit how you use it! Of course you can scrounge around in the examples and finally root it out, but a book should paint a crystal clear picture, get you oriented, then drop in the details to build your understanding.

The book looks so promising, sort of like the beauty of the original "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie, but disappoints in it's fragmented exposition.

I did take a compiler course with the "dragon book" years ago and write a parser, so I'm not totally in the dark, but I expected this book to lay the subject out in a much clearer way. But it is still a good book to have and read "offline".

I hope the authors take a crack at another edition and explain it all better.

Very good guide to an old but useful programming tool.......2006-06-26

Yacc (yet another compiler compiler) and its companion lex (lexical analyzer) are primarily intended to allow quick and easy development of small special-purpose languages. The common mistake is assuming that they are only useful for creating compilers for massively complex eccentric languages. This is not the case, though you could no doubt use them for such a purpose.

Lex and Yacc are commonly used together. Yacc uses a formal grammar to parse an input stream, something which lex cannot do using simple regular expressions since lex is limited to simple finite state automata. However, yacc cannot read from a simple input stream - it requires a series of tokens. Lex is often used to provide yacc with these tokens. As a result, building an application in lex and yacc is often used as an exercise in classes on programming languages and the theory of computation to demonstrate key concepts.

The book starts out building a simple character-driven calculator, and then moves on to build a menu generation language that produces C code that uses the standard "curses" library to draw menus on the screen. The final application is a SQL parser which includes a quick overview of both relational databases and SQL. Some readers will dislike the fact that Lex and Yacc are only capable of generating C code. Thus, the logical conclusion is that you must be able to write C code in order to use these tools. While it would be nice if the sections about the menu generation language and the SQL parser had some information about how to do typechecking and other such things, this book is not about writing a compiler/interpreter using Lex & Yacc. Rather it is just a beginner's guide.

The sections about shift/reduce and reduce/reduce conflicts are especially helpful, as are the sections going over the differences and caveats relating to the major versions of lex and yacc such as AT&T's Lex & YACC, GNU's Flex & Bison, and Berkeley's Yacc. In summary, if you've never used lex or yacc before and think they might be useful tools for you, and you already know the C programming language, this is a handy book to have.

Delivers what is say it will.......2006-06-24

This book is a little out-dated. That is fine, though - this book goes over all the essential proponents of Lex and Yacc and Bison and FLEX and all the other variations ... which you will certainly know a lot more about by the end of this book. This books enabled me to read FLEX input from a c-string, which has played a role in a few of my projects. It is great when you just need a quick reminder of the syntax is the tools. This book does not go over how the programs work, which is a good thing, because that would make the book more oriented towards Finite Autonoma and Context Sensive Languages - leave that sort of thing to autonoma theory and compiler design. This is an excellent reference, so buy it if you really need it.

A very nice intro.......2005-08-23

About the previous review: if the book is "OK", why two stars? Nevertheless, the poster is correct in that the book by Alex Schreiner, Introduction to Compiler Construction With Unix, is very good, and much more detailed and practical than Lex and Yacc by Levine. Which doesn't make the latter a bad book: I think it's the best book to read first; it's simple, friendly, and -- as far as it goes -- very enlightening.

Introduction to Compiling Techniques: A First Course Using ANSI C, Lex, and Yacc (The Mcgraw-Hill International Series in Software Engineering)

Average customer rating:

Very good introduction

Introduction to Compiling Techniques: A First Course Using ANSI C, Lex, and Yacc (The Mcgraw-Hill International Series in Software Engineering)
Jeremy Peter Bennett
Manufacturer: Mcgraw-Hill College
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0077072154

Customer Reviews:

Very good introduction.......2001-09-14

This book is much easier to read and understand than the Dragon book. The Dragon book goes into more depth, but then this book here is supposed to be an introductory text. If you are looking for one get this book before the Dragon book.

Average customer rating:

MKS LEX & Yacc Reference Manual
Mortice Kern Systems Inc.
Manufacturer: Mortice Kern Systems Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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MKS LEX & Yacc Reference Manual (Compiler Construction Tools)

Average customer rating:

MKS LEX & Yacc Reference Manual (Compiler Construction Tools)

Manufacturer: Mortice Kerns Systems, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1895033047

Average customer rating:

MKS, LEX, & YACC Reference Manual

Manufacturer: Mortice Kern Systems
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1895033268

Using C With Curses, Lex, and Yacc: Building a Window Shell for Univ System V

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Using C With Curses, Lex, and Yacc: Building a Window Shell for Univ System V
Axel-Tobias Schreiner
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Operating Systems | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

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Übersetzerbau: Techniken, Werkzeuge, Anwendungen (Springer-Lehrbuch)

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Übersetzerbau: Techniken, Werkzeuge, Anwendungen (Springer-Lehrbuch)
Ralf H. Güting , and Martin Erwig
Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Programming | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 3540653899

Book Description

Das Buch bietet eine kompakte Einführung in die Grundlagen und Techniken des Übersetzerbaus. Übersetzer transformieren Texte einer Quellsprache, deren Struktur durch eine formale Grammatik beschrieben ist, in eine Zielsprache. Die Übersetzung imperativer Programmiersprachen in Maschinensprache ist dabei nur ein Spezialfall. Dieses Lehrbuch betont die vielseitige Verwendbarkeit von Übersetzerbau-Techniken. Insbesondere kann man mit Methoden der Syntaxanalyse Strukturen in Texten, Dateien oder Byte-Strömen identifizieren. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt in der Verbindung von Theorie und Praxis und der Einübung der Benutzung von Werkzeugen wie Lex und Yacc. So wird u.a. die vollständige Implementierung eines Übersetzers einer einfachen Dokument-Beschreibungssprache nach LaTeX vorgeführt. Angemessen berücksichtigt wird auch die Implementierung imperativer und funktionaler Sprachen. Das didaktisch ansprechende Buch enthält Übungsaufgaben mit Lösungen und ist auch zum Selbststudium geeignet.

Average customer rating:

Lex & Yacc - Second Edition
John R.; Mason, Tony; Brown, Doug Levine
Manufacturer: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K1QUI0

Average customer rating:

Mks Lex & Yacc

ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1089503326

Product Description

installation and tutorial program for computer software

Average customer rating:

Mks: Lex & Yacc

Manufacturer: Mortice Kern Systems, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 1895033160

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