Sleeping Dogs

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

PAUL, William

Mystery

Constable

Analyzes the style and social themes of the comic films made in Hollywood by the director, Ernst Lubitsch

Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Columbia Univ. Pr.

Humor & Entertainment

William Paul's exploration of an extremely popular box office genre - the gross-out movie - is the first book to take this lowbrow product seriously. Writing about "movies that embraced the lowest common denominator as an aesthetic principle, movies that critics constantly griped about having to sit through, " Paul examines their unique place in our culture. He focuses on gross-out horror and comedy films of the seventies and eighties - film cycles set in motion by the extraordinary successes of The Exorcist and Animal House. What links these genres together, Paul argues, is their concern with the human body - and all its scatological and sexual aspects. These "films of license, " as Paul calls them, embrace "explicitness as part of their aesthetic." Tracing both of these culturally disreputable subgenres back to older traditions of festive comedy and Grand Guignol, Paul finds their precursors in horror films like The Birds and Night of the Living Dead as well as comedies such as M*A*S*H and Blazing Saddles that were produced under Hollywood's then recently liberalized censorship code. Moving on to mass tastes, Paul asserts that American audiences are "not without powers of discrimination." He argues that gross-out movies challenge social tastes and values, but without the self-consciousness of avant-garde art. Through interpretations of classics by Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, blaxploitation movies, horror films by David Cronenburg and Stanley Kubrick, and comedies starring John Belushi and Bill Murray, Paul establishes gross-out as a true genre - one that "speaks in the voice of festive freedom, uncorrected and unconstrained by the reality principle... aggressive, seeminglyimprovised, and always ambivalent."

Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (Film and Culture)

Movies

Columbia University Press

Traces the history of horror and comedy entertainment, and examines the two genres, dissecting and analyzing scenes from such movies as "Porky's" and "Alien"

Laughing Screaming

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (Film and Culture Series)

There was a time when seeing a movie meant more than seeing a film. The theater itself shaped the very perception of events on screen. This multilayered history tells the story of American film through the evolution of theater architecture and the surprisingly varied ways movies were shown, ranging from Edison's 1896 projections to the 1968 Cinerama premiere of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. William Paul matches distinct architectural forms to movie styles, showing how cinema's roots in theater influenced business practices, exhibition strategies, and film technologies.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Photography & Video

Introducing Detective Chief Inspector David Fyfe, a tired Edinburgh cop whose disregard for law enforcement by the book is both his strength and his weakness. Too far into middle age, too lax about his marriage vows, too fond of booze, and too sarcastic to be popular among the department higher-ups, Fyfe would love to resign. But he can't - too steep a mortgage. Fyfe has owed the chief constable a favor ever since he saved Fyfe's job when Fyfe undoubtedly deserved to be fired. When the chief presents him with a particularly sticky case of funds missing from a church treasury, Fyfe knows he can't refuse. Furthermore, when a priest's murder connects this penny-ante parish theft to a homicide and drug ring investigation Fyfe helped to crack eight years before, he sees an opportunity to prove his worth again as a homicide detective. If only he weren't so involved with the beautiful but manipulative woman who turns out to be the main suspect...

St Martins Pr

Edinburgh's Detective Chief Inspector David Fyfe is a middle-aged police detective with a fondness for the easy way out. So he can't refuse the opportunity to escape Edinburgh's usual urban confusion for a murder-suicide in a sleepy village in the Scottish Highlands, especially when he discovers that he'll be overseeing a case led by a young female detective inspector. He promises to give her - er, the case - his full attention. Unfortunately, peppered with false leads and a growing number of murder victims, the investigation gets more dangerous by the hour, forcing DCI Fyfe and DI McBain to put business before pleasure.

Sleeping Pretty

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PAUL, William. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PAUL, William

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PAUL, William. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sleeping Dogs

Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy

Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy

Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (Film and Culture)

Laughing Screaming

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (Film and Culture Series)

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (Film and Culture Series)

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film (Film and Culture Series)

Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Pretty