Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen is a detailed look at the depiction of teens on film and its impact throughout film's history. Timothy Shary looks at the development of the teen movie – the rebellion, the romance, the sex and the horror – up to contemporary portrayals of ever-changing youth. Films studied include Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961), Carrie (1976), The Breakfast Club (1985), and American Pie ...

Women today are inundated with conflicting messages from the mass media: they must either be strong leaders in complete command or sex kittens obsessed with finding and pleasing a man. In The Rise Of Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas, one of America's most entertaining and insightful cultural critics, takes readers on a spirited journey through the television programs, popular songs, movies, and news coverage of recent years, telling a story that is nothing less than the cultur...

Is The Wire better than Breaking Bad? Is Cheers better than Seinfeld? What's the best high school show ever made? Why did Moonlighting really fall apart? Was the Arrested Development Netflix season brilliant or terrible?For twenty years-since they shared a TV column at Tony Soprano's hometown newspaper-critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have been debating these questions and many more, but it all ultimately boils down ...

From Jezebel.com, the popular website for women, comes a must-read encyclopedic guide to pop culture, feminism, fashion, sex, and much more.Within months of Jezebel's May 2007 appearance on the new media scene, fans of the blog began referring to themselves as "Jezzies" in comment threads and organizing reader meet-ups in cities all over the world. By 2008, the devotion of the self-appointed Jezzies reached such a fever pitch that the New York Times ran a ...

From the author of the bestselling Prozac Nation comes one of the most entertaining feminist manifestos ever written. In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history...

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

N ational B ook C ritics C ircle A ward Winner . "With dazzling clarity, [Chocano's] commentary exposes the subliminal sexism on our pages and screens."— O, The Oprah MagazineAs a kid in the 1970s and 80s, Carina Chocano was confused ...

260 movies, past and present, are reviewed in this high-energy, very funny journey through the world of film, as Marc Fennell, Hungry Beaster, TripleJ film reviewer, polymath, kills your social life by programming your DVD viewing for every weekend of the year.PRAISE FOR MARC FENNELL'Witty, irreverent and fun ...'Good Reading'Gold!'Cleo'A film companion with a difference'Daily NewsSO MANY MOVIES ... ...

Children choose their heroes more carefully than we think. From Pokemon to the rapper Eminem, pop-culture icons are not simply commercial pied pipers who practice mass hypnosis on our youth. Indeed, argues the author of this lively and persuasive paean to the power of popular culture, even violent and trashy entertainment gives children something they need, something that can help both boys and girls develop in a healthy way. Drawing on a wealth of true stories, many gleaned from the fasci...

Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape throughout his childhood and adolescence. As an adult, pop culture became his life. Head writer for A.V. Club for more than a decade, Rabin uses specific books, songs, albums, films, and television shows as springboards for dissecting his Dickensian life story in his acclaimed memoir The Big Rewind.Rabin writes movingly and hilariously about how pop culture helped save him from sui...

“Leto is as funny as she is well-read; a delight for bibliophiles and wannabes alike.”—Wylie Overstreet, author of The History of the World According to FacebookLauren Leto, humor blogger and co-author of Texts from Last Night, now offers a fascinating field guide to the hearts and minds of readers everywhere. Judging a Book by Its Lover is like a literary Sh*t My Dad Says—an unrelentingly witty and delightfully irreverent guide to the intricate world of passionate literary...

WITH 8 PAGES OF BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHSHow—and why—do we obsess over movie stars? How does fame both reflect and mask the person behind it? How have the image of stardom and our stars’ images altered over a century of cultural and technological change? Do we create celebrities, or do they create us?Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe, answers these questions in this lively and fascinating anecdotal history of stardom, with all its blessin...