The Walt Disney Company offers a vast universe of movies, television shows, theme parks, and merchandise, all carefully crafted to present an image of wholesome family entertainment. Yet Disney also produced one of the most infamous Hollywood films, Song of the South. Using cartoon characters and live actors to retell the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, SotS portrays a kindly black Uncle Remus who tells tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the "Tar Baby" to adoring white children. Audience...

This analysis of the films of P. T. Anderson is "a case study of how even the most self-determined directors are always borne aloft by cultural events" ( Cineaste).From his film festival debut Hard Eight to ambitious studio epics Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's unique cinematic vision focuses on postmodern excess and media culture. In Blossoms and Blood, ...

The first in-depth analysis of the films of Alexander Payne through the lenses of authorship, tourism, and leisure.With the films Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska, and The Holdovers, Alexander Payne has carved out an unusual role in American cinema as a bankable auteur. There is something about Payne’s neurotics and searchers, his working stiffs and disillusioned idealists—something funny, moving, and filled w...

Many of Stanley Kubrick's films are often interpreted as cold and ambiguous. Whether viewing Barry Lyndon, 2001, The Shining, or Eyes Wide Shut, there is a sense in which these films resist their own audiences, creating a distance from them. Though many note the coldness of Kubrick's films, a smaller number attempt to explore exactly how his body of work elicits this particular reaction. Fewer still attempt to articulate what it might mean to "feel" Stan...

Traces the complex and contradictory representations of Hawai'i in popular film and television programs from the 1930s to the 1970s.The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of "Hawai'i" for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the boo...