Film Entertainment

As an only child raised in a town of less than 8,000 people and without a Starbucks in sight, Meghan Rienks has always been pretty good at entertaining herself. Then one day — cue the dramatic voiceover — her life changed forever. In 2010, Meghan was diagnosed with mononucleosis. Mono is basically just a really bad case of the flu, right? Wrong. To a party-crazed 16-year-old, mono is social suicide. More than anything, it’s just plain boring.

Peter Cowie's book chronicles the life and the sixty-year film and stage career of Ingmar Bergman as he wrestles of themes of love, sex, and betrayal with the figure of Death hovering overhead. Blending biographical information with critical comment, Cowie presents a man whose life and work were intimately fused.

A fascinating and hilarious deep dive into 30 Rock, Tina Fey's beloved modern classic comedy. In this combination of narrative and oral history, culture writer and editor Mike Roe brings to life the history of the gloriously goofy show through interviews with the creators, stars, writers, and bit players.

Hosts Mike Kalinowski and Brad Gilmore team up in this comprehensive breakdown of the longest running film series in the history of cinema. In Bond, James Bond, they explore the cinematic history of the James Bond collection to celebrate everything it got right and reflect on everything it got wrong.

Encouraged by her mother, Sophie Neville kept a diary about her time filming on location in the lakes and mountains of Cumbria. Bouncy and effervescent, extracts from her childhood diary are interspersed among her memories of the cast and crew, offering a child's eye view of the making of the film from development to premiere—and the aftermath.

Josephine Alibrandi is 17 and in her final year of school. Dealing with her mum and the ways of her Nonna are daunting enough as she prepares for her exams. But Josie is about to discover real life gets in the way of her carefully-made plans.

Are you ready to raise your writing game? Discover advanced creative writing techniques to take your fiction, drama, and poetry to a new level! Dramatic techniques are all about bold, clear, high-impact writing. Once you discover the craft concepts used by screen and stage writers to bring stories to life, you’ll never look back. This practical guide to dramatic concepts will give you confidence in structure, plotting and character, and may even blow your mind. At the very least, you’ll kick yourself for not discovering them sooner.

The Star Wars films continue to revolutionize science fiction, creating new standards for cinematographic excellence and permeating popular culture around the world. The films feature many complex themes ranging from good versus evil and moral development and corruption to religious faith and pragmatism, forgiveness and redemption, and many others.

Why would anyone want to watch horror movies? Why would Christians, in particular, bother with the genre? In Fear Not!, critic Josh Larsen makes the case that monster movies, creature features, slashers, and other fright films artfully reflect our deep worries in a way that resonates with the Christian experience. Combining critical observation and theological reflection, Larsen devotes each chapter to a different horror subgenre, connecting that subgenre to a commonly shared fear.

Rita Hayworth was the epitome of 1940s glamour. A legendary "Love Goddess", she was a huge box-office star, and her sultry beauty and sensational figure made her into one of Hollywood's greatest sex-symbols: a pin-up so incendiary that GIs pasted it on to the first atom bomb ever detonated.

Are you the trivia buff in your friend group? Maybe you're just always hoping to learn more random facts to keep up your sleeve. Whether you're a regular trivia fanatic or someone looking for a fun audiobook to listen to, this audiobook goes beyond the scope of general knowledge into some of the most interesting facts and intriguing trivia tidbits out there.

"Cinema speculation" è la storia di un bambino innamorato del cinema che passa le serate con i genitori nelle sale di Los Angeles. Quello spettatore vorace, che preferisce ai giochi l’incanto del grande schermo, cresce affascinato da una nuova generazione di attori e registi – come Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah, Don Siegel, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese – che dalla fine degli anni Sessanta spazza via la vecchia Hollywood.

Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but while Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film - aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre's major players, New York Times critic Jason Zinoman's Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror's golden age.

Salka Viertel's autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman's pilgrimage through the darkest years of the 20th century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, "a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the 20th century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies."

Believe it or not, America's fascination with celebrity culture was thriving well before the days of TMZ, Perez Hilton, Charlie Sheen's breakdown, and allegations against Woody Allen. And the stars of yesteryear? They weren't always the saints that we make them out to be. Part biography, part cultural history, the stories contained in this book cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups.

Is the Dude a bowling-loving stoner or a philosophical genius living the good life? Naturally, it's the latter, and The Big Lebowski and Philosophy explains why. Enlisting the help of great thinkers like Plato and Nietzsche, the book explores the movie's hidden philosophical layers, cultural reflection, and political commentary.

The saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Visé reveals, is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd; the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard’s Lampoon and Chicago’s Second City; the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry; and, of course, the indelible behind-the-scenes narrative of how the film was made, scene by memorable scene.

With unforgettable performances such as Moses in The Ten Commandments, the anguished astronaut George Taylor in 1968's Planet of the Apes, and the eponymous Ben-Hur - for which he won an Academy Award - Charlton Heston cemented his place in the pantheon of 20th-century Hollywood royalty. But his fame as an actor was matched by his political activism. A Democrat in his early years, Heston became a staunch supporter of Richard Nixon and Reagan Republicanism.

In the spring of 1987, over 60 million viewers tuned in to watch Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis) “get together” in one of the most famously controversial scenes in television history on Moonlighting, ABC’s groundbreaking series about an epically mismatched pair of private detectives. Two years later, the show was canceled due to low ratings. What happened?

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea.