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Title: The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties by J. Hoberman ISBN: 1-56584-763-6 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent book about 50s-70s movies and culture
Comment: This is a great book. It touches on an almost dizzying number of milestones, from the fifties TV show "The Next Voice You Hear" to Brian De Palma's "Blow Out."
The point of the book, if there is one that can be easily summarized, is that political and cultural events (especially films) first became genuinely inseparable during the sixties (not dissimilar to the points that Marshall McLuhan made in "Understanding Media" and Daniel Boorstin made in "The Image: or What Happened to the American Dream" while history was happening, but, as Hoberman points out, that history could not have been fully understood by those prophets in the midst of it).
This is a masterfully rendered cultural history. Hoberman's style can get a little breathless at times, but you overlook that once you get involved in the narrative. Think "The Dirty Dozen," "Easy Rider," "Bonnie & Clyde," "Blow Up," "The Wild Bunch," "Shampoo" (and songs like "The Ballad of the Green Berets"): they're all here, along with the cultural context that they fed into and the "dream life" that they helped construct.
Rating: 4
Summary: Magical Mystery Tour of the Sixties
Comment: This is a wonderful book (I devoured it over a weekend). It examines the relationship between American social and political life and the movies during the turbulent decade of the Sixties, although the book actually covers films well into the Seventies. The book argues that this relationship was a two-way street, with the movies being influenced by what was happening in society, but also that the movies influenced politics and society. For example, Hoberman asserts that Kennedy's fascination with James Bond and secret agents and Nixon's obsession with the movie Patton to some extent influenced the style and substance of their presidencies. Another overarching theme of the book is how the Western, that most American of movie genres, evolved almost beyond recognition through the course of the Sixties and early Seventies (from The Alamo to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid).
Among the films prominently covered in the book are Blowup, Spartacus, The Manchurian Candidate, Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, and Dirty Harry, but the book also discusses more obscure films such as Tell Them Willie Boy is Here and Wild in the Streets. That most quintessential of all Sixties films, Woodstock, is oddly absent from the book.
A couple of quibbles: Hoberman quotes Norman Mailer far too often and it would have been nice to have a true bibliography rather than having to rummage through the source notes. That aside, I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in either the social history or films of the Sixties--you will not be disappointed!
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Title: The Magic Hour: Film at Fin De Siecle by J. Hoberman ISBN: 1566399963 Publisher: Temple University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film by Peter Biskind ISBN: 068486259X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin ISBN: 0851709842 Publisher: British Film Institute Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Essential Cinema by Jonathan Rosenbaum ISBN: 0801878403 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 30 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy by Colin McCabe, Sally Shafto ISBN: 0374163782 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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