As I was saying..."A Companion to the Action Film"

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm proud to have my chapter on Asian action films and their impact on Hollywood included in this new book by James Kendrick.

A genre that is often overlooked by film studies, this book includes essays by the most accomplished scholars of action cinema, including Lisa Purse, Mark Gallagher, Cynthia M. King, Susan Jeffords, and Yvonne Tasker, among others.

Far from being an entertainment of just shallow, kinetic spectacle, action films, as the essays in this volume explain, have long reflected a wide a range of social, political, and gender issues and controversies American society has wrestled with for over a century now.

So check out this book...and check out some of the best action films ever made.

The joy of horror!

And for a complete change of pace, check out this article about horror films on the Rewire webpage I was interviewed for. Horror's one of my favorite genres and this piece has a good discussion about why telling scary stories is one of the oldest forms of story telling.

When I teach my courses on horror films and media theories, we often come around to the discussion of horror and our need to feel fear. In fact, probably the first stories cave people told around the campfire were horror stories. The uses and gratifications theory of how audiences make their choices in entertainment and information also raises interesting questions about why people might be so enthusiastic to seek out films and books that will keep them up all night with fear. Our need to seek out a safe scare, the opportunity to experience the kind of fear you can stop at any time by changing the channel or closing the cover of the book, probably has a lot to do with it. Research has also shown that fans of extremely graphic horror films--the kinds that have been termed "torture porn"--like to watch such films as a sort of personal test. How long can they watch the blood and gore and mayhem before they cover their eyes?

But horror is most effective when it mirrors the real world and symbolically speaks to fears we have in our every day lives. The article discusses how the major horror films that attained iconic status over the decades had also been extremely effective metaphorical mirrors on the times they were made in.

Check it out for my comments and also great comments from James Kendrick, film professor from Baylor University who edited the new book "A Companion to the Action Film," in which I have a chapter on Asian action films.