Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem ANNOTATION
Gun buff, movie critic and bestselling author of Dirty White Boys, Stephen Hunter takes aim at 13 years of violence on the big screen, hitting the highlights and the lowlifes, the thrills, the chills, and the kills, with deadly precision, explosive prose and devastating good humor.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Baltimore Sun film critic Stephen Hunter is an unrivaled master of his craft. This extraordinary collection includes the best of Hunter's movie reviews, taking aim at the 100 most important (or notorious) violent films released since 1982. With an incisive, machine-gun style of writing, Hunter pulls no punches when he bashes Blue Velvet, Tombstone, and Legends of the Fall. And he doesn't hold back in his praise of The Wild Bunch, GoodFellas, and Reservoir Dogs. Commenting on movies and society, Tarantino, Stone, and Peckinpah, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sly Stallone, and Glenn Close, Hunter cuts right to the bone in exposing our flaws, fantasies, and flat-out love affair with blood and gore. His reviews are classics, and this collection is like a straight shot of pure adrenaline -- an electrifying jolt of truth and insight no moviegoer can ignore.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Since long before Robert Dole's condemnation of Hollywood, on-screen sex and violence as well as their companion issue, censorship, have been the focus of hot debate. Critics' views on these issues are often enlightening, and these two books present many thought-provoking perspectives on the artistic, historic, social, and cultural aspects of the subject-ultimately proving that there are no simple criteria on the cinematic front. Reviews and essays on individual films from such top-notch critics as Andrew Sarris and Judith Crist appear in Flesh and Blood. Representative of 25-plus years of film, scores of articles are grouped into various subtopics under the headings of "Flesh," "Blood," and "Censorship." A broad spectrum of opinions, linked by editor Keough's articles, examine some tough issues (AIDS, senseless brutality, exploitation of women, blasphemy, graphic sex, etc.) with approaches that range from scholarly to humanistic to satiric. Violent Screen, on the other hand, offers pithy reviews and articles solely from the engaging pen of Hunter (Dirty White Boys, LJ 10/15/94). He categorizes by genre, thus creatively organizing a virtual laundry list of sex and violence: film noir, outlaws, sexual obsession, horror, westerns, war, action-adventure, race, and domestic violence, to name a few. And many of the summary articles have provocative social/historical angles (e.g., "Changing Film Images of Vietnam"). Covering the gamut from Philadelphia to Rambo to Blue Velvet, both these works will delight cineaste and casual browser alike and either contains enough grist for several years of debate on the subject. Both are well recommended for circulating libraries with cinema collections.-Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, N.J.
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