19 research outputs found
Adam Sandler as (questionable) masculine ‘role model’: towards an analysis of disgust and violence in Adam Sandler's comedian comedy
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Adam Sandler's film work has been critically vilified and paid little attention by academics. This article suggests that his work justifies sustained academic attention, yet I conclude that he offers questionable masculine role models dependent on masculinity being asserted via ambivalent dis-identification with gay men and women. I argue this case via critique of the most sustained analyses of his workand via close readings of aspects of Sandler's films. I dispute Chapman's contextualisation of Sandler's film comedies in relation to thinking about masculinity and gay men. These changes have arisen in response to feminism and the lesbian and gay movement. I argue that Chapman's contextualisation of, and the ambiguities of Sandler's engagement with, feminism and gay men needs more critical attention. Further, I argue that we should actively read Sandler's films using Seidman's idea of comedian comedy and that focusing attention on such comedies’ tensions with narrative film enable us to direct our critical attention on the ambivalences present in Sandler's movies. His films show resistance to relinquishing some privileges of dominant forms of masculinity (physical violence) and demonstrate disgust withthe sexuality, bodies and behaviour of gay men
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Hollywood Comedians: the Film Reader
This critical anthology brings together new and pre-published scholarly material devoted to comedians and to the cinematic, cultural and industrial contexts within which they worked. As well as offering ways of reading the development of the comedian film, from the silent era to the contemporary period, the book also introduces diverse approaches to the study of the comedian film from scholars such as Tom Gunning, Peter Kramer, Steve Seidman, Henry Jenkins, Patricia Mellencamp, Kathleen Rowe and Steve Neale. The book explores the relations between film and other media (vaudeville, television, stand-up performance), between the carnivalesque and genre, and between performance and narrative; it also examines how the comedian film has provided a forum for working through representations of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality and the body. Krutnik is one of the pioneers in this area, whose work is extensively cited in the growing critical literature on the field. This volume extends his earlier explorations of the comedian film, inaugurated in the 1984 Screen article, The Clown Prints of Comedy, and developed through a range of subsequent publications. Beyond its usefulness as a teaching resource, the book also signals and develops paradigms for the scholarly study of films that are often marginalized within established agendas of film and cultural studies. Besides compiling and editing this collection, Krutnik also provided a 10,000 word general introduction and introductory material for the books five sections (a further 5-6000 words in total). The introduction not only outlines the various contributions presented in the book but aims to provide a more wide-ranging and rigorous scrutiny of a range of formal, historical and ideological approaches to performer-centred comedy. It seeks to locate the comedian film, and the representational issues it raises, within broader histories of both Hollywood and traditions of critical discourse on film and popular culture
Auteur meets genre: Rohmer and the rom-com
Eric Rohmer’s influence on filmic chroniclers of love within the auteur
canon is widely recognized. This essay seeks to situate his oeuvre within a different cinematic historiography: that of genre cinema in general and romantic comedy specifically. In so doing it answers Celestino Deleyto’s call for a reappraisal of films usually seen as outside mainstream genericity from this perspective.1 Given that genre is a site of exchange between filmic institutions and audiences, both of which—even in the case of the more specialized audience targeted by Rohmer—interact with culture more broadly, the point of such an approach is to examine the role played by Rohmer’s work in mediating historically and locally specific notions about coupling and romance. In other words, this analysis will reinsert into a particular social context films that have most frequently been understood to exist as “pure
cinema,” outside histor
'Con me if you can': Exploring crime in the American cinematic imagination
This article deals with current re-dramatizations of crime and popular criminologies. It analyses key elements of the popular criminological imaginaries underpinning a recent and highly successful film-Catch Me If You Can-in order to tease out the discursive, mythical and fabulist techniques by which it communicates particular imaginations of crime. Additionally, the article offers some conceptual and analytical anchors for interpreting filmwork so that other popular representations might be more easily situated within criminological analysis. We argue that popular media portrayals of crime are highly effective in sustaining particular conceptions of the interaction between crime and wider social conditions, and we explore four layers of discursive work through which this film communicates the causes and consequences of criminal behaviour