Movies Books

I haven't actually read it, but I own The Movies and I think it's a great game. If this guide will acknowledge you with everything you need to know about it and provide walkthroughs, I'm guessing the guide should be awesome.

A very colorful and helpful book. It gives many of the numbers behind the game. Did you know that you can only use each of the cars three times before that item reaches its overuse limit and future copies of that item only generate about 40% effectiveness rating? This book gives this and many other figures behind the game. It is very, very colorful and detailed in the game's style. It also explains what all the buildings do and what effect they can have on your stars. Also, it tells you about the different research packs you can get. It gives more instruction on how to play the game. The back section tells you how to create your own movies for people to watch online, and gives tips for making a good movie. There is also a guide to winning the Platinum Lifetime Achievement award.

This guide did help me a bit, and explained many of the calculations of the game's ratings system. Still, it is not all that big a help for me, because I played the game for 10 hours already before reading this book. However, it still gave me insight on many of the "behind the scenes" rules and ratings calculations. This knowledge let me improve my rankings on the charts.

Okay, let me start out by saying that I found thids guide very helpful. That being said, I bought it to learn cheat codes for the game or see how to make a bigger studio lot. The guide does not provide ANY cheats for the game, and I did not learn any way to make the lot larger, which is a drag because by the final third of the game, my studio lot is always too full to add anything else. So, the new technologies and sets I was researching were useless to me unless I wanted to delete earlier things.

This book is heavy on stats and figures, which can be quite helpful. The only reason it didn't get the entire 5 stars is that it didn't really help my game. I didn't pick up any vital new information that I needed for the game.

The writer also seems to forget that this is a book about a game. How writing is so serious. It does not seem to be written by someone who actually enjoys playing the game itself for fun. Yes, that's what this book lack. It isn't any fun.

I must admit that I only read game manuals or help books if my computer is down or I can't play the game itself, like if I am waiting for the game to show up in the mail. I learn how to play games on my own or with the help of an in-game tutorial. If I can't figure out the game, I don't play it. I don't like things with large learning curves. Let me learn on my own or forget it.

I also want to make it clear that The Movies along with its STUNTS exapsion, are my most played games. I LOVE making the movies: hiring the players, crew, stuntmen, and writers. I olove creating and filming scripts and competing with the other studios. It is a great game.

The book about it is good enough. It just didn't wow me with new info and it wasn't that fun to read because the magic and imagination of the game was missing from it.

You may think Movies and Mental Illness is a book intended strictly for the mental health professionals and/or educators. Although I do not fall in either of these categories, I was enlightened by the wealth of knowledge offered by this book.

I felt the authors did a remarkable job educating us on mental disorders, the misconceptions associated with them, and the powerful effect film has on public perception of those with mental disorders.

Each chapter discusses a psychological disorder and includes several well-known films that portray each one. The authors showed us a fabricated case history of a lead character in the film with a particular disorder. Also included is the patient's psychological history, behavioral observations, diagnosis, treatment plan, and the prognosis. I found the tables and charts that were included throughout the book to be very helpful and user-friendly.

This book is a useful resource for everyone.

A really fine layman's guide to several prominent mental illnesses where specific films accurately portray manifestations of and reactions to those illnesses. It is now much more enjoyable to watch those films again with a better understanding of what the characters are attempting to portray. Highly recommended to any movie viewer who would like to know more about specific mental illnesses, but aren't able to attend psychiatric Grand Rounds as a physician.

A good book covering a host of movies across time. Apart from one movie at the beginning of each chapter for a disorder category, not much diagnosis detail. Written by sound researchers in psychotherapy

Another lush picture book that fits with the others in the series. It's just as one would expect, extremely impressive visually. Odd omissions, here and there (but that's true of the entire series.) Generally, an excellent volume.

This is a great book. It contains (wonderful) pictures and writing on great films of the '60s - Breakfast at Tiffany's, Zorba the Greek, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Graduate, Lawrence of Arabia, A Hard Day's Night, 2001: The Space Odyssey, Barbarella, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and many others.
As a film enthusiast, I can spend hours reading and looking through this book. Anyone interested in film or the 1960s should give it a try.

And, the book itself is beautifully made.

Bought this book here on Amazon a while ago. I love it a lot. I still get chills when I see the image of Vanessa Redgrave holding her bare chest in "Blow-Up" (aka "The Vanessa De Milo"). But I have a problem with this book: Why is it that Muller left out some of the other great movies? Because of this, this only gets four stars. I mean, where's "Judgement at Nuremberg"? "Splendor in the Grass"? "Days Of Wine And Roses"? "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"? "Seven Days in May?" "Cat Ballou?" (in which Jane Fonda plays the title character and it paved the way for "Barbarella" and when you think about it, Fonda is playing the same character, but different genre) The Michael Caine films as Harry Palmer? "The Chase"? (Also with Fonda) "Georgy Girl"? "Harper"? "Morgan"? "Tony Rome"? "Wait Until Dark"? "Isadora"? "Petulia"? "Medium Cool"? Well, you get the idea.
Also, how is it that Muller can feature "The Pink Panther" and not "A Shot in the Dark"? Some say the latter is a thousand times more funnier than the first. And how can he have "Hell in the Pacific" with Lee Marvin in the book and not give a review of the film he did before which was "Point Blank"? Plus, he has "The Odd Couple." What about the other Neil Simon comedy before that-"Barefoot in the Park"? (With Robert Redford and again with Jane Fonda). Lastly, how can he have all these foreign films and not mention "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow"? That film features Sophia Loren in the most famous strip scene ever put on film. Fonda's floating strip scene in "Barbarella" is no match for Loren's. In conclusion, this is an A- book and I still like it.

For how cheap this book is, even new, on Amazon, you'd be missing a lot of great information on film scoring. It focuses a lot on older film composers, and is a great historical journey through the masters of the past.

A popular and thorough overview of the work of the mainstream scoring composers of both today and yesterday. Author Thomas was a contemporary and colleague of many of the veteran composers, and describes them from his insider perspective as a former producer. Roughly from 1977 (publication date of the first edition) to his death in 1998, Thomas tirelessly promoted performances of the work of his favorite composers in any venue that presented itself. Many of today's scoring composers recommend Thomas as a reference overview to anyone studying the art of film composing. It should be used as an adjunct to the more practical how-to-do-it texts such as ON THE TRACK by Fred Karlin.

There was a time when film music was more than an all-purpose instrumental theme and a collection of irrelevant pop songs. This book concentrates on the golden age of film music which coincided, not surprisingly, with the golden age of film. Charting the careers of the most famous composers - most of whom were European and classically trained - Tony Thomas mixes both musical knowledge and an obvious affection for both the men and their creations. Thus figures such as Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa, Alfred Newman and Erich Korngold emerge as real people rather than just names on the screen. There is no gossip but lots of insight. Essential reading for lovers of classic films and the scores that helped make them great. And especially for those films in which the music more memorable than the movie.

This compilation of essays on film and art, written from the 1950s through the '70s, still stands out as amazingly sharp, combative, and original. Take Farber's legendary "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962); replace the notion of "great painting" with "relational aesthetics," and you see that artists like Allan Sekula follow the termite path while the Hirschhorns and Gillicks of the world are our own white elephants.

A cult book. Not being in on the cult, let me say that Farber had pretty good taste in movies, liking hard-boiled masculine shoot-em-ups in the Forties. And he is, apparently, a very good painter, still having one man shows today in his late eighties. Still, he was a hideously disorganized writer. Reviews seem to start and end at random points in his chain of thoughts. There are some good phrases, but I'd be hard pressed to recount many coherent ideas from his book. It's not that he's lacking good ideas -- in fact, he has too many. He's just not very good at putting them into a comprehensible form. If you are a fanatic for either forties tough guy directors or late sixties artsy directors, you'll no doubt benefit from grinding through the book, but for the general reader, it's a struggle.

I'm hardly surprised that he gave up reviewing over 25 years ago for painting. Writing just doesn't seem to be his strong suit.

Farber found the best metaphor for his inclinations as well as his work: the termite, who burrows, chews, and undermines. Just as Thelonious Monk's solos softly undermine the themes on which they are constructed, so the bits of outrageous reality peeping into the Walsh films Farber so much admires undermine the fictional world Walsh has so carelessly constructed, and the critiques Farber savagely launches at film festivals and white elephant movies undermine their subjects by his relentless burrowing.

Stephen Hunter is not only a good novelist, he is the best film critic in the nation. He's head,shoulders, and chest above anyone else. These are his reviews for the past decade or so. He's an exceptional writer and an exceptional critic. If you like movies, or good writing, by all means get this book

Not realizing that this paperback about movies was merely a collection of reprints of this author's previously published essays, I was a bit let down. After all, the cover photo promised what it didn't deliver, a modern "movie" genre interpretation. Instead, the reader gets criticism from 1997-2003 of what he saw in Washington, D.C. not at the Valencia at all.

Two years ago, I reviewed HOT SPRINGS and HAVANA, novels about gangsters and vice written by this movie critic -- no doubt straight out of the old dated movies like 'Thunder Road.' He admits that he spent his young years in the Valencia as "education" in Illinois where he traversed the short distance between two (make that three: he forgot the Coronet) movie houses to escape growing up normally. Why he refused to see 'Marjorie Morningstar' was not fully explained, why he even made a point of saying he still would not see this 1958 Natalie Wood/Gene Kelly film is mute. Who cares? I saw it at the best of the three theaters we had downtown, and it turned out to be prophetic for me. Since he didn't see it, he has no idea what I mean. The Valencia looks a lot like our Bijou, which has been through many renovations and undergoing another.

The Riveria is long gone, but I spent many hours in that make-believe cinemascope world as a teenager. Before I discovered the musicals of the Fifties, my fate was the B-westerns at the three seedy places only a block or two from the better places every Saturday. The good thing about movies (not possible today) was timing -- you could buy your ticket and enter halfway through the movie, stay until it got back to where you came in, or sit through until the ending again. No usher would tell you to leave. Times have changed. Now you must leave when the movie is over, while the credits are running if possible.

I saw 'No Escape' starring Ray Liotta on video. In the Fifties, I saw Rory Calhoun and George Nader. I liked 'A Knight's Tale' but wasn't aware that Russell Crowe played Chaucer. He was good in 'A Beautiful Life' but, like Mr. Hunter who had some kind of personal aversion to 'Marjorie Morningstar,' I refused to see him in 'Master & Commander' (personal reasons) -- and quit going to Tom Cruise movies a long time ago, and again like Mr. Hunter, don't plan to ever see him on screen no matter what he plays. All I can figure out for Hunter's prejudice about 'Marjorie Morningstar' must pertain to the story and not the actors.

I've seen a lot of movies these past three years but there's just nothing much to look forward to nowadays. I am wondering if he saw 'A New World' or 'Aristocrats'? But I really don't want to know what he thought about them. To me, they wasted my time and money. In 1953, at the Valencia, "things never happen in reality with the clarity that they do in recollection. Symbolism is rarely apparent when it's happening."

We had a t.v. set to watch the westerns in the early Fifties. Movies were special, especially if the young usher gave a young girl free tickets for upcoming features. The movies used to be fun. Not today, however! Stephen Hunter has also written VIOLENT SCREEN: a CRITIC'S 13 YEARS ON THE FRONT LINES OF MOVIE MAYHEM, his other collection of previously published columns from the 'Washington Post.'

Movies are a populist art form, and Stephen Hunter is a people's movie reviewer, giving deft and entertaining analysis for about 100 "popcorn" movies within the 330 pages of this book. No Pauline Kael, he evinces more relish than reverence for film. He seems to have as much fun writing about bad movies as about good ones, and he (at least in this volume) barely touches on foreign films, usually the bread and butter of snobbish critics.

Hunter is a published novelist, and he knows how to write a snappy essay. You won't be bored here. He gets to the meat of the matter very quickly, he's very clear in his analysis, and he has no trouble grasping the themes of movies as they speak to the society at large. Hunter has a lot of accumulated knowledge to draw on, and these reviews are very juicy tidbits as a result.

My favorite quote? "Real movies have gone to live on AMC and TCM."
Yes, Hunter is a grizzled baby boomer, and he is properly skeptical of eye-fooling movies built on CGI effects. He mixes in a few reviews of re-released classics ( "High Noon", "Touch of Evil", "Good, Bad, and the Ugly", "Gone With the Wind", "Third Man").

Anybody who aspires to writing reviews of movies on Amazon should read this book, to understand how a really pleasurable essay is put together. It will also whet your appetite and your appreciation for truly edifying moviegoing.

The "Picture Show" is a vibrant and eclectic collection of movie posters culled from Turner Classic Movie's library of over 3500 vintage films. The book is an over-sized, soft cover reprinting hundreds of movie posters. Lesser known films may appear two or three to a page while greater classics are reprinted in full page glory. The book begins with a short history of movie posters and the explanation of "One-sheets" "Half-Sheets", "Three Sheets" etc...before breaking down the posters into several different chapters.

We lead off with "Bad Girls" and movies like "The Mask of Fu-Manchu", "The Outlaw", and "Born to be Bad". These are some of the more sexy and seductive posters found and highlight screen vamps such as Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Joan Fontaine, and Jane Russell. From there the next chapter features the Battle of the Sexes, featuring classic films like the Thin Man movies, and the various Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn films.

The chapter on Fancy Footwork highlights those great musicals of the 30's and 40's such as "Footlight Parade" with James Cagney, "Girl Crazy" with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, and "An American in Paris" with Gene Kelly. Forward March reprints posters from great war films. "Back to Bataan" and "Flying Leathernecks" with John Wayne, musicals like "Anchors Aweigh" and "Follow the Fleet" and one of my favorites "The Dirty Dozen"

Since Warner Bros is one of the prominent studios featured we naturally get to see many of their great adventure film posters included: "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "Captain Blood", and "The Sea Hawk" as well as "The Three Musketeer" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" There are also chapters devoted to westerns and to tough guys like Cagney, Mitchum, Bogart and McQueen.

The last chapter is devoted to sci-fi and horror films including the Val Lewton flicks "I Walked with a Zombie" and "Cat People" along with sci-fi's "The Thing" and "Them!" Movie posters are very underrated as an art form and interest in collecting posters is at an all-time high. Even the reproduction market is extremely busy reproducing these posters for those of us who can't afford the originals. This is a well diversified sampling of both high-profile classics as and "B" movies. The only short-coming of the book is that it only features the posters of three studios: MGM, Warner Bros., and RKO. Classic horror fans will no doubt be a little let down that Universal's films are not included. I'm not sure why but it's a serious oversight. The horror/sci-fi section is quite skimpy overall. It would have been nice to see "Mark of the Vampire" or "Doctor X". That little caveat aside this is a wonderful book for any fan of classic films.

What a fabulous delight. Posters from American movie archives at my finger tips. Each poster brought back a memory of another day and time. The author's vibrant storytelling recalls the golden era of motion pictures. Everyone in the family has enjoyed the beautiful visual adventure and the excellent commentary. It is a book filled with a thousand memories. Enjoy, I promise it will make you smile.

Another reasonably priced addition to the slowly expanding library of movie poster books. Because it is based on the TCM archives it is very generalised and basically covers movies of the thirties, forties and fifties. The chapters are dictated by what is available in the archive so there is no collection of comedy classics, 'Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House', for instance and other light-hearted titles are included in the chapter called Battle of the sexes.

The posters are presented in various sizes and mostly you'll be able to read all the text, especially the percentage credits that usually appear at the bottom of each poster. Some of this is quite interesting because plenty of people named are complete nobodies now. Rather annoyingly the whole page posters have been enlarged a bit too much so that bottom credits are missing.

I think it is fair to say that there is not a well designed poster in the book, so no stunning Saul Bass work or Bob Peak graphics but you'll get to see the best portraits that Hollywood marketing departments could offer.

Overall a good title to have if you like poster art and if you have an interest in the thirties have a look at Reel Art: Great Posters From The Golden Age Of The Silver Screen, a huge, beautifully produced coffee-table book showing three hundred posters. A lot of MGM productions are in the TCM Archive and probably the most complete showing of this studio is in Mgm Posters: The Golden Years, with 260 posters in a very nicely designed book. My favorite genre is Film Noir, unfortunately hardly represented in 'Picture Show' but you'll find the definitive poster collection in Art of Noir: The Posters And Graphics From The Classic Era Of Film Noir.

To the massive wealth of writings on Hitchcock and his most influential film, add this slender but invaluable piece by the movie's star, Janet Leigh. By now everyone knows that Leigh hasn't taken a shower since she met Norman's mother "out on the old highway," but this book is filled with many other tidbits -- like Hitch refusing to use expensive costumes for his star, but instead insisting on cheap outfits from a discount store (to match the character's profile!); and the fact that in the famous roadside scene with the highway cop, Leigh was never on location; her scenes were filmed in the studio and blended seamlessly with location footage involving the cop. For Psycho fans, this book is a MUST.

Psycho: Behind The Scenes of the Classic Thriller is a book a lot of people have been waiting a long time for. Janet Leigh provides a detailed, behind-the-scenes look at almost all the aspects of the filming of Hitchcock's masterpiece. She provides stories and anecodotes as well as remembrances of others connected with the picture, including rare words from John Gavin. It's written in a memoir style, with Ms. Leigh discussing aspects as they occur to her, which is refreshing. Importantly, she also sets straight many of the rumors and misinformation surrounding this movie over the years (DID Hitchcock or someone else film the famous shower scene)? A wonderful book on the making of a classic. You'll enjoy it if you're a huge fan of the movie, Ms. Leigh, Hitchcock or just filmmaking in general. My only complaint of the book is the fact that it weighs in at under 200+ pages, thus I felt the price was a little on the high side. Well worth the price in the end, however.

As an admirer of the work of actress Janet Leigh and a fan of the director that was Hitchcock, it only seems fitting that someone with the know-how of Ms. Leigh could create a book that not only is a font of insights into the classic film that is "Psycho", but also a fitting tribute to the legend of Hitchcock.

With co-author Christopher Nickens, Ms. Leigh takes you through the various stages of events that made up the phenomenon of "Psycho". She takes you through the brainstorming of the picture, casting, the brilliant editing and photography that Hitchcock wanted to create with his film--everything you could ever want to know or had been curious about. With thorough research that included interviews with cast and crew members, and many photos, some from the personal collection of Ms. Leigh, the reader gets a sense of what creates a masterpiece that has reached such a cult status. Ironically enough, when the film first came out, it wasn't the critical success it is now.

For an admirer of the film itself, the work of Ms. Leigh or Mr. Hitchcock, or anyone with an interest in the art of movie making and what goes into creating a classic, this book has it all.

I think this was a good first novel. The characters were believable and the story was easy to follow. I didn't feel much for the characters in the end. I think he did a much better job with "Nevermind Nirvana," but this was a good, quick read.

I bought this because of the "Trailer Park Chicks Dig It" review below. It came out about seven years before Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" and it's sharper, funnier, cooler, and, of course, American. It's very 1980s, I agree with the other reviewer, but it's also "timeless" I suppose in that it's a guy in his 20s coming of age and all that. The author has a new novel coming out, "Never Mind Nirvana," which people here in Seattle are talking about, but I don't know much about it yet except it's supposed to be great and Peter Buck of R.E.M. wrote a quote for it.

I bought this book shortly after it was published on the strength of a Brett Easton Ellis blurb on the back. Remember him? Anyway, I rather enjoyed the gray, narcissistic mood and the protagonist's obsession with murdering himself. Cool song quotes from the Smiths and Replacements place the book between melancholy self-possession and sensitive longing, though I would not be surprised if the feel is at least somewhat dated by now (think of "Less Than Zero"). My copy was absconded by a trailer park wench who later confessed and told me it was the only book she ever read all the way through. She also said one of her kids shredded it and she tossed the carcass. I have searched for it ever since, lamentably to no avail. This last should not so much stand as a tribute to the novel's force, but rather as a nod toward cheap sentamentality. Nevertheless, "Sad Movies" is a fine, relatively light read if you can find it

Once again, Bruce has put out another great book of poster images! The pictures are all very well done. If you collect movie posters or just like to look at great images you'll love this book. It is full of the greats.

Bruce Hershenson offers yet another stunning example of movie poster art. As in all of his books, Bruce shows impeccable taste in selecting the finest sampling of Sports movie history dating back to the beginning of film spanning to current day. The only complaint with the book is that it is only 80 pages long when movie poster collectors and lovers like myself keep wishing for 800.

This is a terrific book filled with beautifully produced color images of hundreds of sports movie posters. It goes beyond the standard popular sports such as baseball, basketball and football. There are also sections on auto racing, soccer, tennis and much more. It covers posters from the 1910s right on through the 1990s. Most of the pictures are of one-sheets, but there are also examples of lobby cards, half-sheets, etc. Many of the posters are from movies I never even knew existed. This would make a great gift for movie poster collectors and sports memorabilia collectors alike.