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A single father who needs a wife to keep custody of his son and a woman he’s never thought of as anything but his best friend. Maybe she’s the solution he’s looking for. Or maybe that very special favor will change everything. Forever.
Rx Hollywood investigates how therapy surfaced in the themes, representations, and narrative strategies of a changing film industry. In the 1960s and early 1970s, American cinema was struggling to address adult audiences who were increasingly demanding films that confronted contemporary issues. Focusing upon five fields of therapeutic inquiry—therapist/patient dynamics, female "frigidity" and male impotence, marital discord, hallucinogenic drug use, and the dynamics of confession—Michael DeAngelis argues that the films of this period reveal an emergent, common tendency of therapy to work toward the formation of a stronger sense of interpersonal, community/social, and political engagement, counteracting alienation and social division in the spirit of connection and community. Prior to the 1960s, therapy had been considered an introspective process, one that emphasized contemplation and insight and prompted the patient to investigate memories and past traumas. In the 1960s, however, therapy would move toward more humanistic, client-centered, community, group, and encounter models that deemphasized the "there and then" of past feelings and experiences and embraced the "here and now" of the present. These kinds of therapy promised to heal the self through a process of reaching out, helping individuals to connect with communities, support networks, and other like-minded individuals who shared a needed sense of belonging. Drawing on a wide range of films, including Marnie, The Boston Strangler, The Chapman Report, Carnal Knowledge, Divorce American Style, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and Five Easy Pieces, DeAngelis shows how American culture framed therapeutic issues as problems of human communication, developing treatment strategies that addressed individual psychological problems as social problems.
Charles Boyer: The French Lover is the first biography of Boyer to exist in English in almost forty years. Author John Baxter artfully presents the often-tragic life of this often overlooked, yet profoundly impactful French actor. Baxter relates how Boyer (1899–1978) established himself in the theater and cinema of France, confidently transitioning from silent film to sound and making a name for himself as a romantic leading man in Hollywood through the early 1940s. During World War II, Boyer put his career on hold to become politically active on behalf of his occupied home country. Upon returning to the stage and screen, Boyer adapted effortlessly to postwar character roles in both Europe and the United States. He entered television in the 1950s as both producer and performer, and then remade himself as a comedy performer in the 1960s. Nominated four times for Academy Awards, he was honored by the Academy only once—a special honorary award received for his activities on behalf of France during World War II. In an insightful analysis of Boyer's choice of roles during and after World War II, Baxter shows that the actor possessed a shrewd perception of his image. Baxter reveals how Boyer, realizing his accent would always mark him as an outsider, both embraced and subverted that identity. Far from clinging to the performances that made him famous, Boyer showed a readiness to break the mold. Yet above all, Baxter argues, Boyer's greatest achievement was becoming the embodiment of exiles everywhere.
John DiLeo is the author of five other books about classic movies: And You Thought You Knew Classic Movies, 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember—But Probably Don’t, Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery, Tennessee Williams and Company: His Essential Screen Actors, and Screen Savers II: My Grab Bag of Classic Movies. His website is johndileo.com and his Twitter handle is @JOHNDiLEO.
Richard Dyer is a foundational figure for the critical study of cinema and popular culture. Across a career spanning five decades, he has made path breaking contributions to our understanding of stardom and celebrity, gay and queer politics and cultural history, film music, race and whiteness and the pleasures of popular entertainment. The Richard Dyer Reader brings together for the first time key writings by this vital and influential figure, many of which are not otherwise available. The anthology guides readers through Dyer's prolific and rich output through six thematic selections of essays and extracts, each centred on a key theme in Dyer's work: stardom and the image; entertainment and ideology; gay politics and representation; whiteness; the pleasures of popular entertainment, and textual analysis. A seventh section comprises a selection of interviews conducted across the span of his career, as well as a new interview with editors Glyn Davis and Jaap Kooijman. The book will provide an introduction for those new to Dyer's writings, as well as offering a fresh perspective for readers with a more comprehensive knowledge of his work. The collection includes archival and recent pieces of writing never previously anthologised, newly commissioned essays, a substantial introduction to Dyer's life and work and framing introduction to each section.
Cinema, MD follows the intersection of medicine and film and how filmmakers wrote a history of medicine over time. The narrative follows several main story lines: How did the portrayal of physicians, nurses, and medical institutions change over the years? What interested filmmakers, and which topics had priority? What does film's obsession with experiments and monstrosities reveal about medical ethics and malpractice? How could the public's perception of the medical profession change when watching these films on diseases and treatments, including palliative care and medical ethics? Are screenwriters, actors, and film directors channeling a popular view of medicine? Cinema, MD analyzes not only changing practices, changing morals, and changing expectations but also medical stereotypes, medical activism, and violations of patients' integrity and autonomy. Examining over 400 films with medical themes over a century of cinema, this book establishes the cultural, medical, and historical importance of the art form. Film allows us to see our humanity, our frailty, and our dependence when illness strikes. Cinema, MD provides uniquely new and fascinating insight into both film criticism and the history of medicine and has a resonance to the medical world we live in today.
REUBEN ....I’d driven to Santa Ana from South Laguna to tell John Blackburn, a reporter from the Santa Ana Register, about two future forecasts I’d recently completed. I’d had a particularly intense dream and tried a rebuilt simplified set of equations without the earth tides that still eluded me. But I’d gotten two results that were very persuasive. It was February 5, 1971. Blackburn, smiled. “Reuben, you’ve got quite an impressive history here, Eighty-seven percent accuracy in ’35, you said?” “I looked up the July 11, 1935 New York Times article,” he added. “The writer, Lawrence, was pretty complimentary.” I appreciated he did his homework, but I had mixed feelings about his comment. I feared he might have seen the August 1, 1935 Times Science Editor article, which was the opposite of complimentary.... “This is good work, Reuben,” John said, “But these predictions are history. What about the future earthquakes you mentioned on the phone? That’s what our readers want to know.” I smiled. I had a hot one for him in Southern California, Magnitude 6.6 at 6:03 AM, in just four days, and a less imminent forecast, for January 1973 in San Francisco. That was the one that excited me, even though some of the computational results needed double-checking. It could be an accurate prediction of the “Big One.” But boy, did I hit a home run on February 9, 1971—the Southern California Sylmar earthquake struck at 6:01 AM with Magnitude 6.7—it was only two minutes early ...
Tall, dark and handsome, with a manufactured name and a scrupulously designed professional image, Rock Hudson represented the Hollywood ideal of American masculinity during the 1950s and 60s; an ideal that was to be questioned and ultimately undermined during the years to follow by lurid accounts of his private life and his death from AIDS related illness. This illuminating analysis of Hudson's career reassesses the perceived disparity between his public persona and his 'true' nature. Exploring his unique qualities as a performer and exposing the role of his agent, producers and directors in the construction of his image, John Mercer unpicks Hudson's stardom to reveal a more complex star identity than has hitherto been understood. Foregrounding the ways in which Hudson's career provides insights into the nature of American popular culture and attitudes towards gender and sexuality, Mercer ultimately depicts Hudson as a star who embodied a period of transition between the old Hollywood and the new.