Best movie theory books according to redditors

Okay, I'm finding that a little hard to believe, because a simple search on Google Scholar would find dozens of such articles. But here are a few citations purely from my own research:

Balay, A. (2012). “Incloseto Putbacko!”: Queerness in Adolescent Fantasy Fiction. The Journal of Popular Culture, 45(5), 923-942.

Ehnenn, Jill R. (2007). Queering Harry Potter. In Peele, Thomas (Ed.), Queer popular culture: Literature, media, film, and television (pp.229-256). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, D. (2003). Queer theories. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Halperin, D. (2003). The Normalization of Queer Theory. Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, Iss. 2-4.

Hollinger, V. (1999). (Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarisation of Gender. Science Fiction Studies 26(1), 23-40.

Kilgore, De W. (2009). Queering Humanity in SF. In ‘SFS Symposium: Sexuality in Science Fiction’. Science Fiction Studies, 36(3), 385-403.

Lipton, M. (2008). Queer Readings of Popular Culture: Searching [to] Out the Subtext. In Driver, S. (Ed.), Queer Youth Cultures (pp.163-180). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Pearson, W. (1999). Alien Cryptographies: the View from Queer. Science Fiction Studies, 26(1), 1-22.

Pearson, W. (2009). Queer Theory. In M. Bould, A. Butler, A. Roberts & S. Vint (Eds.), The Routledge companion to science fiction (pp. 298-307). Oxford: Routledge.

And here are five academic books on the topic:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Critical-Introduction-Queer-Theory/dp/0748615970/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queer-Theory-Introduction-Annamarie-Jagose/dp/0814742343/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Future-Queer-Theory-Death/dp/0822333694/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Genealogy-Queer-Theory-American-Subjects/dp/1566397871/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Queer-Phenomenology-Orientations-Objects-Others-ebook/dp/B00EHNZ2FY/

"Neuromancer seems like the last book to really impact the genre?" --- ummm, what? Sounds like your post-early 80s SF reading is rather limited... (Butler, Hopkinson, Banks, Stross, Stephenson, Vinge etc -- there are important and influential post-Neuromancer voices out there!).

The nice (semi-scholarly) intro to the genre that I always recommend is Adam Roberts' (yes, the well known SF author -- READ HIS STUFF) "Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom" (2000). Ignore the two average reviews on Amazon US, this is a very short intro which only serves only to touch some important themes...

> Why video games? Why not movies or television that depict violence and sexism and have larger audiences?

Do... do you realize that these conversations happen much more broadly and are much more accepted within movies and TV?

Do you pay attention to media criticism at all? I always feel like GGers don't, which is why they freak out over such trivial, widely accepted things. To them, it's an attack on their precious, when it's common elsewhere.

There are books about this very subject

These aren't controversial things, only when applied to video games, and even then, only to young white males who can't understand this isn't an attack on them or an attempt to ban anything.

I've read something similar (The Seven Basic Plots). I guess to clarify, I'd say that with movies you have to tell the same story with the same structure in a different way. Maybe it's just because I've studied it the most, but movies seems to be the most mechanically suffocating out of any medium. There are a bajillion things that are not open to creative interpretation that you must abide by if you want to do something new. You have to adapt whatever creative idea you have to make sure it follows every little rule and that's before you even get into creative battles with the producer etc.

There's some wonderful satire from the period that can provide some insight on this question. I'd highly recommend reading Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and then following it with her memoir Kiss Hollywood Goodbye. Loos was a witty, independent, critical observer of 1920s culture, at least within her own world of elites and swlls. The novel has a lot to say about gender roles and changing social norms, especially those having to do with wealth, in the 1920s (it was published in 1925). Her memoir will provide context and reflection that makes it even more enjoyable.

Loos was close friends with H.L. Menkin. You might read most anything of his from that period to get a taste for what real cynicism can offer. Satire too; his essay "The Sahara of the Bozart" written in 1917 but widely reprinted after 1920 is sometimes credited with helping launch the Southern Literary Renaissance. No golden age in his mind.

Lots of great suggestions in here, but to really get ahead of the game, I would recommend "The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories." It's a very fascinating look at how all kinds of different stories are, at their root, nearly identical to one another. Amazon listing: http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Basic-Plots-Tell-Stories/dp/0826452094

NO FUTURE

This is probably one of the questions and arguments that gets me in a lot of trouble with people, primarily because I refuse to comply with what they consider to be the best decision. I've pulled a lot of my thinking on the subject by looking at Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. It's an excellent book, although a bit hard to read, about how for the queer individual, we should not have to think about the the future, through the image of a child. In a way, he calls it our queer ascension into the negative. Rather than putting my favorite quotes from the book, I'll give a very very simple gist of the book:

We have conditioned our language and perception of the world with the child in mind. The image of the child is what beckons us to think of the future, and therefore the things we do today, our productive labor, politics, economy is postured with the agreement that it's for the future... for the child. So, the refusal of kids, the refusal to be reproductive, is to open space for non-hetero, non-normative functions to take place. Edelman suggests that this will always be seen as a negative, so he argues that we should ascend to our call towards negativity. The book brings in examples from the movie Children of Man and Hitchcock movies to point out how our "logic" (or as many people in this thread have argued as "programmed") has been prescribed towards a reproductive bias.

I commend /u/jwhoch on your refusal and should you want more discussion about this, I can scan pages from the book that allow you to patiently and elegantly suggest why your choice to not want kids, is in fact just you playing out the role of homos. It really is a thrilling book to read, to see your choices be spelled out as not crazy or bitter, but actual sensibility is rewarding and extraordinary.

I'm not aware of a TED talk, but The Seven Basic Plots may be what you are looking for:

• Overcoming the monster
  
  
• Rags to riches
  
  
• The quest
  
  
• Voyage and return
  
  
• Comedy
  
  
• Tragedy
  
  
• Rebirth
  
  There are a few other variations on this, but Booker's text is probably the most widely known.