(Part 2) Best movie books according to redditors
We found 139 Reddit comments discussing the best movie books. We ranked the 80 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
Indeed.
Kinda NSFW.
I second Making Movies by Lumet . I'll add Pieces of Time by Peter Bogdanovich and A Life in Movies by Michael Powell - which Roger Ebert called the greatest filmmaker memoir ever written.
And actually, on the subject of Ebert , the texts of his Great Movies books are available free on his website. He won a Pulitzer for his critique and his blog won awards too.
but i read it in a really old book - therefore must be true.
Heres my sauce
http://listverse.com/ put out a great book that is like a bunch of Cracked.com articles, The Ultimate Book of Bizarre Lists. I have not read their other book, The Ultimate Book of Top 10 Lists but I enjoyed the other book so much I am definitely going out and getting it.
This is a really entertaining book similar to Cracked.com articles, The Book of Lists: Horror.
And of course, Cracked.com put out their own book You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
Just within the last few months I have found Scars of Dracula, Die Die My Darling and the 2 disc Dracula, Prince of Darkness/Satanic Rites of Dracula. All were at 1/2 Price Books for under $15. They have 5 or 6 stores here and I visit at least one almost every week. Last week I found the soundtrack to Stunt Rock for $5. Couple years ago I bought a book club 1st edition of Dawn of the Dead.
But my biggest steal of all time was about 2 years ago. $4.98, a little nondescript paperback novelization of Phantasm. It is signed by the author (KAte Coscarelli, Don's mommy) and is so rare I couldn't even find a copy online just now to see what it's going for. http://www.amazon.com/Phantasm-Novel-Coscarelli-Original-Screenplay/dp/B000NGVKQ4/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt
They're taken from his book, or at least that's what the articles that I have read say. There is this PDF which corroborates the quotes and has filming notes along with the script. https://subcin.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/el-topo-a-book-of-the-film.pdf
This matches the title of the book listed on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/El-Topo-Book-Alexandro-Jodorowsky/dp/B000J2KMNE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518808936&sr=8-1&keywords=el+topo+book
With the dystopian retro-futuristic technology available in the pre-prequel trilogy, it is believable that Tattooine was very isolated. Old Universe Luke Skywalker goes into the more civilized places often, has several friends, a Skyhopper, and calls old "Ben Kenobi" a crazy hermit. The modern material has added the holonet and even holo channels that mirror our modern society, and Tattooine is turned from a backwater planet into a smuggler mecca with very heavy traffic.
Another planet that suffered "modernization" is Dathomir. When it first appeared it had absolutely nothing but several small force cults. Some light, some dark, they came from the remnants a Dark Jedi's teachings and a Jedi Academy ship led by Yoda that crashed on the planet later. The planet was so uninteresting and unimportant that Han Solo won it in a bet, and when visiting he couldn't find a place where to land. In the modern material, it is a key planet and the Witches of Dathomir have a very well organized society, being a Dark Side faction who play a hand in the fate of the galaxy, and Dathomir is very frequently visited by outsiders.
I could nerd on and on about this topic, but I'll end it by recommending this encyclopedia, written in 1998, as a record of where Star Wars was before 1999. The older material had lots of cliche scifi space pirate femme fatales, multi-dimensional lovecraftian monsters (even stronger and more preposterous than Abeloth) and the technology was a mirror of pre-information age technology.
Others friends have used:
Mitsumi - super common, affordable, not necessarily high-end
Maxon - Swiss, highest of the high end, used on Mars robots, etc. $150+
Weird Drone Racing Motors - haven't heard of any of these guys but you can tell they're eaking out every ounce of performance
Tamiya, Kyoshi, Goki and other Japanese model companies make some great motors. Maybe not for mass production.
Global Sourcescan be a good source for vendors - I see "Sinopro" comes up a lot.
Last but not least, I liked this book: https://www.amazon.com/Motors-Makers-Steppers-Electrical-Machines/dp/0134032837
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Ah thanks for the info! For vol. 2, you can actually order it straight from the Udon store for about $40, although it's still not as good as vol. 1 so its up to you. And for the Nisemonogatari works, it's this book: link. I'm still waiting to order the Bakemonogatari key animation book after I get the Nise one, but 1200 pages of goodness is so tempting haha.
I'll check out the season themed apple books and the redbox collection, thanks for the recommendations!
Those are good books but any particular one might be a little narrow focused for someone trying to get a kind of catch all beginning. If you like book learning I would more suggest a book like this. This particular one is commonly used to teach first year film studies in university classes. It gives a nice blend of instruction like "this is editing", "this is direction" etc... and instruction on film appreciation. I promise that you will learn a lot more form watching film with even a little guidance on film appreciation and how to watch movies more actively.
Personally, I've thought of The Cinema Book as something to be read more as a reference book (or a series of short introductory guides), rather than a overall narrative... which is to say that you dip into the sections that cover topics that interest you, rather than from cover to cover. IIRC each section also has a decent bibliography, so you have further reading if you find that, say, film noir interests you and you want to find out more.
If you're interested in more of an overview of cinema as a long narrative, I'd recommend Mark Cousins' wonderful The Story of Film. A couple of years ago it became a great telly series, but before that it was a really interesting book. The book goes through film broadly chronologically, and still has Cousins' characteristic enthusiasm, knowledge and charm, but without his strong accent, which could be difficult to understand depending on your level of knowledge of English.
More generally, take a look at Sight and Sound magazine's book poll, which they did in a similar way to their famous once-per-decade film polls.
viele bilder und interessante kurztexte horror cinema
In case you wanted something a bit more visual, here's where I got my copy of some of the Production story-boards.
https://www.amazon.com/Evangelion-Storyboard-Shin-Seiki-Collection/dp/4829173475
All in Japanese, and only comes in sets of 5 episodes, but as someone who loves this pre-pro side stuff, it's great to see.
Some other classic tomes every well-rounded reader should have in his or her library:
Excellent post. Just wanted to add that this book is an excellent resource if you want to read about Ray's ideas on cinema. Some of these essays were written almost half a century ago, and yet they still very relevant today (regarding the problems an Indian filmmaker faces if he wants to make serious films).
So a couple months ago, fellow China expat author Arthur Meursault told me about "Saint Jack," a 1979 film directed by Peter Bogdanovich based on the 1973 novel by Paul Theroux, about an American expat living in 1960s Singapore who becomes a pimp and sets up his own brothel, then gets into violent clashes with rival Chinese triads.
I was ashamed that I'd never seen the movie, which stars the suave, cigar-smoking Ben Gazzara. Watched it, dug it [especially the brilliantly bizarre scene with the ladyboy stripping to the Goldfinger theme song.] But what I was more interested in was the making of this movie; as /u/meursaultfag explained to me, Bogdanovich tricked the Singaporean government into letting him film the production on location, knowing that they would never let him adapt a book about hookers and triads. Telling them that he was making a romantic musical, Bogdanovich and the crew pulled a fast one on local authorities, then got the hell out before anyone got wise.
Because of that, the Singaporean government banned the movie AND all of Hollywood from filming another movie in Singapore ever again, which to date they have not. Interested in hearing more behind-the-scenes stories, I did some due diligence, which is how I found Ben Slater's now-out-of-print book from 2006.
Used copies are going for $650 (!!!) on Amazon, so instead I tracked down the author directly, also a fellow expat now living in Singapore. He graciously mailed me a signed, personalized copy from his own stash, which I just received in the mail, and am looking forward to reading over a fine cigar.
When it comes to supplemental media to movie licenses etc, I thnk it's best if folks just come up with their own timelines etc. If you're that invested in a movies universe that you want to read books etc,you can afford to take some liberties with the official canon.
For instance, if you fancy a good follow up to Alien 3, go read The Female War. It's a much better story than Resurrection, and even takes you back to the Alien homeworld.Just beprepared for a couple of new phenomenon such as aliens influencing peoples thought, and you'll enjoy it
Daffodils! They're so common but when you start seeing them you know that winter is coming to an end and the weather is getting better.
Picture
Link
Canon is that they're all suppose to be mobile, because that's how the ships manoeuvre at warp speed. Either it's just difficult to do that with models rather than cgi, or they didn't think that up until later. Or both.
Kevin Murphy (the voice of Tom Servo) already did this. In fact, he wrote a book about it. Check it out here