Win 'WARNING SHADOWS' ... Today!!
'WARNING SHADOWS: Home Alone with Classic Cinema' is a new book by award-winning music and film critic Gary Giddins that provides readers with a guided tour from the early days of film to the modern digital era of DVDs and online video streaming.
Giddins provides insight into the most famous actors, directors, and innovators who made and continue to make films possible, and he examines how developments in technology—from “talkies” to television to special effects to the Internet—effect America’s involvement in the arts, entertainment, and culture.
The DVD collection's raison d'etre is to group movies around organizing principles, which here run the gamut from Hitchcock retrospectives to Disney nature docs to Hollywood literary adaptations to charming oddities like a collection of silents starring Harry Houdini. The downside to reviewing them is that Giddins must glance at lesser works with little to recommend them, though he'll often notice a fine performance, catchy score or radiant lighting scheme gleaming through the dross.
The payoff is the themes that emerge as he sifts a wealth of comparisons and contrasts. These range from the failings of Rodgers and Hammerstein (The Sound of Music is the happiest of all musicals involving Nazis) to keen evocations of a movie star's aura, the casually authoritative stance of an Edward G. Robinson or the mulish twisting between bashful affability and cries de coeur of a Jimmy Stewart.
Giddins is the ideal couch companion, erudite but relaxed and witty; his perceptive commentary shows that it's not what you watch, it's how you watch it.
So, if you would like to win one of these new books then just answer this easy question about the man himself: Giddins is actually best known as the which publication's longtime jazz critic?!
Send us your answer and if you're correct you'll be in the running to win one of these new Books! Just send us an e:mail here before July 1st with your answer and the subject title CONTEST: WARNING SHADOWS BOOKS to: exclusivemagazine@flash.net
BOOK Purchase Link
www.wwnorton.com
www.garygiddins.com