Stephen Lee Naish's Books

Deconstructing Dirty Dancing

By: Stephen Lee Naish

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Renowned film critic Roger Ebert said Dirty Dancing "might have been a decent movie if it had allowed itself to be about anything." In this broadly researched and accessible text, Stephen Lee Naish sets out to deconstruct and unlock a film that has haunted him for decades, and argues that Dirty Dancing, the 1987 sleeper hit about a young middle-class girl who falls for a handsome working-class dance instructor, is actually about everything. The film is a union of history, politics, sixties and eighties culture, era-defining music, class, gender, and race, and of course features one of the best love stories set to film. Using scene-by-scene analyses, personal interpretation, and comparative study, it's time to take Dirty Dancing out of the corner and place it under the microscope.

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John Hunt Publishing

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ISBN 10

1782799729

ISBN 13

9781782799726

Deconstructing Dirty Dancing

By: Stephen Lee Naish

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Deconstructing Dirty Dancing

By: Stephen Lee Naish

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John Hunt Publishing

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1782799729

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9781782799726

U.ESS.AY

Politics and Humanity in American Film

By: Stephen Lee Naish

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U.ESS.AY

Politics and Humanity in American Film

By: Stephen Lee Naish

U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film collects together the published essays of Stephen Lee Naish, into a narrative that explores the political and humanistic elements of modern cinema. With the rise of digital technology and the excessive use of CGI currently overwhelming cinema, realism and humanity have been dispensed with in favor of spectacle and illusion. It is the goal of U.ESS.AY to find within modern cinema contents that address the cultural and political landscape

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John Hunt Publishing

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1782793771

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9781782793779

Riffs & Meaning

Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy

By: Stephen Lee Naish

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Riffs & Meaning

Manic Street Preachers and Know Your Enemy

By: Stephen Lee Naish

Despite high and low brow pop culture references in their lyrics, sleeve art, and in interviews, no concise in-depth study exists of the Manic Street Preachers. This book is in some ways a response to that fact, a study of the band through one particular record. "This book brims with passion and insight and care... every five pages or so Naish had me scrambling to hear various Manics songs from across the years." — Paolo Hewitt "The Manic Street Preachers have long been a blind spot for me. In Riffs and Meaning, Stephen Lee Naish does a great service by creating a solid context for the band — how it developed and how it intersected with its rivals and critics (both in the press and on the stage). Centering his attention on one of their thorniest, most sprawling albums, Know Your Enemy, about which even the band has seemed ambivalent, Naish explores how the 'untameable child of Manic Street Preachers’ records' was a fundamental work, finally letting them escape the shadow of their lost guitarist/songwriter Richey Edwards and 'to forge a different version of the Manic Street Preachers that was almost completely set apart from their previous incarnations.'" — Chris O’Leary, Rebel Rebel: The Songs of David Bowie, 1964-1976 and Ashes to Ashes Like many bands worth obsessing over, the Manic Street Preachers are virtually unknown here in the States. [But this is a] passionate discourse about a divisive album that you should absolutely listen to again immediately. — John Sellers, author of Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life

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149

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SCB Distributors

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1909394572

ISBN 13

9781909394575

Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper

By: Stephen Lee Naish

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Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper

By: Stephen Lee Naish

Across his directorial films, American filmmaker Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative, signpost the era in which the films were made, and delineate the characters’ place within American culture. This book explores five of Hopper’s films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds of his films in ways that influenced other filmmakers and foreshadowed the advent of the music video format. The author traces Hopper’s distinctive approach to the use of music through films from 1969 to 1990, including his innovative use of popular rock, pop, and folk in Easy Rider, his blending of diegetic performances of folk and Peruvian indigenous music in The Last Movie, his use of punk rock in Out of the Blue, incorporation of hip-hop and rap in Colors, and commissioning of a jazz/blues soundtrack by Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker for The Hot Spot. Uncovering the film soundtrack as a vital piece of the narrative, this concise and accessible book offers insights for academic readers in music and film studies, as well as all those interested in Hopper’s work.

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