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Blockbuster Performances
How Actors Contribute to Cinema's Biggest Hits
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Book Presentation:
This book examines performances in the American film industry’s highest-earning and most influential films. Countering decades of discourse and the conventional notion that special effects are the real stars of Hollywood blockbusters, this book finds that the acting performances in these big-budget action movies are actually better, and more genre-appropriate, than reputed. It argues that while blockbusters are often edited for speed, thrills, and simplicity, and performances are sometimes tailored to this style, most major productions feature more scenes of stage-like acting than hyper-kinetic action. Knowing this, producers of the world’s highest-budgeted motion pictures usually cast strong or generically appropriate actors. With chapters offering unique readings of some of cinema’s biggest hits, such as The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, Iron Man and The Hunger Games, this unprecedented study sheds new light on the importance ofperformance in the Hollywood blockbuster.
About the Author:
Daniel Smith-Rowsey teaches Communication Studies at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. He is the author of Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels (2013) and a co-editor of The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century (2016).
Press Reviews:
"Daniel Smith-Rowsey fills in the gaps in our understanding of acting in contemporary blockbusters. Many accomplished film actors gladly take the shuttle between prestigious independent films and vastly popular action, fantasy, and superhero franchises. Do large scale spectaculars call for a kind of acting different from that required in an intimate character study?With well-chosen case studies and intricate analyses, the author answers these questions and many others in a book that should become a standard in the studies of performance and Hollywood cinema." (Dennis Bingham, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, USA)
See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan
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