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Smith, Anthony N., Storytelling Industries: Narrative Production in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, 266 pp., $59.99 (eBook), ISBN: 978-3-319-70597-2.

Harrod , Mary, and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, eds., Women Do Genre in Film and Television. New York: Routledge, 2018, 266 pp., $39.16 (paperback), ISBN: 9780367889845.

García, Alberto N. ed., Emotions in Contemporary TV Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 253 pp., $89.00, ISBN: 978-1-137-56885-4.

Dunleavy, Trisha. Complex Serial Drama and Multiplatform Television. New York: Routledge, 2019, 202 pp., $46.95, ISBN: 9781138927759.

In film criticism, “feel-good films” are widely dismissed as intellectually undemanding and sentimental entertainment. This study identifies key characteristics, emotional effects, and aesthetic qualities of feel-good films from the audience’s perspective. Although the feel-good film does not appear to be a genre in its own right, it is more than just a rather vague category. Romantic comedy films with a substantial share of drama are shown to be the most prototypical feel-good genre blend. Fairy-tale likeness and perceived lightness were indicated as key characteristics of these films. Yet for all their focus on happiness and relaxation, the emotional trajectories also involve serious conflicts and are experienced as profoundly moving. Moreover, preferences for feel-good films differ greatly, depending on gender and age.

This study tested the role of the audio soundtrack in the opening scene of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (Orson Welles and Albert Zugsmith, 1958) in supporting a predictive inference that a time bomb will explode, as the filmmakers intended. We designed two experiments and interpreted their results using the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT). Across both experiments, viewers watched the scene, we manipulated their knowledge of the bomb, and they made a predictive inference just before the bomb would explode. Experiment 1 found that the likelihood of predicting the explosion decreased when the soundtrack was absent. Experiment 2 showed that individual differences in working memory accounted for variability in generating the prediction when the soundtrack was absent. We explore the implications for filmmaking in general.

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between philosophical accounts of criticism, largely within the analytic tradition, and the practice of criticism. Specifically, I am interested in the performative, subjective, and often idiosyncratic nature of such a practice and in the advantages it can deliver in the understanding of works of mass art, in the inquiry over the nature of aesthetic judgments, and in initiating aesthetic appreciation. Promoting such a connection is also, in turn, a way of at least partially bridging the divide between analytic approaches and the kind of work more typically conducted by scholars in film studies.

Abstract

This interview is based on a series of email exchanges in November 2019 between Taiwanese writer and scholar Ta-wei Chi and Korean American scholar Jane Chi Hyun Park about Chi's queer speculative novella, The Membranes. The first section provides a summary of the novella, which was recently translated into English by Ari Heinrich. The second section paints a picture in broad brush strokes of the contexts in which Chi wrote The Membranes—taking into consideration key cross-cultural influences and critical reception in Taiwan in the 1990s. It also examines the cultural and political relevance of Chi's creative predictions about the future within the present historical moment. Finally, it explores afterlives for the novella in the form of sequels and possible cinematic adaptations.

Andrew Klevan, Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 256 pp, $22.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978-1784991258.

Mario Slugan, Noël Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture (New York: Bloomsbury Academic), xi +218 pp., $103.50 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-78831-229-5.

Wheatley, Catherine, Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, vi +307 pp., $118 (hardback), ISBN: 9781350113220.