Pop Classics (ECW Press)

The Worst. Movie. Ever. is a masterpiece. Seriously. .Enough time has passed since Showgirls flopped spectacularly that it's time for a good, hard look back at the sequined spectacle. A salvage operation on a very public, very expensive train wreck, It Doesn't Suck argues that Showgirls is much smarter and deeper than it is given credit for. In an accessible and entertaining voice, the book encourages a shift in critical perspective on Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, analyzing the film, its reception, and rehabilitation. This in-depth study of a much-reviled movie is a must read for lovers and haters of the 1995 Razzie winner for Worst Picture.

Celebrating the persistence of Turtle Power Raise Some Shell critically and cleverly examines the origins, evolution, and impact of the Ninja Turtles phenomenon - from its beginning as a self-published black-and-white comic book in 1984, through its transformation into a worldwide transmedia phenomenon by the middle of the 1990s, and up to the sale of the property to Nickelodeon in 2009 and relaunch of the Turtles with new comics, cartoons, and a big-budget Hollywood film. With the eye of contemporary cultural studies and the voice of a true lifelong Turtles fan, Rosenbaum argues that the Turtles' continuing success isn't mere nostalgia, but rather the result of characters, and a franchise, that mutated in a way that allowed the to survive and thrive in a post-modern world.

Damn good coffee, cherry pie, and the "big bang of auteur television." In 1990, avant garde filmmaker David Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet) and acclaimed television writer Mark Frost (Hill Street Blues) teamed up to create a television show that would redefine what the medium could achieve in a one-hour drama. With Twin Peaks, the duo entranced audiences with the seemingly idyllic town, its quirky characters, and a central mystery - who killed Laura Palmer? In a town like Twin Peaks, nothing is as it seems, and in Wrapped in Plastic, pop culture writer Andy Burns uncovers and explores the groundbreaking stylistic and storytelling methods that have made the series one of the most influential and enduring shows of the past 25 years.

An explosive, groundbreaking album that crowned a new king of rock in just 33 minutes. Before Elvis Costello was one of Rolling Stone's greatest artists of all time, before he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was Declan P. McManus, an office drone with a dull suburban life and a side gig in a pub rock band. In 1976, under the guidance of legendary label Stiff Records, he transformed himself into the snarling, spectacled artist who defied the musical status quo to blaze the trail for a new kind of rock star with his debut album, My Aim Is True. In Elvis Is King, Richard Crouse examines how the man, the myth, and the music of this arrestingly original album smashed the trends of the era to bridge the gap between punk and rock 'n' roll.

In defense of Nicolas Cage - the man and the meme - a debate-sparking actor who audiences seem to love and loathe in almost equal amounts Nicolas Cage: leading man or character actor? Action hero or goofball comedian? Internet joke or one of the greatest actors of his generation? Beyond the gif bait and easy punchline, Nicolas Cage continually frustrates easy categorization or understanding. In National Treasure, pop culture writer Lindsay Gibb studies Nicolas Cage's acting style and makes sense of the trajectory of his eclectic career. In the process, Gibb debunks the common claim that Cage makes bad choices. While his choices of roles are seemingly inscrutable, Cage challenges critics and audiences alike by refusing to be predictable or to conform to the Hollywood approach to acting. Much like one of his mentors, David Lynch, Cage aims for art in movie-making. Is there a method to his madness? Is he in on the joke? In this clear-eyed and well-argued volume of the Pop Classics series, Gibb answers both questions with a resounding hell yes.

A smart, engaging investigation of the show that brought real teens to TV My So-Called Life lasted only 19 episodes from 1994 to 1995, but in that time it earned many devoted viewers, including the showrunners who would usher in the teen TV boom of the late '90s and the new millennium. With its focus on 15-year-old Angela Chase's search for her identity, MSCL's realistic representation of adolescence on TV was groundbreaking; without her there would be no Buffy or Felicity, Rory Gilmore or Veronica Mars. The series' broadcast coincided with the arrival of third-wave feminism, the first feminist movement to make teen voices a priority, and Angela became their small-screen spokesperson. From her perspective, MSCL explored gender, identity, sexuality, race, class, body image, and other issues vital to the third wave (and the world). To this day, passionate fans dissect everything from what Rickie Vasquez did for gay representation to what Jordan Catalano did for leaning, and Soraya Roberts makes an invaluable contribution to that conversation with In My Humble Opinion.

Gus Van Sant's 1991 indie darling My Own Private Idaho perplexed and provoked, inspiring a new ethos for a new decade: being different was better than being good. Gentlemen of the Shade examines how the film was a coming-of-age for a generation of young people who would embrace the alternative and bring their outsider perspectives to sustainability, technology, gender constructs, and social responsibility. My Own Private Idaho - fragmented and saturated with color and dirt and a painfully beautiful masculinity - also crept into popular media, and its influence can still be traced. R.E.M. Portlandia. Hipsterism. James Franco. Referencing the often-funny and sometimes-tragic cultural touchstones of the past 26 years, Gentlemen of the Shade sets the film as social bellwether for the many outsiders who were looking to join the right, or any, revolution.

A deep dive into the groundbreaking and bestselling video game series. The critically acclaimed first-person shooter franchise Borderlands knows it's ridiculous. It's a badge of pride. After all, Borderlands 2 was promoted with the tagline "87 bazillion guns just got bazillionder." These space-western games encourage you to shoot a lot of enemies and monsters, loot their corpses, and have a few chuckles while chasing down those bazillion guns. As Kaitlin Tremblay explores in Ain't No Place for a Hero, the Borderlands video game series satirizes its own genre, exposing and addressing the ways first-person shooter video games have tended to exclude women, queer people, and people of colour, as well as contribute to a hostile playing environment. Tremblay also digs in to the way the Borderlands game franchise - which has sold more than 26 million copies - disrupts traditional notions of heroism, creating nuanced and compelling storytelling that highlights the strengths and possibilities of this relatively new narrative medium. The latest entry in the acclaimed Pop Classics series, Ain't No Place for a Hero is a fascinating read for Borderlands devotees as well as the uninitiated.

The right reasons to fall in love with The Bachelor When it debuted in 2002, The Bachelor raised the stakes of first-wave reality television, offering the ultimate prize: true love. Since then, thrice yearly, dozens of camera-ready young-and-eligibles have vied for affection (and roses) in front of a devoted audience of millions. In this funny, insightful examination of the worlds favorite romance-factory, Suzannah Showler explores the contradictions that are key to the franchises genius, longevity, and power and parses what this means for both modern love and modern America. She argues the show is both gameshow and marriage plot an improbable combination of competitive effort and kismet and that its both relic and prophet, a time-traveler from first-gen reality TV that proved to be a harbinger of Tinder. In the modern media-savvy climate, the show cleverly highlights and resists its own artifice, allowing Bachelor Nation to see through the fakery to feel the romance. Taking on issues of sex, race, contestants-as-villains, the controversial spin-offs, and more, Most Dramatic Ever is both love letter to and deconstruction of the show that brought us real love in the reality TV era.

A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic strip The internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there's one thing that's universally beloved: Bill Watterson's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all around the world. The story of a boy and his best friend a stuffed tiger was a pitch-perfect distillation of the joys and horrors of childhood, and a celebration of imagination in its purest form. In Let's Go Exploring, Michael Hingston mines the strip and traces the story of Calvin's reclusive creator to demonstrate how imagination its possibilities, its opportunities, and ultimately its limitations helped make Calvin and Hobbes North Americas last great comic strip.

Megan Fox, a diabolic indie rock band, toxic friendship, fluid sexuality, feminist reckoning, and a literal man-eater in the body of a high school cheerleader: Jennifer's Body has it all Featuring an original interview with director Karyn Kusama What would be an easy sell in 2021, women at the helm (screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Karyn Kusama), a bankable cast (Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried), and a deceptively complex skewering of gender politics, was a box office flop in 2009. In Extra Salty, Frederick Blichert flips the script on how Jennifer's Body was labeled a failure to celebrate all that is scrumptious (as Jennifer would say) about it: supernatural horror, dark comedy, queer love, and a nuanced handling of gendered violence. The movie could have been to the aughts what Heathers was to the eighties, and it's finally getting its due, whether in the flood of tenth-anniversary praise, the parade of Jennifer Halloween costumes, or Halsey's nod to it ("Killing Boys") on her platinum-selling album. With insight into the genre's cinematic tropes, our current cultural reckoning with misogyny, and an original interview with director Karyn Kusama, Extra Salty solidifies the status of Jennifer's Body as a cult classic.

An exuberant, incisive look at how Tony Hawk's Pro Skater transformed a culture. Going from a hobby toy for surfers to an Olympic sport, skateboarding has had a tumultuous history. Today, professional skateboarders land endorsement deals with Nike and Adidas, while popular television series like HBO's “Betty” tell the stories of diverse crews of skaters living in New York City. So how did a fledgling subculture rise from its near-death knell in the '90s to become ubiquitous today? It was simply a matter of finding the right messenger. In 1999, the bestselling video game “Tony Hawk's Pro Skater” was released, and a new generation was exposed to skateboarding culture right in their very own homes. Kids and adults alike could now spend hours playing as actual skateboarders, learning the vernacular, listening to the music skateboarders loved, and having fun onscreen before trying to skate IRL in the driveway. “Right, Down + Circle” explores how a video game starring the most famous pro skater in the world brought skateboarding culture-and its ever-shifting markers of music, subversion, and coolness-to the masses and ultimately transformed the culture it borrowed from in the process. Combining skateboarding history and memoir, “Right, Down + Circle” explores how a video game starring the most famous pro skater in the world brought skate culture-and its ever-shifting markers of music, subversion, and coolness-to the masses and ultimately transformed the culture it borrowed from in the process.

An engaging exploration into the enduring popularity of “Dirty Dancing” and its lasting themes of feminism, activism, and reproductive rights. When “Dirty Dancing” was released in 1987, it had already been rejected by producers and distributors several times over, and expectations for the summer romance were low. But then the film, written by former dancer Eleanor Bergstein and starring Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze as a couple from two different worlds, exploded. Since then, “Dirty Dancing's” popularity has never waned. The truth has always been that “Dirty Dancing” was never just a teen romance or a dance movie, it also explored abortion rights, class, and political activism, with a smattering of light crime-solving. In “The Time of My Life”, celebrated music journalist Andrea Warner excavates the layers of Dirty Dancing, from its anachronistic, chart-topping soundtrack, to Baby and Johnny's chemistry, to Bergstein's political intentions, to the abortion subplot that is more relevant today than ever. The film's remarkable longevity would never have been possible if it was just a throwaway summer fling story. It is precisely because of its themes-deeply feminist, sensitively written-that we, over 30 years later, are still holding our breath during that last, exhilarating lift. “The Time of My Life” weaves together the sharp, incisive, wryly funny story of the making of a young feminist who found inspiration in an unexpected place, and the former teenage mambo queen who turned her love of dance, music, and social justice into an unlikely blockbuster hit about an illegal abortion: “Dirty Dancing.”

A smart and incisive exploration of everyone's favorite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The “Jurassic Park” series is one of the most famous and profitable movie franchises of all time-an entire generation of people has never known life without these CGI dinosaurs. The movie spectacle broke film and merchandising records, pioneered special effects, and made Jeff Goldblum into an unlikely sex symbol, and now it has also been re-envisioned as a classic of queer feminist storytelling. In “Clever Girl”, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free. The velociraptors were not just jump scares for children but also revelatory and predatory symbols of feminist rage. Clever girls, indeed.

A sweet and sly exploration of the Jane Austen–inspired teen movie and its evergreen imperative to be kind, do better, and find the activist within We are totally butt-crazy in love with Clueless. Since the movie's premiere in 1995, pop culture has mined Amy Heckerling's high school comedy for inspiration, from Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX's "Fancy" music video to Cher's iconic yellow plaid suit appearing at every Halloween party. In Ugh As If!, Veronica Litt argues that this seemingly fluffy teen romp is the quintessential thinking woman's movie, one in which the audience is asked to seriously consider the beauty and power of naïveté. Cher Horowitz's gradual pivot from oblivious it girl to burgeoning activist is a powerful reminder that even the most unlikely people can change for the better and contribute to their communities. In this bright, shiny film, pursuing a more just society isn't just possible - it's enjoyable. This fun, feminine, feel-good movie is a counter-narrative to nihilism, a refusal to give into cynicism, hopelessness, and passivity. Almost without viewers noticing, Clueless teaches Cher, and us, how to become better. Like the film it examines, Ugh As If! nudges even the most jaded viewer into feeling hopeful about the future. About the Pop Classics Series Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters. Ugh As If! uncovers the complex layers beneath the glossy surface of the 1995 classic film Clueless. Litt investigates not just the Austen satire but the deeper themes embedded in the film, such as ethical questions about femininity, innocence, bias, and inequity. Veronica Litt is a writer, reader, teacher, and hobbyist letterpress printer from Hamilton, Ontario. She holds a PhD in English and Book History from the University of Toronto and currently lives in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, where she teaches post-secondary classes on English literature. Ugh As If! is her first book. "Ugh! As If! makes a powerful argument for why we should keep inviting Amy Heckerling's film into our lives, and it reminds us of comedy's awesome power to connect us." - Deidre Lynch, author of Loving Literature: A Cultural History "Litt's lively, original Ugh! As If! uses the brilliant teen movie Clueless as a lens to examine the broader cultural landscape with playfulness and depth." - Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun! "Litt gives Clueless the intellectual importance it deserves, adding it to the canon of timeless women-led pictures." - Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour "Just like Clueless, Ugh! As If! is an unabashed celebration of all things girly, bubbly, and bright. If you've been feeling jaded about the state of the world, this sweet, smart, and funny book is exactly what you need." - Hannah McGregor, author of Clever Girl and A Sentimental Education "Veronica Litt, using Clueless as her campy, colourful vessel, encourages us to love the art that moves us, to interrogate our notions of complacency and ignorance and, most importantly, to tell us not to give up the fight, whether it be on a global scale or confined to the halls of high school chaos." - Mount Holyoke News Sales and Market Bullets • SIMULTANEOUS AUDIO RELASE WITH SPOTIFY • QUIZ YOUR HEART OUT: Packed with quizzes to reveal your Clueless persona and uncover other must-know essentials! • JUST PLAIN FUN: The book tackles the flaws in the script and direction of the film, particularly regarding race, but it ultimately argues that the movie shows how to do good in the world without being a bummer. Ugh As If! is a defense of girly art that shows that a chick flick can be an oddball roadmap to a better world. • A MOVIE THAT LIVES ON: The movie's lasting popularity comes through in its many adaptations: a stage play,

A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee's performance was "more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee." In It Can't Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee's death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn't need to be hard and impenetrable. Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope. About the Pop Classics Series Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters. Near the completion of filming The Crow, the star was killed in a shooting accident on set. Mughal argues against the criticism that the tragedy overshadows the quality of the film and shows readers that The Crow - which explores gender, grief, and love - is a work of art that ended up birthing and transcending tragedy. Alisha Mughal is a culture writer based in Toronto. She is a journalist and film critic who has written for Film Daze, Exclaim!, RogerEbert.com, and Catapult. "This book is a sheer, dark gem that glints and pulses at the very intersection of life and death. Alisha Mughal writes with searing intelligence, exactitude, and soul about heartbreak as a generative force and art as a site of resurrection. Through the prismatic lens of a cult film and its dead star, Mughal finds her own hard-won salvation. Daring, gory, and radiant, It Can't Rain All the Time is ultimately that rarest of offerings: an act of faith and a testament to hope." - Claudia Dey, author of Daughter "Meticulously researched and brilliantly presented, Mughal unpacks The Crow's raw beauty and aching grief - themes that resonate at the core of both James O'Barr's graphic novel and the iconic 1994 film adaptation. This is more than analysis; it's a tribute to the emotional weight and artistic legacy that The Crow continues to carry." - Carleigh Baker, author of Last Woman "It Can't Rain All the Time is criticism, history, memoir, and poetry: a work of art about a work of art." - Matt Zoller Seitz, author of The Wes Anderson Collection "Alisha Mughal writes beautifully, vulnerably, and viscerally. It Can't Rain All the Time is a powerful reminder that the most powerful art reminds us how to feel." - Anne T. Donahue, author of Nobody Cares Sales and Market Bullets • A FRESH CRITIQUE: The editor of the Pop Classics series had been on the hunt for a proposal that was a little more niche and had a unique perspective. Alisha Mughal leans into the emo/goth/grunge vibe of The Crow, meeting the film where it's at rather than judging it by clinical critical standards. Mughal offers a frank discussion on mental health, grief and loss, and the ways in which we just try to feel better. For her, feeling better meant watching The Crow and being submerged in its dark, moody, broken heart.