Post-pop cinema : the search for meaning in new American film

During the early 1990s a cultural tide of pop postmodernism swept through music, film, literature, and fashion.

In cinema in particular, some of the art's most fundamental aspects - stories, characters, and genres, for instance - assumed such a trite and trivialised appearance that only rarely could they take their places on the screen without provoking an inward smirk or a wink from the audience.

Out of this highly self-conscious and world-weary environment, however, a new group of film-makers began to develop as the decade wore on, with a new set of styles and sensibilities to match.

In "Post-Pop Cinema", the author takes us on a film-by-film tour of the works of Wes and P.

T. Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Richard Linklater, Alexander Payne, and David O.

Russell, and reveals how a common pool of styles, collaborators, and personal connections helps them to confront the unifying problem of meaning in American film.

Although these men and women represent a wide range of styles and subject matter, all their films revolve in different ways around the difficulty of establishing and maintaining connections. This theme of connection also runs deeper than the films made: the directors share actors (Mark Wahlberg, Bill Murray, Ben Stiller, Jason Schwartzman), collaborators (the musician Jon Brion) and sometimes even personal connections (Spike Jonze starred in Russell's "Three Kings", and was married to Sofia Coppola).

Together these filmmakers form a loose and distinctly American school of filmmaking, one informed by postmodernism but not in thrall to it, and one that every year becomes more important to the world of cinema both within and beyond the United States.

This book represents not only the first prolonged study devoted to several of these very important filmmakers, but also the first effort to chronicle the efforts of this group as a whole.