Description

Metabolism. There isn’t perhaps a more frequently used word in the weight loss (and weight gain) vocabulary than this.Indeed, it’s not uncommon to overhear people talking about their struggles – or triumphs – over the holiday bulge or love handles in terms of whether their metabolism is working, or not.Doctors, too, often refer to metabolism when they try and explain why starvation and water-loss diets aren’t scientifically of medically responsible; since, alas, they do not influence or take into account metabolism (there’s that word again!).So, for all of the usage that this rather daunting and biologically-charged word enjoys in our world, you’d comfortably assume that people understand it, right?Or, at least, they have some fundamental information when it comes to how to speed up their metabolism, right?Wrong!

Description

From the sets to the costumes to the delightfully wacky makeup, from the sketchbook to the storyboards to the production shots, here is a detailed look at the art and the ingenuity that went into the making of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, director Ron Howard's and Imagine Entertainment's feature movie adaptation of the Dr. Seuss holiday classic.

With a sharp eye for detail, good photos, and oodles of inside information, Andy Lipschultz has produced an exemplary book on the making of the live-action film of How the Grinch Stole Christmas.The transformation of Seuss's fanciful illustrations into physical reality (and the challenge of competing with Chuck Jones's great cartoon version) is largely a feat of makeup, special effects, and design, and a book is the perfect medium for explicating such magic. In chapters with lively, entertaining titles (the one on costume design is called "Laugh Now, But Wait Until It's Selling on Melrose Avenue"), Lipschultz delves into the origins and deeper meanings of the zillion props and sets and characters. Five-time Oscar winner Rick Baker's face-engulfing Grinch makeup design looks great on the page, and it's interesting to learn how the contact lenses and artificial snow made Jim Carrey suffer for his art. "We tried painting my face, which would have been very comfortable and given me a lot of leeway, but I looked like someone from the cast of Cats," explains Carrey. The Grinch's Mount Crumpit is revealed as Solitude ski resort near Salt Lake, with twisty Seussian crags added. The Grinch's cave is Carlsbad Caverns with the ramp from the Guggenheim and the bleak spirit of Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu. Like Dr. Seuss himself, the designers were crucially inspired by the architect Antonio Gaudi, and so there are no straight lines in Whoville. Even a pencil must be crooked, and the overall aesthetic was defined as "Blizzard Deco"--every item looks as if it were buried in a snowdrift. Almost all the materials used in the movie were made no later than 1957, when the book was written, stuff like Bakelite. Director Ron Howard consulted George Lucas on how to create an alien world rooted in realism. When the Grinch opens his "General Wholectric" fridge to remove the roast beast, the design evokes the optimistically futuristic spirit of that era. There are plenty of colorful pictures here, but don't miss the text explaining the in-jokes. When the Grinch burns the Christmas tree, he exclaims, "Oh, the Whomanity!," echoing the radio report of the Hindenburg disaster (to hear the original, get the book-and-CD set We Interrupt This Broadcast: The Events That Stopped Our Lives). When the Grinch, driving a stolen car, narrowly misses a Who baby carriage, it's a reference to the famous scene in Battleship Potemkin. --Tim Appelo

Description

Four time Hugo Award winner Vernor Vinge has taken readers to the depths of space and into the far future in his bestselling novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. Now, he has written a science-fiction thriller set in a place and time as exciting and strange as any far-future world: San Diego, California, 2025. Robert Gu is a recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a cure developed during the years of his near-fatal decline, he discovers that the world has changed and so has his place in it. He was a world-renowned poet. Now he is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he's starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son's family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum, layers of reality built on digital views seen by a single person or millions, depending on your choice. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access--through nodes designed into smart clothes--and to see the digital context--through smart contact lenses.  With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High, learning with other older people what is second nature to Miri and other teens at school, he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination.  In a world where every computer chip has Homeland Security built-in, this conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert's son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot.  As Robert becomes more deeply involved in conspiracy, he is shocked to learn of a radical change planned for the UCSD Geisel Library; all the books there, and worldwide, would cease to physically exist. He and his fellow re-trainees feel compelled to join protests against the change. With forces around the world converging on San Diego, both the conspiracy and the protest climax in a spectacular moment as unique and satisfying as it is unexpected. This is science fiction at its very best, by a master storyteller at his peak.

Features

• ISBN13: 9780812536362
• Condition: New
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