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HOLLYWOOD HYBRIDS: MIXING GENRES IN CONTEMPORARY FILMS Irajaffe. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlepeld, 2008, 160 pp.
In Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films, Ira Jaffe takes on the subject of genre mixing in films, or what he calls "hybrid cinema," and attempts to draw a comparison between classical Hollywood and contemporary Hollywood, saying that the former has "not yielded hybrid generic forms ... as radical as those in other [artistic] traditions that have responded to modern life's distinct complexity and indeterminacy" (24). Some contemporary Hollywood films, on the other hand, according to Jaffe, "faithfully reflect as well as influence contemporary life" (6). Overall, he writes, "Diverse stylistic and generic currents intersect in more glaring and anarchic ways than in the past" (26). If this seems vague, it is at least consistent with the rest of the book, which examines this "phenomenon" (26), as the author calls it, in a rather disorganized manner.
The book is arranged into an introduction and five chapters titled "Fact and Fiction," "Gangster and Warrior," "Melodrama and Teen Romance," "Tragicomic Accidents," and "Global Parallels." The chapter titles give some idea of Jaffe's wide scope, a scope that accounts for much of the vagueness of the book. Jaffe starts out with a comparison that one might reasonably tackle in 160 pages- classical Hollywood genre mixing versus contemporary Hollywood genre mixing- and then immediately departs from it by looking at documentaries in chapter 1.
Despite the many thoughtful points, overall, there are too many eras represented here, too many kinds of films: not only classical Hollywood and documentary, but also international, independent, and avant-garde films, among others. By taking a tour across film history, Jaffe actually makes the opposite point:...