All books using the keywords: Rand Careaga

“‘A masterpiece of its kind’ does not seem too strong an accolade for a book apt to be the only one of its kind.” This judgment of John Updike’s, rendered in his review of an entirely different work almost half a century ago, does not seem inapt for this collection of 300 film titles edited into geography-based visual puns. It’s likely to appeal to a smallish audience of outré sensibilities, but as XIX century American humorist “Artemus Ward” observed (in a quip since erroneously associated with Abraham Lincoln), “for the people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they’ll like.” In that spirit, for those whose discretionary income permits such an indulgence, there are ...

In this thematic sequel to the author’s 2021 collection “Cinema Paronomasia,” which has sold nearly four copies since its publication, film posters once again are the subject. This time, though, the electronic spirits of a dozen or so eminent artists and illustrators have been enlisted—conscripted, really—to generate these artworks as “Midjourney,” an AI gorged on tens of millions of images scraped from the internet, “imagines” they might render them. The results range from intriguing to grotesque, but for even the most preposterous examples, as the epigraph notes, “you are surprised to find it done at all.”