Friday, March 22 2013
Meryl Streep, Sex Goddess
Meryl Streep is portraying a string of desirous mammas, these days. In Mamma Mia, It's Complicated and Hope Springs, each of the leading ladies are mothers with grown children and a sexual appetite. A healthy one.
Thursday, January 10 2013
Movie Time Travel and the New Nostalgia
The new nostalgia signals the ultimate rejection of millennial anxiety, postmodernism, irony and the future. It longs for a post-industrial, green world. Of course, that suggests a vague and painful longing for something that never was.
Tuesday, November 20 2012
Color Television: What Diversity Looks Like in America Today
The buzz word from the 2012 presidential election is "diversity". It's a good story. The look of the Obama crowd had both the structure and randomness of a Jackson Pollock painting. It was the ol' melting pot writ large.
Wednesday, October 17 2012
How to Be a Film Snob: On ‘High’ (as in Getting) Culture
I was expecting Frederick Wiseman's cinema verite masterpiece for this column. Imagine my surprise when I was served up John Stalberg Jr.'s sophomoric High School, instead.
Wednesday, September 19 2012
Ethnographies of the Hipster: Miranda July’s ‘The Future’ and ‘It Chooses You’
It Chooses You provides a sketch of the deluxe hipster, one who hardly knows what to make of the poor, the underprivileged, the recently incarcerated, and others who are just plain weird, as opposed to quirky.
Wednesday, August 15 2012
Movie Toilets: Women and the Politics of Defilement
The toilet, and its spirit ally, potty humor, has come to be associated with a kind of strength—both at the box office and in terms of a cultural defiance.
Friday, July 13 2012
Spoiler Alert! The End of Film Endings
The ambiguous ending in a movie doesn’t feel like 'art'. It feels like a copy. And it resembles the tendency of the franchise ending, with intent to leave it open for a sequel.
