Country Music Is a Political Bellwether
If politics runs downstream from culture per the “Breitbart Doctrine”, then do far-right politics run downstream from country music?
vietnam war
‘The Sympathizer’ Fractures Identity into a Knockout Kaleidoscopic Tale
The mini-series adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s kaleidoscopic tale The Sympathizer is a knockout account of colonialism, war, and (the loss of) identity.
Anti-Authority Film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Still Bites
Film-goers viewed One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a metaphor for ’70s era struggles against war, racism, and political corruption.
Baby Boomer Optimism and Regret in the Star Wars Trilogies
While the original Star Wars trilogy display George Lucas’ youthful optimism, the prequels reveal his dismay and regret at the world created by the Boomer generation.
Smoking Saved My Life: A Skinny Jewish Kid Comes of Age in the Haze of American Violence
As cool as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Jack Kerouac or Dalton Trumbo, rebel Max "Flaco" Greenbaum grows up in Watts Riots-Vietnam-draft-era L.A. Too smart (and smart-mouthed) for school, the violence of this world is drawn in deep and lingers like the long, slow, life-saving drag of a cigarette.
Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’ and Pedagogical Filmmaking in the Movement for Black Lives
As with Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee's films are replete with experimental aesthetics that deconstruct the conventions of (white) Hollywood and re-frame and re-contextualize Black lives and Black history.
There’s a War Going on: Spike Lee’s ‘Da 5 Bloods’
Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods engages with the notion of perpetual conflict. But how well does it fit into the current social milieu of demonstrations against police violence?
‘Norman Mailer: The Sixties’: A Turbulent Decade, an Exhaustive Collection, a Divisive Writer
Despite Mailer's literary merit, his persistent fetishizing of the black body in his writing during the '60s gets tiresome. Yet we can't ignore these works.
‘Bring the War Home’ Digs into the Trenches of the White Power Movement in America
Historian Kathleen Belew painstakingly details the influence of the Vietnam wartime experience on the evolution of white power ideology.
Apocalypse, American Style
Apocalypse Now is the most iconic American film about America’s War in Vietnam. But we are not here to expand the myth. We are here to explode it.
Marcelino Truong’s ‘Saigon Calling’ Is a Beautiful Graphic Memoir of a Nightmarish Time
This book offers a poignant and jarring reminder not just of the resilience of the human spirit, but also of its ability to seek solace in the materiality of one's present.
How ‘The Quiet American’ Continues to Colonize Vietnam
Neither bombs nor bumbling Americans broke the will of the Vietnamese. Something far more insidious and far-reaching, however, may have.