Author: Simon Hardy Butler
Child Cinemacology: ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,’ ‘Kingergarten Cop’ and Real Life Lessons
For what it’s worth, I’ve come to the conclusion that America’s historical record vis-à-vis the depiction of children in movies gets a dismaying, Hollywood-sign-size “F.” The uninvolving, horribly scripted Spy Kids (2001) is a dreadful mess that aims to bring to life youth’s heroic fantasies yet ends up feeling cheap in the maudlin, simplistic sentiments…
Laughter in the Pain: When Movie Humor Crosses the Bigotry Border
Allow me to ask you a few potentially offensive cinema-focused questions. Did you giggle at the line in Woody Allen’s 1975 comedy Love and Death in which Diane Keaton’s character Sonja says of her one true love, “Boris is trying to commit suicide—last week he contemplated inhaling next to an Armenian”? How about chuckle at…
A Rebuttal to Boots Riley’s Letter Criticizing ‘BlacKkKlansman’
Truth and film. They often go hand in hand. In general, movies based on real-life stories take portions of those tales and weave them into the cinematic fabric. Frequently, these pictures also embellish certain scenes, bits of dialogue, elements of action. If a work is good enough, the audience will find it credible. The best…
Tolerating Intolerance: ‘Silence,’ ‘Get Out’ and the Spectre of Anti-Japanese Bias
How is it that two of the most brilliant, perceptive films about discrimination in cinema history both seem to attack, in a distinctly pejorative way and despite their vital criticisms of intolerance, the same Asian ethnicity? I’m referring to Get Out (2017) and Silence (2016), directed by Jordan Peele and Martin Scorsese, respectively—pictures that I…
Sex and Tragedy: Hollywood’s Hypocritical Treatment of Gay Characters
Why does it always seem that mainstream American filmmakers are perfectly fine with showing homosexual relationships and even gay sex onscreen … as long as the characters don’t wind up with individuals of the same genders at the ends of the movies? A look at a selection of relatively high-profile pictures tells a rather perturbing…