Tag: film
Hollywood’s Role in Lifting the Stigma of Mental Illness
Through the years, mentally ill individuals have often been portrayed in cinema in ways that are either reductionist or offensive. In some of the worst instances, the mentally ill are characterised as crazy, psychotic serial killers, strapped into straitjackets or hiding behind terrifying masks. Friday The 13th, Psycho, The Silence of The Lambs, and The…
Women in Film: Are things looking up in 2018?
In the final two months of 2018, here in the States, several intriguing movies centered on women will be released. Diverse genres will be represented, including the star vehicle (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which is already generating Oscar buzz for Melissa McCarthy), period ensembles (The Favourite, which has already won awards at the Venice…
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…
Anjelica Huston on James Joyce: A Shout in the Street
Mention the name James Joyce to most people, and they’ll be able to tell you that he was a brilliant Irish writer. There’s even a good chance they’ll be able to point to a copy of his much-revered masterpiece Ulysses on their bookshelf. But it’s also likely that they’ve never worked up the courage to…
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…