Screen
Ode to Joystick
How can you not love Ms. Pac-Man, a woman for whom power pellets, peaches, and pretzels constitute a steady diet?
This is how I feel about her now, but my love for the little yellow gal with the red bow began when I wore bows myself—when I was around 11.
Each summer, my mom would drag me to... Read more »
L in a Handbasket: Kate Clinton's Politics of Funny
Kate Clinton has been called the lesbian Jon Stewart. Her fans, however, prefer to think of Stewart as the straight Kate Clinton. Her career as a political humorist spans several White House administrations, but the current regime has offered her, like most liberal comedians, endless material for... Read more »
Student Counsel: Talking Sense with <em>The Education of Shelby Knox</em>’s Creators and Star
Everything’s bigger in Texas, or so the saying goes, and that may be truest in the realm of sex-education controversy. Texas, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, has also been at the forefront of abstinence-only education in... Read more »
Senex and Sensibility: Boys to men in Wes Anderson's film oeuvre
From the machismo of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone to Woody Allen’s nebbishes and the teenage fantasies of the Porky’s and American Pie franchises, manhood in all its flavors is a staple of the silver screen. Writer-director Wes Anderson is clearly fascinated by the... Read more »
Five Conversations About One Thing - Jim McKay
Amy Richards met Jim McKay as he was getting ready to release his first film, Girls Town, in 1995. McKay was kind (and political) enough to offer his film to the Third Wave Foundation, which Richards cofounded, for a benefit screening. Though Third Wave has had dozens of events since then, none has... Read more »
Jail Bait: Rethinking Images of Incarcerated Women
It is not my pleasure to remind anyone of the 2001 teen flick Sugar & Spice. Teetering between the black humor of Heathers and the girly glitz of Clueless, it achieves the success of neither, and I bring it up now only because of a single scene.
The movie follows a group of cheerleaders who... Read more »
Period Pieces: The Last Taboo of Reality TV
Detailed discussions of diarrhea (Survivor). On-camera vomiting (The Bachelor, The Biggest Loser). Extensive cosmetic surgery (The Swan). Endless hot-tub makeout sessions (take your pick). On reality tv, no subject is too personal to reveal, no biological function too intimate to discuss—... Read more »
Suburban Blight: The Battle of <em>The Stepford Wives</em>
A film studies professor once told me that everything you need to know about a movie is revealed in the first five minutes. This is particularly true of The Stepford Wives.
In the opening scene of Bryan Forbes's 1975 original, Joanna Eberhart (Katharine Ross) takes a long,... Read more »
Compromising Positions: Gender by design on <em>Merge</em> and <em>Mix It Up</em>
Mass media, particularly so-called family television, from Bewitched to Everybody Loves Raymond, has long portrayed the home as women's domain, an ultra-feminized realm in which housewives bustle and cluck while their hapless husbands do little more than hand out spending money and retreat to the... Read more »
The Queen's Gambit: The underhanded treatment of race in bringing down the house
Few would debate the fact that before the civil rights and women's liberation movements percolated into mass culture, representations of black/white relationships in popular media, particularly Hollywood, were thoroughly unbalanced. Viewed in retrospect, seemingly amicable duos like Uncle Tom and... Read more »
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