Film Friday Last Friday I wrote about my deep distress over the season 4 finale of Dexter. (Read no further if you want don’t want the suspense ruined for you.) My friend Rachel Kranz, who introduced me to the show, wrote me the following response examining why people, men especially, find the show so captivating. […]
Tag Archives: Film
The Sexual Politics of Dexter
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Your Friendly Neighborhood Serial Killer
Film Friday Today, in a slight departure, I am writing on a television series rather than a film, one that has gripped me for months. My love affair came to a crashing end last week, however, and I have resolved never to watch another episode. Since I tell my students that negative viewing experiences are […]
Dance with the Enemy, Then Go Wash
Film Friday The Western, Hollywood’s quintessential genre, can tell us a lot about race relations. I was reminded of this on Wednesday when I taught John Ford’s The Searchers in my American Film class. Rewatching the movie got me thinking about the Congressional hearings on “Muslim American Radicalization,” which began yesterday. I will have more […]
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Dorothy’s Advice for Lawyers
Film Friday In a 2006 commencement address to the University of Richmond Law School, John Douglass outlined how The Wizard of Oz can serve as a guide for lawyers. His brother Brent, husband of Carter Douglass whose children-in church poem I published two weeks ago, alerted me to it, and since it fits this blog […]
Chicks Who Kick Butt, 20th Anniversary
Film Friday Slate reminds me that 2011 is the 20th anniversary of Thelma and Louise, a film that once worked (and perhaps still does) as a gender Rorschach test. When it came out, many women loved it and many men didn’t. I remember walking out of the theater feeling very uncomfortable while my wife was […]
Strangelove Somewhat Dated (Thank God!)
Film Friday Recently, maybe on National Public Radio, I heard a story that struck me as marvelous: an American tourist was visiting underground Russian bomb shelters. What with improving relations, apparently the Russians no longer feel they need a place where their government officials can hide out for two weeks following a nuclear attack. The […]
Kane: Sunny Pleasure Dome, Caves of Ice
Film Friday I’m teaching Citizen Kane currently in my American Film class and am struck, once again, by the influence that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” had on the movie. My father and I tried to make this case in an article that we wrote on Citizen Kane a number of years back (described here), and while the editors […]
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A Gritty Child in a Tough World
Film Friday (Warning: The following essay contains spoilers) I watched Ethan and Joel Coen’s remake of True Grit last Friday and now can’t help but think about it in terms of the Arizona shootings. Will our young people, faced with all this violence, grow up as tough as 14-year-old Mattie Ross? Yesterday’s Washington Post had […]
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Film’s Phantom Empire Controls Our Lives
Film Friday Film has restructured the way we see the world. Such is the thesis of a fascinating book that my father gave me for Christmas. Geoffrey O’Brien’s aptly named The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century is a very smart book that takes one inside the movie viewing experience—good movies, […]
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