Search Results for: Taken

An American Icon: In Praise of Jane Fonda, AFI’s Life Achievement Award Winner of 2014

The roles she began to play during this period revealed a growing socio-political awareness.

‘Shine’: 10 Women Strip Down and Share Their Thoughts on Body Image

There were parts of the short that I really loved. The variety of women–not just in terms of body type but also ethnicity–was wonderful to see captured on film. The scenes where the women were just hanging out being themselves were beautiful and really conveyed a sense of easy feminine bonding that is something unusual in a world where women are almost always conveyed as competing with each other.

Women Who Steal: ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ and ‘Lift’

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up, to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’: A Three-Hour Explosion of Contempt for You and Your Family

You don’t have to be an intellectual elitist to hate ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction.’ It is a terrible movie for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of originality and everything to do with an abundance of vulgarity, violence, misogyny, and racism.

‘Adventure Time’ vs. ‘Regular Show’

There is one thing that, for me, gives ‘Adventure Time’ a bit of an edge over ‘Regular Show’, and it’s been compounded after sitting through a two-hour back-to-back marathon of both shows over the weekend. It boils down to this: while both cartoons are awesome, ‘Regular Show’ is pretty much a bro-zone while ‘Adventure Time’ has a bit more room for the ladies.

The Feminism of ‘Sailor Moon’

This has been a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time. I’m an absolutely die-hard fan of ‘Sailor Moon,’ and part of that is because it served as my childhood introduction to feminism. That might be a little bit hard to believe, considering the superheroines of the show are known for outfits not much more revealing than Wonder Woman’s. Silly outfits aside (you get used to them), this show was absolutely groundbreaking. Its protagonists are 10 realistically flawed, individual and talented teenage girls (and women) who, oh, you know. Save the world.

‘Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School’

Time for a serious interlude. ‘Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School’ is an 80-minute documentary that tells a story about the Indian boarding school experience from the Native American perspective. The dark history of Indian boarding schools sanctioned by U.S. government policy is a stain on this nation, but one that very few people know about. This film provides an emotional and logical overview of these boarding schools and the continuing effects on today’s Indigenous populations.

Seed & Spark: My Heroes Have Always Been Cowgirls

Female characters are often filler, like the cartilage that goes into hot dogs, with no real meat on their bones. They stand in the doorway, boxed in the jam, never truly inhabiting the whole room. Why? Why are female characters relegated to the margin? Maybe because studios believe men go to the movies more than women. Maybe because the industry spends time and money making action figures and toy guns for boys, whose mothers are trying to teach them that violence is always unacceptable, especially toward women. We have got to stop feeding this system.

The Dreamscapes and Nightmares of Jamin Winans’ ‘Ink’

Like many fans of this film, I initially watched ‘Ink’ (2009) on Netflix and immediately conducted some research to learn more about the making of this independent picture. It’s also a narrative that lingers with you after you’ve finished watching it, so I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the film’s acting and score, as well as the pivotal moments that merge with a complex plot that unfolds somewhere between reality and fantasy. After maybe a half a dozen viewings, this story never fails to evoke tears for me.

Father Archetypes in Guillermo Del Toro’s Films

There are patterns in Guillermo del Toro’s dark fairy tales, one of the obvious ones being the ease with which he puts children in harm’s way, some of their trials being so painfully harsh that one can’t help suspecting that he puts them in his stories just to tear at our heartstrings. Thankfully, the stories of childhood loss are balanced with protective Nurturer figures, some women, some men, but I’ll be focussing purely on the men because of the clichéd figure of the female nurturer.