I am weary of this story. And if I’m tired of it, I can only imagine how audience members of color might feel. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A racist white person, cartoonishly evil, meets a black person and, for the first time, really gets to know them. This personal experience with […]
Perhaps Us is about how scary it is to exist in this country right now, when so many people we’ve known all our lives have revealed themselves to be sociopaths or worse. Maybe it’s about the scary realization that we never know who will turn on us next, or when, or why. “Therefore thus saith […]
If you value diversity, you have to appreciate the effort this year. The 2019 Oscars managed to avoid most of the problems people usually complain about. Given how many awards they present, a long show is unavoidable, but the pace this year seemed positively snappy, with more than one winner getting played off the stage […]
Once it was over, the night’s importance was hard to miss. In most ways, it, like much of the last year, belonged to women. Next time someone complains about the length of the Oscars telecast, please refer them to the 2019 Grammy Awards. Clocking in at just over twenty-three years, the Grammys overstayed their welcome […]
If you throw a fit about the message here, you reveal little but your own insecurities and guilt. The recent Gillette ad targeting patriarchal definitions of masculinity has already sparked backlash from conservative douchebags (hi, Piers Morgan!) and bratty, whiny “incels” and men who just, like, don’t understand why you hate all men, bro. What […]
Much like our hosts, the winners, at times, seem to have been chosen out of two boxes—one white and traditional, the other from the larger and unwieldier box called “diversity.” Few things bore me faster than people who talk on social media about how boring and irrelevant and overlong and stupid Awards Show X is. […]
The film glosses over, perhaps even misrepresents, some of the most important aspects of Mercury’s life—his sexuality, his death from AIDS, and the symbology of the ’80s that both evoke. The Queen-Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has polarized audiences and critics. IMDB.com reports an 8.4/10 audience score but only a 49/100 from its sister site […]
What might be possible if all women, and their allies of other genders, stood together? What would violent, penetrative, power-mad men do then? In the first act of David Gordon Green’s Halloween, Allyson (Andi Matichak)—granddaughter of John Carpenter’s original film’s Final Girl, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)—asks why Laurie can’t just move past her trauma. […]
I sat in a theater and listened to Jett speak about the blatant, rampant sexism in the music industry, and I honestly wondered if there is ever any time, any space, any way for a woman to live safely in this country. One is a cunt, a whore, a slut. According to rock star Joan […]
‘BlacKkKlansman’ lulls the viewer into easy readings of good/evil, only to complicate what those terms mean and how they apply in our ever-more-divided country. It asks us how we’ve managed to come so far, only to wind up back where we started, as if we’ve never moved at all. I felt an uncomfortable species of […]
At a time when so many of us, including me, are often reduced to screaming instead of listening, to fighting instead of loving, we need Fred Rogers’ example more than ever. In Morgan Neville’s astonishing documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Fred Rogers, the host of the long-running children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, testifies before […]
Even when a viewer recognizes a typical horror-movie beat or a tired trope, even when the story seems predictable, the deeper questions of identity and agency remain. When I saw Hereditary a week into its theatrical run, professional film critics and fans had already called Ari Aster’s movie the scariest piece of American cinema since […]
