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4596 | dbpedia | 3 | 1 | https://www.elle.com.au/culture/celebrity/supermodel-real-names-24167/ | en | Every Supermodel Who Has Changed Their Name | [
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] | 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00 | 14 supermodels who've changed their names including Gigi Hadid, Suki Waterhouse, Cindy Crawford, Irina Shayk, Iman, Elle Macpherson, Christie Brinkley. | en | ELLE | https://www.elle.com.au/culture/celebrity/supermodel-real-names-24167/ | While a dramatic haircut can be the make-or-break difference in the successful career trajectory of a model, so too can a name change.
And while the supermodels of the ’90s—aside from Cindy Crawford—typically maintained their birth name when entering the industry, it’s become increasingly common for models to rebrand themselves even before they set foot on the runway.
RELATED VIDEO: HEADSHOTS OF SUPERMODELS BEFORE THEY WERE FAMOUS
But it still surprises many to learn that many fashion-related household names were not born with the monikers they’re associated with today.
Here, we round up every single model who has ever changed their name for the industry. | |||||
4596 | dbpedia | 1 | 82 | https://www.hellomagazine.com/fashion/2013080814021/burberry-model-gabriella-wilde-engaged/ | en | Cressida Bonas' half sister Gabriella Wilde is engaged | [
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] | 2013-08-08T10:07:55+00:00 | Burberry model Gabriella Wilde is reportedly engaged to Alan Pownall, her musician boyfriend of four years | en | /apple-touch-icon-57x57.png | HELLO! | https://www.hellomagazine.com/fashion/2013080814021/burberry-model-gabriella-wilde-engaged/ | Harper Beckham's most famous fashion moment revealed - how could you forget?
David and Victoria Beckham's daughter is one stylish teenager!
This Net-A-Porter & Moda Operandi alum's new luxury boutique has pieces you will absolutely loveNocca is our newest fashion fixation: Here's 7 things we're shopping now
7 best yellow dresses for the special occasion in your diary
The yellow dress trend is here to stay...
Victoria Beckham gives us all a lesson on how to wear tiny denim shorts
How do you style up a pair of denim shorts? The Spice Girl has the answer...
Willow Smith rocks stunning bodycon dress and slicked back braids for latest appearance
The "Wait A Minute!" singer is currently on tour
GalleryPippa Middleton's backless silk gown was an unmatched red carpet look
The Princess of Wales' sister looked stunning at a 2008 ball | ||||
4596 | dbpedia | 0 | 60 | https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2014/02/gabriella-wilde-actress-photo | en | Gabriella Wilde Says Her Endless Love Sex Scenes Will Be Tamer Than Franco Zeffirelli’s | [
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Politics
The Mad Dash to Make 2024 Debates Happen
The emergence of the Kamala Harris–Tim Walz ticket, and Donald Trump’s flip-flopping on a planned ABC debate, have sent the networks and campaigns back to the drawing board. As one TV exec puts it, “The fall schedule is a blank piece of paper now.”
Royals
Prince Harry’s Calls to King Charles “Go Unanswered”
The monarch is reportedly no longer speaking to his younger son over Harry’s ongoing battle to secure enhanced security when he visits the UK.
Award Season
Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon Hold Nothing Back in the Wrenching His Three Daughters
The three stars exclusively share the trailer for their widely acclaimed Netflix drama, and go deep on their vulnerable powerhouse performances: “I let go so completely.”
Movies
Liza Minnelli Is Writing a Memoir Because She’s “Mad as Hell”
In a statement to People, Minnelli expressed disappointment with other representations of her life and revealed that she’s releasing a memoir set to hit stands in spring of 2026: “It’s my own damn story.”
Award Season
Joan Chen Has Always Been a Movie Star. Hollywood Is Finally Catching Up
The veteran actor has worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, and Ang Lee, and maintained rich careers in both China and the US. With the new film Dìdi, Oscar buzz is trailing her for the first time. What took so long?
Royals
King Charles and Queen Camilla to Visit Australia in First Royal Tour Since Cancer Diagnosis
It will be Charles’s first visit to the Commonwealth realm since he ascended the throne.
News
The 1992 Republican Convention Jump-Started the Culture Wars—and the GOP’s Prime-Time Extremism
In an excerpt of his book The Naughty Nineties, David Friend recounts the partisan political battle America has been fighting for three decades, beginning with Pat Buchanan and George H.W. Bush in Houston.
Royals
How Kate Middleton Became the Future of the Monarchy
After best-laid plans gave way to her difficult cancer diagnosis, the Princess of Wales has reemerged to a whole new public admiration.
Movies
Amy Adams Hears the Call of the Wild in Nightbitch
“When people ask me what the movie is about, I’m like, ‘It’s about motherhood and rage,’” says director Marielle Heller in this exclusive first look. “And you either get that or you don’t.”
Television
Who Won the House of the Dragon Season 2 Finale?
Rival factions prepare for war as Alicent and Rhaenyra attempt once again to broker peace. But that compromise comes at a high price for one of the queens. | ||||
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4596 | dbpedia | 2 | 4 | https://ideas.fandom.com/wiki/Gabriella_Wilde | en | Gabriella Wilde | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ideas/images/a/a6/Gabriella_Wilde.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1200?cb=20220427103500 | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ideas/images/a/a6/Gabriella_Wilde.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1200?cb=20220427103500 | [
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] | 2024-07-29T22:27:06+00:00 | Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe (born on 8 April 1989), professionally known as Gabriella Wilde or Gabriella Calthorpe, is an English model and actress. She has appeared in the films St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), The Three Musketeers (2011), Carrie... | en | https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ideas/images/4/4a/Site-favicon.ico/revision/latest?cb=20210823084823 | Idea Wiki | https://ideas.fandom.com/wiki/Gabriella_Wilde | Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe (born on 8 April 1989), professionally known as Gabriella Wilde or Gabriella Calthorpe, is an English model and actress.
She has appeared in the films St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009), The Three Musketeers (2011), Carrie (2013), Endless Love (2014), and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). Her television work includes the Doctor Who episode "The Vampires of Venice" (2010) and the BBC historical drama series Poldark (2016–2019).
Roles in Idea Wiki[]
#JusticeForLove: End of the World - Jessica Morgan[note 1]
Asteroid Clara[note 2] - Jessica Morgan | ||
4596 | dbpedia | 3 | 15 | https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227363/Fergie-Princess-Pushy-error-protocol.html | en | Fergie, Princess Pushy and an 'error of protocol' at the Maharajah's gala | https://www.dailymail.co.uk/favicon.ico?v=2 | https://www.dailymail.co.uk/favicon.ico?v=2 | [
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] | 2009-11-13T00:00:22+00:00 | They are known to have had their differences in the past. Indeed, Princess Michael of Kent once travelled in the same plane to the South of France just inches away from the Duchess of York - but icily chose to ignore her. Now, 12 years later, there are extraordinary echoes of their apparent royal rivalry. | /favicon.ico?v=2 | Mail Online | https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1227363/Fergie-Princess-Pushy-error-protocol.html | They are known to have had their differences in the past. Indeed, Princess Michael of Kent once travelled in the same plane to the South of France just inches away from the Duchess of York - but icily chose to ignore her.
Now, 12 years later, there are extraordinary echoes of their apparent royal rivalry.
At the glittering £1,000-a-head Royal Rajasthan Charity Gala held at the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall this week - guests included actress Sigourney Weaver and singer Sir Bob Geldof - the Duchess was seated on the same table as the host, the Maharajah of Jodhpur.
Lots of front: The revealing outfit worn by Sarah, Duchess of York, at the gala
But as she chatted away to the Maharajah, who is an old family friend, an embarrassed official approached and murmured something about 'a problem'.
According to another guest, the Maharajah was invited to move to another table where Princess Michael was sitting. If not, I am told, it was suggested that the Duchess might like to move from her position at his High Highness's right side.
'No one could quite believe it,' I am told. 'Everyone thought it was ridiculous. Fergie was having a good old gossip with the Maharajah, whom she has known for years because he was a long-time chum of her parents, Major Ronald Ferguson and Mrs Susan Barrantes.'
Making up? Princess Michael and the Duchess embracing earlier this year
Unwilling to cause a fuss, the Duchess decided the most diplomatic course of action was to change seats herself. 'She got up and moved around the table,' I am told. It meant the seat on the right side of the Maharajah was left vacant.
So what precisely was the exchange with the official, and at who's instigation?
Fellow guests understood an 'error of protocol' had been pointed out, by which Fergie, who no longer has the royal style HRH, was seated next to the Maharajah. Princess Michael, who was with her husband, of course still enjoys the HRH style.
The Princess, however, says she had no views on the arrangements.
Her assistant private secretary, Anna Parkinson, tells me: 'Princess Michael did not object to the seating plan and sat where she had been placed, according to the pre-agreed brief. In fact, the Maharajah of Jodhpur came to sit next to Princess Michael during the dinner as they are old friends.
'We are not aware of any change of seating by Sarah, Duchess of York, and certainly not because of anything said by Princess Michael.'
Wilde child joins St Trinian's
Stage name: Gabriella has swapped her somewhat unwieldy surname 'Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe' for the more user-friendly 'Wilde'
As St Trinian's fans await the release of the sequel to the schoolgirl blockbuster - once again starring sultry duo Talulah Riley and Tamsin Egerton, with a cameo by Girls Aloud singer Sarah Harding - I learn another bright young thing is starring in the film.
Stunning Heathfield-educated Gabriella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe - the 20-year-old daughter of Sir Dai Llewellyn's ex-wife Vanessa and businessman John Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, and whose good looks have turned the head of Prince William - has landed a role as 'posh totty' Saffy in the flick. Called The Legend Of Fritton's Gold, it will be released next month.
Gabriella's presence has so far gone undetected since - keen to make a name independent to her older sister Isabella, squeeze of Sir Richard Branson's son Sam - she has switched her name to the quixotic moniker Gabriella Wilde.
At least it is preferable to her nickname - she is known as 'Bumpy' among friends.
As a contestant on the latest series of ITV's I'm A Celebrity, makeover king Colin McAllister was prepared to suffer injury on the reality show - but he did not expect to receive cuts, bruises and stitches before he had even set foot in the Australian jungle.
Colin, 41, and his partner of 20 years Justin Ryan, 42, the presenters of How Not To Decorate, are both taking part in the show. But hours before they were due to leave for Down Under, Colin - struck down by illness - got up in the middle of the night and tripped over a sculpture at their Glasgow home.
'He cut his face and has had five stitches in his left eyebrow,' I am told. Ouch!
After cooking his Goose, going off Broccoli and cutting out Beer, TV chef James Martin has a new dish
Given his penchant for pretty blondes, it is no surprise that after splitting from former Miss England Sally Kettle, celebrity chef James Martin, 37, has quickly found himself another stunning companion.
She is, I can reveal, interior designer Julia Dempster. The two met in Dubai, where the 38-year-old lives and runs her own interior design company.
'We just clicked. Sometimes you meet someone so perfect you don't mind about the distance - you just have to do it,' says Julia, who has a three-year-old son, Miro, by a previous relationship.
Is she watching her beau on the box? Celebrity chef James Martin's new squeeze Julia Dempster, who lives in Dubai
She moved to the UAE 13 years ago, when Sheikh Mohammed invited her to decorate his palaces.
'We have been together a year. It is very serious. We meet wherever we can all over the world,' she adds. 'James comes out here once a month for a week, and I'm starting to come to the UK more often. We have spoken about marriage, but we'll have to see.'
The only bad news is that the relationship spells the end of the chef's run of girlfriends with culinary-themed names - former dates include Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, actress Claire Goose, TV presenter Alice Beer and the aforementioned Ms Kettle.
There will be a distinctly military theme to the spectacular Lord Mayor's Show in London tomorrow, with the Royal Marines Armoured Support Group - just back from Afghanistan - joining the procession from Mansion House to St Paul's Cathedral.
It will be the first time the Marines have been part of the event, which dates back to the time of Dick Whittington. Other highlights include an RAF flypast, 11 military bands and 60 military horses.
'The show honours heroes back from Afghanistan, as well as volunteers from all walks of life who serve our country,' says pageant master Dominic Reid.
Sprint Eastwood
At 79, Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood keeps himself fitter than men half his age. Two nights ago, he was out jogging in Central London after a day's work on his latest film, Hereafter, which stars Matt Damon.
At 9.30pm, after making a brief appearance at the crowded bar at Claridge's, where he is staying, he took off at a lively pace around the streets of Mayfair in blue sweat pants and a windcheater.
'He's going for a run - he'll be back later,' said a minder. 'He loves to jog.'
There is an intriguing twist in the divorce of tycoon Scot Young, who insists he has lost £400 million and can't therefore afford to pay a penny to his estranged wife, Michelle.
The case resumes at the High Court today, where Young must prove precisely how his once vast fortune has disappeared or face jail for contempt.
Now, I learn, the judge in the case, Mrs Justice Parker, has fallen ill. She will be replaced by Hugh Bennett, the judge who presided at Sir Paul McCartney's divorce from Heather Mills.
PS
Transport Secretary Lord Adonis won the 'Minister to Watch' prize at yesterday's Spectator parliamentary awards at Claridge's, with some tipping him to be kept on by the Tories should they win power.
Recalling his first appearance at the Lords Despatch Box, Adonis - who at 46 is indisputably young for the upper house - says that, as he went to speak, he heard an ancient peer of the realm mutter: 'My God - it's child labour.' | |||
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] | 2020-04-10T00:00:00 | Gabriella Wilde is like an angel. I know… I have used that description one too many times but really now… Can you blame me? I mean, take a long, good look at her… Her hair alone is proof that there is a paradise above us. Oh dear, and her wholeness is like a glimpse of […] | en | https://hotnessrater.com/articles/2020/04/10/gabriella-wilde-here-will-make-your-imagination-run-wild/ | Gabriella Wilde is like an angel. I know… I have used that description one too many times but really now… Can you blame me? I mean, take a long, good look at her…
Her hair alone is proof that there is a paradise above us. Oh dear, and her wholeness is like a glimpse of heaven. I don’t know about you but me (and the rest of the readers here, I’m sure), she is that hot. Yup, just that hot.
Who is Gabriella Wilde?
Gabriella Wilde or Gabriella Calthorpe is an English model and actress who has appeared in the films St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009), The Three Musketeers (2011), Carrie (2013) and Endless Love (2014). Her television work includes the Doctor Who episode “The Vampires of Venice” (2010) and the BBC historical drama series Poldark (2016–present).
Her Early Life
Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe was born on April 8, 1989, in Basingstoke Hampshire, England. Her mother, Vanessa Mary Teresa (Hubbard), is the former wife of socialite Sir Dai Llewellyn, 4th Baronet. Gabriella’s father, businessman John Austen Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, is a former chairman of the Watermark Group, and the grandson of baronet Fitzroy Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe. Her ancestry includes English, as well as some Scottish and Irish.
Gabriella has a younger sister, Octavia, as well as five half-siblings: Olivia and Arabella, from her mother’s first marriage, and Georgiana, Isabella, and Jacobi, from her father’s first marriage to Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon. She is also “unofficial stepsisters” with Pandora Cooper-Key and Cressida Bonas, Lady Mary-Gaye’s other daughters. Isabella and Olivia are also actresses.
Gabriella attended Heathfield St Mary’s School, Ascot, and St Swithun’s School, Winchester, before leaving to pursue a course in art while continuing with her modeling career. She studied fine art at the City and Guilds of London Art School but dropped out to pursue acting.
Career Start
Gabriella began her career as a model. Spotted at age 14 by Naomi Campbell, she joined her agency Premier Model Management and appeared in campaigns for companies including L.K.Bennett, Lacoste, Abercrombie & Fitch, Burberry, and Topshop and posed for InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Nylon. In 2007, she was named the second-most-eligible girl in Britain but rejected press attention and the “It girl” label.
Gabriella made her acting debut in the adventure comedy film St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold in December 2009. In May 2010, Wilde appeared in an episode of the BBC television series Doctor Who as one of the eponymous vampires in “The Vampires of Venice”. In December 2010, she was announced to have been cast in her film debut in the adventure film The Three Musketeers, an adaptation of the novel of the same name.
Gabriella was also cast in the 2013 remake, Carrie, that same month (as Sue Snell). In 2014, Gabriella starred in the remake of Endless Love, opposite Alex Pettyfer.
Gabriella joined Estée Lauder as their newest spokesmodel in 2015, becoming the face of the brand’s advertising campaigns. She has played Caroline Penvenen in the BBC drama Poldark since 2016.
Facts and Trivia
In 2014, she married musician Alan Pownal. The couple welcomed a son, Sasha Blue Pownall on February 3, 2014. She gave birth to her 2nd child at age 27, a son named Shiloh Silva Pownall in 2016.
Gabriella is the paternal granddaughter of the 2nd Baronet Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe and a descendant of Charles II, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, in turn twice a great-great-great-grandson of Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, and of Joan the Mad, sister of Catherine of Aragon.
Her Body Measurements
Gabriella stands 5 feet, 10 inches and she rocks a 34-25-35 figure.
Gabriella Wilde Photos | ||||||
4596 | dbpedia | 3 | 39 | https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/5803101 | en | Isabella Calthorpe | [
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] | null | [] | null | Infobox actor name = Isabella Calthorpe caption = birthdate = 3 March 1980 birthplace = WinchesterIsabella Amaryllis Charlotte Anstruther Gough Calthorpe (born 3 March 1980), who uses the stage name Isabella Calthorpe, is an English actress and… | en | https://en-academic.com/favicon.ico | Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias | https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/5803101 | [http://www.investegate.co.uk/Article.aspx?id=200607281247179078G InvestEgate, Watermark Group PLC - Directorate Change ] ] has been married twice, and has issue one son and four daughters. [http://www.angelfire.com/realm/gotha/index.html] Isabella thus has several half-sisters (two from her mother's first and third marriages, and two via her father's second marriage), one full sister, and one brother Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, who is reputedly a close friend of Prince William).Fact|date=April 2007
Through both her parents, Isabella is a descendant of King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland. Sir Fitzroy Hamilton Anstruther, 1st Baronet (her great-grandfather) was the son of Gertrude Louisa Georgina Fitzroy (9 Dec 1850-17 Jul 1923), herself of the family of the dukes of Grafton, descended from the illegitimate son of Charles II and Barbara Villiers.
She is also a fourth cousin once removed of Prince William of Wales, with common descent from the 1st Earl Howe. [ [http://groups.google.com/group/alt.talk.royalty/browse_thread/thread/6ffbeff928e4238d/ce47a1ae9280bea1] Reitwiesner, W.A. "Re: Prince William: the bride stuff begins", Usenet group "alt.talk.royalty", 13 June 2000] ] The Prince is descended from the 1st Earl's daughter Lady Mary Anna who married James Hamilton, 2nd Duke of Abercorn; their granddaughter Lady Cynthia Hamilton married the 8th Earl Spencer; their granddaughter Lady Diana Spencer was mother of the prince. Isabella's ancestry is via her maternal grandfather the 6th Earl Howe, who was himself maternal grandson of the Honourable Montagu Curzon (brother of Mary Anna, Duchess of Abercorn).
Baronets and titles
Her family, the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes, are an ancient Scottish family, [http://www.stirnet.com/HTML/genie/british/aa/anstruther01.htm ] but inherited their money along with their latter two surnames from the noble Gough-Calthorpe family, when the 6th Baron left his money to one of his two daughters, Rachel, who had married Fitzroy Hamilton Anstruther, of a family of Scottish baronets, the Anstruthers of Balcaskie [http://www.stirnet.com/HTML/genie/british/aa/anstruther01.htm] in 1898.
The first baronet in this particular line of Anstruthers was Sir Robert Anstruther, 1st Bart of Balcaskie (1658-1737) who was granted the baronetcy in 1694, the first baronetcy for this family. (A senior branch of the family was granted a second baronetcy in 1700; the most famous representative of that family was the writer Jan Struther, author of "Mrs. Miniver"). Fitzroy Hamilton Anstruther (1872–1957), husband of the Honourable Rachel Gough-Calthorpe, was created a baronet (the third baronetcy extant in this family) in 1929. Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe and her father are descendants of this couple.
Descent from 1st Baronet
Sir Fitzroy Hamilton Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, Bt. (5 Jul 1872-29 Sep 1957); m.11 Oct 1898 Hon.Rachel Gough-Calthorpe (d.25 May 1951); issue including
1. Sir Richard Hamilton Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, 2d Baronet. (28 Mar 1908-1985); m.20 Jul 1939 Nancy Moireach Malcolmson (d.1976); issue 3 sons, of whom the youngest son was
1.3. John Austen Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, b.14 Jul 1947; m.1st 27 May 1977 (div 1986) Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, issue 1 son and 2 daughters; m.2d 1987 Vanessa Mary Theresa Hubbard, issue 2 daughters 1.3.3. Isabella Amaryllis Charlotte Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, b. 3 March 1980
ocial prominence
As the daughter of two wealthy and well-connected parents of prominent aristocratic families, and possessed of good looks, Isabella Calthorpe was chosen quite early by British society magazine "Tatler" for various yearly lists of most desirable guests or most attractive (society) women. (For example, she was number eight on the list of top female dates for the 21st century, as chosen by the fifth annual edition of the Little Black Book in Tatler. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/503564.stm] She has appeared repeatedly in the society pages of Tatler, and its rival "Harpers and Queen".Fact|date=April 2007 More recently, she was the first cover model of "Country Life" to appear with a belly button ring. [cite web | title=Prince William and Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe | url=http://theinternetforum.co.uk/william/isabella1.html]
Isabella Calthorpe and Prince William | ||||
4596 | dbpedia | 0 | 83 | https://nightmovies.tv/people/39865/gabriella-wilde | en | Gabriella Wilde | [] | [] | [] | [
"biography",
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"credits"
] | null | [] | null | Gabriella Zanna Vanessa Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, better known by her stage name Gabriella Wilde or Gabriella Calthorpe, is an English model and actress best known for her roles in The Three Musketeers (2011) and Carrie (2013).
Wilde was born in Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K. She is descended from the aristocratic Gough-Calthorpe family.Her father, businessman John Austen Anstruther-Gough-Calthor... | en | favicon/icon-144x144.png | NIGHTMovies.tv™ | https://nightmovies.tv/people/39865/gabriella-wilde | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 7 | https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-american-indie-movies-21st-century/ | en | The Best American Independent Films of the 21st Century | [
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] | null | [
"Alison Foreman",
"Kate Erbland"
] | 2024-07-04T14:00:09+00:00 | The Best American Independent Movies of the 21st Century: "Lady Bird," "Before Sunset," "Blue Valentine," "Moonlight," and more indie films. | en | IndieWire | https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/best-american-indie-movies-21st-century/ | Films are stunning artifacts of humanity’s singular ability to dream and wonder in unison. But if the moviemaking miracles produced by Hollywood’s studio system are predestined — recycled IP inevitabilities that cost as much money as there are stars in the sky — indies are something greater.
Indie filmmaking is notoriously hard to define; combine the constantly shifting number known as “low budget” and another shifty goalpost, “independent,” and we’re partly there. Here’s another definition: It feels as if it’s willed into existence, both in the final story on screen and in the behind-the-scenes journey that explains how an auteur’s story got there. It was created because it had to be, rendered by talented and undaunted auteurs, through powerful visions and innovative commitment to craft. And finally, it’s introduced to equally ambitious audiences.
It’s in our name: IndieWire was founded in 1996 as an outlet dedicated to championing creative independence and charting indies’ growth as the beating heart of cinematic artistry. But in the search engine age, when everything’s a list (or ought to be a list before some robot makes it a list), IndieWire was forced to consider an indelicate and enormous question: What are the best independent films?
The quandary sent seismic ripples through our site (both coasts, not just the tectonically precarious Los Angeles office), and demanded strict guidelines. As is always the case with these sorts of lists, we hope some of our choices will surprise and delight, even if others shock and bother. But, make no mistake, we thought this one through, as it deserves to be.
A note on our methodology:
We eventually narrowed our consideration to the Best American Indies of the 21st Century.
We then hemmed things in further, tasking ourselves with selecting one film to represent the best of each year.
Nominations were submitted by our staff of more than two dozen writers and editors, with each asked to select a single film they wanted to champion from each year.
Every title (seriously, every title) was cross-checked for qualification; country and studio of origin was verified; and the budget requirement was capped at $16 million. Competition years were decided by the date of wide release in U.S. theaters (not festival debuts, for instance).
The most frequently nominated films were compiled into a final ballot voted on by the entire IndieWire staff one last time.
Those results were given closer curatorial consideration by our top editors, combed for repeat directors, and are now submitted as the most complete answer we could give to an impossible question. At least, as of this moment. Things are, of course, always shifting.
[UPDATE]: On July 4, 2024, IndieWire film editors selected “I Saw the TV Glow” as the Best American Indie Film of 2024.
Listed chronologically, these are the 24 Best American Independent Films for each year of the 21st century. We have also listed runner-ups for each year so that our readers can get an even fuller look at the films we love.
With editorial contributions by Samantha Bergeson, Christian Blauvelt, Tom Brueggemann, Wilson Chapman, Jude Dry, David Ehrlich, Marcus Jones, Eric Kohn, Ryan Lattanzio, Sarah Shachat, Erin Strecker, Anne Thompson, and Christian Zilko. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 14 | https://ew.com/article/2016/06/09/brian-de-palma-women/ | en | Brian De Palma on how he depicts women in his films | [
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"Joe McGovern",
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] | 2016-06-09T00:00:00 | 'I've been dealing with this all my career,' the director tells EW | en | /favicon.ico | EW.com | https://ew.com/article/2016/06/09/brian-de-palma-women/ | Since the 1970s, Brian De Palma — along with his buddies Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola — has been associated with a florid, lurid style in American cinema. “De Mented, De Ranged, De Ceptive, De Palma,” screamed the poster for his 1992 horror film Raising Cain.
De Palma, the new documentary by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow (now out in limited release; expanding all summer), takes a maximalist approach to his career, as the director, 75, journeys through every single film on his résumé. That includes De Palma’s first hit Carrie, his invigorating thriller Blow Out, his indelible and bloody version of Scarface, his towering adaptation of The Untouchables (which won the only Oscar for a De Palma film, a supporting actor statuette for Sean Connery), and his biggest box office success, Mission: Impossible. (And yup, even his duds like The Bonfire of the Vanities and Mission to Mars.)
The documentary is most fascinating, though, when probing De Palma’s own obsessions, manifest in his overt Hitchcockian films like Dressed to Kill and Body Double. EW sat down with the legendary “master of the macabre” to chat further about these two pictures — and his long-commented upon treatment of women in his movies.
Body Double (1984)
This baroque blend of Rear Window and Vertigo (with a deliciously ’80s synth score by Pino Donaggio) stars Bill Maher doppelgänger Craig Wasson as a Hollywood actor who becomes embroiled in a murder case after witnessing a woman attacked in her home. Scenes like the one below, which is followed by a moment involving a power drill that still, 32 years later, boggles the eyeballs, have been cited as evidence of De Palma’s alleged exploitation of women.
He’s tired of the topic. “I’ve been dealing with this all my career,” De Palma tells EW. “Fortunately, now Quentin Tarantino has to deal with it, so I don’t have to deal with it anymore. Violence and women. He’s the director who has the biggest persona in that area. In fact, we had a conversation about that once, which was very funny.”
He continues, “I say the same thing over and over again. If I can create a sequence where you’re gazing at a woman or following a woman, it seems to me like a basic building block of cinema. I think it was Jean-Luc Godard who said, ‘The history of cinema is men photographing women.’ I mean, look at advertising. Every magazine cover is a women. It draws the gaze of the man and the gaze of the woman, who’s looking at what she’s wearing. We look at women all the time. Look at the red carpet in Cannes — all they do is take pictures of women, and it dominates the coverage. It’s so obvious to me. It’s not something I discovered.”
Dressed to Kill (1980)
De Palma, however, is somewhat more rueful when talking about Dressed to Kill. His rich, twisted riff on Psycho, stars Angie Dickinson as a doomed, bored housewife and Michael Caine as a transgender woman who turns out to be a mad killer.
“I don’t know what the transgender community would think [now],” he tells EW of the film’s twist ending. “Obviously I realize that it’s not good for their image to be transgender and also be a psychopathic murderer. But I think that [perception] passes with time. We’re in a different time.”
As for how Dressed to Kill has aged since its 1980 release, De Palma says he is proud the film has found many fans within the LGBT community. Last year, Out published a piece calling Dressed to Kill a “gay movie landmark.”
“I’m glad that the picture’s always seemed a favorite of the gay community,” he says. “Because of its flamboyance, basically.” | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 19 | https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/photos/2020/03/nature-movies-quarantine-watch-list | en | 16 Beautiful Movies That Celebrate the Glory of Nature | [
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"Yohana Desta",
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] | 2020-03-24T14:54:07.199000-04:00 | For those looking to visit the outside world without leaving home. | en | https://www.vanityfair.com/verso/static/vanity-fair-global/assets/favicon.ico | Vanity Fair | https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/photos/2020/03/nature-movies-quarantine-watch-list | You can go anywhere in a movie. Take a virtual stroll outside through the films listed below, all of which are clamoring to give you a cinematic dose of nature. From the rolling hills of The Sound of Music to the beachside splendor of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, here are a few watch list suggestions that will help you escape into a series of other worlds.
This article has been updated. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 55 | https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38190720/blind-side-subject-michael-oher-alleges-adoption-was-lie-family-took-all-film-proceeds | en | 'Blind Side' subject Oher alleges Tuohys made millions off lie | https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=%2Fphoto%2F2023%2F0813%2Fr1210165_1296x729_16%2D9.jpg | https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=%2Fphoto%2F2023%2F0813%2Fr1210165_1296x729_16%2D9.jpg | [
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"Michael A. Fletcher",
"Daniel Oyefusi",
"Mike Reiss",
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"Sarah Barshop",
"Kevin Seifert",
"Marc Raimondi",
"Ben Solak",
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"Lindsey Thiry"
] | 2023-08-14T16:00:00+00:00 | In a 14-page court petition, the former NFL star alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy never adopted him, instead tricking him into signing a document that gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name. | en | ESPN.com | https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/38190720/blind-side-subject-michael-oher-alleges-adoption-was-lie-family-took-all-film-proceeds | Retired NFL star Michael Oher, whose supposed adoption out of grinding poverty by a wealthy, white family was immortalized in the 2009 movie "The Blind Side," petitioned a Tennessee court Monday with allegations that a central element of the story was a lie concocted by the family to enrich itself at his expense.
The 14-page petition, filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court, alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.
The petition further alleges that the Tuohys used their power as conservators to strike a deal that paid them and their two birth children millions of dollars in royalties from an Oscar-winning film that earned more than $300 million, while Oher got nothing for a story "that would not have existed without him." In the years since, the Tuohys have continued calling the 37-year-old Oher their adopted son and have used that assertion to promote their foundation as well as Leigh Anne Tuohy's work as an author and motivational speaker.
"The lie of Michael's adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their Ward, the undersigned Michael Oher," the legal filing says. "Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys."
The Tuohy family did not immediately return phone calls Monday to numbers listed for them. Their attorney, Steve Farese, declined comment to ESPN on Monday, saying the family would file a legal response to the allegations in the coming weeks.
Sean Tuohy told the Daily Memphian website that he was stunned by Oher's allegations and said the Tuohys "didn't make any money off the movie," only a share of proceeds from Michael Lewis' book, which was the foundation for the film.
"We're devastated," Sean Tuohy told the outlet. "It's upsetting to think we would make money off any of our children. But we're going to love Michael at 37 just like we loved him at 16."
Oher's petition asks the court to end the Tuohys' conservatorship and to issue an injunction barring them from using his name and likeness. It also seeks a full accounting of the money the Tuohys earned using Oher's name, and to have the couple pay him his fair share of profits, as well as unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
"Since at least August of 2004, Conservators have allowed Michael, specifically, and the public, generally, to believe that Conservators adopted Michael and have used that untruth to gain financial advantages for themselves and the foundations which they own or which they exercise control," the petition says. "All monies made in said manner should in all conscience and equity be disgorged and paid over to the said ward, Michael Oher."
Oher was a rising high school senior when he signed the conservatorship papers, and he has written that the Tuohys told him that there was essentially no difference between adoption and conservatorship. "They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as 'adoptive parents,' but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account," Oher wrote in his 2011 best-selling memoir "I Beat the Odds."
But there are some important legal distinctions. If Oher had been adopted by the Tuohys, he would have been a legal member of their family, and he would have retained power to handle his own financial affairs. Under the conservatorship, Oher surrendered that authority to the Tuohys, even though he was a legal adult with no known physical or psychological disabilities.
The petition alleges that the Tuohys began negotiating a movie deal about their relationship with Oher shortly after the 2006 release of the book "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game," which chronicled the story.
According to the legal filing, the movie paid the Tuohys and their two birth children each $225,000, plus 2.5% of the film's "defined net proceeds." The movie became a critically acclaimed blockbuster, reportedly grossing more than $300 million at the box office, and tens of millions of dollars more in home video sales. The film received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and Sandra Bullock won a Best Actress trophy for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy. While the deal allowed the Tuohys to profit from the film, the petition alleges, a separate 2007 contract purportedly signed by Oher appears to "give away" to 20th Century Fox studios the life rights to his story "without any payment whatsoever." The filing says Oher has no recollection of signing that contract, and even if he did, no one explained its implications to him.
The deal lists all four Tuohy family members as having the same representative at Creative Artists Agency, the petition says. But Oher's agent, who would receive movie contract and payment notices, is listed as Debra Branan, a close family friend of the Tuohys and the same lawyer who filed the 2004 conservatorship petition, the petition alleges. Branan did not return a call to her law office on Monday.
In the past, the Tuohys have denied making much money from the movie, saying they received a flat fee for the story and did not reap any of the movie's profits. And what they did earn, they added, was shared with Oher.
"We divided it five ways," the Tuohys wrote in their 2010 book, "In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving."
Oher's court petition says he never received any money from the movie, even though he long suspected that others were profiting, according to his attorney, J. Gerard Stranch IV. Whenever Oher asked questions, he did not get straight answers, his attorney said.
And since the film's success coincided with the start of his lucrative NFL career in 2009, Oher did not take the time to fully investigate the deal until after he retired in 2016, Stranch said. Oher eventually hired a lawyer who helped him uncover the details surrounding the movie deal and his legal connection to the people he believed were his adoptive parents. His lawyer unearthed the conservatorship document in February, and Oher came to the painful realization that the Tuohys had not adopted him.
"Mike didn't grow up with a stable family life," Stranch said. "When the Tuohy family told Mike they loved him and wanted to adopt him, it filled a void that had been with him his entire life. Discovering that he wasn't actually adopted devastated Mike and wounded him deeply."
The petition marks a sharp break in what had been an inspiring, if unsettlingly stereotypical, feel-good story. As the movie portrayed the story, the Tuohys adopted Oher, a poor, virtually homeless and academically challenged Black teenager. They made Oher part of a functional family for the first time. They helped him catch up in school, taught him the basics of football and how to harness his physical skills, putting him on the road to sports stardom.
The truth, however, was more complicated.
Oher certainly led a hard-knock life growing up. But he also had the smarts, the pluck and plenty of help from the Tuohys and others to rise above his circumstances.
Oher was one of 12 children born to his mother, who struggled with drug addiction. Before his 11th birthday, Oher was placed into foster care, where he bounced around numerous homes, and at times lived on the streets. Although he was a capable student, he attended 11 schools in nine years, and repeated both the first and second grades, leaving him behind academically.
His fortunes changed after a friend's father, impressed with Oher's inner drive and focus, introduced him to the principal of a private Christian school in a prosperous Memphis neighborhood. Oher began attending the school in 10th grade, even as his home life remained chaotic. He was a sports prodigy, excelling in track and field, basketball and football, a game he had studied for years.
He began playing football for his new school in 11th grade, quickly establishing himself as one of the nation's top offensive linemen, and college scholarship offers poured in from big-time football programs across the country.
Because of his unstable housing situation, Oher frequently stayed over at the homes of his classmates, including the Tuohys, whose children attended the school. The petition says that the Tuohys forged a closer relationship with him once Oher's athletic prowess drew wide attention. They invited him to spend more nights at their spacious Memphis home and took him shopping. Eventually, they asked Oher to move in. They encouraged him to address them as "mom" and "dad," and said they planned to adopt him, the filing says.
Oher was delighted with all that at the time, his lawyer said, and he fully trusted the Tuohys.
Oher went on to play college football at the University of Mississippi, the Tuohys' alma mater. He was a two-time All-American and a first-round pick of the Baltimore Ravens in 2009.
After the success of "The Blind Side," however, suspicion slowly eclipsed Oher's trust of the Tuohys, his lawyer said.
"Mike's relationship with the Tuohy family started to decline when he discovered that he was portrayed in the movie as unintelligent," Stranch said. "Their relationship continued to deteriorate as he learned that he was the only member of the family not receiving royalty checks from the movie, and it was permanently fractured when he realized he wasn't adopted and a part of the family."
For years, Oher has chafed at how "The Blind Side" depicted him, saying it hurt his football career and clouded how people view him. He has said that based on the film, some NFL decision-makers assumed he was mentally slow or lacked leadership skills.
"People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie," Oher told ESPN in 2015. "They don't really see the skills and the kind of player I am."
For their part, the Tuohys agreed that Oher always had what it took to succeed. "If there is a fundamental misapprehension about Michael, it's that he needed saving," the Tuohys wrote in their book. "We discovered that underneath his shyness, his foot shuffling, and his head ducking, he had a tremendous will to determine the course of his own life."
For years, Oher has said, he was content to live with the myth created by the movie, reasoning that its inspirational message outweighed the pain inflicted by what he saw as its inaccurate portrayal of his life. But that has changed.
"There has been so much created from The Blind Side that I am grateful for, which is why you might find it as a shock that the experience surrounding the story has also been a large source of some of my deepest hurt and pain over the past 14 years," Oher wrote in his book "When Your Back's Against the Wall," released last week.
"Beyond the details of the deal, the politics, and the money behind the book and movie, it was the principle of the choices some people made that cut me the deepest." | |||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 35 | https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/1920s/best-movies-of-the-1920s | en | The 75 Best Movies of the 1920s | [
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] | null | [
"Jeremy Mathews"
] | 2024-04-19T06:00:00+00:00 | The '20s saw the silent film boom turn to talkies, with impressive sci-fi and German Expressionism. Here are the best movies of the 1920s: | en | Paste Magazine | https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/1920s/best-movies-of-the-1920s | The 1920s were the heart of the silent film era, building upon the early experiments with the medium and taking it in whatever directions filmmakers across the world could dream. Hollywood, taking advantage of the interruptions to the Italian and French film communities caused by World War I, solidified its grip on the film industry throughout the decade as bigger film studios, like Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and United Artists began taking over the smaller houses. That didn’t entirely impact where the best movies of the 1920s came from, though.
The Roaring ’20s saw the advent of the art film, the movie star and the Academy Awards. It also was the decade where filmmaking rapidly transformed from silent movies to talkies beginning with The Jazz Singer in 1927. Feature films began to dominate shorts, while the genres at play flourished. Looking through the list below, it’s remarkable how many of these movies remain relevant today.
Here are the 75 Best Movies of the 1920s:
75. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) (1920)
Director: Robert Wiene
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari brought German Expressionist film to full view with art direction that’s every bit as dark and twisted as the story it tells. Set in an environment full of askew streets, warped roofs and staircases that travel at impossible angles, no film has the same spooky feel as this tale of a mysterious doctor and the sleepwalker he uses as a murder weapon. While the film’s influence is immeasurable, its visuals were more a catalyst for ideas than a target of direct imitation. This is partly because the look is so out there, and partly because the graphical set design could have lent itself more to the film medium—the painted-on shadows and canvas backdrops can make it seem as if the characters are walking on plywood theater stages rather than through a demented cityscape.
74. Norrtullsligan (The Nortull Gang) (1923)
Director: Per Lindberg
Whether in 1923 or today, it’s rare to see a film about a strong-willed, independent woman and her likeminded friends. There are no flappers or scandals, just discussion of what life is like for these Swedish women, including workplace harassment, judgmental family members and wage disputes. The film even gets away with some pretty long intertitles—generally a big no-no—because the first-person voice’s deadpan humor is so bewitching. The only drawback is the final act’s love story, which maintains the tone, but undermines some of the best themes that came earlier.
73. Prästänkan (The Parson’s Widow) (1920)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Lots of superlatives can be use to describe Carl Theodor Dreyer’s films, but “charming” doesn’t often end up on the top of the list. That changes when you watch this sweet folk comedy about a new priest who is obligated, by the rules of a small village, to marry his predecessor’s widow. There are two problems: 1. The priest already has a cute, young fiancée whom he has to hide instead of marry. 2. Word on the street is that the widow is a witch. Dreyer’s deep compassion for the human condition comes through in the lovers’ failed covert meetings and the priest’s ill-advised attempts to trick his wicked, old wife.
72. Mighty Like a Moose (1926)
Director: Leo McCarey
In the wrong hands, Charley Chase’s schtick can get old pretty quick, but the short Mighty Like a Moose shows just how funny the actor could be. Chase and Vivien Oakland play Mr. and Mrs. Moose, a married couple who were perhaps drawn together by mutual unattractiveness. She has a gigantic nose, and he has ridiculous teeth. But when they both have corrective surgery without telling the other, they each realize they can do better and set out to have an affair—which each other, as both are unrecognizable with their new good looks. The farcical premise is silly, of course, but director Leo McCarey commits to it fully and refuses to let either character off the hook, sustaining the laughter long after the concept should have grown stale.
71. The Boat (1921)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
There’s a gag in The Boat in which the hero launches his boat, and it immediately sinks. It seems simple enough, but Buster Keaton actually went through several attempts and engineering adjustments before getting the shot right. If it had sank any other way, it wouldn’t have been funny, he said. That level of commitment to a few seconds of a movie embodies the ethos of the best silent comedy: It may seem on the surface to be pure silliness, but a great deal of thought, strategy and effort went into maximizing the audience’s laughter. The Boat is characteristically loaded with both great humor and great physical comedy—including Keaton trying to stay oriented as his boat is battered around in circles.
70. The Lodger: A Story of London Fog (1927)
Director:Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock’s films before The Lodger had plenty of his characteristic inventive camerawork and playfulness, but this is the one where he overtly hits the themes that he’d explore throughout his career: Suspicion of people close to you, public mania, fear of the police. Telling the story of a sexy-but-dangerous lodger, whom our heroine suspects may be Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock builds upon clues and doubts, while making Ivor Novello’s character increasingly intriguing.
69. The Docks of New York (1928)
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg is best known for his seven sound films with Marlene Dietrich, but his visual prowess was most at home in the silent medium, allowing him to find warmth and humanity in his actors’ faces. The way he photographs Betty Compson’s suicidal prostitute in The Docks of New York is remarkable. Each crack of hope or despair catches the light perfectly. George Bancroft plays a sailor who rescues the woman while he’s on shore leave, but seems destined to abandon her like all the men who have come before. Compson’s resigned demeanor adds to the stirring poignancy.
68. Dans La Nuit (In the Night) (1929)
Director: Charles Vanel
Starting with documentary-like realism at a coal mine before transforming into a noir-ish tale of murder and betrayal, Charles Vanel’s Dans La Nuit uses those shifting forms to illustrate just how quickly our lives can change in spirit and meaning. Vanel cast himself as both a betrayed husband and the lover who cuckolds him, adding to the film’s disconcerting qualities while showcasing an amazing range on both sides of the camera. Sandra Milovanoff’s performance as the young wife whose whose view of life is torn asunder provides further empathy and asks us to grapple with moral ambiguity.
67. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925)
Director: Fred Niblo
We’re all now well familiar with stories of epic movies with prolonged productions and out-of-control spending, but Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ set a high bar early on. The movie brought in more money than any film before it, but still couldn’t recoup its expenses. Yet somehow, after going through multiple directors and lead actors, the film turned out as grandiose as promised—a stirring drama that may be a bit uneven, but nevertheless delivers when it counts. The pirate attack and chariot race represent the ideal cinematic spectacle, pulsating with pure excitement.
66. The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
It’s hard to say what Sergei Eisenstein’s most famous film influenced more: The Soviet spirit or film course syllabi. While the novelty of the film’s montage may be a bit overstated (Abel Gance—and he’s not the only one—played gleefully with rapid editing in La roué a couple years beforehand, and many U.S. films were cutting together exciting action sequences at the same time), there’s a genuine excitement and urgency in this workers’ rallying cry.
65. Jenseits der Straße (Harbor Drift AKA Beyond the Streets) (1929)
Director: Leo Mittler
The problem with a lot of silent German (and U.S.) “street films” is that they’re so intent on showing the dark side of society that the movies just become one long barrage of terrible things happening to some poor girl who doesn’t deserve any of it. What sets Harbor Drift apart is that its assortment of characters start in the gutter, and see a chance, in the form of a valuable necklace, to get out. Mittler makes the expected critiques of the class divide, but he also gets deeper into the dark side of human nature with keen expressionistic flare.
64. 7th Heaven (1927)
Director: Frank Borzage
A melodrama of the highest order, 7th Heaven sends you to the heights of romance, then into the trenches of war. Janet Gaynor gave two pure, indelible performances in 1927, as the country wife in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise and in this film as a long-suffering woman who finds love in a spirited street cleaner (Charles Farrell) before war separates them. Proving that the Academy doesn’t always get things wrong, she won the first Best Actress Oscar—for both films as well as Borzage’s Street Angel (1928), as the rules were bit different at the time. Borzage pulls off some glorious shots, like the camera traveling up the stairs of a humble but high Parisian apartment, but some of his most moving moments are the simplest, like when the two lovers speak to each other while they’re miles away from each other.
63. Flesh and the Devil (1926)
Director: Clarence Brown
Greta Garbo and John Gilbert had so much chemistry that you could have shot them waiting in line at the DMV and it still would have oozed with sex appeal. But with director Clarence Brown and cinematographer William Daniels working alongside them, there’s enough erotic energy to power the planet for 20 years—if only we could figure out how to harness it. Brown and Daniels use matches, fireplaces, moonlight through a rainy window and even a church window to emphasize the ill-fated yet irresistible relationship. Garbo’s fellow Swede Lars Hanson also deserves attention for his nuanced performance as the third point in the story’s love triangle, but with those two stars, he’s never going to get it.
62. A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)
Director: Anthony Asquith
This thriller taps into the darkness of the human soul, depicting jealousy and violence when a love story doesn’t go the desired way. But it also refuses to paint its villain as a monster, instead putting doubt over the degree of malice meant in his jealous actions. Director Anthony Asquith is full of visual invention, finding brilliant cues into flashbacks and creating a chilling atmosphere throughout, excelling in particular when a romance’s outcome becomes clear at a movie house. (The film was made during the transition to sound, and the musicians stop playing for the talkie.)
61. Battling Butler (1926)
Director: Buster Keaton
The least grandiose Buster Keaton feature has no train wreck, no cattle stampede, no army of brides. It instead showcases Keaton’s human assets as an actor and director. While never one to ask the audience for sympathy, he still elicits support in his ill-advised endeavors. Keaton and his cameramen’s work with deep-focus cinematography is used not only for comedy but for emotion, such as when the hero’s lady disappears from view out his car’s rear window.
60. Gösta Berlings saga (The Saga of Gosta Berling) (1924)
Director: Mauritz Stiller
The golden age of Swedish silent cinema ended with a bang via this this epic tale of a drunken priest’s redemption. Mauritz Stiller conjures a series of defining moments in Gosta Berling’s life, including sex scandals, wolves, fire and romance, with a level of grandeur that recalls Gone with the Wind. Lars Hanson carries the film with his fiery eyes and bravado exchanges with costars, including Gerda Lundquist and Greta Garbo (in her first film).
59. The Last of the Mohicans (1920)
Director: Maurice Tourneur
The Last of the Mohicans signifies a passing of the torch. Director Maurice Tourneur fell ill while filming it, and his longtime assistant and apprentice, Clarence Brown, directed a part of it on his behalf. Tourneur was already a visual master, and Brown would of course go on to a storied career, famously making Greta Garbo a star. Here, Tourneur and Brown craft an epic tale of men pitted against each other and nature’s elements, with shots of the intimidating, mountainous nature that would make John Ford jealous.
58. Body and Soul (1925)
Director: Oscar Micheaux
A rare surviving movie from pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux’s early years, Body and Soul maintains some of his pet themes while entirely giving itself over to a gripping debut performance from Paul Robeson. A scorching critique of organized religion and how it related to Black life, taking far further a mistrust Micheaux briefly explored in Within Our Gates, Body and Soul sees Robeson (freshly successful on the stage) play two parts: A violent, drunk, extortionist preacher and a mild-mannered inventor. One of the cruelest and most intimidating men of the cloth outside of The Night of the Hunter, Robeson’s Reverend Isaiah T. Jenkins is a bundle of vices and hypocrisy—perfect for exploiting a congregation all too eager to give itself over to any passing preacher, one more concerned with the next life than the one they’re living. Shouldering that brassy role is a performance to match. With a menace that fully utilizes Robeson’s NFL physicality and a scuzzy charm that twists his handsome charisma into vulgarity, Jenkins is a monster worth devoting a film towards. Body and Soul is a fiery and dark film, with just a dash of the surreal thanks to the dual roles, a late plot twist and a horror-tinged flashback sequence set in an abandoned shack.—Jacob Oller
57. Strike (1925)
Director: Sergei Eisenstein
While Sergei Eisenstein is best known for his theories on and use of montage, Strike is most engaging for its dazzling camera trickery. Eisenstein shoots reflections, brings still photos to life and dramatically captures the ill-fated attempt of workers to rise against their exploitative employers. Of course, he still gets in his trademark pointed editing, such as juxtaposing the strikers with the rich factory heads who are “considering” the workers’ demands.
56. Hard Luck (1922)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
Sometimes failing at life includes failing at ending your life. That’s the problem Buster Keaton’s character faces in Hard Luck. He hangs himself from weak trees, jumps in front of cars that turn out not to be cars and just plain can’t find a way to put himself out of his misery. Note that the wonderfully absurd finale isn’t included in the Kino blu-ray of Keaton’s shorts, but is on the UK Masters of Cinema release and, oddly, Kino’s own Keaton Plus DVD.
55. Show People (1928)
Director: King Vidor
Marion Davies is sadly better known as William Randolph Hearst’s mistress than for her great comedic performances. (Let’s not talk about people’s odd tendency to expect Citizen Kane, which was merely inspired by the life of Hearst, to be more accurate than most biopics that are actually about real people.) No director brought out the magnetic personality that made Davies the life of Hollywood parties better than King Vidor. He made two films with Davies in 1928, The Patsy and Show People, and she’s utterly lovable in both of them. Show People arrived as the silent era was ending, and provides an inside look at the Hollywood studio system (with all the required cameos) and the divide between comedy and high art. As an actress who gets her start in slapstick before becoming a dramatic star, Davies gets to send up various acting styles while always showcasing her own personality.
54. Speedy (1928)
Director: Ted Wilde
Speedy is Harold Lloyd’s most consistently fun and effortlessly likable film. Take away the marquee race-against-time finale through New York City, and you’re still left with the misadventures of a good-natured boy who just can’t seem to hold onto a job. The romance between Lloyd and his girlfriend (the fantastic Ann Christy) is sweet, and since the film begins after their courtship, has a different dynamic than the typical love story. Oh, and Babe Ruth isn’t too shabby either.
53. The Gold Rush (1925)
Director: Charles Chaplin
The Klondike gold rush made the perfect setting for Charles Chaplin’s tramp to run wild. Chaplin took all the motifs he could find from adventure novels, melodramas and other stories of the northern frontier, tossed them in a blender and served up a collection of what would become his most famous scenes. He finds humor in peril—with a suspenseful teetering cabin scene, as well as starvation (when he famously makes a meal of his boot) and of course finds time to show off with his dancing roll scene. However, no one has succeeded in finding any humor in the atrocious voiceover Chaplin added to the 1942 rerelease. Be sure to watch the original version. For a more serious take on the Klondike hardships, see Clarence Brown’s The Trail of ’98 (1928).
52. The Cameraman (1928)
Director: Buster Keaton, Edward Sedgwick
Buster Keaton’s first film at MGM would also be the last one on which he was allowed to work the way he wanted with the crew he’d assembled during the previous eight years. That gives The Cameraman a bit of a bittersweet feel when it’s not making you laugh your ass off at a Chinatown riot or wowing you with a long take following Keaton up and down an apartment building’s stairs. Keaton (and many of the other silent comedians) liked to improvise scenes with a crew of gagmen, feeling out and adjusting scenes until they were just right. Shooting on location allowed Keaton to do this one last time before pre-planning and fixed budgets took the magic out of the process.
51. The Thief of Bagdad (1924)
Director: Raoul Walsh
Douglas Fairbanks threw all his resources and energy into making sure The Thief of Bagdad was a rousing piece of entertainment from start to finish. The Arabian Nights fantasy boasts lavish art direction (the costly castle Fairbanks built for Robin Hood was redesigned for the new setting), gorgeous visuals and thousands of fellow actors and extras who bring the fantasy to life. And of course, Fairbanks is in the middle of it all, making everything tick with his elastic gymnastics.
50. L’Hirondelle et la Mésange (The Swallow and the Titmouse) (1920)
Director: André Antoine
A hybrid documentary-narrative, The Swallow and the Titmouse beautifully records the life of a barge captain and his family as they work the river in Belgium and northern France. Little-known French director André Antoine (credited as simply “Antoine”) had a short-lived career, but thankfully left behind these images of life on the barges and in seaside towns, including a sea-goers parade. The structure almost anticipates 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it first calmly acquaints us with a way of life before letting the tense drama unfold.
49. Blackmail (1929)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film was also his last silent, as Blackmail was made in both formats. While the sound version is known for Hitchcock’s experiments with the new technology (most famously a scene that emphasizes the word “knife”), the silent version flows much smoother. And Donald Calthrop’s performance of the blackmailer feels even creepier with just his face and body language doing the job.
48. The Playhouse (1921)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
The sight of nine Buster Keatons dancing in sync with each other in this two-reeler may seem like an impressive technical feat for 1921—and it did involve exposing the same roll of film nine times, with the cameraman manually cranking at the same speed each time. But in fact, Georges Méliès pulled off similarly impressive shots more than a decade earlier. What makes The Playhouse special is how thoroughly realized the theater of Busters is—featuring actors, the orchestra pit and the audience—and how it riffs on notions of identity and ego. (“This Keaton fellow seems to be the whole show.”) After Buster wakes from his dream, only to find himself back on set in a clever reveal, the gags continue to draw on the notion of doubles and multiple roles. If that weren’t enough, you get to see Keaton pretend to be a monkey.
47. The Great White Silence (1924)
Director: Herbert Ponting
In the early 20th Century, many explorers set off to Antarctica and the South Pole in the name of country and science. English photographer Herbert Ponting came along to take pictures and film Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, and, luckily, didn’t follow Scott and his small crew to the South Pole itself, or we wouldn’t have this film. It features breathtaking tinted shots of the icy landscape, and personal moments with the crew and their adorable pets. (Watch the film with an audience for a communal struggle between love for the cute, plucky black cat and disgusted shock at his racist name.) Ponter’s eye for composition is great, but the film also acts as a cultural time capsule, showing how people once viewed the world and its unknown areas.
46. Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) (1929)
Director: G.W. Pabst
Pandora’s Box starts off scandalous and voyeuristic, then descends into a nightmare. By the time the film lands in the dirty, Jack the Ripper-haunted streets of London, the posh digs of the early scenes are but a distant memory. While it’s often said that Louise Brooks’s character, Lulu, leads the men who love her to ruin, director G.W. Pabst and his lead actress make it more complicated than that. Yes, things generally don’t turn out well for her lovers, but that’s often as much their fault as hers. Brooks has a lot of fun with the camera while giving her seductive performance, but there’s also a melancholy beneath the surface, suggesting Lulu is as much a victim of circumstance and the world we live in as anything else. She’s trying to play her way out of a losing hand, and has to go all-in.
45. The Wind (1928)
Director: Victor Sjöström
When Swedish director Victor Sjöström came to Hollywood (working under the surname Seastrom), he quickly showed an ability to make films that distill his stars’ best traits. Lillian Gish essentially returned the favor when she brought him onto an adaptation of Dorothy Scarborough’s novel The Wind, whose battle-with-the-elements plot was a perfect match. Sjöström had proven himself a master of capturing the outdoors in his Swedish work, and here he harnesses the weather to create wind and sand that are as much characters as the film’s fine actors.
44. Seven Chances (1925)
Director: Buster Keaton
Forget the silly a-day-to-get-married plot—Buster Keaton didn’t actually like the play Seven Chances was based on—and simply marvel at how the film’s gags build and build in a glorious crescendo. Even though you know that giant swarm of brides is coming, the twists and turns of the chase deliver laughs every time. For a great example of The Great Stone Face’s deadpan acting, see his reaction when he has angry brides in one direction, and a landslide in the other. On an unfortunate sidenote, a few scenes are marred with completely unjustified racist humor.
43. The Last Laugh (1924)
Director: F.W. Murnau
There’s not a whole lot of plot in The Last Laugh, but with F.W. Murnau directing and Emil Jannings starring, you don’t really need one. This has become the go-to film school example of how German Expressionism can be done with camera angles, movement and effects rather than artificial sets a la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Janning plays an overly proud hotel doorman who loses his sense of pride when his employers deem him too old to continue his job. Without the stately uniform his job provided, his proud stance becomes hunched and crumpled, the buildings seem to crush him, and the respect of his family and neighbors vanishes. The story’s parallels to Germany—especially its uniformed soldiers—in the dire aftermath of World War I are clear but not forced. The final reel, shot at the studio’s insistence, is quite clever in the way it skirts the command for a happy ending. A title card comes up beforehand and declares it all an unrealistic fantasy, then Murnau intentionally makes it so absurd that it only serves to underline the desperation felt in the rest of the film.
42. L’Etoile de Mer (The Starfish) (1928)
Director: Man Ray
Surrealist photographer May Ray set out to do away with trivialities like characters and plots when he made his cinéma pur (“pure cinema”) shorts. In Emak-Bakia, he mixed direct-film (laying nails directly on a film strip and exposing it) with distorted close-ups of motion and all sorts of other trickery to create a mesmerizing experimental trip. In L’Etoile de Mer, he teamed up with poet Robert Desnos to push things in a different direction—making a film that evokes a distant memory of a near-erotic encounter. Punctuated by intertitles with Desnos’s words, Ray shoots his images through rough glass or mirrors to keep the actors out of focus—discernible but indecipherable. And so the voyeurism inherent in the medium comes to the forefront, only to be teased with undelivered goods.
41. The Last Command (1928)
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg’s visual prowess is rarely called into question, but The Last Command shows off some of his most impactful dramatic work. Emil Jannings (who won the first Best Actor Oscar for his performance) shows off his famous range as a suave general in Tsarist Russia and the broken remains of the same man a decade later, when he lives in Hollywood as an old, out-of-sorts extra who seems to have suffered a terrible trauma. The ultimate testament to von Sternberg’s lighting prowess comes in the final scene, in which he acknowledges the artifice behind the visuals, yet still sweeps us up in their majesty.
40. There It Is (1928)
Directors: Harold L. Muller, Charles R. Bowers
Coming onto the two-reeler scene after the giant silent comedians had graduated to features, Charlie Bowers moved comedy toward a greater level of absurdity, using stop-motion animation and other fantastical/absurd effects. Think of him as the time-traveling result of a night of passion between Looney Tunes and Monty Python. There It Is stars the actor/director as a detective from Scotland Yard (visualized like it sounds) who tries to unravel the secrets of a mysterious house with a sidekick he keeps in a matchbox. Any comedian could have walked into that setup, but only Bowers could deliver the must-see-to-believe weirdness that ensues.
39. The Navigator (1924)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Donald Crisp
The Navigator mines an ocean liner for every gag imaginable. Keaton plays a clueless rich young man who finds himself stranded on a giant, adrift ship with the clueless rich young woman who rejected him serving as his only company. These two spoiled upper-class twerps don’t know how to open canned food, let alone operate a ship, and have to improvise in hilarious ways to get things under control. The scene where the two characters each suspect someone else is on the boat, but can’t find anyone else, plays out in classic Keaton fashion: With perfectly timed wide shots that make it more believable that the two keep missing each other. The best moment may be a spooky night when the characters let the creepiness of the boat get the best of them.
38. The Penalty (1920)
Director: Wallace Worsley
If you want to see how many different terrifyingly sinister facial expressions one man can make, The Penalty is the film for you. No role showcases Lon Chaney’s brilliant acting better than his portrayal of a criminal mastermind who lost his legs as a young child and turned evil in the process. Not even the cop-out ending can dull the impact of the film’s horror.
37. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Lotte Reiniger spent three years moving back-lit cardboard cutouts around to make this animated feature adaptation of the ancient Arabian Nights stories. The characters move with their own unique rhythms, taking on an otherworldly feel. The silhouette format naturally limited what could be communicated via facial details and the like, but that didn’t stop Reiniger from using her careful craftsmanship and design skills to create emotionally expressive body language.
36. The High Sign (1921)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
Buster Keaton made The High Sign as his first two-reeler as director and solo star, but shelved it because he didn’t think it was good enough to be his debut. This is indicative of either incredibly high standards or insanity. Keaton plays an unapologetically unscrupulous wanderer who happily accepts two jobs—one as assassin for a secret society and the other as a bodyguard for the man he’s been hired to kill. The film is hilarious from its opening broadsheet newspaper gag (one that may have finally hit a generation that won’t appreciate it) to the fast-paced finale that plays off of several secret passageways and trapdoors.
35. Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)
Director: G.W. Pabst
The ruined lives of disgraced women is a common theme in socially conscious silent pictures, as heroines become the victims of circumstances that lead only toward a more scandalous, sad life. G.W. Pabst’s film stands above the pack thanks to Louise Brooks’s strong, attitude-filled performance and a greater indictment of social attitudes toward “lost girls.” It targets not only lecherous men, but the people who see shame as a greater reformer than compassion.
34. Safety Last (1923)
Directors: Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
“I shouldn’t have bothered scoring the last 15 minutes,” Rodney Sauer of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra told me after accompanying Safety Last at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. He said he and his ensemble couldn’t even hear themselves over the uproarious laughter in the Castro Theatre during Harold Lloyd’s famous building-scaling sequence. The scene, with its famous clock-hanging finale—is such a perfect mix of suspense and comedy that it doesn’t much matter that the rest of the film seems to exist merely as a lead-up to it.
33. Downhill (1927)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Known in America as When Boys Leave Home, Downhill shows Alfred Hitchcock in full control of his craft. While the film isn’t in the director’s trademark thriller genre, Hitchcock’s style is on full display as he shows Ivor Novello’s character mentally deteriorate using dramatic angles and camera effects. A delirious fever scene is particularly disturbing, pointing to the shocking, unsettling moments the director would deliver throughout his career.
32. München-Berlin Wanderung (Walking from Munich to Berlin) (1927)
Director: Oskar Fischinger
Before Oskar Fischinger made his groundbreaking music-synchronized abstract animation, he documented his walk through the German countryside one frame at a time to make this short film. As jittery images of people, time-lapses of fields and other moments whiz by, we get the impression of a long journey condensed into a short, lasting memory.
31. Big Business (1929)
Directors: J. Wesley Horne, Leo McCarey
Laurel and Hardy loved to make shorts with a series of dramatically escalating destructive exchanges. The year before Big Business, they made Two Tars, in which a traffic jam turns into a free-for-all of destruction. Big Business uses fewer characters, yet brings the violence to even greater levels, making it the ultimate tit-for-tat two-reeler. Stan and Ollie play clueless Christmas tree salesmen in sunny California who piss off a grumpy sales target (James Finlayson), and decide to enact revenge on his rude behavior, only to find that he’s just as stubborn and bent on revenge as they are. This is a great example of how to build a gag as far as it can possibly go—then push it a little further for good measure.
30. Finis terræ (1929)
Director: Jean Epstein
Each Jean Epstein film has its own unique feel, separate from the director’s other work as well as anyone else’s. Finis terræ is at once documentary and dreamlike as it tells a story of seaweed harvesters on the coast of Brittany. Epstein shot on location with non-actors using handheld cameras to capture their way of life, yet he also gives his the impression that his subjects’ way of life could soon vanish, becoming nothing but a distant memory.
29. Zvenigora (1928)
Director: Alexander Dovzhenko
Even at a time when Soviet filmmakers were pushing the limits of the form and veering off in many different directions, Alexander Dovzhenko stood apart from his contemporaries, more interested in poetry than propaganda. The first film in his “Ukraine trilogy” (before Arsenal and Earth), Zvenigora jumps around hundreds of years in the country’s history, blending modern commentary with folk tales and fantasy—all of which links to a buried Ukrainian treasure. While we certainly get to see some bourgeois pigs—including a savage sequence in which rich people want to see a man shoot himself in a packed theater—the work is more about connection to land—and the pain of the fight for it—than the glory of the U.S.S.R.
28. One Week (1920)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
Buster Keaton wanted to start his career headlining two-reelers with a serious statement of intent, and did so with this wild tale of a newlyweds’ build-by-numbers house gone awry. (Think of it as a home bought at Ikea and assembled by a drunk.) The askew structure alone is a marvel of production design, and it’s as if Keaton and his fellow gagmen kept daring each other take things to the next level. Also watch for a smaller-scale version of Keaton’s most famous sight gag.
27. Rotaie (Rails) (1929)
Director: Mario Camerini
As this Italian film’s title suggests, it’s about the constant motion of the modern age, as a young couple stays on the move, unable to find a place in the industrial age. Director Mario Camerini went on to make tame, socially conservative comedies under Mussolini’s regime, earning him a reputation as a Fascist stooge. You wouldn’t guess that watching Rotaie, a stylistically bold film about social upheaval and aimlessness. The characters experience the life of both the poor and the rich, and the camera reflects their uncertainty at some moments, and boredom at others. In an age where you could travel the world faster than ever before, you could also change your life with the same pace.
26. Maldone (1928)
Director: Jean Grémillon
There’s an extended folk-dance scene in Maldone in which Jean Grémillon seems to find every angle imaginable. Grémillon’s dazzling direction in Maldone juxtaposes the simple life with wealthy privilege via the tragic story of a canal worker (Charles Dullin) who abandons life in the country to manage his family’s estate. Genica Athanasiou shines as the gypsy woman he left, and whose memory won’t stop haunting him.
25. Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922)
Director: F.W. Murnau
F.W. Murnau defined the horror genre by exploring the deep shadows of the soul in Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror. While the story is adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula—without permission, hence the name Count Orlok—the vampire is not a suave charmer, but an ugly, bald creature with pointy ears. Max Schreck’s performance is legendary, but Murnau’s lighting and atmosphere are what really elevate the film to the embodiment of terror.
24. Napoleon (1927)
Director: Abel Gance
Abel Gance had to invent cameras while shooting Napoleon to get all its unchained shots. The countless creative sequences—in which the camera rolls with waves, swings with patriotic fervor and tumbles through a snowball fight—propel this six-hour epic toward its famous triptych finale. You can read about how that finale features projection on three full-sized synchronized screens.; you can even watch it on a TV, in which it shrinks instead of grows to show the panorama. But none of that will prepare you for the grandeur of seeing it in person. Watching on home video, some of the historical-bullet-point flaws in the script come through, but on the big screen, the sheer scale of it is overwhelming. Sadly, there aren’t many opportunities to see it due to the complicated technical hurdles. (The San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s screening in Oakland in 2012 was the first since the 1980s.) So if you have the chance, don’t pass it up.
23. Greed (1924)
Director: Erich von Stroheim
In our current age of acclaimed TV series and cinematic trilogies, Erich von Stroheim might have been a king. But in his time, he had a knack for making movies longer than his bosses deemed releasable. So instead of being split and shown over multiple nights, his eight-hour Greed was cut down to 140 minutes. People who saw von Stroheim’s cut said it was a revolutionary work, but even in its abridged form the genius shines through. The deep-focus cinematography captures the detailed art direction and, most memorably, enables a scene in which a funeral procession passes out a window while a wedding goes on in the foreground. But the greatest moment is the famous desolate desert sequence, during which the value of all the money the characters seek is rendered meaningless.
22. Cops (1922)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
Buster Keaton would deride any attempt to connect his work to that of Franz Kafka, but it’s hard to resist doing so with Cops, his most elaborate short, about a man with no bad intentions who soon becomes wanted by the entire Los Angeles police department as a thief and a terrorist. Regardless of how much emphasis you place on the themes of persecution and ensnarement, Cops is a gloriously assembled series of building gags. The character remains oblivious to his wrong-doings until they have escalated, leading to a sea of cops chasing Keaton’s little man down the city streets.
21. The Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Director: Dziga Vertov
Most non-cinephiles don’t want to watch any 70-minute experimental films with no stories or actors, let alone an 85-year-old silent one. But Dziga Vertov approaches his film with such pizzaz and vigor that he could convert them. Playing with the mechanics of photography and of everyday machinery in footage shot across four Russian cities, Vertov builds to an orgasm of slow motion, multiple exposures, Dutch angles, stop-motion animation, tracking shots and split screens. Even if you watched it without accompaniment, the result would be bombastic.
20. The Big Parade (1925)
Director: King Vidor
King Vidor’s long, successful career as a director covered several decades of the sound era. But he was at the height of his artistic powers making silents, routinely turning out exquisitely crafted films with great performances. His epic World War I saga The Big Parade set the stage for All Quiet on the Western Front and all the war movies that came after. Rather than romanticizing war as heroic, Vidor shows boys swept up with the idea of patriotic duty, only to find themselves in the terror of battle.
19. Faust – Eine deutsche Volkssage (Faust) (1926)
Director: F.W. Murnau
Faust was F.W. Murnau’s final German film before he left for Hollywood, and he bid his native country farewell with serious style. This technically elaborate, big-budget epic set the stage for Metropolis’s production the following year, and its special effects get the job done as well as any in cinema’s history. The techniques Murnau played with in The Last Laugh are used to even more impressive ends, as the camera races through the foggy, hellish landscape. The actors are also in fine form, with Emil Jannings standing out (as usual) with his menacing Mephisto.
18. Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna) (1929)
Director: Hanns Schwarz
The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna has two things elevating it above your typical wartime melodrama: Brigitte Helm’s inviting performance and director Hanns Schwarz’s gorgeous visuals. Helm plays the title character, a colonel’s mistress in Tsarist Russia who falls for a poor young officer (Francis Lederer), much to the anger of her rich lover (Warwick Ward). Lederer and Ward are great as the innocent fool and the sinister schemer, but Helm steals the show, showing a vulnerability even in the irresistible seduction scenes. Schwarz’s floating camera’s movement helps underline the circular structure by revisiting the opulent opening scene at the film’s end, but with a darker context.
17. A Page of Madness (1926)
Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
If you think Germany cornered the market on dark examinations of the psyche during the silent era, think again. Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness (sometimes translated as A Crazy Page, hard to find under any title) explores fractured, chaotic minds held captive in a mental institution. Do not expect something that is quaint by today’s standards. This thing will still blow your mind. Telling the story of a man who works as a janitor in the institution in the hopes of freeing his wife, the film contains no intertitles, making the plunge into insanity all the deeper. Kinugasa’s use of distorted lenses, multiple exposures and dazzling editing are made more impressive when you learn that the director hadn’t seen much of the European work that he appears to be emulating.
16. H2O (1929)
Director: Ralph Steiner
H2O is more about the camera’s ability to both document and distort than it is about the liquid of our lives. The silent era is full of compelling tone poems and studies of subject matter, as filmmakers toyed with how the camera could record reality. Ralph Steiner’s short short sets itself apart with the way its shots of water slowly become less and less recognizable. By the end, the image looks more like abstract animation than ripples on the surface of the familiar fluid.
15. Metropolis (1927)
Director: Fritz Lang
Metropolis never slows down as it delivers a constant stream of iconic images. Fritz Lang filled the parable with all the sci-fi/adventure tropes he could: The mad scientist, the robot, the rooftop chase, the catacombs and, as it turns out, a devious henchman. Metropolis is a great reminder of just how difficult it is to judge an incomplete film. Many silents are missing material, even when it isn’t made clear in screenings or on home video. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has always been known for its spectacular special effects—it’s legally required that I use the phrase “visionary” while discussing it—but not until a few years ago did modern audiences see a film anywhere close to the one that first premiered. It turned out that the film’s best performance, Fritz Rasp as a ruthless spy for the corporate state, gives the film a greater sense of urgency and increases the feeling of rich dwarfing the poor. With that unknown excellence lurking in one of the most famous films of all time, it leaves us to wonder what else was lost in nitrate flames.
14. The Scarecrow (1921)
Director: Buster Keaton, Eddie Cline
There are Buster Keaton two-reelers with more ambitious special effects, more epic stunts and more elaborate chase scenes, but in my experience, none get more laughs than The Scarecrow. The film never stops to catch a breath as it moves from place to place, always setting up and paying off new laughs. The best moments include an ingeniously designed one-room house, an appearance from the great Luke the Dog, and some truly divine knockabout between Keaton, Joe Roberts and Keaton’s father, Joe.
13. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
Director: Jean Epstein
Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher has such an otherworldly feel, it seems you could get lost in the ether just watching it. Multiple exposures were much more common in the silent era, as directors attempted new ways to visually communicate ideas, but Epstein takes it to another level, with layers of visual fog that add dread to each shot. Whether we’re simply watching a dog running away or witnessing a house fall to ruin, Epstein evokes Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid fright whether or not he’s paying much mind to the details of the source material.
12. Menilmontant (1926)
Director: Dimitri Kirsanoff
Watching Menilmontant is a deeply felt experience. Impressionist filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff takes the dreamlike qualities of silent cinema to their natural conclusion, letting the story float by alongside haunting imagery without any intertitles directing how to interpret the story. Kirsanoff made only one other film before this bold work, which starts abruptly and brutally with a man murdering a couple, then follows a love triangle involving the dead parents’ two daughters once they’ve grown. For all his cinematic innovations, Kirsanoff is not too hoity-toity to to tug the heartstrings, and a scene with a kind old man on a park bench is one of the most touching you’ll ever see.
11. The General (1927)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman
A Buster Keaton chase sequence is like a great piece of music, gliding effortlessly from one variation on a theme to another, building gag upon gag until the explosive climax. Plenty of other filmmakers made chases with the same sets of notes, but none played them so fluidly. The General, then, is like a grand symphony—one long, sustained chase back and forth across the landscape of the Civil War. After a brief prologue to establish the characters, our hero is either chasing or being chased as the camera tracks across the authentic Civil War landscapes. The tightness of the narrative, combined with the large-scale gags, makes this many people’s favorite Keaton film—if not simply their favorite silent.
10. The Man Who Laughs (1928)
Director: Paul Leni
It’s impossible to say that one dramatic silent film performance is definitively the best, but Conrad Veidt’s portrayal of Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs comes pretty damn close. Veidt’s makeup famously inspired the creation of Batman villain The Joker, but those who only know that creepy image may be surprised by just how fragile, delicate and sympathetic the character is. Adapted from the Victor Hugo novel about a man whose face was disfigured into a permanent smile at childhood as a punishment to his father, the film has everything—sex, humor, despair, joy, suspense, thrills and serious pathos. And director Paul Leni miraculously brings it all together for as exhilarating a conclusion as you’ll find in the movies.
9. Jujiro (Crossroads a.k.a. Crossways) (1928)
Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japanese master Teinosuke Kinugasa’s two landmark works of silent expressionism, Jujiro and A Page of Madness, have not been as widely seen as they deserve to be. Jujiro, the comparatively calmer, more introspective of the two, tells the story of a sister’s despair as her brother loses his mind over a woman in the red-light district of Edo. Playing the sister, Akiko Chihaya gives the film its emotional core and grounds it in reality as the rest of the world disintegrates into a grotesque fever dream. If you ever have the chance to see the film live with Stephen Horne’s piano-and-flute score, do not miss it. It will be one of the most emotionally draining experiences of your life.
8. He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
Director: Victor Sjöstrom
“I say serious things, and people laugh!” Such is the simple tragedy of Lon Chaney’s character in Victor Sjöstrom’s He Who Gets Slapped. Chaney plays a great scientist who loses his ideas and wife to a scheming baron, then becomes a clown so he can re-live the humiliation in the circus ring every night. Sjöstrom crafted the best Chaney film of them all by taking taking all of Chaney’s favorite obsessions and exaggerating them even more than usual. The main character is sympathetic yet terrifying, an amplification of all our biggest fears and hangups. When the circus calls him onto the stage one last time, it’s the grand exit of all grand exits. Not for people with coulrophobia.
7. Our Hospitality (1923)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Jack Blystone
Buster Keaton was never one for grandiose social commentary, but he loved observing absurd human behavior. So he had no trouble making Our Hospitality, about a generations-long family feud that comes head-to-head with a southern hospitality code. That code says that you can’t kill someone when they’re a guest in your house, so when Keaton’s character unknowingly stumbles into his enemy family’s home, he can’t leave. Keaton has a great time attempting escapes, with the inside of the house serving as his safe zone if things go wrong. The funniest moment is the dinner prayer, during which everyone is watching everyone else rather than actually praying. A river chase sequence, including a killer waterfall stunt, brings things to a perfect climax. And I didn’t even mention the first act’s use of Stephenson’s Rocket—the historically accurate, ridiculously puny train that transports our hero from New York City.
6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s face is in your brain, whether you’re aware of it there or not. Its contours and stipples, topped by hair shorn of substance or style—her head centered by two wide eyes rimmed with tears, always in some sort of superposition between ecstasy and misery—consumes boundless space in Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, seemingly suspended over the long course of history between now (whenever now happens to be) and when Dreyer first envisioned this immersive, expressionist experience. Dreyer wrote of his film, “What counted was getting the spectator absorbed in the past,” and then explained further, “A thorough study of the documents from the rehabilitation process was necessary; I did not study the clothes of the time, and things like that. The year of the event seemed as inessential to me as its distance from the present.” Though The Passion of Joan of Arc Dreyer based on the 1491 transcripts of its titular saint’s trial for heresy (the director welcomed by the Société Générale des Films to make a film in France, his choice of subject bolstered by France’s canonization of Joan of Arc after World War I), he provides little visual detail or historical context. Instead he submerges the viewer in Joan’s perspective, keeps his hand on our heads as we drown in the torment of what she’s subjected to, rarely releasing his weight except for in the film’s final moments, when Joan’s brutal execution at the stake unleashes violence throughout the citizenry. But mostly: That face, awestruck throughout time. Most notably, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie, the director watches as his protagonist, Nana (Anna Karina), watches Joan of Arc, lighting her tear-streaked face in close-up as she experiences something of the same images before her. Godard reflects Falconetti’s face in Karina’s, spanning more than three decades as if they’re nothing. There is perhaps no better ode to the power of what Dreyer achieved: Timelessness borne by the tragedy of our all too weak, all too human, flesh. —Dom Sinacola
5. Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
Directors: Buster Keaton, Charles Reisner
Steamboat Bill, Jr.’s climactic cyclone sequence—which is at once great action and great comedy—would on its own earn the film a place on this list. The iconic shot of a house’s facade falling on Keaton is only one of many great moments in the free-flowing, hard-blowing sequence. But the film also showcases some of Keaton’s best intimate acting, including a scene in which his father tries to find him a more manly hat, and a painfully hilarious attempt to pantomime of a jailbreak plan.
4. Sunrise (1927)
Director: F.W. Murnau
During the last few years of the 1920s, the excitement was palpable as brilliant filmmakers pushed to unlock the medium’s full potential. Sunrise was born of that ambition, as Fox brought German genius F.W. Murnau to Hollywood, where he and his cameramen used all the resources at their disposal to create some of the most stunning visuals ever put on celluloid. Telling the story of a husband who strays and then tries to redeem himself, Murnau’s camera flies over country fields, gets tangled in the bustle of the city and desperately looms over a lake in a storm, while his actors, George O’Brien and Janet Gaynor, radiate with sincerity.
3. Un Chien Andalou (1929)
Directors: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali
Roger Ebert described Luis Buñuel’s first film as a shadow of logic, a facsimile of reality: “We know that the car at the auto show does not belong to (and was not designed or built by) the model in the bathing suit who points to it.” Ebert offers this conception as a way of approaching Un Chien Andalou, a film which defies approach. Conceived when Buñuel, then working in France under director Jean Epstein, described to fellow Spanish expatriate Salvador Dali a dream he had—visceral but untethered from narrative bounds—Un Chien Andalou became a back-and-forth between two men struggling with their subconsciouses, attempting to recreate the upsetting images burped up by the deepest nethers of their brain stems. The iconic eyeball-slicing; a man dressed as a nun getting into a ridiculous bike accident; a dead hand crawling with ants seemingly borne from a Christ-like palm wound; two dead donkeys, tangled within the innards of two grand pianos, dragged alongside two befuddled priests by a man trying to feel up the woman whose eye he may or may not have sliced eight years, two weeks, the night before—sense must be countered with contrarianism, and all narrative conventions must be shat upon. With his car show metaphor, Ebert was talking about causation, about the 20-minute film’s resistance to the way traditional stories (and our four-dimensional conception of reality, for that matter) feature characters who do things that all follow a chronological line of action and reaction. But what makes Un Chien Andalou truly terrifying is understanding that Ebert’s approach, thinking of these images as “models” of a recognizable world, points to a greater force at play. A hand that reaches down and manipulates our lives without our knowledge, without our consent. We are ultimately at the mercy of powers far beyond our control. There’s little else scarier than that, and with his still stomach-churning debut, Buñuel bored right into the heart of it. —Dom Sinacola
2. The Crowd (1928)
Director: King Vidor
It may be counterintuitive to portray the disappointment of an ordinary life with some of the most extraordinary visual storytelling ever, but King Vidor pulls it off magnificently. His oft-quoted imagery (see Billy Wilder’s The Apartment) reveals an average man lost in a sea of other average men—at a desk among endless rows of desks, on just one floor of a tall building in a giant city. With the help of great performances by James Murray and Eleanor Boardman, Vidor employs a full cinematic vocabulary with flying cameras, tracking shots, expressionistic typography and more. Yet it always serves, rather than overpowers, the story. Without sentimentality, preachiness or melodrama, The Crowd shows that even a big loser can have a story that will break your heart.
1. Sherlock, Jr. (1924)
Director: Buster Keaton | |||||
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] | 2016-03-30T00:00:00 | Here’s a new message to blacks complaining about racism: You don’t know how good you have it. It’s called “black privilege.” Others call that idea pure bunk. | en | /media/sites/cnn/apple-touch-icon.png | CNN | https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/30/us/black-privilege/index.html | Here’s some good news for all you black folks complaining about racism in America.
You don’t know how good you have it.
At least that’s the message I heard during one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had about race. I was talking about the concept of white privilege – the belief that being white comes with unearned advantages and everyday perks that its recipients are often unaware of. I asked a white retiree if he believed in the existence of white privilege. He said no, but there was another type of privilege he wanted to talk about:
“Black privilege.”
Confused by his answer, I asked him to give me an example of a perk that I enjoyed as a black man that he couldn’t. His answer: “Black History Month.”
“In America you can’t even talk about whiteness,” said Drew Domalick, who lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “If you try to embrace being white, you are portrayed as being a racist. If we had a White History Month, that would be viewed as a racist holiday.”
Domalick isn’t the only one who believes in black privilege. The term is being deployed in conservative circles as a rhetorical counterattack to the growing use of the term “white privilege.” It’s part of a larger transformation: White is becoming the new black.
Google the phrase “black privilege,” and one steps into a universe where whites struggle daily against the indignities heaped upon them because of their skin color. In books and articles such as “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream,” and “It’s Past Time to Acknowledge Black Privilege,” white commentators describe how blackness has become such a “tremendous asset” that some whites are now trying to “pass” as black.
If you’re a skeptic, there’s even a “Black Privilege Checklist” listing some of the perks blacks enjoy that whites cannot.
A sample:
Blacks can belong to clubs and organizations that cater specifically to their race, but there’s no National Association for the Advancement of White People because such a group would be deemed racist. Blacks can call white people “honky” and “cracker,” but whites cannot use the N-word.
The concept of black privilege is still so new, though, that some of the nation’s most acclaimed scholars on race didn’t even know it existed. One giggled when she heard the phrase because she thought it was a joke. Others were bewildered; some became angry.
Count Peggy McIntosh as one of the angry. She is arguably more responsible for popularizing the concept of white privilege than anyone else. An activist and retired Wellesley College professor, her 1989 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” has been widely reprinted and is now taught in many colleges. Her essay gives examples of what McIntosh calls white privilege (“I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed; If a traffic cop pulls me over … I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race”).
McIntosh scoffed at the idea of black privilege.
“When you’ve had as much freedom to do what you want to do and think what you want and say what you want and act as you please, then you get irrationally rankled at having to curtail your life and your thought in any way,” says McIntosh, who also founded the National SEED project, which helps teachers create courses that are more gender sensitive and multicultural.
She said the black privilege checklist sounds like a “prolonged whine” from people who resent being challenged about their white privilege.
Why it’s good to be black
Black privilege may be new, but some of the rhetoric defending it is at least two centuries old. As far back as the late 19th century, whites were saying that blacks weren’t so much victims of racism as they were victims of special treatment.
The 19th century U.S. Supreme Court echoed that thinking in one of its most infamous decisions. Congress had passed a sweeping Civil Rights Act in 1875 that banned discrimination against former slaves in public places. But the Supreme Court declared that act unconstitutional in 1883, a decision that sanctioned the rise of Jim Crow segregation and mob violence against blacks that would last a century.
In the high court’s 1883 decision, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in the majority opinion that there must come a time when blacks cease “to be the special favorite of the laws.”
Over the years, that sentiment bubbled to the surface at various times as debates over “reverse racism” and affirmative action erupted. Yet something new is now happening. More whites have begun talking about themselves as a racially oppressed majority. In a widely publicized 2011 survey, white Americans said they suffer from racial discrimination more than blacks.
Where does this belief come from? The numbers don’t appear to support it. Numerous studies and surveys show that blacks lag behind whites and other racial groups in many socioeconomic categories.
The wealth of white households is 13 times the median wealth of black households. Black children represent 18% of the nation’s preschool enrollment but make up nearly half of all children with multiple suspensions. Job applicants with white-sounding names are 50% more likely to get called back for an interview than similarly qualified applicants with black-sounding names. And prison sentences for black men are nearly 20% longer than those of white men convicted for similar crimes.
Some say you don’t even need numbers to dismiss black privilege. Use your eyes. If being black is such an asset, why do many whites consistently move out of communities – neighborhoods, churches, schools – when too many blacks move in? It’s a phenomenon that sociologists have long documented and that some call “racial tipping.”
Those who argue for the existence of black privilege, however, don’t deny these grim numbers. They just don’t blame racism for those racial disparities.
David Horowitz, author of the book, “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream,” says blacks are still more privileged, though they lag behind other racial groups in varying categories. It’s not white privilege that’s preventing them from doing better, he says; it’s their behavior, such as their inability to build more intact families.
“The fact that white people are better off is not a privilege; it’s earned,” says Horowitz, founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a think tank in Los Angeles created to combat “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values.”
Not all racial disparities are inherently racist, he says.
“If racial disparities prove discrimination, then the National Basketball Association is racist,” Horowitz says. “Probably 90 percent of its players are black.”
Black privilege is so pervasive that it’s hard to miss, he says. College professors practicing “affirmative grading” hold black students to lower standards than others. Corporations offer programs and internships to black workers but not to whites.
Black privilege even extends to the White House, he says. Barack Obama was an inexperienced presidential candidate who was elected because Americans wanted to experience a post-racial sugar high, he says. “He wouldn’t be elected dogcatcher if he wasn’t black,” Horowitz says of Obama.
Some who invoke “black privilege” also make another argument: Who says all unearned advantages are wrong?
In fact, some are unavoidable, says Benjamin Shapiro, a political commentator and author of an essay titled “Why White People Seek Black Privilege.”
“Birth to a two-parent family is an unearned advantage. Birth into wealth is an unearned advantage. Being born smart or tall or athletic is an unearned advantage,” Shapiro says. “But being born white in a rural backwater in West Virginia is not an advantage over being born the son of Colin Powell.”
Blackness, though, has become a “tremendous asset” in contemporary America, he writes in his column. Despite the “horrific and evil history of racism against black people,” being black today gives its recipients privileges ranging from landing coveted college scholarships to becoming activists who can build careers on racial grievances, he says.
There are even whites now who try to pass themselves off as black activists because it’s a career booster, Shapiro says. He cites Rachel Dolezal, the former head of an NAACP chapter, who said “I identify as black” but was called white by her family members.
Who is Rachel Dolezal?
“Being black confers the advantage of rhetorical victimhood,” says Shapiro, host of “The Morning Answer” radio show in Los Angeles. “Accusing others of racism is a convenient way of avoiding discussion on uncomfortable topics ranging from murder rates to poverty rates to single motherhood rates.”
‘We swim in white supremacy’
Arguments for black privilege may face a hostile audience as acceptance of the idea of white privilege grows.
The white rapper Macklemore recently released a song titled “White Privilege.” The term “check your privilege,” a reference to white privilege, has gone mainstream.
The comedian Louis C.K. even built one of his most popular routines around the concept of white privilege.
“Here’s how great it is to be white,” he says. “I can get in a time machine and go to any time, and it would be awesome when I get there. … A black guy in a time machine is like, hey, any time before 1980, no thank you.” No one appears to have asked C.K. about black privilege, but others who have explored white privilege in books and essays reject the existence of such a privilege.
Some suggest that people who believe in black privilege still do not understand what white privilege is all about.
Consider a popular argument against white privilege: I grew up poor, and nobody gave me anything. How can you say I’m privileged?
That argument is why Deborah Foster wrote an essay titled “A Guide to White Privilege for White People Who Think They’ve Never Had Any.”
Foster says she grew up in an impoverished white family in Iowa where her parents were so poor, she was placed in foster care as a child because they couldn’t afford to feed her.
Still, Foster says she experienced white privilege. She says she only knew that because she happened to live around poor black people. She still had advantages that they did not, she says.
Her black friends would get accused of stealing from stores; she wouldn’t, even though she was with them. They would be suspended for missing too many classes or being late; she was placed in a gifted program, even though she also had attendance problems. They were called lazy blacks behind their backs if they missed work at a fast-food restaurant; her behavior was never seen as a reflection on her race.
“We swim in white supremacy, which makes it harder to point out unless you start looking for it,” she says.
Then there is affirmative action. Don’t blacks get plenty of perks from affirmative action programs? That’s a privilege that whites don’t enjoy.
Only if you ignore much of U.S. history, some say. Whites have been the biggest affirmative action beneficiaries in U.S. history – they’ve routinely been given advantages in jobs and other economic opportunities that were kept from blacks, says the Rev. Jim Wallis, one of the country’s best-known commentators on race.
Wallis, who grew up in a white working-class family in Detroit, says they received special help from a massive government program that was largely denied to black families. It was called the GI Bill, he writes in his new book, “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America.”
The GI Bill was created for U.S. veterans returning from World War II. The government paid for the college education of white veterans and provided other types of financial aid to them, but black veterans were unable to reap many of the same rewards.
The exclusionary racial nature of the GI Bill was repeated throughout U.S. history. The financial help and land grants that the U.S. government gave to 19th century homesteaders; the New Deal policies that lifted the nation out of the Great Depression but were kept from many blacks – that has been the norm, according to historians and books such as “When Affirmative Action Was White,” by Ira Katznelson.
“I’m the beneficiary of the biggest affirmative action program in American history,” Wallis says. “A free education, a loan for a house. But black veterans didn’t get it. We got made middle-class by our government program. It was good. That’s privilege.”
He says some whites resist the term “white privilege” because they think they’re being blamed for something wrong.
“Every white person isn’t guilty for every bad thing that’s been done to every black person,” Wallis says. “But if we benefit from cooperating with white supremacy, then we are responsible for changing it. To tolerate racism in our social system is to be complicit.”
Stepping into another time machine
Perhaps one reason some white people invoke black privilege is because they are tired of being on the defensive. That’s the impression I got after talking to Domalick, the Wisconsin retiree.
He is a soft-spoken man who says he doesn’t judge people by their race. But he says others often don’t return the favor when they see him. He longs for the day when Americans stop talking so much about race, which only increases division.
“If you’d get away from this white-black struggle, people will start coming together,” he says.
Maybe. But extend the logic behind the belief in black privilege into other areas, and there could be more strange conversations over race. If someone stepped into the time machine that Louie C.K. imagines and dared to go forward instead of backward, what would they see and hear in the brown new world of a future America?
Would they see a calendar marked by a White History Month? Would they click on the television and see a White Entertainment Network or legions of white citizens marching on Washington, singing “We Shall Overcome”?
And would they hear a white leader step forward at a crowded news conference to announce: “It’s time to talk about reparations”? | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 79 | https://french.kwiziq.com/revision/grammar/il-elle-ils-and-elles-it-he-she-and-they | en | Subject pronouns - il, elle, ils, elles | [
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"Aurélie Drouard"
] | 2023-09-26T10:33:12 | Learn how to use Il/elle/ils/elles = it/he/she/they (French Subject Pronouns) and get fluent faster with Kwiziq French. Access a personalised study list, thousands of test questions, grammar lessons and reading, writing and listening exercises. Find your fluent French! | en | Kwiziq French | https://french.kwiziq.com/revision/grammar/il-elle-ils-and-elles-it-he-she-and-they | In French, you use specific subject pronouns for it/he/she/they depending on what they refer to.
The subject pronouns "it/he/she/they" in French
Il means he or it (for a masculine noun)
Jean travaille dans le club. - Il travaille dans le club.Jean works in the club. - He works in the club.
Le stylo est sur la table. - Il est sur la table.The pen is on the table. - It is on the table.
Elle means she or it (for a feminine noun)
La fleur est jolie. - Elle est jolie.The flower is pretty. - It is pretty.
Ils means they (for masculine or mixed plural nouns)
Jean et Paul vont au cinéma. - Ils vont au cinéma.Jean and Paul are going to the cinema. - They are going to the cinema.
Elles means they or them (when every one of the group are female or feminine nouns)
Les fleurs sont jolies. - Elles sont jolies.The flowers are pretty. - They are pretty.
See also "C'est" vs "Il/Elle est" to say it is/she is/he is in French
Grammar note: Pronouns are general words that replace specific nouns in sentences. A verb has a subject (the person or thing doing the verb), and may have an object (the thing being done to). Subject pronouns are usually different to object pronouns, so you cannot use one to replace the other (in English it can be either, but French uses distinct words) .
Subject - Verb - Object
(sub) Jean (verb) kicks (obj) the ball > (subj pron) He (verb) kicks (obj pron) it
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Jean travaille dans le club. - Il travaille dans le club.Jean works in the club. - He works in the club.
Jean et Paul vont au cinéma. - Ils vont au cinéma.Jean and Paul are going to the cinema. - They are going to the cinema.
Les fleurs sont jolies. - Elles sont jolies.The flowers are pretty. - They are pretty.
Le stylo est sur la table. - Il est sur la table.The pen is on the table. - It is on the table.
La fleur est jolie. - Elle est jolie.The flower is pretty. - It is pretty. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 5 | https://liviacamperi.medium.com/i-wonder-what-a-woman-is-a-superheroine-subject-to-the-male-gaze-e1bfc7e206f8 | en | I Wonder What a Woman Is: a Superheroine Subject to the Male Gaze | [
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"Livia Camperi",
"liviacamperi.medium.com"
] | 2018-12-30T14:50:12.747000+00:00 | Film began (in its earliest form) in the late 19th century as a way to settle a bet between two rich horse breeders. Since then, it has slowly and gradually transformed into the art form we know… | en | https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19 | Medium | https://liviacamperi.medium.com/i-wonder-what-a-woman-is-a-superheroine-subject-to-the-male-gaze-e1bfc7e206f8 | Film began (in its earliest form) in the late 19th century as a way to settle a bet between two rich horse breeders. Since then, it has slowly and gradually transformed into the art form we know, love, and study today. Since the Great Depression, when movie studios decided that women were not business-minded or financially-oriented enough for the industry, female filmmakers have been few and far between; like most other art forms, film has been dominated by men since its inception (or at least since it became a business). To this day, there continues to be a paucity of female filmmakers, and a lack of appreciation for the few working today. As of 2010, women comprised only 7 percent of the directors working on the top 250 grossing films. In fact, since the Academy Awards started in 1928, out of 69 Best Director Oscars there has only been one female winner: Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for The Hurt Locker. This scarcity of female auteurs contributes to the lack of female-driven stories on the big screen, and stems from the fact that film is and always has been a way for men to depict their desires on screen; this phenomenon has been coined the “male gaze.” In fact, some theorists argue that film is a way for male sexual desires to play out on screen, which always involve some sort of submission on the part of the woman. This prevents real female-led stories from successfully playing out on screen, as the essence of film is male desire itself. Taking a genre-specific approach, I’ll explore how the male gaze affects the way that superheroines are depicted on screen, via an exploration of the feminist theory, as elaborated by E. Ann Kaplan in her essay “Is the Gaze Male?” I will also compare sequences and costume choices from the various on-screen representations of Wonder Woman and the Amazons, as well as a discussion of Diana’s origins, which will help illustrate how the male gaze manifests itself cinematically, even in 2017.
According to theorist Laura Mulvey, there are three levels to the male gaze. The first is the man directing the camera, be it director or camera man, who literally controls the image. The second is the male character in the story, who makes the female character the object of his gaze. The third is the male spectator, who emulates the first two. The structure of film is, therefore, voyeuristic with an intent to fetishize females. Basically, men like to watch. However, the male gaze has more power than just objectification, which is problematic on its own. According to Kaplan, men’s gaze has “the power of action and of possession that is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act on it.” This disparity, between the male who wants to watch and the female who can only be watched, goes further to becomes a sort of sadomasochistic relationship where the male essentially punishes the woman for her lack of a manhood (for more on this, look into Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory on male sexual pleasure). This in turn engenders completely different reactions in the audience, where the male spectator sees himself as the subject and the female sees herself as an object. If a woman were to try to flip the script and own the gaze, would she simply be appropriating the male role as subject, or remain the object of desire?
Enter Wonder Woman. In 1941, psychologist William Moulton Marston created the character of “Suprema, the Wonder Woman,” later renamed just Wonder Woman. Marston was a rather interesting character himself. He believed the world would eventually become a matriarchy, and that women would be the rightful and better rulers of the world. He was in a polyamorous relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and their girlfriend, Olive Byrne. The three of them lived together and raised their five shared children together. He also developed the early prototype of the lie detector test (polygraph), which eventually inspired Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth. (For a more detailed and highly engrossing telling of Marston’s fascinating life, check out Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman) Essentially, he didn’t like the current slate of characters in comic books, and wanted to create a strong female character to represent the future he believed imminent and unavoidable. Inspired by his two lovers, he created Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman.\
In 1975, ABC decided to make a television show for Wonder Woman after the continued success of her comic book. The two male producers, male director, male costume designer, male cinematographer, and male casting director, decided to cast former beauty-queen-turned-actress Lynda Carter in the title role. Although the show was hailed as a feminist success at the time and was generally a beloved show, hindsight has shed light on some its more problematic aspects, as well as the intensely 70’s campy nature of it. After Warner Bros’ Man of Steel in 2013, Zack Snyder, the director of the new lineup of DC movies, cast former beauty-queen-turned-actress Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman to be introduced in 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. In 2017, she was finally able to star in her own movie, directed by the now highest grossing female director of all time, Patty Jenkins. Gal Gadot then reprised her role in 2017’s Justice League, first directed by Zack Snyder, and then Joss Whedon. These three showcase the difference between a male-directed and a female-directed representation of Wonder Woman, as well as showing the possibilities of a female-driven film that Kaplan hints at in her essay.
The first and most obvious way in which these representations were influenced by the male gaze is the look of Wonder Woman and the Amazons. In case one is unfamiliar with her origins, Wonder Woman, aka Diana, is the princess and the only somewhat natural-born woman on Paradise Island (later Themyscira), an island populated entirely by female warriors, known as the Amazons, or Amazon warriors. It would stand to reason that warriors would need warriors’ attire, i.e. armor and such. However, in the 1975 television show, which was directed by a man and costume designed by a man, Donfeld, the Amazons are shown wearing nothing more than quasi-sheer slip dresses, and then glorified swimsuits during the training/sporting montages. All, obviously, are extremely low-cut at the top and high-cut at the bottom.
Wonder Woman’s own costume (when she goes to man’s world and starts doing her superhero thing) is more of the same, except with flashier colors, and apparently made of spandex. The show lasted three seasons, and as it went on the designer made her costume skimpier and tighter.
In 2017, Patty Jenkins made history with Wonder Woman. It was critically and financially the best film to emerge from the DC/Warner Bros machine since The Dark Knight trilogy, and fans finally witnessed a Wonder Woman for the modern age in all her glory. The costumes, designed by a woman, Lindy Hemming (who also worked on The Dark Knight trilogy), were functional and intimidating. Although the functionality of so-called “boob plates” has been called into question, there is no doubt that these are more practical for battle-minded warriors than the sheer swimsuits of the 70’s television show. The Amazons trained and fought in metal armor that hugged their muscles and yet did not amplify or even show any cleavage, and allowed for free movement at the big joints (hips, shoulders), as explained by Diana herself to Etta Candy.
Wonder Woman’s outfit is similarly updated. Her training armor is subdued yet tactical, and its simplicity is used narratively to show the difference between herself and the “real” Amazon warriors, since she is the only one who was born rather than created. Her Wonder Woman costume is battle-ready, with sculpted muscles (to go along with all the other on-screen heroes of the DC movies), actual armored plating, and no visible cleavage.
Many of those differences, however, could be chalked up to cultural evolution in the past 40 years, technological evolution, and evolution of the character. However, possibly the greatest proof that the male gaze still dominates today, happened just over a year ago. In November 2017, the movie Justice League was released. Wonder Woman was in most of the movie, and her battle costume was kept mostly the same as in Patty Jenkins’ movie. However, the Amazons also had a small role in the movie: they appear in one scene to defend this movie’s MacGuffin, the Mother Box, from the big baddie, Steppenwolf. They lose quite quickly. That’s it for them in this movie.
Zack Snyder, who was in charge of the new DC lineup, is Executive Producer on all the movies, including Wonder Woman, and has directed three other movies (Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Justice League). Given the fact that Justice League came out only about four months after Wonder Woman was released, one can assume that they filmed one directly after the other, if not at the same time. The same actresses from Wonder Woman acted as the Amazon warriors in Justice League. Snyder had access to all the same costumes. However, he decided to have his costume designer, Michael Wilkinson, redesign the Amazon’s costumes, for some reason. The warriors who were previously wearing battle-ready tactical armor, were now sporting glorified leather bikinis. There was no logical reason for Snyder to change their whole costumes, especially given the fact that they are only in a few minutes of the movie. The only explanation is that Snyder wanted to pander to the male gaze, exactly how Kaplan described it: men are afraid of women and so they over-sexualize them so as to have them be fetishes rather than characters.
This is also prevalent in the promotional imagery for all three of these movies. In the promotional imagery for the two male-influenced representations, Wonder Woman is striking a glamour pose. She is there to look pretty and to attract male viewers. In the ads for the female- directed one, Wonder Woman is always depicted either mid-battle or striking a fierce, intimidating pose.
There are also times we see Diana in civilian clothes (not her costume). The few times that she wears civilian clothes in Wonder Woman, they are classy and refined, not over-sexualized. In Justice League, on the other hand, the director takes every chance possible to showcase her “natural talents” so to speak.
These examples showcase exactly what the aforementioned feminist theorists were discussing. Cinema is traditionally a way of expressing male desires on screen. The subject treated by a woman filmmaker, given complex characterization, a great story, and a strong message, is reduced to a sexual object to be observed and desired by men when treated by a male filmmaker.
There is also the type of male gaze that Mulvey noted as pro-filmic: the camera. The way the camera moves and “observes” the female characters informs the other types of male gaze, both how/where the male actor will look and how/where the male spectator will look. By choosing the movements, angle, and placing of the camera, a filmmaker has the power to decide what kind of gaze he/she wants on the subject. The differences between the shooting of the Wonder Woman television show and movie are great examples of this. Even just comparing the pilot episode of the television show (which is one hour long and presents Diana’s origin story) to the movie, we see choices made by the directors that show what kind of audience they were expecting and catering to. One of the most conspicuous examples is the use of slow motion. In the television show, Diana and the other Amazons compete in an Olympics-style sporting competition to see who will accompany Steve Trevor back to man’s world. Here, slow motion is used in a very Baywatch style: the camera lingers on and prolongs shots of the Amazons running towards camera in their sheer, thin, barely-holding-it-in suits, with their breasts bouncing all over the place. This gratuitous lingering of the camera shows that the director of this episode, the producers of the series, and the creative team (all men), wanted to market this show to men, in the simplest of ways, despite its purported feminist tone. This objectification and conspicuous eroticism is “designed to annihilate the threat that woman … poses.” The show-runners are effectively, through the pro-filmic gaze, telling men that they need not be afraid of these women, they are just here to be sexy.
On the other side of things is the 2017 Wonder Woman. Patty Jenkins has said since the start that she wanted Wonder Woman and the Amazons to not only be strong, capable, formidable warriors, but also look amazing doing it. She wanted to knock down the idea that women have to sacrifice femininity in order to be strong. That was why she gave the Amazons heels (albeit reinforced metal ones) and still made sure the costumes were appealing. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly,
Jenkins defends the impractical footwear. “It’s total wish-fulfillment,” she says, adding that the warriors have flats for heavy fighting. “I, as a woman, want Wonder Woman to be hot as hell, fight badass, and look great at the same time — the same way men want Superman to have huge pecs and an impractically big body. That makes them feel like the hero they want to be. And my hero, in my head, has really long legs.”
Although Jenkins did make sure the Amazons still looked attractive (since they were, canonically, created by Zeus to “influence men’s hearts with love”), she did not cross the line into having the camera linger lasciviously on breasts or butts jiggling as they run in slow motion across a field to 70’s pop music. In fact, slow motion is used generously throughout Jenkins’ film, but it is used to accentuate moments of great physical prowess. The film switches to slow-motion as an Amazon is jumping twenty feet in the air and throwing a sword to another Amazon with perfect precision, or demonstrating ferocity with a spear, or jumping off of a shield and shooting three arrows to perfectly kill three enemies. These slow-motion shots are not for men to ogle women’s bodies as sexual objects: they exist, in fact, to show the complete opposite than the 1975 television show. These beautiful bodies are insanely strong and can, probably, destroy you.
Slow motion is used in largely the same way in Justice League, but the biggest difference in terms of the pro-filmic gaze is the repeated use of butt shots. So, so many butt shots.
There is, finally, the question that Kaplan asks in her article: is it possible for a woman to own the gaze? In other words, is it possible for a female spectator to identify with something more than the female object of desire, without simply appropriating the male position? Wonder Woman (2017), I think, answers that question with a resounding “yes.” In this depiction, Diana is most definitely a woman. She is traditionally beautiful, and wears makeup and attractive “clothing” (attractive battle armor, really). She is in love with a man, so she is also a heterosexual woman (Kaplan mentions that lesbian depictions on screen are a whole different question as to who the female spectator identifies with), and she has implied sex with Steve. This relationship and depiction of a strong woman shatters the glass ceiling mentioned by Kaplan, as first stated by Mary Ann Doane in her paper “The Women’s Film: Possession and Address”: because a woman is sexuality in male-gaze-driven films, in order for a film to be female-driven, it must be de-eroticized. However, in doing this, the film denies an entire side of the female experience. Wonder Woman (2017) succeeds in showing us a complex reality with a female character who saves the day and is stronger than the men around her, yet doesn’t go the typical male-strongman-hero route of insisting on doing everything alone, and expresses her sexuality and confidence in a deeply feminine and unobscured way. This step forward in feminist cinema is what makes it all the more disappointing that it seems the studio took an immediate step backwards with Justice League. However, Wonder Woman 1984, the sequel directed again by Patty Jenkins, spells hope for the future of superheroines on film.
The male gaze theory states that the male-minded camera, male actors, and male spectators affect how a female character is depicted on screen, and how a female spectator identifies with her. Although the previous depiction of Wonder Woman in the 1975 television series (not to mention all the other truly horrendous attempts at putting superheroines on the screen, such as Supergirl, Catwoman, and Elektra) and 2017’s Justice League definitely show a perpetuation of the trend of hypersexualizing strong female characters so as not to scare men, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman shows the possibility that a female-centric, non-male-ego-stroking, well-made film can shatter glass ceilings, break records, and make history. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 37 | https://www.georgetown.edu/news/the-surprising-history-of-synchronized-swimming-in-the-olympics/ | en | The Surprising History of Synchronized Swimming in the Olympics | [
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"Rosemary Lane"
] | 2024-08-06T16:01:30+00:00 | Synchronized swimming was first performed in flooded Roman amphitheaters, but it wasn't until 1984 that it became an official Olympic sport. | en | /wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/apple-touch-icon.png | Georgetown University | https://www.georgetown.edu/news/the-surprising-history-of-synchronized-swimming-in-the-olympics/ | Artistic swimming begins this week at the 2024 Paris Olympics with a few milestones in its wake.
It’s the first year the U.S. artistic swimming team, formerly known as synchronized swimming, is competing in the team event at the Olympics in 16 years — a comeback after Americans dominated the sport for decades.
It’s the first Olympiad that men are allowed to compete in the sport’s team event, although no countries will be sending any male competitors this year.
And it’s the 40th anniversary of the sport’s official entry into the Olympics — a relative latecomer after early forms of artistic swimming were performed in flooded Roman amphitheaters and glass tanks in Victorian England.
Vicki Valosik, an adjunct writing instructor in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and editorial director for Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, uncovers much of this aquatic history in her new book, Swimming Pretty: The Untold Story of Women in Water, which chronicles women’s rise in all forms of swimming, including synchronized.
For Valosik, her interest in synchronized swimming’s history began, appropriately, in the pool.
She took up the sport herself more than a dozen years ago, and was practicing for her first competition in 2011 when her teammates told her to take off her goggles, per the norms of the sport. She was surprised, given that swimmers in other sports wear goggles, but she took them off and dove underwater. She remembers feeling keenly aware as she spun and swam that she couldn’t breathe or see.
“Clearly it’s an athletic and difficult sport,” she said, “but there’s this performance aspect of it as well, such as not wearing goggles simply because it doesn’t look as good. I was curious about that tension as I was looking into the history and was struck by seeing this sport versus spectacle conflict pop up over and over through the decades.”
That tension between athleticism and performance is the question Valosik continued to explore as she dug through archives at the International Swimming Hall of Fame and pored through physical education journals and the scrapbooks and personal effects of early Olympians and aquatic performers of the carnival world. She interviewed swimmers who went on State Department missions to spread the sport internationally, former coaches, and top athletes and leaders in artistic swimming today.
Valosik hopes to share her research with the Georgetown community this fall. In the meantime, dive into the sport’s surprising history, its Cold War-era battle for Olympic acceptance, and what to look for in the pool at this year’s Summer Games.
Synchronized swimming looks so effortless, but it takes so much strength underneath the water. What’s hard about the sport, and what strengths do you need to be successful at it?
The biggest things are endurance and lung capacity. Athletes are conducting incredibly difficult maneuvers upside down in the water. At the Olympics, they spend more than half of the routine underwater. As a routine goes on and the athletes are breathing faster and their heart rates are elevated, these moves become increasingly difficult. Imagine you’re running a sprint and then suddenly you have to hold your breath. That would be so much harder, right?
At the same time, the swimmers are often changing patterns, shifting spatially and in relationship to one another, while upside down in the water. On top of that, they are traveling all over the pool. Then, of course, there’s matching everyone perfectly in the water, an element that doesn’t lend itself to sharp and precise movements.
And all of this takes place in deep water. When you see the swimmers catapulting someone out of the water, it’s easy to forget they’re not touching the bottom of the pool. They are kicking as hard as they can to create enough tension against the water to propel not just themselves above the surface, but also the body weight of the people they’re supporting and lifting. It requires an incredible amount of strength.
What made you want to write a book about synchronized swimming?
I was fascinated to discover that the sport’s development was deeply connected to important social currents over the years and specifically to women’s physical empowerment.
For example, Annette Kellerman became a vaudeville and silent film star for her aquatic performances, which escalated to become increasingly dangerous in her movies. She did things like swim with her hands tied behind her back through rapids. She swam with alligators. She dove from a hundred-foot-tower into the ocean, barely missing the rocks surrounding the tower’s base. Her movie, A Daughter of the Gods, came out in 1916 when the agitation for women’s suffrage was building and reviewers of her movies made connections between her physical daring and women’s political enfranchisement. Several wrote things like, ‘Anybody who thinks women aren’t as strong as men and therefore shouldn’t have the right to vote need to go watch Annette Kellerman.’
As I was discovering these interesting connections between swimming performance and other important developments for women, such as suffrage, the development of lifesaving, the growth of physical education and how synchronized swimming and its evolution was tied to these things, I realized it was a fascinating story — and one that hadn’t been told.
What were you surprised to learn about the history of women’s swimming?
I was surprised at how hard women had to fight, over and over, to be taken seriously as athletes. In the Victorian era, women had to fight to simply get to swim and do it in clothing that was not dangerous in the water. Then they had to fight to get into the world of sports at a time when people believed that women should conserve their energy to have children and be good mothers, and that sports would make women masculine.
At the same time, it was also surprising to discover how differently female swimmers, who were seen as the glamour girls of sport, were treated in comparison to other female athletes. Women in the early 20th century were not supposed to exert themselves in public, but for swimmers, the water hides much of their physical effort. Swimming was considered a beautifying sport that didn’t create big, knotty muscles and was considered aesthetic and pretty to watch.
As a result of being seen as an appropriately feminine activity, swimming became the first national competitive sport for women in 1916. America’s first real women’s Olympic team were the female swimmers and divers who competed in the 1920 Olympics. These swimming stars parted the waves for other women athletes, and once the doors to the world of sport opened, women’s athletics really took off.
Was there a time when women’s swimming was taken more seriously than synchronized swimming?
As early as the twenties, when the American women dominated Olympic swimming and diving, and Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel (and doing it faster than the five men who had swam it before her), people were like, ‘Wow, this is a sport women are good at.’ Women in aquatic sports were some of the first to be respected as real athletes.
On the other hand, synchronized swimming, which became a competitive sport in 1939, struggled for many years to be taken seriously. This was largely because it remained associated with the performative styles of aquatics it had evolved from like Red Cross water pageants. These plays, which featured costumes, dialogue and swimming scenes, were used to spread information about water safety and teach the public swimming and lifesaving skills.
Synchronized swimming became a popular form of professional entertainment as well, with spectacular water shows like Billy Rose’s Aquacades and Esther Williams’ MGM ‘aquamusicals’ all featuring dazzling and glamorous water ballets. Williams soared to fame at the same time that competitive synchronized swimming was taking off, which permanently linked the sport — at least in the public imagination — with the world of show business. It became a constant quest over the fifties, sixties and seventies by the synchronized swimming community to distance itself from these entertainment roots and become increasingly aligned with the world of sport.
Why did it take so long for synchronized swimming to become an official Olympic sport in 1984?
There was a lot of pageantry involved in the early years of synchronized swimming, and it took a long time to shake that image, even as the sport grew increasingly athletic and technical over the years. Avery Brundage, the longtime president of the International Olympic Committee, called synchronized swimming ‘aquatic vaudeville’ and repeatedly refused proposals to bring synchro’s Olympic acceptance up for a vote.
But in the post Title IX era, there was a push for more women’s sports in the U.S., which spread to the Olympic level. Synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, both of which were women-only sports at the international level at the time, were voted in together for the 1984 Olympics.
Even after Olympic acceptance, the sport still struggled to be taken seriously, especially by the media. After the 1984 Olympics, Saturday Night Live aired its now-famous skit with Martin Short and Harry Shearer playing male Olympic hopeful synchronized swimmers — despite the fact that they could barely swim.
But in the early nineties, U.S. Synchronized Swimming did something clever. They realized that most people had no idea how difficult the sport was, so they issued a ‘media challenge,’ inviting any willing journalist to join one of the country’s top teams for a practice in the pool. A few took them up on it, including the famous humor columnist Dave Barry. Without fail, these writers reported on how surprised they were at the incredible athleticism and difficulty of the sport and their newfound respect for its athletes. So to actually have journalists who had been making fun of synchronized swimming come and try it and be completely changed, it was a successful campaign.
Are there any countries to watch or major rising stars that you’re rooting for in this Olympics?
It’s exciting to have an American team to cheer for again, since the last time the U.S. qualified for the team event was in 2008.
After falling behind other countries and failing to qualify for the team event in 16 years, the U.S. national team has been making a huge comeback in recent years and climbing up in the international rankings. Also, new rules that aim for greater objectivity in scoring are being used at the Olympics for the first time this year.
Between the U.S. comeback and the overhaul in the rules, combined with the fact that Russia — which has won every Olympic artistic swimming medal of the 21st century — has been barred this year from the Olympic team events, we could see some exciting changes on the podium in Paris!
Your book mentions that there were geopolitical forces at play with Russia. Did Russia try to develop a team in response to America owning the sport for so long?
Absolutely. In the seventies, the U.S. was the dominant country in synchronized swimming while the Soviet Union didn’t have a very developed program. As a result, they were opposed to adding synchro, a sport America would win, at the World Aquatic Championships or the Olympics. When the addition of synchro came up for a vote at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, it was voted down, largely due to Soviet opposition. In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered since the U.S. led a boycott of the 1980 Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Before the 1984 Olympics, rhythmic gymnastics, which originated in Russia, was put forward as a new event. It was accepted alongside synchronized swimming for the Los Angeles games.
The U.S. continued to be the dominant country for synchronized swimming for the remainder of the century, and in 1996, when the team routine debuted, America got a perfect score. But then the entire Olympic team retired and the athletes taking their place didn’t have the same level of competitive experience. Russia, meanwhile, had been working hard to build its national program and in 2000, catapulted to first place. The Russian team has dominated the sport ever since, pushing the bar and elevating it to ever greater levels of athleticism.
You mentioned women having to fight to be taken seriously in this sport every step of the way. Does it make you look at your own practice of synchronized swimming differently from when you first began, knowing what it took for women to get to this point? | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 82 | https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/subject-vs-predicate/ | en | Identifying Subject & Predicate in Sentences | [
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] | 2020-01-06T08:18:33+00:00 | Every complete sentence needs a subject and a predicate. But what is the difference? Learn how to determine the subject and a predicate in a sentence. | en | Thesaurus.com | https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/subject-vs-predicate/ | We all write every single day, whether it’s a text message, report, or email. And that means we all compose sentences that are crafted from different parts. Yup, there are different parts of sentences. And guess what? Learning what the different parts of a sentence are called can show a mastery of language.
subject vs. predicate
By elementary school, kids begin learning about the different parts of a sentence. These parts give each word a job. And every complete sentence needs two things: a subject and a predicate. But what exactly are they?
The subject of the sentence is what (or whom) the sentence is about. In the sentence “The cat is sleeping in the sun,” the word cat is the subject.
A predicate is the part of a sentence, or a clause, that tells what the subject is doing or what the subject is. Let’s take the same sentence from before: “The cat is sleeping in the sun.” The clause sleeping in the sun is the predicate; it’s dictating what the cat is doing. Cute!
How can you tell the difference between a subject and a predicate?
One way to remember the difference between the two is that the subject will be a noun or pronoun. The predicate will contain a verb in addition to a possible modifier.
Test time: Can you identify the subject and predicate?
Let’s test our new skills! We’ll build a sentence and you guess the subject and predicate. Ready? Go!
1. He reads.
Answer: This is pretty simple, as there are only two words. The subject is he, and the predicate is reads.
Can you still identify the subject and predicate with more words?
2. He reads the book.
Answer: The subject is still he, but the predicate has some extra words: reads the book. Since it’s still modifying the subject and contains a verb, it’s still serving the same function.
Are you ready to kick it up a notch?
3. He reads the book in the park on Tuesdays.
Answer: Can you guess the subject? It’s still he! The predicate is slightly more complicated: reads the book in the park on Tuesdays. Yup, all of it.
How about when the subject isn’t at the start of the sentence?
4. Maria’s sisters are going to the pool.
Answer: The subject in this sentence isn’t Maria, even though at first glance it seems like it is. This sentence is actually about Maria’s sisters; they are the subject. The predicate is are going to the pool because it shows what the sisters are doing.
Let’s try one more:
5. Aileen really liked the piece of artwork because it reminded her of her childhood.
Answer: If you identified Aileen as the subject, you’re correct. Likewise, if you said it, you are also correct. This sentence has two parts, and because joins the two. Aileen is the subject of the predicate really liked the piece of artwork. It is the subject of the predicate reminded her of her childhood.
Another way to practice the subject and the predicate is to illustrate simple pictures of actions and describe who (the subject) is and what they’re doing (the predicate). Use your imagination and have fun with it. There are endless combinations of subjects and predicates. Here’s one more good one:
I (subject) learned something new today (predicate)! | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 21 | https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty-explainer-intl/index.html | en | How the ‘ideal’ woman’s body shape has changed throughout history | [
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] | 2018-03-07T00:00:00 | The female form has been idealized as far back as 23,000 years ago, yet perceptions of a woman’s “ideal” body change constantly, putting pressure on women worldwide. | en | /media/sites/cnn/apple-touch-icon.png | CNN | https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty-explainer-intl/index.html | Hidden in the halls of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York are historic textiles and glamorous garments, many of which hold secrets from years past.
Yet no matter how aesthetically unique or historically significant a particular piece of fashion may be, most visitors to the museum typically ask one question, said Emma McClendon, the museum’s associate curator of costume.
“People come and always want to know what size something is,” said McClendon, who organized the exhibition “The Body: Fashion and Physique,” about the history of the idealized body type in fashion, which is on display until May.
“Whether it’s contemporary or 19th century, they want to know what size it is or what size it would correlate to, or what measurement it is,” she said. “We as a culture, as a society, are obsessed with size. It’s become connected to our identity as people.”
This obsession fuels societal pressures to appear a certain way and to have a certain body type, particularly among young women, stemming from a cultural construct of the “ideal” body, which has in turn changed over time – as long ago as pre-history.
Thousands of years ago, sculptures and artworks portrayed curvaceous, thickset silhouettes. More recently, in the late 20th century, thin, waif-like models filled the pages of fashion magazines. Now, shapely backsides are celebrated with “likes” on social media.
To mark International Women’s Day, we explore how this “ideal” is ever-changing, forming a complex history throughout art and fashion – with damaging impacts on women who try to conform in each era.
Prehistory-1900s: A focus on full-figured silhouettes
Some of the earliest known representations of a woman’s body are the “Venus figurines,” small statues from 23,000 to 25,000 years ago in Europe.
The figurines – including the “Venus of Willendorf,” found in 1908 at Willendorf, Austria – portray round, pear-shaped women’s bodies, many with large breasts. Experts have long debated whether the figurines symbolize attractiveness or fertility.
In ancient Greece, Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love and beauty, was often portrayed with curves.
A statue commonly thought to represent Aphrodite, called the Venus de Milo, depicts small breasts but is shaped with a twisted figure and elongated body, characteristic of that time period.
Artists continued to portray the “ideal” woman as curvy and voluptuous all the way through to the 17th and 18th centuries.
The 17th century Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens was even the namesake of the term “rubenesque,” meaning plump or rounded, as he often depicted women with curvy body types.
To achieve this in reality, the corset became a popular undergarment among women in the Western world from the late Renaissance into the 20th century. It helped accentuate a woman’s curves by holding in her waist and supporting her bosom.
As societal views of a woman’s body changed over time, so did the shape and construction of the corset, also sometimes referred to as stays.
The 18th-century stay mirrored a cone-shaped silhouette, but by the 1790s, shorter stays emerged, resembling proto-brassieres, which complemented the new fashion trend of high-waisted dresses.
“There was an emphasis on under-structure to shape the body. That’s true for skirts as well,” McClendon said.
“Whether it be hooped or caged or padded, under-structures were worn around the lower body to create a specific volume,” she said. “In the 18th and the 19th centuries, the idealized fashionable body – so this is talking specifically about what’s promoted in the fashion industry itself – was much more curvaceous and much more voluptuous.”
In the 1890s, American artist Charles Dana Gibson drew images of tall, slim-waisted yet voluptuous women in illustrations for mainstream magazines, and these depictions of the new feminine ideal were referred to as the “Gibson Girl.”
Going into the early 20th century, the portrayal of women’s bodies in art was constantly evolving, as seen in French artist Henri Matisse’s oil paintings showing lithe, flowing bodies and then Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s paintings showing plump, contorted nude bodies in vivid detail.
“Then, in the 20th century, there’s a very defined shift towards an increasingly young and increasingly kind of athletic and slender body,” McClendon said.
It remains somewhat unclear what triggered this shift, but the interest in thin bodies would continue well into the modern day.
1920s-’50s: Eating disorders – and a changing bust-to-waist ratio
The rise of the 1920s flapper reflected this shift toward the Western world desiring a more slim physique.
As slender women’s bodies started to appear in magazines In the mid-1920s, an epidemic of eating disorders also occurred among young women, according to some studies.
“The highest reported prevalence of disordered eating occurred during the 1920s and 1980s, the two periods during which the ‘ideal woman’ was thinnest in US history,” researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote in a paper in the Journal of Communication in 1997.
The bust-to-waist ratios among women featured in the magazines Vogue and Ladies Home Journal dwindled by about 60% between 1901 and 1925, according to an analysis in a study published in the journal Sex Roles in 1986.
“Such findings would constitute empirical support for the hypothesis that the mass media play a role in promoting the slim standard of bodily attractiveness fashionable among women,” the researchers wrote. “Through this standard perhaps the eating disorders that have become increasingly common.”
By the late 1940s, that ratio climbed back, increasing by about one-third in both magazines, the study found.
Around that time, the fuller body types of pinup models and actresses like Marilyn Monroe grew in popularity, and the first issue of Playboy magazine was published in 1953.
The ratio then dropped again.
By the late 1960s, the ratio had returned to approximately the same level it was in the 1920s, the study found.
1960s-’70s: ‘A complete fallacy’ revealed
The historical shift from a rounded to a thinner body preference led to the rise of British fashion model Lesley Lawson, known as Twiggy, and other slender models.
They seemed to symbolize a shift away from the corsets and pinup girls of years past. Simultaneously, the “second wave” of the women’s rights movement began.
In 1960, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the birth control pill. In 1963, women’s rights activist Betty Friedan published her book “The Feminine Mystique.” In 1966, the National Organization for Women in the US was founded.
“People talk about the ’60s, even the ‘70s, as this moment when the woman’s body is freed,” McClendon said. “But that notion that women were all of a sudden completely free in their bodies after that point is a complete fallacy.”
Although women were no longer squeezing themselves into corsets, the media messaging and societal pressures to adhere to an “ideal” body still continued. That “ideal” was instead a very young and thin body type.
“Foundation garments were replaced by diet and exercise,” McClendon said.
What remained was the “notion that in order for your body to be truly fashionable, you had to probably change it some way,” she said. “You had to maintain it in some way.”
The incidence of severe anorexia nervosa requiring hospital admission rose significant during the 1960s and ’70s to reach a plateau, according to a study in the journal Current Psychiatry Reports in 2012.
1980s-’90s: The rise of the supermodels – and obesity
Though images of thin women continued to be mainstream well into the 1980s, there became more of an emphasis on strong, athletic and toned body types.
“We do see an interest in a fit, toned, strong body – still lean but athletic. So this is where you get the emphasis on those classic supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell,” McClendon said.
Though there still was an emphasis on a thin body, there was also emphasis on a healthier and fitter body.
Then, by the ’90s, that emphasis shifted back to more skinny, waif-like body types.
“The term that gets so much associated with that decade is the ’90s is the moment of the waif,” McClendon said. “Kate Moss is the epitome of that. Her nickname was ‘the waif.’ She became a household name from Calvin Klein ads in the early 1990s.”
Anorexia nervosa was associated with the highest rate of mortality among all mental disorders during the 1990s, according to the study in Current Psychiatry Reports.
Around that same time, the World Health Organization began sounding the alarm about the growing global obesity epidemic.
Obesity means a person has too much body fat, and it can increase the risk of health problems including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, arthritis and even some cancers.
The prevalence of obesity sharply increased in the ’90s. An estimated 200 million adults worldwide were obese, and that number rose to more than 300 million by 2000, according to the WHO.
As images of obesity flashed across media screens as a part of public health outreach efforts, in contrast so did images of skinny models, McClendon said.
“We begin to see a stark divide in the way bodies are presented across the media, with extreme thinness celebrated in fashion imagery while larger bodies are highlighted as ‘unhealthy’ and bad in reporting on obesity. And we begin to judge our own bodies through the same binary lens,” she said.
So, it seems, the psychological impacts from that included impacts on body image.
2000s: Loss of self-confidence
Nearly a third of children aged 5 to 6 in the US select an ideal body size that is thinner than their current perceived size when given the option, and by age 7, one in four children has engaged in some kind of dieting behavior, according to a Common Sense Media report published in 2015.
The report, based on a review of existing studies on body image and media, also found that between 1999 and 2006, hospitalizations for eating disorders in the US spiked 119% among children under age 12.
In the United Kingdom, nearly a quarter, 24%, of child care professionals have reported seeing signs of body confidence issues in children aged 3 to 5, according to research from the Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years published in 2016.
Another study found that the incidence rate of eating disorders for people aged 10 to 49 in the UK rose from 32.3 per 100,000 in 2000 to 37.2 per 100,000 in 2009. Yet the peak age of onset for an eating disorder diagnosis in women was during adolescence, between 15 and 19, according to that study.
“When kids are entering adolescence, they’re developing their own identity and trying to figure out what’s socially acceptable so when they’re inundated with images of a particular body type in appealing scenarios, they’re more apt to absorb the idea that that particular body type is ideal,” said Sierra Filucci, executive editor of parenting content and distribution for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization focused on helping children, parents and educators navigate the world of media and technology.
Among a sample of 6,411 South Africans 15 and older, 45.3% reported being generally dissatisfied about their body size, according to a study published in the journal BMC Public Health in 2015.
Overweight and obese study participants underestimated their body size and desired to be thinner, whereas normal and underweight participants overestimated their body size and desired to be fatter, according to the study. Only 12% and 10.1% of participants attempted to lose or gain weight, respectively, that study found.
2010s: Embracing diversity
Since the start of the 21st century, there has been a shift toward celebrating diverse body types in the media and fashion. That trend appears to correlate with the use of social media, where diverse types are represented by everyday users online.
Of course, social media can also give some teens a negative body image. A Common Sense Media survey found that more than a quarter of teens who are active online stress about how they look in posted photos.
On the other hand, the rise of social media has allowed for real women to celebrate real body types. McClendon even called social media a “frontier for body-positive expression.”
“Over the course of the last 50-plus years, the American ideal has shifted from curvy to androgynous to muscular and everything in between,” Filucci said.
“As these ideals change, they are reflected and reinforced in the culture through media – whether it’s fine art or advertising billboards or music videos,” she said, adding that however those ideals are presented, they can still influence the body image of young women and even children.
In 2007, the first episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” aired in the US, and ever since, the Kardashian sisters’ bodies have become a frequent focus of celebrity weekly magazines, ushering in new curvaceous body ideals.
In 2015, Robyn Lawley was the first plus-size model featured in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue.
In 2016, fashion designer Christian Siriano featured five plus-size models in his show during New York Fashion Week. That same year, toy manufacturing company Mattel debuted a line of Barbie dolls depicting diverse body types, including curvy shapes.
Last year, reality show Project Runway, included models ranging from size 0 to 22 for the first time in its history.
As for the current state of beauty, some health experts are warning of the dangers of the “selfie” and social media culture as influencing body image, as the rise of Instagram and YouTube has allowed for the bodies of everyday people to be idealized, not just the bodies of supermodels.
Yet “when that body type is different from the one girls and young women have, they can be vulnerable to low self-esteem,” Filucci said, adding that parents can help children develop positive body images through role modeling.
“That means refraining from negative body talk both for themselves and others and speaking positively about their own bodies – especially emphasizing their body’s abilities like strength, flexibility, resilience, adaptability … rather than attractiveness,” she said. “Parents can also look for media that reinforces positive body images and avoids gender stereotypes.” | ||||
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] | null | [] | null | It was the deadliest workplace accident in New York City’s history. | en | https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/ | Narrator: On April 5, 1911, 400,000 people lined the rain-drenched sidewalks of New York as an empty, horse-drawn hearse crept from the dank, narrow streets of the Lower East Side toward the skyscrapers towering over Madison Square. New Yorkers from all walks of life had come to pay tribute to the unidentified victims of the Triangle fire: the deadliest workplace accident in the city's history. A few weeks earlier, the workers had been forgotten cogs in America's immense industrial machine; now, one in 10 New Yorkers were there to claim them as their own.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: Public conscience thought they had failed these young women. They had somehow not protected them.
David Von Drehle, Writer, Writer: There was a recognition: wait these girls can't die in vain. That was said over and over and over again as if the city had somehow turned it's back on them.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: If there weren't massive funerals, it would have been very easy for the city and the city officials to say, "Well, this is just, it's sort of a natural disaster. It's a terrible thing, but there's nothing anyone can do about it. "
Annelise Orleck, Historian: If you ask the average American, "Is it okay for workers to work in a shop where the conditions are so dangerous that it could cost them their lives and not have government intervene," most people would say, "No. There's a line." The Triangle Fire drew that line. It burned that line, really, into the nation's conscience.
Narrator: Every morning -- six days a week -- more than 100,000 people poured out onto the streets of the Lower East Side, headed toward another day's work in the city's garment factories. Many were young women in their teens, some were girls as young as 10. They were immigrants, Italians who had fled natural disaster, Jews who had escaped persecution in Russia, Ukraine, Poland. Their families had chosen America for its promise of a better future. But even the youngest daughters had come to understand that their precarious hold on the American dream depended on their willingness to work.
Woman 1 (Meredith Anne Bull): Father had to take me to the shop and not be late for his own work. I was eager to begin life on my own responsibility but was also afraid. "Don't look so frightened," he said.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: These young girls weren't just earning money for their own clothes or to, you know, go out to a dance hall or to Coney Island. They were earning money to support the family.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: Economic security was the American dream for many of them. Making enough money to be able to put food on the table, not worry about making rent for the week.
Narrator: As the throng disappeared into sweatshops in tenement apartments, several hundred workers veered off toward the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, in the heart of Greenwich Village.
At the base of the Asch Building, men and women stepped into wooden freight elevators, to ascend to the Triangle factory on the eighth and ninth floors. Workers like Michela Marciano, who managed to send a few dollars to her family in Italy every month, or Julia Rosen whose 17-year-old son worked alongside her to help support three younger children, or Catherine Maltese whose 13-year-old daughter wasn't too young to join her on the factory floor.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: Getting a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a pretty desired position because they were working in a much more modern factory environment. High ceilings, big windows. Compared to the coal-stove heated, dusty, hugely crowded sweatshop rooms, Triangle was a plum.
Narrator: But even at the Triangle, sewing machine operators faced a 14-hour workday for $2 a day at most. And that was before bosses docked their pay for the needles, the thread, the electricity they used.
Gussie Schneier (Daniella Rabbani): Sometimes you work at a big machine and it's not working right. One of the needles skips and you get blamed for mistakes.
Pauline Newman (Marta Milans): The same machines, the same surroundings. Shirtwaists, Shirtwaists, and more shirtwaists.
Narrator: On the 10th floor, the Triangle owners could feel their vast machine shuddering below. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris had made Triangle a million-dollar-a-year behemoth, mass-producing the garment every modern woman must have: the shirtwaist. Harris and Blanck were known as The Shirtwaist Kings, but their empire, as they saw it, was under constant siege. After 20 years, the shirtwaist was getting stale. Fashion editors began to showcase colorful dresses for the modern woman and turned up their noses at the bourgeois waist. No matter how much silk embroidery Harris added to their designs, the Triangle's sales charts sloped down. Material and shipping costs seemed always to be rising.
Profit margins matched this year's fashion: "teasingly sheer."
David Von Drehle, Writer: For Max and Isaac there was this constant awareness that they were -- as successful and as rich as they were -- they were one bad season away from being broke. The competition was enormously fierce: 500 blouse-makers on the island of Manhattan alone.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: While they're getting the orders from the department stores, there's some small shop a half a mile away that's willing to beat them by half. So it's all about continuous production to get as much cloth turned into a product as possible, at the lowest possible price.
Narrator: That summer there was a growing new threat. All over the city, garment workers were agitating for shorter hours, better pay, safer shops, unions.
Harris and Blanck saw it in the papers every day and on the streets below. Workers were walking off the job by the tens, scores, hundreds. The partners even suspected talk of union on their own shop floor.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: Unionization was the single largest fear for most of these employers. They were terrified that unions would come in because that would diminish their authority over the work place.
Narrator: The right to control their own factory was an article of faith for Harris and Blanck -- as for hundreds of business owners just like them. The Triangle partners were in a bracing, daily battle for economic survival. And they meant to control all they could.
Speed mattered more than ever at the Triangle: volume kept Harris and Blanck ahead of their competition. The men had invested in the most up-to-date technology -- and it had to pay. The old pedal pump sewing machines made 34 stitches a minute. With the new electric machines the girls were expected to make 3,000 stitches a minute -- and no mistakes.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: An individual worker would be assigned a task whether it was, you know, making collars or buttonholes, and that's what they would do.
Steve Fraser, Historian: They're subject to the rhythms of the machine. They are the slave of that machine and the pace at which it works.
Pauline Newman (Marta Milans): Rubber heels had just come into use and you rarely heard the foreman sneak up behind you, watching.
Sonia Murray (Ami Ankin): He wouldn't let you stop. Not for a drink, the bathroom, nothing.
Woman 2 (Meredith Anne Bull): Sometimes, in my haste, I'd get my finger caught and the needle goes right through it. I bind the finger up with a piece of cotton and go on working.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: Operators were charged for any mistakes that they made. For a lot of these young women whose families depended on their earnings it was very, very stressful. If they messed up a garment, and their pay was docked, they would be left, you know, coming home to tell mom, who always got the pay check, "The family's gonna be hungry this week."
Narrator: Even after the machines powered down for the day, the Triangle workers were subject to one final management imperative: No one left the building before opening her bag to the foreman's inspection at the Greene Street exit.
Max Blanck was kept awake nights calculating the dollars he might lose if workers walked out with shirtwaists tucked in their bags, or fabric, or thread. To ensure that nobody slipped out un-inspected, Blanck ordered that the only other exit -- at Washington Place -- be kept locked.
Steve Fraser, Historian: Bosses are under such intense competitive pressure that they're prepared to ignore under most circumstances the grievances of their workers to treat them like, like shtuka, like animals, like pieces. And they don't fear anything. There's no government intervention. There's no labor legislation. There's really very little sanitary legislation protecting the health and safety of workers. There are no minimum wage laws or maximum hour laws. Nobody's watching!
Narrator: There was release at end of a day's monotonous toil as the women stepped out into the long light of summer.
Alfred Allan Lewis, Writer: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was in the middle of New York. If you walked half block you were in Washington Square, lower Fifth Avenue, the great Greek revival homes of the affluent. If you walked to the other side, you were in Broadway, where Wannamaker's store was, where, within a few blocks, what was called "Ladies Mile" was, with all of the wonderful shops.
Steve Fraser, Historian: This is the gilded age. It's an age of extravagant conspicuous consumption.
Thomas Bender, Historian: They can walk up Fifth Avenue and see limestone mansions as far as the eye can see. They can see all around them that there's all kinds of wealth.
Maria Cichetti (Kara Jackson): They were so beautiful, those hats. They were so rich. A woman looked so dressed, you know, in the back, with the bustle. I wanted to grow up to wear earrings and hats and high heels.
Lottie Spitzer (Daniella Rabbani): I liked music. I liked lectures. I wanted to learn things; I wanted to learn everything. The only thing is, the time; I needed time.
Anzia Yezierska (Marta Milans): I used to creep up on the roof of the tenement and talk out my heart to the stars and the sky. Why were we cramped into the crowded darkness? Why are we wasting with want? Where is America?
Narrator: On the morning of October 4, 1909, Harris and Blanck arrived at the Triangle to find their worst fear realized -- their own workers on strike.
They saw this union movement as a personal attack on them; an attack on private property; an attack on the liberty at the heart of America's promise and possibility. Only 20 years earlier, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck had themselves arrived in America -- two young tailors from the shtetls of Eastern Europe -- poor, but ambitious.
As far as they were concerned, they'd built the Triangle Waist Company with their own sweat and ingenuity. They'd risked every hard-won dollar on their dream. And the gamble had earned them each 10-room brownstones uptown with maids, butlers, governesses.
David Von Drehle, Writer: This was the story that was being told all across Europe about what was possible in America. They'd made it. It was the American Dream. The symbol of what it was all about.
Robyn Muncy, Historian: They saw their wealth, their power, as perfectly legitimate reward for their exercise of individual freedom. And that that was the best thing for American society. That was the best thing for the economy.
Narrator: The evidence abounded in New York: Private wealth was building the city's skyscrapers, its parks, museums, libraries and hospitals. And the men who made it happen were celebrated.
Steve Fraser, Historian: These industrial buccaneers are lionized. There is this commitment in American culture to an extreme kind of individualism that individuals, especially the owners of private property, should not be interfered with. That to interfere with them is to place inhibiting obstacles in their path that will restrain prosperity and industrial growth.
Robyn Muncy, Historian: I think a lot of industrialists saw themselves as fairly benevolent, as providing jobs, as providing the means of survival to hundreds and sometimes thousands of workers. And if workers complained about their wages, complained about their hours or the conditions under which they worked, they were biting the hand that fed them.
Narrator: Progressive reformers had been shining a light on the growing inequalities in America for 20 years: The crushing poverty, cramped living spaces and inhumane working conditions. But their calls for government to re-balance the relationship between employers and their employees went largely unheeded. What elected official wanted to put the brakes on the country's remarkable economic engine?
Picketers at the Triangle knew that if they wanted their bosses to treat them fairly, they'd have to force the change themselves.
Steve Fraser, Historian: Winning a union in the shop means establishing a contractual relationship with the boss that covers all the workers in that shop, with respect to not only the wages they work for and the hours that they work, but the conditions under which they work and that their bosses no longer be allowed to get away with what they've been getting away with.
Narrator: Max Blanck and Isaac Harris weren't going to let a bunch of disgruntled factory girls tell them how to run their company. The Triangle owners used "private detective agencies " to provide replacement workers and muscle, bought prostitutes to start fights with the women on the picket lines, and paid off the local police precinct. Their hired thugs beat Triangle strikers; and policemen hauled the picketers into court if they fought back. But every day for six weeks -- in the face of physical abuse and public indifference -- the women took up their places in front of the Asch Building.
The longer the women of the Triangle stood fast, the more workers at other shirtwaist factories paid attention. Week after week the feeling grew: something could be done at their own shops.
Rose Cohen (Kara Jackson): I used to go in the ladies room and a few used to follow me and I was talking to them union.
Eva Goldstein (Ami Ankin): I knew our girls were dissatisfied, I knew other shops were already on strike. I knew it only needed someone to talk to the girls a little and they would join the strikers.
Steve Fraser, Historian: They are in America and they're surrounded by the vocabulary of equality and fairness and that whole language of democracy and they begin to expect something like that for themselves -- real opportunity where they see none; a real voice where they have none.
Narrator: That autumn, on factory floors all over New York, shirtwaist workers were talking about ways to secure equitable pay, reasonable working hours, a bit of control over the safety of their shops, and unions to hold the gains.
At the end of November 1909, when organizers called a meeting at New York's Cooper Union, shirtwaist workers packed the house. The aisles overflowed. The crowd backed up into the street.
And they were all there to consider something unthinkable before the Triangle women had made their stand: a proposal to run an industry-wide strike against each and every one of the city's 500 shirtwaist manufacturers.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: It's a pie-in-the-sky idea. And everyone's trying to talk them out of it. The reformers and the Women's Trade Union League, the senior men and their union, the leadership of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers himself, is begging them not to do this crazy thing: "None of your families have enough money to sustain a strike. Your younger siblings could starve. You don't wanna do this."
Narrator: While union leaders cautioned against action, a 22-year-old garment worker stepped uninvited to the podium. Everyone at the meeting knew of Clara Lemlich. Just a few weeks earlier when she'd organized a strike at the factory where she'd worked, Lemlich had been beaten by the owners' hired men. She could still feel the sting of six broken ribs.
Clara Lemlich (Amy Ankin): I want to say a few words. I have listened to all the speakers. I have no more patience for talk. I move that we go on a general strike.
David Von Drehle, Writer: And the room goes crazy. There's almost no point in taking a vote, you know. It's like it's unanimous. She's carried the day.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: They believed they were going to make history.
Narrator: The next morning, workers in shirtwaist factories across the city awaited some kind of signal.
Rose Perr (Kara Jackson): We all sat at the machines with our hats and coats beside us, ready to leave. And there was whispering and talking softly all around the room among the machines. "Shall we wait like this? Who will get up first?" I started to get up. And at just the same minute all -- we all got up together, in one second. We all stood up, and all walked out together.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: They had calmly put down their scissors and walked away from the only thing standing between them and starvation and between their families and starvation.
Narrator: The women of the Triangle had spurred what was then the largest single work stoppage in the city's history.
Pauline Newman (Marta Milans): Ten thousand, 20,000, this is more than anyone of us dared to dream of or hope for. This is not a strike. This is an uprising.
Narrator: Within 48 hours 70 of the smallest and most vulnerable shirtwaist factories gave in to their workers' demands. They were union-only shops now.
The Triangle bosses were contemptuous of the owners who gave up without a fight. Harris and Blanck organized a manufacturers' association to stand united against the rabble-rousers. And they issued an edict: "No surrender."
Annelise Orleck, Historian: The prostitutes are out there. They're beating them. The police are watching. They're doing nothing.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: And it wasn't just women, the prostitutes' pimps would jump in. Triangle would hire ex-prize fighters and known toughs. You'd have people being sent off to the hospital.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: Ribs were being broken, heads were being cracked, and there wasn't a lot of sympathy. When one girl was dragged into court with her head in bloody bandages and the policemen said she'd attacked him, the magistrate believed it and said, "You are on strike against God and nature."
Narrator: Policemen ran strikers into court every day, where judges fined the women, put them in jail, or shipped them to the workhouse on Blackwell's Island. When 10,000 workers marched on City Hall to protest police brutality, the mayor waved them off.
David Von Drehle, Writer: The establishment was against labor unions; the police were against labor unions; city hall was against labor unions.
Narrator: Still, the women went back to their picket lines day after day after day. A handful of Progressive reformers were inspired to join the pickets, but for nearly a month most of the city -- and much of the press -- paid little attention.
David Von Drehle, Writer: At this low moment in the strike, when they're running out of money, the most amazing thing happens: A woman named Anne Morgan decides to take up their cause. Anne Morgan was the daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful financier probably in the history of the world. Here was the face of American capitalism, Morgan, and the idea that his daughter was taking up the cause -- in a public way -- of these radical, often socialist, trade-unionist strikers, walking picket lines in New York was shocking and exciting. I mean the newspapers ate it up. It was great copy.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: They really did believe that the city needed to be reformed and that it was unacceptable to be beating these young girls. And they also believed that they were allies in this campaign for women's suffrage, which was picking up steam. So the mink brigade, the so-called mink brigade, start walking the picket lines and it works.
Narrator: The society ladies' support kept the strike on the front pages. Millionaire socialite Alva Vanderbilt Belmont and Anne Morgan took over a committee to challenge police brutality and to enlist picketers from the uptown crowd.
Annelise Orleck, Historian: If you have someone on the social register walking a picket line, police are going to be a little bit more careful and even private police are gonna be a little more careful about who they club.
Narrator: By the middle of December, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris could feel things turning against them. The mainstream press was now writing sympathetic stories about the striking women -- they had suddenly become "those brave girls." With Christmas approaching and the strikers gaining public support, Harris and Blanck decided it was time to lead their fellow factory owners toward the negotiating table. On the Triangle owners' recommendation, the manufacturers' association agreed to higher wages and shorter hours, if the strikers would drop their demand for union-only shops.
Strike leaders refused.
Their hard-line didn't sit well with Miss Morgan. She was all for individual workers getting better treatment, but she drew the line at fomenting social upheaval.
"I am heartily in favor of these strikers," Anne Morgan told the press, "but these 'fanatical doctrines' are all the more dangerous because they tend to tear down all the good in our present social state." She abruptly resigned from the strike committee.
Alfred Allan Lewis, Writer: She thought they were really trying to turn this into a socialist cause. And she would have none of it. This wasn't about changing the world. Anne Morgan liked most of the world in which she lived.
Narrator: Despite having lost a powerful public advocate, the shirtwaist workers refused to soften their demands. The busy season was right around the corner, and the strikers were betting that owners would want all the experienced hands they could get. One by one, hundreds of shirtwaist manufacturers accepted their workers' demands for a union. And by the middle of February, thousands had returned to union-only shops.
The Triangle strikers weren't so fortunate. When they finally went back on the job, they had won concessions on wages and hours, but Harris and Blanck had forced them to give up the big issue. Triangle workers still lacked real power to improve the worst conditions of the factory floor. There would be no union in the Asch Building.
March 25, 1911 was a Saturday, a short, eight-hour day at the Triangle. As the clock inched toward the end of the shift thoughts drifted toward escape: a long night of freedom beckoned and no work on Sunday.
Woman 2 (Daniella Rabbani): Sometimes we go to Coney Island, where there are good dancing places. I'm very fond of dancing. Many of the young men like to talk to me, but I don't go out with any except Henry. Lately he has been urging me more and more to get married. But I think I'll wait.
Narrator: On the streets below, New Yorkers were already enjoying a leisurely Saturday: bicycling, motoring, strolling the Avenues, window-shopping on Broadway.
David Von Drehle, Writer: Washington Square, you know, is the center of that downtown community so the park was packed with people enjoying the day. And suddenly there's smoke rising over this tower a half a block away.
Narrator: Minutes earlier, a dropped cigarette had started a fire on the eighth floor of the Asch Building. Triangle workers dashed for the stairs, the elevators, and the fire escape. Max Blanck and Isaac Harris on 10 -- warned by phone from below -- made their way to the roof where they scrambled across to the building next door.
In the panic, no one alerted the 200 sewing machine operators on the ninth floor.
Ethel Monick (Kara Jackson): I turned to one of the girls who was putting on her hat and said, "Where does that smoke come from?"
Woman 3 (Daniella Rabbani): Before I could move, everybody in the shop started to scream and holler.
Narrator: Startled machine operators scanned the floor for friends and family, and for the fastest way out. The everyday exit, the Greene Street stairway, was already blocked by smoke and fire. Some women fled out a window and onto the fire escape to the back alley. Others ran toward two tiny passenger elevators that led to Washington Place.
Woman 3 (Daniella Rabbani): The first time the elevator came up the girls rushed in, and it was crowded in a half second. The elevator driver struggled with the door and finally closed it. I was left with those who didn't make the first trip.
Narrator: Sewing machine operators pushed their way down narrow aisles clogged with wicker baskets, loose fabric, their own co-workers.
Mary Bucelli (Marta Milans): I was throwing them out of the way. I was pushing them down. I was only looking out for my own life.
Kate Alterman (Kara Jackson): A young lady began to pull me in the back of my dress. I kicked her with my foot and I don't know what became of her.
Yetta Lubitz (Ami Ankin): I jumped over two lines of machines away from the flames. I looked and I saw an old Italian woman. She couldn't jump over the machines.
Narrator: Panic rose when the women inside heard the overburdened fire escape pull from its masonry, heard the cries of their fellow workers tumbling off the twisting structure. As the smoke grew thicker, some were drawn toward the light of windows overlooking Washington Square.
People were starting to gather at the Asch Building now: passers-by and picnickers, students from nearby New York University, and a young reporter from the United Press.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): There was a living picture in each window -- four girls waving their arms. "Call the firemen," they screamed. "Get a ladder." We heard a fire engine in the distance. "Here they come," we yelled. "Stay there."
Narrator: The fire was spreading faster now -- feeding itself on piles of shirtwaists, wooden tables, even the fabric dust that hung in the air. The only precaution the Triangle owners had taken against this sort of disaster -- a dozen red pails of water -- sat impotent in the corners.
The workers who remained inside pushed toward the Washington Place passenger elevator. They knew time was running out. This was probably the last run.
Anna Gullo (Marta Milans): The elevator came up and I was swept into the car by the crowd behind me. The last thing I remember seeing was my sister Marie -- enveloped in flames.
David Von Drehle, Writer: As the elevators descended, workers started jumping into the elevator shaft, first trying to slide down the cable or ride the top of the car but then the crowd behind these women in the open elevator doorways are pushing, pushing to escape from the flames. And now people are being pushed, falling into that elevator shaft.
Narrator: There was one final hope for the trapped Triangle workers: opening the locked door to the Washington Place stairway. But no one had the key.
Kate Alterman (Kara Jackson): I saw Bernstein trying to open the door. He couldn't open it. And then I saw Margaret bending down on her knees. The trail of her dress and the ends of her hair began to burn. And then came a big smoke and I couldn't see. I just knew it was Margaret.
Lena Yaller (Daniella Rabbani): People were screaming about their children and anything else. I noticed Bernstein going around like a wild cat on the windows. Then I saw the flames covering him. Smoke was coming up all around us. I couldn't see anything else. I felt a draft. I wanted to make my way over to where it came from. I wanted to open the window.
Narrator: It had been less than five minutes since the first alarm, but more than a thousand people had crowded around the Asch building. They watched as the firemen raised their ladders to their full extension. They barely reached the sixth floor -- 30 feet shy of the trapped Triangle workers.
Man 1 (Frank Pando): People began to holler, "Raise the ladders! Raise the ladders!" But we had the ladders up.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space.
Man 2 (Joe Lisi): I saw groups of women embracing each other and leaping to the sidewalk. The firemen were helpless. The nets were ripped from their hands, many stooped and picked up the nets again with their hands bleeding.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): The last workers were trapped against the blackened windows, burning to death before our very eyes. The glass they were pressed against shattered. Down came the bodies in a shower -- burning, smoking, flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward.
Man 1 (Frank Pando): The bodies lay there on the sidewalk three or four high, burning, and we had to play the hoses on them.
William Gunn Shepherd (Michael Daly): I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year.
David Von Drehle, Writer: The crowd knew the Triangle. They knew the cause of these workers And here, now, of all places this same factory had gone up in flames and hundreds of these workers who had said that the conditions were not safe, that the fate of workers was perilous in New York, the justice of the strikers' cause had been underlined in blood on these sidewalks.
Narrator: Thirty minutes after the initial call, the New York City Fire Department had the blaze at the Triangle under control. Three hours later, firemen began lowering bodies by block-and-tackle.
New York City policemen -- some of them the same men who had beaten the picketing workers -- leaned out of windows on each floor to make sure the bodies didn't bang against the side of building as they descended from the Triangle Waist Company for the final time. Others catalogued the personal belongings strewn on the sidewalks: a broken hair comb, a patent leather Oxford with the laces still tied in a knot, a rosary, a fur-trimmed hat with a crushed red rose.
Even the most hardened policemen buckled; the crew had to be changed almost every hour. When the last body was removed just after midnight, the total number of dead stood at 145.
Fifty-three had jumped or fallen from the windows. Nineteen fell in the elevator shaft. More than 20 tumbled off the fire escape. And at least 50 burned to death on the factory floor. All but 23 of the dead were women, nearly half of them teen-agers. One jumper had miraculously survived. She lay near death in St. Vincent's Hospital.
The morning after the fire, friends and relatives of the Triangle workers gathered outside a temporary morgue on the East River, where the bodies were lined up for identification each under white cloth, heads pillowed up for viewing.
David Von Drehle, Writer: People were invited to come in and try to identify children, or wives, or husbands, or boyfriends, or daughters, or girlfriends who had not come home all night.
Man 3 (Frank Pando): I had to get Mary identified; she was burned beyond recognition. The dentist opened her mouth and recognized his work.
Esther Rosen (Daniella Rabbani): It was Mama's hair. I braided it for her. I know... I know.
Salvatore Maltese (Joe Lisi): I've been to the morgue three times and looked over 20 charred bodies. None of them can I recognize as my wife.
Narrator: The fire claimed its final victim on March 30, 1911, when the surviving jumper died. In death, she was no longer anonymous. She was Sarah Kupla, a 16-year-old sewing machine operator mourned by her family in the Bronx.
Newspapers, public officials, the wider world had begun to attach names to these Triangle workers by then: Rosie Bassino and her sister Irene; Max Lehrer and his brother Sam; Mary Goldstein; the Saracino sisters; Michela Marciano, who had survived an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius before emigrating to America; Rose Manofsky, whose little sister had lost her sole source of support; and Salvatore Maltese, who had buried every female in his household: his wife Catherine, his 20-year old daughter Lucia and his daughter Rosaria, who was -- at 14 -- the fire's youngest victim.
Families of the victims took some small measure of comfort from a sympathetic public. New Yorkers raised money to pay for burials, to support dependents left behind, or to replace the weekly cash envelopes Triangle workers had sent to their families in Europe.
Survivors also hoped for some small measure of justice when Isaac Harris and Max Blanck were brought up on charges of manslaughter and were shattered when the two men were acquitted. The state failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the two men knew the exit door was locked at the time of the fire.
The Shirtwaist Kings would take their insurance settlement and fade into obscurity. The Triangle factory -- and the memory of the women who worked there -- would not.
Thomas Bender, Historian: People were realizing that they had tolerated a kind of set of employment and other industrial practices that they should never have tolerated. What people had been saying, that you can't have unregulated industrialization, that there are things that have to be managed not by the market but by public policy, this now rang true in a way that it didn't the day before.
Richard A. Greenwald, Historian: It opens wide a system that was for so long seen as a private system between a worker and an owner. It essentially says at that point that it's no longer private. It can never be private again. There are 146 women, men who died because that was a private system. That doesn't work.
Narrator: In the aftermath of the Triangle fire, an enraged public compelled government to act.
The New York State Legislature funded a factory safety commission, which held months of hearings, collected testimony from hundreds of owners and workers, and inspected nearly two thousand factories.
Within two years, the commission's shocking findings spurred the passage of more than 30 new laws. They set standards for minimum wages, maximum hours and workplace conditions, gave teeth to child labor laws, and addressed each and every failure at the Triangle factory.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger, Historian: And New York does become a model, clearly inspired by these young women. I think Sam Gompers said it best that rarely do you get an opportunity for such legislative reform, but women had to burn first in order for this to happen. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 23 | https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/sundance-institute-announces-year-three-of-film-forward-advancing-cultural/ | en | Sundance Institute Announces Year Three Of Film Forward: Advancing Cultural Dialogue | [
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] | 2012-11-01T00:00:00-07:00 | “Through the act of watching a film about Cuba, in Chinese or in English, we are one audience. We are finding a space for one dialogue. I left China with a renewed belief in art as a way to find common ground for constructive discussion. | en | sundance.org - sundance.org | https://www.sundance.org/blogs/news/sundance-institute-announces-year-three-of-film-forward-advancing-cultural/ | “Through the act of watching a film about Cuba, in Chinese or in English, we are one audience. We are finding a space for one dialogue. I left China with a renewed belief in art as a way to find common ground for constructive discussion.” Benjamin Murray, Co-Director for Unfinished Spaces (FILM FORWARD China 2012)
Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities announced today the program details for the third year of FILM FORWARD: Advancing Cultural Dialogue, an international touring program that offers film screenings, workshops and discussions with filmmakers. In eight locations across the U.S. and internationally, and in collaboration with local organizations, a program of eight independent films will be accompanied by workshops, filmmaker appearances and discussions.
FILM FORWARD uses the power of cinema to inspire curiosity, foster dialogue, promote broader cultural understanding and enhance awareness of shared stories and values across generations, language, education and borders. The program is an initiative of Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, in concert with U.S. Embassies and domestic presenting institutions.
The films selected for the third year of FILM FORWARD are: Beasts of the Southern Wild, by Benh Zeitlin; BONES BRIGADE: An Autobiography, by Stacy Peralta; Chasing Ice, by Jeff Orlowski; La Misma Luna (Under The Same Moon),by Patricia Riggen; The Light in her Eyes, by Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix; The Loving Story, by Nancy Buirski; Town of Runners, by Jerry Rothwell; and Valley of Saints,by Musa Syeed. Common themes explored in the films include issues surrounding family, friendship and community, as well as the intersection of tradition and modern culture. Film synopses and links to trailers are listed below.
Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “FILM FORWARD highlights film as a powerful medium for storytelling that brings people of different cultures, viewpoints, and backgrounds together in a shared dialogue. The first two years of FILM FORWARD connected films and filmmakers with audiences they might have never reached resulting in some remarkable and rich events; we look forward to building on these shared experiences in the third year of the program.”
Rachel Goslins, Executive Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, said, “This program just gets better and better every year. The President’s Committee and the program’s federal partners, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, are thrilled to once again bring the FILM FORWARD initiative to communities, both in the U.S. and around the world, who might not be otherwise exposed to these kinds of compelling stories and universal themes.”
FILM FORWARD will travel to eight locations this year: Imperial Valley, California and Mexicali, Mexico; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Maine; Washington State; Bosnia and Herzegovina; China and Taiwan; Colombia; Jordan. This is the third year FILM FORWARD will host events in China and Puerto Rico and the second year returning to Imperial Valley, California; Mexicali, Mexico and Bogota, Colombia. FILM FORWARD’s primary audience is communities without ready access to independent films, students, and the local filmmaking community in each region.
Dates, venues, partners and program schedules for the third year of the initiative will be announced at www.sundance.org/filmforward at a later date.
FILM FORWARD Year Three Films:
Federal Partners
The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) bridges the interests of American federal agencies and the private sector, supports special projects that increase participation and excellence in the arts and humanities, and helps incorporate these disciplines into White House objectives. First Lady Michelle Obama is the Honorary Chairman of the PCAH.
The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector. To join the discussion on how art works, visit the NEA at arts.gov.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an independent federal agency, provides support for documentary films, digital media and other educational programs in the humanities through competitive grant programs. The NEH is the nation’s leading supporter of research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent federal grant making agency dedicated to creating strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas. The IMLS works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development.
Sundance Institute
Founded by Robert Redford in 1981, Sundance Institute is a global, nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to nurturing artistic expression in film and theater, and to supporting intercultural dialogue between artists and audiences. The Institute promotes independent storytelling to unite, inform and inspire, regardless of geo-political, social, religious or cultural differences. Internationally recognized for its annual Sundance Film Festival and its artistic development programs for directors, screenwriters, producers, film composers, playwrights and theatre artists, Sundance Institute has nurtured such projects as Born into Brothels, Trouble the Water, Son of Babylon, Amreeka, An Inconvenient Truth, Spring Awakening, Light in the Piazza and Angels in America. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
# # #
Media Contacts:
Sarah Eaton
Sundance Institute
310.360.1981
Sarah_Eaton@sundance.org
Elizabeth Latenser
Sundance Institute
435.658.3456
Elizabeth_Latenser@sundance.org | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 76 | https://www.commonsensemedia.org/ | en | Common Sense Media: Age-Based Media Reviews for Families | [
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5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 18 | https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/hedy-lamarr | en | Hedy Lamarr | [
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] | null | [] | null | Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems | en | /sites/default/files/favicon.ico | National Women's History Museum | https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/hedy-lamarr | Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems. As a natural beauty seen widely on the big screen in films like Samson and Delilah and White Cargo, society has long ignored her inventive genius.
Lamarr was originally Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born in Vienna, Austria on November 9th, 1914 into a well-to-do Jewish family. An only child, Lamarr received a great deal of attention from her father, a bank director and curious man, who inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. He would often take her for long walks where he would discuss the inner-workings of different machines, like the printing press or street cars. These conversations guided Lamarr’s thinking and at only 5 years of age, she could be found taking apart and reassembling her music box to understand how the machine operated. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s mother was a concert pianist and introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons from a young age.
Lamarr’s brilliant mind was ignored, and her beauty took center stage when she was discovered by director Max Reinhardt at age 16. She studied acting with Reinhardt in Berlin and was in her first small film role by 1930, in a German film called Geld auf der Straβe (“Money on the Street”). However, it wasn’t until 1932 that Lamarr gained name recognition as an actress for her role in the controversial film, Ecstasy.
Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, became one of Lamarr’s adoring fans when he saw her in the play Sissy. Lamarr and Mandl married in 1933 but it was short-lived. She once said, “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife … He was the absolute monarch in his marriage … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” She was incredibly unhappy, as she was forced to play host and smile on demand amongst Mandl’s friends and scandalous business partners, some of whom were associated with the Nazi party. She escaped from Mandl’s grasp in 1937 by fleeing to London but took with her the knowledge gained from dinner-table conversation over wartime weaponry.
While in London, Lamarr’s luck took a turn when she was introduced to Louis B. Mayer, of the famed MGM Studios. With this meeting, she secured her ticket to Hollywood where she mystified American audiences with her grace, beauty, and accent. In Hollywood, Lamarr was introduced to a variety of quirky real-life characters, such as businessman and pilot Howard Hughes.
Lamarr dated Hughes but was most notably interested with his desire for innovation. Her scientific mind had been bottled-up by Hollywood but Hughes helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer on set. While she had an inventing table set up in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. Hughes took her to his airplane factories, showed her how the planes were built, and introduced her to the scientists behind process. Lamarr was inspired to innovate as Hughes wanted to create faster planes that could be sold to the US military. She bought a book of fish and a book of birds and looked at the fastest of each kind. She combined the fins of the fastest fish and the wings of the fastest bird to sketch a new wing design for Hughes’ planes. Upon showing the design to Hughes, he said to Lamarr, “You’re a genius.”
Lamarr was indeed a genius as the gears in her inventive mind continued to turn. She once said, “Improving things comes naturally to me.” She went on to create an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that dissolved in water to make a soda similar to Coca-Cola. However, her most significant invention was engineered as the United States geared up to enter World War II.
In 1940 Lamarr met George Antheil at a dinner party. Antheil was another quirky yet clever force to be reckoned with. Known for his writing, film scores, and experimental music compositions, he shared the same inventive spirit as Lamarr. She and Antheil talked about a variety of topics but of their greatest concerns was the looming war. Antheil recalled, “Hedy said that she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state.” After her marriage to Mandl, she had knowledge on munitions and various weaponry that would prove beneficial. And so, Lamarr and Antheil began to tinker with ideas to combat the axis powers.
The two came up with an extraordinary new communication system used with the intention of guiding torpedoes to their targets in war. The system involved the use of “frequency hopping” amongst radio waves, with both transmitter and receiver hopping to new frequencies together. Doing so prevented the interception of the radio waves, thereby allowing the torpedo to find its intended target. After its creation, Lamarr and Antheil sought a patent and military support for the invention. While awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 in August of 1942, the Navy decided against the implementation of the new system. The rejection led Lamarr to instead support the war efforts with her celebrity by selling war bonds. Happy in her adopted country, she became an American citizen in April 1953. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 0 | https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/movie-themes-examples/ | en | Movie Themes: Examples of Common Themes for Screenwriters | [
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] | 2020-09-13T14:25:10+00:00 | Theme is a difficult literary element for any writer. This breakdown of the most common movie themes will inspire and guide your next script. | en | https://s.studiobinder.com/wp-content/uploads/favicon.ico | StudioBinder | https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/movie-themes-examples/ | Although we may not always consciously realize it, we seek out stories for their themes. The movies that most affect us – the ones we cherish and carry with us throughout our lives – are those with common themes that have profoundly affected and even changed us. And yet, because movie themes are often buried deep within a story’s structure, it can be hard to articulate or even recognize them. This article will analyze how seven classic movies deliver profound movie experiences through common story themes.
Watch: What is Theme and How to Write It
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Theme in film
What is a movie theme?
Robert McKee, the famous screenwriting teacher, defines stories as “equipment for living.” He argues that stories teach us how to live by dramatizing common themes that are central to our lives. McKee refers to movie themes as “controlling ideas,” which are “the purest form of a story's meaning, the vision of life the audience members carry away into their lives.” Here's McKee with further explanation.
Movies Themes • Equipment for Living
As seen with McKee’s “controlling idea,” theme can be defined in a number of ways. Often, people define film themes in one, or perhaps several, words. Examples include:
Love
Death
Justice
Coming of age
Man vs. nature
But strictly speaking, these are story topics or subjects, not themes. As we define it in our article on theme, a theme in film is actually “the inferred stance taken on a topic of a story.”
THEME DEFINITION
What is a theme in film?
A theme is the inferred stance taken on a topic of a story. Everything that happens within a story should reference back to a theme.
For example, while “justice” may be the overriding subject of a movie, a theme derived from this subject may be something like, “If a person doesn't first do herself justice, she can never do it for others.”
In the film analysis below, we organize a number of types of themes into seven major subjects:
God and Philosophy
Survival
Virtue and Values
Love
Good vs. Evil
Society
Discovering Self-Knowledge
For each of these subjects, we generate a list of subtopics, then analyze how classic films transform several of those subtopics into common themes in movies. Any given movie, of course, can yield multiple and overlapping movie theme examples from across these major subjects.
Movie Themes #1
God and Philosophy
In this category, subtopics that yield common themes include:
Faith vs. doubt
Fate vs. self-determination
Reason vs. faith
Facing an empty universe
Destruction of the soul
Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007) features themes derived from these topics. Typical themes in Coen Brothers' films include the idea that the universe is beyond comprehension or appeal. The Coens often symbolize this theme with a desk, which represents an implacable force that cannot be reasoned with, as seen in this video.
Are the Coen Brothers Obsessed with Desks? • Subscribe on YouTube
The symbol of the desk is used in No Country for Old Men, a movie in which the implacable force is pure evil in the form of Javier Bardem’s terrifying serial killer, Anton Chigurh, whose nature and motivations the other characters cannot fathom.
This character suggests the theme that “the more we try to understand the nature of the universe, the less we are likely to understand it.” The theme is further symbolized by Chigurh’s use of a coin flip to decide who will live or die.
For the Coens in this film, human self-determination is an illusion.
Coin Toss Scene • No Country for Old Men
The theme is also expressed through the character of Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), mystified and struck helpless by a universe he can’t understand, much less control. The Coens organize the movie as a standoff between good and evil, using the Neo-Western genre as a way to reinforce that traditional story.
But then they subvert the genre’s typical triumph of good in the third act. Not only does evil vanquish good, but Sheriff Bell quits law enforcement, feeling that his actions can no longer make a difference. In this scene, Sheriff Bell lays out this existential quandary.
I Feel Overmatched • No Country for Old Men
A final expression of the theme occurs near the end of the film, when Chigurh is badly hurt in a freak car accident. What could have easily become a moment of cosmic irony or poetic justice is left unresolved.
Themes in Coen Brothers’ films
While viewers can read this as the villain getting his comeuppance, the random nature of it — as well as the fact that none of the main characters even realize that it happens — suggests the theme that the moral arc of the universe does not bend towards justice, no matter how much we want it to.
List of Themes
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
The more we try to understand the nature of the universe, the less we are likely to understand it.
The moral arc of the universe does not bend towards justice, no matter how much we want it to.
Movie Themes #2
Survival
In this category, subtopics that yield common themes include:
Human vs. nature
Human vs. human
Individual vs. self
Perseverance/finding strength
Resistance to oppression
Facing disease/mortality/addiction
Beating the odds
Survival is a subject that lends itself well to movies because it tends to feature intense conflict between an individual and another force (human, nature, machine), as well as between individual and self.
A classic that has touched many viewers with these theme topics is The Shawshank Redemption (1994), written and directed by Frank Darabont.
In one crucial way, The Shawshank Redemption expresses the opposite theme of No Country for Old Men. While both movies imply that humans are at the cruel whims of an inexplicable universe, Shawshank firmly believes in some degree of self-determination.
No matter how bad your situation is, the way you react to it — what you learn, how you feel, and how you treat other people — is always up to you. That’s what the wrongly convicted Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) persists in believing, despite his brutal treatment in Shawshank prison over many years.
“There’s something inside they can’t get to”
While Andy fights outward oppression, his friend Red (Morgan Freeman) struggles internally. While Red has an easier time of it in prison than Andy, he doesn’t believe that he can make it on the outside if he is ever released.
“I guess it comes down to a simple choice.”
The famous line from the scene, “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’,” can be tweaked slightly to convey another theme: “If you don’t commit to actively living despite your circumstances, you aren’t really alive, and you might as well be dead.” Eventually Red embraces living, leading to one of cinema’s most famous and moving endings.
Ending Scene • Shawshank Redemption
List of Themes
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
No matter how bad your situation is, the way you react to it - what you learn, how you feel, and how you treat others - is up to you.
If you don’t commit to actively living despite your circumstances, you aren’t really alive, and you might as well be dead.
Movie Themes #3
Virtue and Values
In this category, subtopics that yield common themes include:
Courage and heroism
Honor and loyalty
Hypocrisy
Facing fear/finding bravery
Greed as downfall
Pride as downfall
Rising to the occasion
Themes of virtue and values are typically dramatized in films for children, especially fantasy adventures such as Hayao Miyazaki’s animated classic Spirited Away (2001). The movie chronicles the adventures of a young girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into an alternate spirit world where her parents' greed turns them into pigs. In the early scenes Chihiro is fearful, clingy, and whiny, with no spirit of adventure.
“It’s creepy! Let’s go home!”
Determined to save her parents, Chihiro tentatively begins to face her fears, becoming braver and more adventurous as she stumbles into one strange and frightening situation after another. Eventually she makes friends in this world and decides to risk herself to save them. Even the film’s trailer describes her quest in terms of virtues and values.
Judgement, Courage, Loyalty
Ultimately, Chihiro saves her parents and returns to the real world wiser, bolder, and more self-reliant.
List of Themes
SPIRITED AWAY
Before you can help others, you must find the courage to conquer your own fears.
A rewarding life requires both an adventurous and a childlike spirit.
Movie Themes #4
Love
In this category, subtopics that yield common themes include:
Love vs. loneliness
Love vs. Social control
Finding self-love
Regret over lost love
Power/strength of family/friendship
Sacrificing for love
Love is one of the most common subjects in movies, and one of the most famous of all love stories is Casablanca (1942). The enduring influence and popularity of the movie is arguably due to the elegant and powerful way that it dramatizes themes of love.
Rick (Humphrey Bogart), a former freedom fighter, has retreated into cynicism, self-pity, and alcoholism in his nightclub in Casablanca. The source of his misery is his former lover, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), who abandoned him years earlier and who now shows up at his club with her husband, Laszlo. The couple are fighting the Germans and need Rick’s help to escape to American before they are captured.
“You are our last hope.”
Eventually, Rick agrees to help Ilsa and Laslo. His sacrifice for both Ilsa and the war effort is made out of the highest kind of love - doing what’s best for another person even if it’s not what you want for yourself. The climactic scene in which Rick expresses his love through selflessness is one of the most famous and celebrated in the movies.
Judgement, Courage, Loyalty
The fact that Rick is willing to give up Ilsa for a higher cause also shows that he has gained self-love, as his self-loathing and self-pity would not allow him to make such a choice earlier in the film.
List of Themes
CASABLANCA
True love means doing what’s best for another person even at great cost to yourself.
You must first love yourself before you are able to love another.
Movie Themes #5
Social themes
In this category, subtopics that yield common themes include:
Class struggles
Power and Corruption
Fighting for Justice
Individual vs. society
Materialism/capitalism
Progress – real or illusion
Resistance
Humanity vs. technology
Change vs. tradition
Chaos Vs. Order
The evils of prejudice
Quest for power
Social mobility
Social themes inform movies in many different genres, including drama, comedy, science fiction, western, war, and biopics. The social issues above are so prevalent in movies, Classical Hollywood even came up with a sub-genre called Social Problem Films. Famous social problem films include The Lost Weekend (1945), Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), On the Waterfront (1954), and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).
A more contemporary social problem film about racism is Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), which was hailed as a masterpiece upon its release and propelled Lee into the first ranks of American filmmakers. Do the Right Thing chronicles a hot summer day in Brooklyn during which simmering racial tensions come to a boil.
In this famous scene, various characters from the movie shout racial epithets directly at the camera.
Mookie and Pino
Do the Right Thing is a powerful indictment of systemic racism, of a society organized around racial hierarchies — with white people at the top — and police policies that single out black people as especially threatening.
Death of Radio Raheem
But Lee also calls for personal responsibility, exhorting each of us to do better at treating each other with kindness and empathy. The themes in Do the Right Thing are not dramatized with particular subtlety, but they remain as relevant as ever.
List of Themes
DO THE RIGHT THING
Defeating racism requires both social and personal change.
Empathy and tolerance are key to co-existing in a diverse society.
Movie Themes #6
Good vs. Evil
In this category, subtopics that yield types of themes include:
The destructive nature of crime and violence
The horrors of war
The temptation of sin
The ugliness of revenge
Resisting oppression
Like most crime films, Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) dramatizes both the rise and the fall of a group of criminals. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is a poor kid who is thrilled to discover a path to easy power and money with the Italian mob. It’s fun for a while. But eventually the mobsters’ reliance on crime and violence results in their long and ugly decline.
Scorsese conveys their rise — the good times of power, pleasure, and wealth — with lush colors, warm lighting, nostalgic music, and sweeping cinematography, as for example in the famous Copacabana scene. In this scene, a long take tracking shot ushers Henry and his girlfriend Karen inside with a flourish that creates a sense of excitement and grandeur.
The hottest spot north of Havana
In the second half, the characters’ embrace of crime and violence takes its toll as they succumb to infighting, drug addiction, financial problems, prison, and death. Compare the early Copacabana scene to a later scene when Henry and Karen realize that life as they know it is coming to an end. Scorsese conveys the theme visually, using ugly mise-en-scene, flat lighting, and awkward framing to reflect the poverty of their values.
“Why did you do that!?”
List of Themes
GOODFELLAS
One may achieve power and pleasure through crime and violence; but hurting other human beings for personal gain will have ruinous effects on one's psyche and soul.
Movie Themes #7
Discovering Self-Knowledge
In this category, subtopics that yield types of themes include:
Coming of age
Shallowness vs. depth
Finding empowerment
Starting over
Learning to live with mistakes/guilt/regret
The cost of not accepting one’s true identity
Disillusionment/Loss of innocence
Dangers of ignorance
Finding self-awareness
Desire to escape
One of the most common themes in movies is discovering self-knowledge. This theme is most evident in coming-of-age stories such as Amy Heckerling's classic teen comedy Clueless (1995), based on Jane Austen’s coming-of-age novel, Emma.
In Clueless, Beverly Hills teen princess Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is basically good-hearted. But her wealth and privilege, and her obsession with clothes and popularity, have contributed to her shallowness and ignorance, preventing her from growing into a well-rounded person.
Contempo casual
Cher designates herself matchmatcher in the movie, trying to find love for her friends and teachers. But she tries to hook them up based on shallow considerations such as what social clique they belong to.
Cher’s new project
Because Cher doesn’t take the time to really get to know people, she ends up feeling confused and alone. Once she begins to accept people for who they really are — and recognize that nobody’s perfect — she is able to develop a deeper understanding of herself.
All by Myself
In each of the movies we’ve analyzed, the arc of a character’s change — his or her ability to find some degree of enlightenment and happiness — depends on discovering self-knowledge, whether it’s Cher, Rick in Casablanca, Red and Andy in Shawshank, or Chihiro in Spirited Away.
Conversely, the characters that don’t discover self-knowledge, such as Henry Hill and his fellow gangsters in Goodfellas are doomed to a life without true fulfillment.
List of Themes
CLUELESS
You can’t discover who you really are until you learn to accept people for who they really are.
To really grow up, you must accept your flaws and failures and learn from them.
UP NEXT
Theme: Definition and Examples
Now that we’ve identified common themes in seven classic films, read the StudioBinder article on theme and learn more about its purpose and how screenwriters and directors weave theme within narrative film.
Up Next: What is theme?
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5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 40 | https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/23/the-20-best-time-travel-movies-ranked | en | The 20 best time-travel movies – ranked! | [
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] | 2023-02-23T00:00:00 | As Adam Driver accidentally winds up 65m years ago, facing not just dinosaurs but an asteroid, we count down the best films about going backwards, or forwards, through the ages | en | the Guardian | https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/23/the-20-best-time-travel-movies-ranked | 20. Timecop (1994)
Regardless of what anyone says, I believe in my heart that Timecop was greenlit because someone showed a studio executive a picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme and said the word “Timecop” out loud, at which point they had to throw a script together as quickly as possible. Nothing about Timecop makes sense. It is the most 90s film ever made.
19. Tenet (2020)
I have to be careful here, because Tenet might not be a time-travel movie. Certainly time passes in it and some of the people are going backwards in time in it. But I’ve seen this movie twice now, and it mainly just seems to be about people mumbling everything, except for Kenneth Branagh, who gets to shout very loudly three times. Anyway, here it is.
18. Cavegirl (1985)
Finally, a film that uses time-travel for the correct reason; to allow a horny 1980s high school student to go back to prehistory so that he can convince a smoking hot, bikini-wearing cavegirl to have it off with him. You will note I’ve ranked this above Tenet.
17. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
Weird to think that Austin Powers was originally a fish-out-of-water comedy, in which the promiscuous titular character had to navigate the (then) uptight world of the 1990s. That all fell apart for the sequel, where Powers was sent back to the 60s to shout his catchphrases at people who actually appreciated them. That makes it a time-travel movie, right?
16. The Butterfly Effect (2004)
God, this film. In summary: Ashton Kutcher plays a man who experiences blackouts, only to learn some years later that he can travel back in time and inhabit his younger self’s mind during the blackouts. But in doing so, he unleashes a world of unintended consequences. He becomes a murderer and loses limbs. Seek out the director’s cut if you can, because it ends with Kutcher’s character deliberately strangling himself in the womb with his umbilical cord. No, really.
15. The Tomorrow War (2021)
Wherein Chris Pratt is drafted into a war that takes place 26 years later, because the invading aliens have already killed all the soldiers who were alive at the time. It’s a great premise for a film – we all pay the price for the actions of other generations – let down by a truly confusing ending. Admit it, you forgot this film even existed, even though it cost $200m to make and only came out 18 months ago.
14. The Time Travelers (1964)
A 1964 movie made on the cheap with genuinely terrible effects, The Time Travelers is about a group of scientists who travel to the future, fight some mutants and then return. What sets it apart, though, is its crazed ending. The film ends with the scientists venturing into the distant future, whereupon the film plays through again, faster and faster and faster until it cuts away to a still of the galaxy. Are they trapped in a loop? Is free will an illusion? Did the producers just run out of money? We may never know.
13. The Adam Project (2022)
In which a young boy’s life is turned upside down when he is visited by an older version of himself from the future. The good news? He grows up to be a fighter pilot. The bad news? He also grows up to have all the cadences and surface-level snarky patter of Ryan Reynolds. What follows is a buddy movie where the two buddies are the same person.
12. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
So seminal that it was namechecked in Avengers: Endgame. A flat-out comedy that primarily exists to allow a bunch of middle-aged men to act like teenagers, Hot Tub Time Machine is a film about an enchanted Jacuzzi that sends people back to the mid-1980s. Possibly a bit too bawdy for its own good, there’s a hint of a message about the unreliability of nostalgia here.
11. Flight of the Navigator (1986)
This family film involves a young boy who goes missing in a Fort Lauderdale ravine, only to show up eight years later having not aged. There are UFOs and rubbery little creatures and whatnot, but there’s a real emotional wallop to the moment when the boy realises that the world has moved on without him, right down to the scene (that plays out like a horror movie) where the boy realises that his parents have become unrecognisably ancient, even though they are probably only in their early 40s.
10. Primer (2004)
Some see Shane Carruth’s Primer as the gold standard of what a time-travel film should be. It’s the sort of movie that seems unnervingly realistic, from the down-at-heel engineers to the unshowy nature of time travel itself, where people in effect just get in and out of some boxes. Almost entirely unwilling to explain itself, for years Primer fans have come to rely on a series of graphs and charts to figure out what the film actually is.
9. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
A time-travel movie that may or may not have any actual time-travel in it, Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed is a delicate wonder of a thing. A man places an ad in a magazine asking for a time-travel companion – “Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before” – and the respondents slowly come to realise that all is not quite as it seems.
8. Planet of the Apes (1968)
If you haven’t seen Planet of the Apes, then the fact that I’ve put it on a list of time-travel movies is probably quite a heavy spoiler, and for that I’m sorry. But what a reveal this is – what seems at first like a silly movie about Charlton Heston being persecuted by some monkeys quickly becomes something darker and much more sinister. That new Adam Driver movie probably could have achieved something similar, if it hadn’t blabbed its big secret in the trailer.
7. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Endgame is a lot, so much so that it is effectively a time-travel movie bookended by two entirely separate movies. And, yes, it takes a lot of liberties with time-travel, from Tony Stark’s “Huh, I did it” invention to the lazy referencing of other time-travel movies as a shorthand for what the characters can do. Nevertheless, when they get to it, the film nails it. The Battle of New York is the obvious highlight, with Captain America fighting Captain America and the Hulk embarrassed by his unreconstructed former self, but the heart of the film really comes when Tony meets his father as a man and learns to let go of the past.
6. Interstellar (2014)
Interstellar is also a lot. But at its core is a simple ethical quandary: would you try to save the world if it meant missing your children’s entire lives? Matthew McConaughey has to touch down on a planet during a space trip. The problem is that every hour he spends there is equal to seven years on Earth. Is the trip important enough for him to miss seeing the wonder of his children grow into adults? Technically, if you want to be fussy about this, Interstellar is a time dilation movie rather than a time-travel movie. But it gets a pass, largely because McConaughey sells the agony of the moment so beautifully.
5. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
There are times when Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure feels like it was written by a toddler off his face on pop. But that’s a deliberate ploy, a way to camouflage all the careful rigour that underpins the script. The lead characters are initially reluctant to embark on their time-travel adventure, until they’re visited by versions of themselves from the near future who compel them to do it; a beautiful and hilarious example of predestination in action. Extra points are awarded thanks to the film’s total lack of interest in consequences. Swiping Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon from their respective eras has no bearing on world history whatsoever, which is probably quite lucky.
4. Looper (2012)
One problem with time-travel movies is that the rules always need to be explained upfront. In lesser hands, this can lead to all manner of clunky, stilted exposition. But when Rian Johnson dabbled in the genre with Looper, he gave us a masterclass in “show, don’t tell”. The sequence where poor Paul Dano’s character is tortured at two different points in time simultaneously, with the older version following instructions carved into the younger version’s arm, is arguably one of the most inventive uses of time-travel in the entire history of cinema. All that plus this is Bruce Willis’s last truly great performance.
3. The Terminator (1984)/Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The lure of the first two Terminator movies were the killer robots running around murdering everyone. But they were very smartly built around a framework of pure time-travel. We only see the future in brief flashes, but what’s important is the present. It is very, very important that Kyle Reese (a guy from the future) has sex with Sarah Connor (a woman from the present), because only that will save humanity as we know it. It’s a hell of a pickup line, but the device also elevates what could have simply been a shonky B-movie into the realm of the classics.
2. Idiocracy (2006)
The smartest time-travel movies use the device as a mirror, telling us more about the times we live in now than the times the characters visit. Enter Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s stinging satire about modern times. An average person is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the future, shocked to discover that the global IQ has fallen off a cliff in the intervening years. Surrounded by aggressive stupidity, he single-handedly saves the US from famine by suggesting that they use water – and not an electrolyte drink – to grow crops. We are conservatively 15 years from this happening in real life.
1. Back to the Future (1985)/Back to the Future Part II (1989)
The only conceivable first choice. The first two Back to the Future films (the third, which is basically just a western, is far less imaginative) have come to define time-travel as a genre. They deliver a complex set of hard sci-fi rules about what can and cannot happen during time-travel and – miraculously – manage to do it in a way that kids can understand. Good music, cool clothes, a million catchphrases and, in the case of the second film, an unnervingly prescient prediction of how Donald Trump would turn out. Just perfect. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 15 | https://www.glamour.com/gallery/romantic-comedies-best-relationship-movies-about-love-and-dating | en | 57 Romantic Movies That Perfectly Explain Your Current Relationship (or Lack Thereof) | [
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The best romantic movies are the ones that you can watch over and over again, even when they hit a little too close to home. That's because whether you’re single, in a new relationship, divorced, or something in between, there are so many movies about relationships that reflect every stage of your love life—past, present, and future.
While we can’t promise that watching these love stories will help you solve any current relationship problems you might have, we can tell you that you’ll be able to relate to at least one. Whether it's Rose's goodbye to Jack in Titanic or that rain-kissing scene in The Notebook, there are some film moments that are so iconic they've transcended pop culture and have become part of the way we live and think about love. I mean, tell me you watched those couple interviews in When Harry Met Sally and didn't wish that would be you someday. You can't!
So see our picks for the best romantic movies, below, and enjoy. PS: Of course, not all love movies are winners. See our list of romantic comedies that probably never should have been made.
All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 17 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femme_fatale | en | Femme fatale | [
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For other uses, see Femme Fatale (disambiguation).
A femme fatale ( FEM fə-TA(H)L, French: [fam fatal]; lit. 'fatal woman'), sometimes called a maneater,[1] Mata Hari, or vamp, is a stock character of a mysterious, beautiful, and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, often leading them into compromising, deadly traps. She is an archetype of literature and art. Her ability to enchant, entice and hypnotize her victim with a spell was in the earliest stories seen as verging on supernatural; hence, the femme fatale today is still often described as having a power akin to an enchantress, seductress, witch, having power over men. Femmes fatales are typically villainous, or at least morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification, and unease.[2]
The term originates from the French phrase femme fatale, which means 'deadly woman' or 'lethal woman'. A femme fatale tries to achieve her hidden purpose by using feminine wiles such as beauty, charm, or sexual allure. In many cases, her attitude towards sexuality is lackadaisical, intriguing, or frivolous. In some cases, she uses lies or coercion rather than charm. She may also make use of some subduing weapon such as sleeping gas, a modern analog of magical powers in older tales. She may also be (or imply that she is) a victim, caught in a situation from which she cannot escape.[3]
In early 20th-century American films, a femme fatale character was referred to as a vamp, a reference to The Vampire, Philip Burne-Jones's 1897 painting, and Rudyard Kipling's later 1897 poem, and the 1909 play and 1915 film A Fool There Was.
Female mobsters (including Italian-American Mafia or Russian Mafia) have been portrayed as femmes fatales in films noir.[4] Femmes fatales appear in James Bond films.
History
[edit]
Ancient archetypes
[edit]
The femme fatale archetype exists in the culture, folklore and myths of many cultures.[5] Ancient mythical or legendary examples include Inanna, Lilith, Circe, Medea, Clytemnestra, Lesbia, Tamamo no Mae, and Visha Kanyas. Historical examples from classical times include Cleopatra and Messalina, as well as the biblical figures Delilah, Jezebel, and Salome.[6] An example from Chinese literature and traditional history is Daji.
Early Western culture to the 19th century
[edit]
The femme fatale was a common figure in the European Middle Ages, often portraying the dangers of unbridled female sexuality. The pre-medieval inherited biblical figure of Eve offers an example, as does the wicked, seductive enchantress typified in Morgan le Fay. The Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute shows her more muted presence during the Age of Enlightenment.[7]
The femme fatale flourished in the Romantic period in the works of John Keats, notably "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "Lamia". Along with them, there rose the gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, featuring Matilda, a very powerful femme fatale. This led to her appearing in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and as the vampire, notably in Carmilla and Brides of Dracula. The Monk was greatly admired by the Marquis de Sade, for whom the femme fatale symbolised not evil, but all the best qualities of women; his novel Juliette is perhaps the earliest wherein the femme fatale triumphs. Pre-Raphaelite painters frequently used the classic personifications of the femme fatale as a subject.
In the Western culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the femme fatale became a more fashionable trope,[8] and she is found in the paintings of the artists Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, Franz von Stuck, and Gustave Moreau. The novel À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans includes these fevered imaginings about an image of Salome in a Moreau painting:[9]
No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, – a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours, Sisters of Salome
In 1891, Oscar Wilde, in his play Salome: she manipulates her lust-crazed stepfather, King Herod, with her enticing Dance of the Seven Veils (Wilde's invention) to agree to her imperious demand: "bring me the head of John the Baptist". Later, Salome was the subject of an opera by Strauss, and was popularized on stage, screen, and peep show booths in countless incarnations.[10]
She also is seen as a prominent figure in late 19th- and 20th-century opera, appearing in Richard Wagner's Parsifal (Kundry), Georges Bizet's "Carmen", Camille Saint-Saëns' "Samson et Delilah" and Alban Berg's "Lulu" (based on the plays "Erdgeist" and "Die Büchse der Pandora" by Frank Wedekind).
Other considerably famous femmes fatales include Isabella of France, Hedda Gabler of Kristiania (now Oslo), Marie Antoinette of Austria, and, most famously, Lucrezia Borgia.
20th-century genres
[edit]
Early 20th century
[edit]
Mrs Patrick Campbell, George Bernard Shaw's "second famed platonic love affair", (she published some of his letters)[11][12] and Philip Burne-Jones's lover and subject of his 1897 painting, The Vampire, inspired Burne-Jones's cousin Rudyard Kipling to write his poem "The Vampire", in the year Dracula was published.[13][14][15][16] The poem, which began: "A fool there was ...",[17] inspired Porter Emerson Browne to write the play, A Fool There Was.
The poem was adapted to become a 1909 Broadway production. This was followed by The 1913 film The Vampire by Robert Vignola, containing a "vamp" dance.[18] Protagonist Alice Hollister was publicised as "the original vampire".[19][20][21] The 1915 film, A Fool There Was, starring Theda Bara, as "The Vamp" followed.[22][23][24][25][26][27][28] The short poem may have been used in the publicity for the 1915 film.[citation needed] 1910s American slang for femme fatale was vamp, for vampire.[29][30][24]
Another icon is Margaretha Geertruida Zelle. While working as an exotic dancer, she took the stage name Mata Hari. She was accused of German espionage during World War I and was put to death by a French firing squad. After her death she became the subject of many sensational films and books.
Femmes fatales appear in detective fiction, especially in its 'hard-boiled' sub-genre which largely originated with the crime stories of Dashiell Hammett in the 1920s. At the end of that decade, the French-Canadian villainess Marie de Sabrevois gave a contemporary edge to the otherwise historical novels of Kenneth Roberts set during the American Revolution.
Film villainess often appeared foreign, often of Eastern European or Asian ancestry. They were a contrast to the wholesome personas of actresses such as Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford. Notable silent-cinema vamps include Theda Bara, Helen Gardner, Louise Glaum, Valeska Suratt, Musidora, Virginia Pearson, Olga Petrova, Rosemary Theby, Nita Naldi, Pola Negri, Estelle Taylor, Jetta Goudal, and, in early appearances, Myrna Loy.
Classic film noir era
[edit]
During the era of classic film-noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, the femme fatale flourished in American cinema. The archetypal femme fatale is Phyllis Dietrichson, played by Barbara Stanwyck (who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for this role) in the 1944 film Double Indemnity. This character is considered one of the best femme fatale roles in film noir history.[31] The character was ranked as the #8 film villain of the first 100 years of American cinema by the American Film Institute in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.[32] In a classical film noir trope, she manipulates a man into killing her husband for financial gain.
Other examples of femme fatale include Brigid O'Shaughnessy, portrayed by Mary Astor, who murders Sam Spade's partner in The Maltese Falcon (1941); manipulative narcissistic daughter Veda (portrayed by Ann Blyth) in Mildred Pierce who exploits her indulgent mother Mildred (portrayed by Joan Crawford) and fatally destroys her mother's remarriage to stepfather Monte Barragon (portrayed by Zachary Scott); Gene Tierney as Ellen Brent Harland in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and the cabaret singer portrayed by Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946),[33] narcissistic wives who manipulate their husbands; Ava Gardner in The Killers and Cora (Lana Turner) in The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on novels by Ernest Hemingway and James M. Cain respectively, manipulate men into killing their husbands.[33] In the Hitchcock film The Paradine Case (1947), Alida Valli's character causes the deaths of two men and the near destruction of another. Another frequently cited example is the character Jane played by Lizabeth Scott in Too Late for Tears (1949); during her quest to keep some dirty money from its rightful recipient and her husband, she uses poison, lies, sexual teasing and a gun to keep men wrapped around her finger. Jane Greer remains notable as a murderous femme fatale using her wiles on Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947). In Gun Crazy (1950), the femme fatale lures a man into a life of crime. In Hitchcock's 1940 film and Daphne du Maurier's 1938 novel Rebecca, the eponymous femme fatale completely dominates the plot, even though she is already dead and we never see an image of her. Rocky and Bullwinkle's Natasha Fatale, a curvaceous spy, takes her name from the femme fatale stock character. Blonde Ice (1948) features a female serial killer who murders several men.
1980s to the present
[edit]
The femme fatale has carried on to the present day, in films such as Body Heat (1981) and Prizzi's Honor (1985) – both with Kathleen Turner, Blade Runner (1982) with Sean Young, The Hunger (1983) with Catherine Deneuve, Blue Velvet (1986) with Isabella Rossellini, Fatal Attraction (1987) with Glenn Close, Basic Instinct (1992) with Sharon Stone, Damage (1992) with Juliette Binoche, Final Analysis (1992) with Kim Basinger, Dream Lover (1993) with Madchen Amick, The Last Seduction (1994) with Linda Fiorentino, To Die For (1995) with Nicole Kidman, Lost Highway (1997) with Patricia Arquette, Devil in the Flesh (1998) and Jawbreaker (1999), both with Rose McGowan, Cruel Intentions (1999) with Sarah Michelle Gellar, Original Sin (2001) with Angelina Jolie, Femme Fatale (2002) with Rebecca Romijn, and Jennifer's Body (2009) with Megan Fox. In 2013, Tania Raymonde played the title role in Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret. In 2014, Eva Green portrayed a femme fatale in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and Rosamund Pike starred in Gone Girl. In Babylon (2022), Margot Robbie plays character with femme fatale tendencies.[35]
Academy Award-winning actress Marion Cotillard has frequently played femmes fatales, in such films as A Private Affair (2002), A Very Long Engagement, The Black Box, Inception, Midnight in Paris, The Dark Knight Rises and Macbeth. Nicole Kidman has also played a few femmes fatales in films as To Die For, The Paperboy, Moulin Rouge! and The Northman.
The archetype is also abundantly found in American television. One of the most famous femmes fatales of American television is Sherilyn Fenn's Audrey Horne of the David Lynch cult series Twin Peaks. In the TV series Femme Fatales, actress Tanit Phoenix played Lilith, the host who introduced each episode Rod Serling-style and occasionally appeared within the narrative. In the Netflix TV series Orange Is the New Black, actress Laura Prepon played Alex Vause, a modern femme fatale, who led both men and women to their destruction.
Femmes fatales appear frequently in comic books. Notable examples include Batman's long-time nemesis Catwoman, who first appeared in comics in 1940, and various adversaries of The Spirit, such as P'Gell.
This stock character is also often found in the genres of opera and musical theatre, where she will traditionally have a mezzo, alto or contralto range, opposed to the ingénue's soprano, to symbolize the masculinity and lack of feminine purity.[citation needed] An example is Hélène from Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.
Use in criminal trials
[edit]
The term has been used by the media in connection with highly publicised criminal trials, such as the trials of Jodi Arias[36][37] and Amanda Knox.[38]
References
[edit]
Further reading
[edit]
Literature portal
Dominique Mainon and James Ursini (2009) Femme fatale, ISBN 0879103698. Examines the context of film noir.
Giuseppe Scaraffia (2009) Femme fatale, ISBN 9788838903960
Julie Grossman (2020) The Femme Fatale, ISBN 9780813598246. A brief history of the femme fatale in cinema and TV.
Toni Bentley (2002) Sisters of Salome, ISBN 9780803262416. Salome considered as an archetype of female desire and transgression and as the ultimate femme fatale.
Bram Dijkstra (1986) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture, ISBN 0195056523. Discusses the Femme fatale-stereotype.
Bram Dijkstra (1996) Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture, ISBN 0805055495.
Elizabeth K. Mix Evil By Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale, ISBN 9780252073236. Discusses the origin of the Femme fatale in 19th-century French popular culture.
Mario Praz (1933) The Romantic Agony, ISBN 9780192810618. See chapters four, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', and five, 'Byzantium'.
Julie Grossman (2009) Rethinking the Femme Fatale in film noir: Ready for her close-up, ISBN 9781349313341. Tries to bring about a more nuanced and sympathetic reading of the "femme fatale" in film criticism and popular culture commentary.
, | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 42 | https://www.umass.edu/film/requirements-major | en | Major : Film Studies : UMass Amherst | [
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Film Studies Major through BDIC Requirements
Full list of requirements. Here is a list of the core courses that a student must take to obtain the Film Studies Major as a concentration under BDIC:
Introductory course (I)
Film course before 1950s (H1)
Film course after 1950s (H2)
Director or Genre course (D&G)
National cinema course (N)
Film Theory course (T)
Electives Track A: History of Cinema, Film Theory, Film Criticism
Electives Track B: World Cinema, Cinema Cultures, International Film
Electives Track C: Filmmaking, Production
Electives Track D: DIY (Design your own track)
Introductory Course (I)
FILM-ST 170 - Introduction to Film Analysis: Cinematic Time Travel
Instructor: Barry Spence
NOTE: This is a combined course, and can be enrolled under either COMP-LIT 170 or FILM-ST 197FA.
This is an introduction to film studies and to the analysis of film. The course explores the complex nature and cultural function of cinema by focusing on time travel as both a central theme of a wide range of films and as a way of understanding how cinema works as a time-based medium. By studying films from various points in the global history of cinema - including films from nine countries and five continents - this course performs a transcultural introduction to the formal and stylistic aspects of cinematic storytelling. (Gen. Ed. AT)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: I, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: Counts for pre-major introductory course requirement
COMP-LIT 170 - Introduction to Film Analysis: Cinematic Time Travel
Instructor: Barry Spence
NOTE: This is a combined course, and can be enrolled under either COMP-LIT 170 or FILM-ST 197FA.
This is an introduction to film studies and to the analysis of film. The course explores the complex nature and cultural function of cinema by focusing on time travel as both a central theme of a wide range of films and as a way of understanding how cinema works as a time-based medium. By studying films from various points in the global history of cinema - including films from nine countries and five continents - this course performs a transcultural introduction to the formal and stylistic aspects of cinematic storytelling. (Gen. Ed. AT)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: I, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: Counts for pre-major introductory course requirement
COMM 140 - Introduction to Film Studies
Instructor: Shawn Shimpach
3 Credits
NOTE: Open to Sophomores & Freshmen only
This course is designed to provide introduction to the nature and functions of film in its narrative, documentary, and experimental forms. We will look at the various components of film expression (composition, movement, editing, sound, production design, acting), developments in screen narrative, film's relationship to other arts and media, and its role as an instrument of social expression.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: I, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: Counts for pre-major introductory course requirement
COMM 231 - Film & TV Production Concepts
Instructor: Kevin Anderson
3 Credits
This class provides an overview of film and television production principles and processes from script to screen and also prepares students for later hands-on production courses. We will explore both the art and craft of film and digital motion picture production, including the roles and functions of the major creative and technical personnel in the scripting, pre-production, production, and post-production phases. Technical aspects such as digital vs. analog media, lighting and color, cinematography, production design, editing concepts, sound recording, and storytelling and script-writing will be covered. In addition, students are given three options for producing a creative project for the course.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: I, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: Counts for pre-major introductory course requirement
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
top
Film course before 1950s (H1)
COMM 340 - History of Film I
Instructor: Marty Norden
3 Credits
Lecture, lab (screening), discussion. A survey of key events and representative films that mark the history of motion pictures in the United States and other countries to 1950. In addition to identifying and providing access to major works, the course is designed to facilitate the study of the various influences (industrial, technological, aesthetic, social, cultural, and political) that have shaped the evolution of the medium to the advent of television.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H1
FILM-ST 397Z: Classical Hollywood Cinema
Instructor: Barry Spence
3 credits
This is a history of film course focusing on what is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. An examination of classical Hollywood cinema, this course will concentrate on the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. We will look at the production and distribution practices of the Hollywood studio system, and pay special attention to the way this preeminent form of cinema established many of the norms of the immersive film experience. Among other subjects, we will consider the construction of classical continuity by studying the narrative structures and devices, stylistic techniques, and approaches to editing of a wide range of exemplary films. Weekly in-class screenings, with separate discussion.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H1
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
top
Film course after 1950s (H2)
COMP-LIT 337 - International History of Animation
Instructor: Christopher Couch
4 Credits
This course traces the history of animation from the late 19th century to today, including short and feature-length films from the United States, Europe and Japan. Topics will include the Fleischer, Disney and UPA studios, directors from Emil Cole to Hayao Miyazaki, and experimental animators including Oskar Fischinger and John Canemaker. Animation for television, including Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle and Matt Groening's The Simpsons will also be considered.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMPLIT 381- Self- Reflective Avant- Garde Film
Instructor: Don Levine
4 credits
Explores modern origin of film experimentation in avant-garde modes such as Expressionism, Surrealism and Contemporary results of this heritage. Trying to determine if film is the most resolutely modern of them media, we’ll look at cinema as the result of two obsessive concerns 1.) The poetic, dreamlike and fantastic 2.) The factual, realistic and socially critical or anarchistic. Thus, we’ll attempt to discover how modern culture deals with avant-garde imperatives to always “make it new.” Films and filmmakers such as Breathless (Godard), My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant), The American Soldier (Fassbinder), others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMP-LIT 383 - Narrative Avant-Garde Film (Gen.Ed. AT)
Instructor: Don Levine
4 Credits
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST 383 - Narrative Avant-Garde Film (Gen.Ed. AT)
Instructor: Don Levine
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST - 497AC/697AC: Arthouse Cinema 1950-1980
Instructor: Barry Spence
3 Credits
This course will examine the cultural phenomenon of the “art film” during the first three decades of the postwar period (1950s, 60s, 70s). The nature and characteristics of, as well as the relationships connecting and distinguishing, modernist cinema, art cinema, and avant-garde film during this vital period in film history will be the course’s primary concern. We will examine the notion of the auteur and consider its usefulness for thinking about this multiform, innovative cinema. What is the relationship between cinematic modernism and the core principles and representational strategies of modern art? Does modern cinema, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, function as a mental substitute for the lost connection between the individual and the world? Can it restore our belief in the world? The course will pay particular attention to distinctive stylistic attributes, but will also look at dominant thematic concerns. There will be weekly in-class screenings as well as regular streaming of films outside of class. The filmmakers we will consider include, but are not limited to: Chantal Ackerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Stan Brakhage, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Miklós Janscó, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Sergei Paradzhanov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais, Jean-Marie Straub, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
top
Director or Genre course (D&G)
COMM 444 - Film Styles and Genres
Instructor: Shawn Shimpach
3 Credits
Why do we put certain films into categories? What constitutes a film genre, how do we recognize it, and what do we do with it? This course examines these questions and more by considering a specific genre over the course of the semester. We will learn to think of genre as a way of comparing and contrasting different films. Genre will also be thought of as a way of creating expectations and measuring experience and meaning. The power of film genre is that it allows us to understand film as a text and film as a social practice at the very same time.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
COMM 446: Film Documentary
Instructor: Bruce Geisler
3 credits
We will view, analyze, and discuss films by modern documentary masters such as Michael Moore ("Sicko"), Chris Paine, ("Revenge of the Electric Car"), Seth Gordon ("The King of Kong - A fistful of Quarters"), Pamela Yates ("Granito") and many others to further the understanding of the documentary craft and art from a filmmaker's perspective. Students will also do preproduction (research and treatment) for their own short documentary, along with shorter hands-on exercises in writing narration, interview techniques, etc.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
COMM 493L - S-Experimental Film & Video
Instructor: Kevin Anderson
3 Credits
Prerequisites: COMM 331, 441, OR 446
NOTE: Open to Seniors and Juniors only
This course explores the genre of Experimental Film and Video with a critical eye toward the history and current articulations of this form of production in both feature film and short form movies and videos. The course begins with an introduction to the genre, then explores Experimental Film; video according to three different categories: Experimentation with Narrative, Experimentation with Structure/Form, and Experimentation with the line between Fact and Fiction. Students will emerge from this course with a solid foundation in the history and theory of experimental film/video as evidenced by writing projects, research papers, and student-produced experimental media projects.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
COMM 494BI- Countercultural Films
Instructor: Bruce Geisler
Seminar, Discussion. An exploration of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 70s and later, hosted by someone who was there and lived to tell the tale. Through the medium of documentary and fiction films, we will delve into the musical, sexual, artistic, political and spiritual upheavals that rocked America and Europe back then and that continue to reverberate today.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
COMP-LIT 350: INTERNATIONAL FILM
Instructor: Barry Spence
4 credits
This general education course will screen films from across the globe studying examples of a range of lesser-known subgenres of the Horror film, such as Giallo (Italian genre mixing slasher horror with detective mysteries), Fantastique (French genre mixing gothic horror with fantasy erotica), and Jiangshi (Hong Kong genre mixing slasher horror with Kung Fu). And we will consider in equal measure the so-called dystopian film. We will look at the interrelationship connecting these two modes, which can be seen at work in films like Battle Royale. This course will include a primary focus on gender issues, will examine the representation of women, and will screen (transgressive) examples of these modes by women filmmakers. The intention of this course is to expose students to a cultural diversity of these vital contemporary film genres beyond the conventional Hollywood fare. Weekly film screenings and discussion.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
GenEd: AT
COMPLIT 391SF- International Sci-Fi Cinema
Instructor: Christopher NC Couch
3 Credits
This course provides an introduction to science fiction cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Beginning with the experiments of the Melies Brothers and the importance of German Expressionist films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the course considers technological prognostication from Destination Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventure and science fiction in films like Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and the dystopian imagination from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to District 9. The course will also highlight the roles of women writers and directors from Thea von Harbou to Kathryn Bigelow, and technological cinematic advances from matte painting and process shots to CGI.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 330: Film Auteurs: Akira Kurosawa
Instructor: Barry Spence
Credits 4
This class will focus on one, or more, specific filmmaker and will aim to highlight their cinematic models, distinctive style and recurrent themes, within the theoretical framework of the "auteur theory", thus offering students an introductory and comprehensive view of perhaps the most central concept in film studies. In the first place, this class will address the historical evolution of the debate around "auteur theory," from the "politique des auteurs" to the "death of the author", while providing author criticism and analysis in practice. It will tackle questions such as: Why do certain filmmakers qualify as auteurs? What is the difference between commercial cinema and auteur cinema? Due to the collaborative nature of filmmaking, can we talk about the author of a film? What is the intersection between gender and authorship? What does it mean to be a woman author? Secondly, it will concentrate on one specific filmmaker: students will read pertinent bibliography (e.g. biography, film reviews, etc.) on their films, watch and study their most significant film production, and contextualize it historically, geographically and culturally.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 391SF- International Sci-Fi Cinema
Christopher NC Couch
This course provides an introduction to science fiction cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Beginning with the experiments of the Melies Brothers and the importance of German Expressionist films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the course considers technological prognostication from Destination Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventure and science fiction in films like Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and the dystopian imagination from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to District 9. The course will also highlight the roles of women writers and directors from Thea von Harbou to Kathryn Bigelow, and technological cinematic advances from matte painting and process shots to CGI.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 397A- ST Alien Encounters
Istructor: Daniel Pope
3 credits
Could extraterrestrial life exist in the cosmos? Scientists say yes, possibly on billions of planets in our galaxy alone. In this class, we will examine the international cinema of alien encounters and explore how these films envision the alien other. How do these films both reflect and shape our own experience of "the alien" or the unknown "other"? Since the beginning of cinema, the figure of the alien has visited the big screen with its promise of otherworldly wonders and its threat of unthinkable perils. This course will explore how alien encounters reflect the haunting of historical realities (such as European voyages of discovery, conquest, and colonization) as well as contemporary issues, such as international conflict (war or global migration), questions of identity (race, gender, sexuality), and the power and perils of emerging technologies (nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, space travel). Imagining encounters with intelligent beings beyond our own cultural and ideological sphere provides powerful new perspectives on what we think we know about the world, about ourselves, and about others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 397E: Film at the End of the World
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Climate disaster, world war, aliens, cosmic collisions, dystopias, zombies, the rise of the machines, catastrophic pandemics, mass extinction, prophesied apocalypse. What do films about the end of the world tell us about contemporary realities? What insights do they offer into the cultural moment that produces them and the prevailing attitudes and realities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and gender identity? How do they speak to our anxieties and fears about the future as well as our hopes and aspirations? How does the genre of end-of-the-world films intersect with other genres—thriller, action film, neo-noir, comedy, art-house, romance, drama, experimental, historical? In this course we will study the cinema of eschatology, of ultimate endings, and analyze a range of filmic approaches to the philosophical, psychological, social, and aesthetic questions posed in end-of-the-world films.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 497V – Video Essay in Film Criticism
Daniel Pope
3 Credits
This is a course in planning, scripting, and editing video essays in film criticism, working with films from around the world and across film history. The field of film criticism is taking new forms in recent years, with social media, podcasts, websites and blogs dedicated to analyzing and discussing movies. Out of this trend, the video essay emerges as an exceptionally attractive and powerful medium for the film critic. In this class, we examine a wide array of video essays and explore the unique analytical and expressive opportunities the medium offers. A primary emphasis in the course is the study and practice of film criticism as an intellectual and creative endeavor with its own particular objectives, challenges, and expressive powers. With this foundation, we develop the critical, creative, and technical skills necessary for making effective video essays addressing films, directors, genres, national cinemas, and cultural and social issues. Making a video essay is in many ways like making a movie. As such we are engaged not only in film analysis and film writing but also in video editing, image composition, sound design, and other aspects of moving image media.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
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National cinema course (N)
FILM-ST 304: German Cinema: From Berlin to Hollywood (also: /German 304 )
Instructor: Mariana Ivanova
Credits: 3
This course offers a survey of German cinema from the 1920s on until the 21st century and focuses on transborder mobility of pictures and artists. We will examine the emigration of film directors from Babelsberg, the epicenter of the ‘Golden Age’ in German cinema to Hollywood. From celebrated directors such as Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch, to stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, we will trace the careers of those working in exile in the 1930s and 1940s. The course will continue with an exploration of the postwar period and the export of West German films into the US, while we look at the work of directors Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarete von Trotta and Harun Farocki who also significantly shaped the perception of North America in Germany. We will conclude with discussions of more recent works by Tom Tykwer and Michael Hanneke, well-known among cineastes today for their international coproductions, Hollywood remakes, or Netflix series. Key issues in the course will be the transformation of film financing and material production circumstances as a result of European funding structures and a persistent ‘transnational aesthetic’ emerging in the work of the above directors. Both big budget blockbusters and independent films will be considered in their implications for film content, style, and social content. Conducted in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
FILM-ST 344: Film and Society in Israel (Also available as JUDAIC 344)
Instructor: Olga Gershenson
Wed 4-6:45
This course uses film to discuss Israeli society. Topics include: foundation of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust survivors, religion, gender, and interethnic relations. All film showings are with English subtitles.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
FILM-ST 353: African Cinema (Also available as French 353)
Also available online as a multimodal class
Instructor: Patrick Mensah
4 credits
Gen Ed course (AT and DU)
Tues 4 pm-6:45 pm
Histories and development of African film and its aesthetic forms, from its inception to the present day. The sociocultural, economic, and political forces and imperatives defining its forms and shaping its agendas. Questions this work raises in film aesthetics and theory as a whole. All screenings available online. Line up of screenings: The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) Lumumba, Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck) Xala, Borom Sarret, Moolaade, Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene) Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck) Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako) Afrique, Je te plumerai (Jean-Marie Teno) Keita, Heritage of the Griot (Dany Kouyaté) Pièces d’Identités (Mweze Ngangura) Tsotsi (Gavin Hood) District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli) Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety) Course taught in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
Film 397V Latin American Cinema (also available as SPAN 397W)
Instructor: Barbara Zecchi
Latin American Cinema
Credits: 3
Monday 4:00-6:30
The course is designed to introduce students to the cinematic work of some of the most important Latin American directors . The course will center on a variety of topics that are vital to the understanding of the most significant political, historical, social and cultural events that have shaped Latin America. Some of the topics to be examined in the class are: racial, gender, sexual and identity issues; nation formation; revolution; immigration; repression; utopia; resistance; violence; freedom and indigenism. Students will be expected to develop interpretative filmic skills through an exploration of the connections between the technical composition of the films and the social, political, and cultural context to which each film refers.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: N
FILM-ST 497L /697FL Fellini- The Liar (Also available as ITALIAN 497FL/ ITALIAN 697FL)
(Also available online)
Instructor: Andrea Malaguti
Credits: 3
Tue 4:00-6:30
The course examines the most important films by Federico Fellini (whose "La dolce vita" and "8 1/2" both entered the 100 greatest movies list of the British Film Institute) to understand how his work both contends with his contemporaries (especially Hollywood) and still has a strong grip on our film imagery today. Lectures and discussions in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
FRENCH 353 – African Film
Patrick Mensah Cap: 30, 4 Credits
Lecture: Tu 4:00PM-6:45PM; Discussion: Thu 2:30PM-3:45PM OR Thu 4:00PM-5:15PM
This course offers an introduction to African film as an aesthetic and cultural practice. Students should expect to be familiarized with the key ideas and objectives that have inspired and driven that practice since the early 1960s, and be furnished with the technical tools and methodological skills that would permit them to understand, analyze, and think critically about the artistic and thematic aspects of the films that are screened. They should also expect the course to provide them with a critical peek into several cardinal issues of social and cultural relevance in contemporary Africa and its history. Issues of interest typically include, the nation state and its declining status, imperatives of decolonization, economic dependency and structural adjustment programs, orality and changing traditional cultures, diasporic migrations, urbanization and its problems, gender relations, civil wars, child soldiers, gangs, and related themes. Filmmakers studied include, but are not limited to, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ousmane Sembene, Raoul Peck, Jean-Marie Teno, Dani Kouyate, Mweze Ngangura, Gavin Hood, Neill Blomkamp, Moufida Tlatli, Djibril Diop Mambety (please note that this list is subject to change, and shall be updated as future changes are made). The course is conducted in English, and requires no prior knowledge of the field. All films are streamed to your computer from the UMass library on demand. Required readings are provided online, and no book purchases are necessary. (Gen.Ed. AT, DG)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
GERMAN 304 – From Berlin to Hollywood
Mariana Ivanova Cap: 10, 4 Credit
Lec: TBA
This course offers a survey of German cinema from the 1920s on until the 21st century and focuses on transborder mobility of pictures and artists. We will examine the emigration of film directors from Babelsberg, the epicenter of the ‘Golden Age’ in German cinema to Hollywood. From celebrated directors such as Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch, to stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, we will trace the careers of those working in exile in the 1930s and 1940s. The course will continue with an exploration of the postwar period and the export of West German films into the US, while we look at the work of directors Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarete von Trotta and Harun Farocki who also significantly shaped the perception of North America in Germany. We will conclude with discussions of more recent works by Tom Tykwer and Michael Hanneke, well-known among cineastes today for their international coproductions, Hollywood remakes, or Netflix series. Key issues in the course will be the transformation of film financing and material production circumstances as a result of European funding structures and a persistent ‘transnational aesthetic’ emerging in the work of the above directors. Both big budget blockbusters and independent films will be considered in their implications for film content, style, and social content. Conducted in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
ITALIAN 497FL /697FL Fellini- The Liar (Also available as FILM 497FL)
(Also available online)
Instructor: Andrea Malaguti
Credits: 3
Tue 4:00-6:30
The course examines the most important films by Federico Fellini (whose "La dolce vita" and "8 1/2" both entered the 100 greatest movies list of the British Film Institute) to understand how his work both contends with his contemporaries (especially Hollywood) and still has a strong grip on our film imagery today. Lectures and discussions in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
JUDAIC 344 - Film and Society in Israel
Olga Gershenson Cap: 10, 4 Credits
We 4:00PM - 6:45PM
This course uses film to discuss Israeli society. Topics include: foundation of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust survivors, religion, gender, and interethnic relations. All film showings are with English subtitles. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
SPANISH 397W – Special Topics: Latin American Cinema
Barbara Zecchi Cap: 15, 3 Credits
Lec: Mo 4:00PM-6:30PM
The course is designed to introduce students to the films of some of the most important Latin American directors. The course will center on a variety of topics that are vital to the understanding of the most significant political, historical, social and cultural events that have shaped Latin America.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
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Film Theory course (T)
FILM-ST 470- FILM THEORY
Barry Spence 4 credits
This course provides an in-depth overview of key theoretical approaches to the study of cinema by examining historically significant ways of analyzing film form and its social and cultural functions and effects. The course seeks to equip students with a command of the diverse history of theoretical frameworks for understanding the medium and experience of cinema, from early concerns over films relation to other arts to the way the movie as a cultural form has been reconceptualized within the contemporary explosion of new media. The pressing relevance of film theory becomes clear once we stop to consider taking just one small example the many implications of a society-wide movement away from the collective experience of movies in a public theater to private viewing with earbuds on the tiny screen of a cell phone or tablet. We will explore a wide range of questions (concerning the nature of the cinematic medium and its apparatus, aspects of the spectator’s experience of film, and the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of film genre, to name just a few) as a way of putting ourselves in dialogue with various film theoreticians. And we will ground our examination by looking at cinematic practice in relation to theory. This will be done through regular film screenings throughout the semester.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: T
FILM-ST 497P Film Podcasting
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Tue 4pm-7:30pm
This is, above all, a course in film criticism. For as long as there has been cinema there has also been film criticism, from print and broadcast media to web sites and social media in recent decades. The swiftly growing field of audio podcasting offers a versatile new digital medium for film criticism, drawing on many of the strengths of traditional media and bringing its own unique qualities of engagement. In this course, we will study varieties of film writing and explore the craft of creating compelling and illuminating film criticism and the key techniques for producing rich, engaging podcast content. We will work with films across a variety of genres and time periods and do hands-on work in all aspects of producing a film criticism podcast - research, analysis, writing, planning, conducting interviews, moderating, recording, editing, and posting your finished podcasts.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: T, E
FILM-ST 597A Cinemas of Confluence and Alliance
Instructor: Daniel Pope
3 credits
Mon 4:00- 6:30
Cap 25
How can film foster empathy? Bridge difference? Inspire dedication to the dreams, endeavors, and struggles of others? In this course, we explore a selection of international films that engage themes of community, solidarity, and partnerships for social justice, environmental advocacy, intersectional alliance, and other collective efforts to achieve a common good or address a prevailing ill. We investigate the potential for narrative fiction film, documentary, video art, and other media to challenge ideas of self and other and imagine new modes of reflection, representation, and agency. Concepts of selfhood and otherness, questions of empathy, relationship, community and allyship, and such issues as equity, ethics and ecology will frame our discussions.
Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. UMass Amherst Undergraduate Film Certificate Categories: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: T, E
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies
https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
ELECTIVES - Track A: History of Cinema, Film Theory, Film Criticism
COMM 340 - History of Film I
Instructor: Marty Norden
3 Credits
Lecture, lab (screening), discussion. A survey of key events and representative films that mark the history of motion pictures in the United States and other countries to 1950. In addition to identifying and providing access to major works, the course is designed to facilitate the study of the various influences (industrial, technological, aesthetic, social, cultural, and political) that have shaped the evolution of the medium to the advent of television.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H1
FILM-ST 397Z: Classical Hollywood Cinema
Instructor: Barry Spence
3 credits
This is a history of film course focusing on what is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. An examination of classical Hollywood cinema, this course will concentrate on the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. We will look at the production and distribution practices of the Hollywood studio system, and pay special attention to the way this preeminent form of cinema established many of the norms of the immersive film experience. Among other subjects, we will consider the construction of classical continuity by studying the narrative structures and devices, stylistic techniques, and approaches to editing of a wide range of exemplary films. Weekly in-class screenings, with separate discussion.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H1
COMP-LIT 337 - International History of Animation
Instructor: Christopher Couch
4 Credits
This course traces the history of animation from the late 19th century to today, including short and feature-length films from the United States, Europe and Japan. Topics will include the Fleischer, Disney and UPA studios, directors from Emil Cole to Hayao Miyazaki, and experimental animators including Oskar Fischinger and John Canemaker. Animation for television, including Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle and Matt Groening's The Simpsons will also be considered.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMPLIT 381- Self- Reflective Avant- Garde Film
Instructor: Don Levine
4 credits
Explores modern origin of film experimentation in avant-garde modes such as Expressionism, Surrealism and Contemporary results of this heritage. Trying to determine if film is the most resolutely modern of them media, we’ll look at cinema as the result of two obsessive concerns 1.) The poetic, dreamlike and fantastic 2.) The factual, realistic and socially critical or anarchistic. Thus, we’ll attempt to discover how modern culture deals with avant-garde imperatives to always “make it new.” Films and filmmakers such as Breathless (Godard), My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant), The American Soldier (Fassbinder), others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMP-LIT 383 - Narrative Avant-Garde Film (Gen.Ed. AT)
Instructor: Don Levine
4 Credits
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST 383 - Narrative Avant-Garde Film (Gen.Ed. AT)
Instructor: Don Levine
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST - 497AC/697AC: Arthouse Cinema 1950-1980
Instructor: Barry Spence
3 Credits
This course will examine the cultural phenomenon of the “art film” during the first three decades of the postwar period (1950s, 60s, 70s). The nature and characteristics of, as well as the relationships connecting and distinguishing, modernist cinema, art cinema, and avant-garde film during this vital period in film history will be the course’s primary concern. We will examine the notion of the auteur and consider its usefulness for thinking about this multiform, innovative cinema. What is the relationship between cinematic modernism and the core principles and representational strategies of modern art? Does modern cinema, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, function as a mental substitute for the lost connection between the individual and the world? Can it restore our belief in the world? The course will pay particular attention to distinctive stylistic attributes, but will also look at dominant thematic concerns. There will be weekly in-class screenings as well as regular streaming of films outside of class. The filmmakers we will consider include, but are not limited to: Chantal Ackerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Stan Brakhage, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Miklós Janscó, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Sergei Paradzhanov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais, Jean-Marie Straub, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST 470- FILM THEORY
Barry Spence 4 credits
This course provides an in-depth overview of key theoretical approaches to the study of cinema by examining historically significant ways of analyzing film form and its social and cultural functions and effects. The course seeks to equip students with a command of the diverse history of theoretical frameworks for understanding the medium and experience of cinema, from early concerns over films relation to other arts to the way the movie as a cultural form has been reconceptualized within the contemporary explosion of new media. The pressing relevance of film theory becomes clear once we stop to consider taking just one small example the many implications of a society-wide movement away from the collective experience of movies in a public theater to private viewing with earbuds on the tiny screen of a cell phone or tablet. We will explore a wide range of questions (concerning the nature of the cinematic medium and its apparatus, aspects of the spectator’s experience of film, and the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of film genre, to name just a few) as a way of putting ourselves in dialogue with various film theoreticians. And we will ground our examination by looking at cinematic practice in relation to theory. This will be done through regular film screenings throughout the semester.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: T
FILM-ST 497P Film Podcasting
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Tue 4pm-7:30pm
This is, above all, a course in film criticism. For as long as there has been cinema there has also been film criticism, from print and broadcast media to web sites and social media in recent decades. The swiftly growing field of audio podcasting offers a versatile new digital medium for film criticism, drawing on many of the strengths of traditional media and bringing its own unique qualities of engagement. In this course, we will study varieties of film writing and explore the craft of creating compelling and illuminating film criticism and the key techniques for producing rich, engaging podcast content. We will work with films across a variety of genres and time periods and do hands-on work in all aspects of producing a film criticism podcast - research, analysis, writing, planning, conducting interviews, moderating, recording, editing, and posting your finished podcasts.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: T, E
FILM-ST 597A Cinemas of Confluence and Alliance
Instructor: Daniel Pope
3 credits
Mon 4:00- 6:30
Cap 25
How can film foster empathy? Bridge difference? Inspire dedication to the dreams, endeavors, and struggles of others? In this course, we explore a selection of international films that engage themes of community, solidarity, and partnerships for social justice, environmental advocacy, intersectional alliance, and other collective efforts to achieve a common good or address a prevailing ill. We investigate the potential for narrative fiction film, documentary, video art, and other media to challenge ideas of self and other and imagine new modes of reflection, representation, and agency. Concepts of selfhood and otherness, questions of empathy, relationship, community and allyship, and such issues as equity, ethics and ecology will frame our discussions.
Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students. UMass Amherst Undergraduate Film Certificate Categories: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: T, E
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies
https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
ELECTIVES - Track B: World Cinema, Cinema Cultures, International Film
COMP-LIT 337 - International History of Animation
Instructor: Christopher Couch
4 Credits
This course traces the history of animation from the late 19th century to today, including short and feature-length films from the United States, Europe and Japan. Topics will include the Fleischer, Disney and UPA studios, directors from Emil Cole to Hayao Miyazaki, and experimental animators including Oskar Fischinger and John Canemaker. Animation for television, including Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle and Matt Groening's The Simpsons will also be considered.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMPLIT 381- Self- Reflective Avant- Garde Film
Instructor: Don Levine
4 credits
Explores modern origin of film experimentation in avant-garde modes such as Expressionism, Surrealism and Contemporary results of this heritage. Trying to determine if film is the most resolutely modern of them media, we’ll look at cinema as the result of two obsessive concerns 1.) The poetic, dreamlike and fantastic 2.) The factual, realistic and socially critical or anarchistic. Thus, we’ll attempt to discover how modern culture deals with avant-garde imperatives to always “make it new.” Films and filmmakers such as Breathless (Godard), My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant), The American Soldier (Fassbinder), others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMP-LIT 383 - Narrative Avant-Garde Film (Gen.Ed. AT)
Instructor: Don Levine
4 Credits
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST 383 - Narrative Avant-Garde Film (Gen.Ed. AT)
Instructor: Don Levine
Focus on narrative problems of love, desire, sexual identity, daily life, and death. These films' investigations of how we might gain distance on our life fictions by questioning and undermining viewer identification with narrative.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
FILM-ST - 497AC/697AC: Arthouse Cinema 1950-1980
Instructor: Barry Spence
3 Credits
This course will examine the cultural phenomenon of the “art film” during the first three decades of the postwar period (1950s, 60s, 70s). The nature and characteristics of, as well as the relationships connecting and distinguishing, modernist cinema, art cinema, and avant-garde film during this vital period in film history will be the course’s primary concern. We will examine the notion of the auteur and consider its usefulness for thinking about this multiform, innovative cinema. What is the relationship between cinematic modernism and the core principles and representational strategies of modern art? Does modern cinema, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, function as a mental substitute for the lost connection between the individual and the world? Can it restore our belief in the world? The course will pay particular attention to distinctive stylistic attributes, but will also look at dominant thematic concerns. There will be weekly in-class screenings as well as regular streaming of films outside of class. The filmmakers we will consider include, but are not limited to: Chantal Ackerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Stan Brakhage, Robert Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Werner Herzog, Miklós Janscó, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Sergei Paradzhanov, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alain Resnais, Jean-Marie Straub, Andrei Tarkovsky, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Wim Wenders.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: H2
COMP-LIT 350: INTERNATIONAL FILM
Instructor: Barry Spence
4 credits
This general education course will screen films from across the globe studying examples of a range of lesser-known subgenres of the Horror film, such as Giallo (Italian genre mixing slasher horror with detective mysteries), Fantastique (French genre mixing gothic horror with fantasy erotica), and Jiangshi (Hong Kong genre mixing slasher horror with Kung Fu). And we will consider in equal measure the so-called dystopian film. We will look at the interrelationship connecting these two modes, which can be seen at work in films like Battle Royale. This course will include a primary focus on gender issues, will examine the representation of women, and will screen (transgressive) examples of these modes by women filmmakers. The intention of this course is to expose students to a cultural diversity of these vital contemporary film genres beyond the conventional Hollywood fare. Weekly film screenings and discussion.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
GenEd: AT
COMPLIT 391SF- International Sci-Fi Cinema
Instructor: Christopher NC Couch
3 Credits
This course provides an introduction to science fiction cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Beginning with the experiments of the Melies Brothers and the importance of German Expressionist films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the course considers technological prognostication from Destination Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventure and science fiction in films like Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and the dystopian imagination from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to District 9. The course will also highlight the roles of women writers and directors from Thea von Harbou to Kathryn Bigelow, and technological cinematic advances from matte painting and process shots to CGI.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 297SF Special Topics- Possible Futures: Science Fiction in Global Cinemas
Instructor: Kevin Anderson
3 credits
There are multiple growing concerns regarding issues of climate, class, race, gender identity, and the nature of democracy in our contemporary world. Science fiction has proven to be a thought-provoking genre to help raise awareness to many of these social and environmental issues. This course takes a global perspective on such pressing issues by examining science fiction films from around the world. As such, the course uses science fiction films as primary texts, accompanied by weekly readings. Students will engage in a critical analysis of the assigned films and readings in order to better appreciate what we can begin to anticipate regarding our future.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G (limit one 200 level course)
FILM-ST 330: Film Auteurs: Akira Kurosawa
Instructor: Barry Spence
Credits 4
This class will focus on one, or more, specific filmmaker and will aim to highlight their cinematic models, distinctive style and recurrent themes, within the theoretical framework of the "auteur theory", thus offering students an introductory and comprehensive view of perhaps the most central concept in film studies. In the first place, this class will address the historical evolution of the debate around "auteur theory," from the "politique des auteurs" to the "death of the author", while providing author criticism and analysis in practice. It will tackle questions such as: Why do certain filmmakers qualify as auteurs? What is the difference between commercial cinema and auteur cinema? Due to the collaborative nature of filmmaking, can we talk about the author of a film? What is the intersection between gender and authorship? What does it mean to be a woman author? Secondly, it will concentrate on one specific filmmaker: students will read pertinent bibliography (e.g. biography, film reviews, etc.) on their films, watch and study their most significant film production, and contextualize it historically, geographically and culturally.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 391SF- International Sci-Fi Cinema
Christopher NC Couch
This course provides an introduction to science fiction cinema from the end of the nineteenth century to today. Beginning with the experiments of the Melies Brothers and the importance of German Expressionist films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the course considers technological prognostication from Destination Moon to 2001: A Space Odyssey, adventure and science fiction in films like Forbidden Planet and Star Wars, and the dystopian imagination from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to District 9. The course will also highlight the roles of women writers and directors from Thea von Harbou to Kathryn Bigelow, and technological cinematic advances from matte painting and process shots to CGI.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 397A- ST Alien Encounters
Istructor: Daniel Pope
3 credits
Could extraterrestrial life exist in the cosmos? Scientists say yes, possibly on billions of planets in our galaxy alone. In this class, we will examine the international cinema of alien encounters and explore how these films envision the alien other. How do these films both reflect and shape our own experience of "the alien" or the unknown "other"? Since the beginning of cinema, the figure of the alien has visited the big screen with its promise of otherworldly wonders and its threat of unthinkable perils. This course will explore how alien encounters reflect the haunting of historical realities (such as European voyages of discovery, conquest, and colonization) as well as contemporary issues, such as international conflict (war or global migration), questions of identity (race, gender, sexuality), and the power and perils of emerging technologies (nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, space travel). Imagining encounters with intelligent beings beyond our own cultural and ideological sphere provides powerful new perspectives on what we think we know about the world, about ourselves, and about others.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 397E: Film at the End of the World
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3
Climate disaster, world war, aliens, cosmic collisions, dystopias, zombies, the rise of the machines, catastrophic pandemics, mass extinction, prophesied apocalypse. What do films about the end of the world tell us about contemporary realities? What insights do they offer into the cultural moment that produces them and the prevailing attitudes and realities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and gender identity? How do they speak to our anxieties and fears about the future as well as our hopes and aspirations? How does the genre of end-of-the-world films intersect with other genres—thriller, action film, neo-noir, comedy, art-house, romance, drama, experimental, historical? In this course we will study the cinema of eschatology, of ultimate endings, and analyze a range of filmic approaches to the philosophical, psychological, social, and aesthetic questions posed in end-of-the-world films.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST 304: German Cinema: From Berlin to Hollywood (also: /German 304 )
Instructor: Mariana Ivanova
Credits: 3
This course offers a survey of German cinema from the 1920s on until the 21st century and focuses on transborder mobility of pictures and artists. We will examine the emigration of film directors from Babelsberg, the epicenter of the ‘Golden Age’ in German cinema to Hollywood. From celebrated directors such as Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch, to stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, we will trace the careers of those working in exile in the 1930s and 1940s. The course will continue with an exploration of the postwar period and the export of West German films into the US, while we look at the work of directors Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarete von Trotta and Harun Farocki who also significantly shaped the perception of North America in Germany. We will conclude with discussions of more recent works by Tom Tykwer and Michael Hanneke, well-known among cineastes today for their international coproductions, Hollywood remakes, or Netflix series. Key issues in the course will be the transformation of film financing and material production circumstances as a result of European funding structures and a persistent ‘transnational aesthetic’ emerging in the work of the above directors. Both big budget blockbusters and independent films will be considered in their implications for film content, style, and social content. Conducted in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
FILM-ST 344: Film and Society in Israel (Also available as JUDAIC 344)
Instructor: Olga Gershenson
Wed 4-6:45
This course uses film to discuss Israeli society. Topics include: foundation of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust survivors, religion, gender, and interethnic relations. All film showings are with English subtitles.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
FILM-ST 353: African Cinema (Also available as French 353)
Also available online as a multimodal class
Instructor: Patrick Mensah
4 credits
Gen Ed course (AT and DU)
Tues 4 pm-6:45 pm
Histories and development of African film and its aesthetic forms, from its inception to the present day. The sociocultural, economic, and political forces and imperatives defining its forms and shaping its agendas. Questions this work raises in film aesthetics and theory as a whole. All screenings available online. Line up of screenings: The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo) Lumumba, Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck) Xala, Borom Sarret, Moolaade, Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene) Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck) Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako) Afrique, Je te plumerai (Jean-Marie Teno) Keita, Heritage of the Griot (Dany Kouyaté) Pièces d’Identités (Mweze Ngangura) Tsotsi (Gavin Hood) District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli) Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety) Course taught in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
Film 397V Latin American Cinema (also available as SPAN 397W)
Instructor: Barbara Zecchi
Latin American Cinema
Credits: 3
Monday 4:00-6:30
The course is designed to introduce students to the cinematic work of some of the most important Latin American directors . The course will center on a variety of topics that are vital to the understanding of the most significant political, historical, social and cultural events that have shaped Latin America. Some of the topics to be examined in the class are: racial, gender, sexual and identity issues; nation formation; revolution; immigration; repression; utopia; resistance; violence; freedom and indigenism. Students will be expected to develop interpretative filmic skills through an exploration of the connections between the technical composition of the films and the social, political, and cultural context to which each film refers.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: N
FILM-ST 497L /697FL Fellini- The Liar (Also available as ITALIAN 497FL/ ITALIAN 697FL)
(Also available online)
Instructor: Andrea Malaguti
Credits: 3
Tue 4:00-6:30
The course examines the most important films by Federico Fellini (whose "La dolce vita" and "8 1/2" both entered the 100 greatest movies list of the British Film Institute) to understand how his work both contends with his contemporaries (especially Hollywood) and still has a strong grip on our film imagery today. Lectures and discussions in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
FRENCH 353 – African Film
Patrick Mensah Cap: 30, 4 Credits
Lecture: Tu 4:00PM-6:45PM; Discussion: Thu 2:30PM-3:45PM OR Thu 4:00PM-5:15PM
This course offers an introduction to African film as an aesthetic and cultural practice. Students should expect to be familiarized with the key ideas and objectives that have inspired and driven that practice since the early 1960s, and be furnished with the technical tools and methodological skills that would permit them to understand, analyze, and think critically about the artistic and thematic aspects of the films that are screened. They should also expect the course to provide them with a critical peek into several cardinal issues of social and cultural relevance in contemporary Africa and its history. Issues of interest typically include, the nation state and its declining status, imperatives of decolonization, economic dependency and structural adjustment programs, orality and changing traditional cultures, diasporic migrations, urbanization and its problems, gender relations, civil wars, child soldiers, gangs, and related themes. Filmmakers studied include, but are not limited to, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ousmane Sembene, Raoul Peck, Jean-Marie Teno, Dani Kouyate, Mweze Ngangura, Gavin Hood, Neill Blomkamp, Moufida Tlatli, Djibril Diop Mambety (please note that this list is subject to change, and shall be updated as future changes are made). The course is conducted in English, and requires no prior knowledge of the field. All films are streamed to your computer from the UMass library on demand. Required readings are provided online, and no book purchases are necessary. (Gen.Ed. AT, DG)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
GERMAN 304 – From Berlin to Hollywood
Mariana Ivanova Cap: 10, 4 Credit
Lec: TBA
This course offers a survey of German cinema from the 1920s on until the 21st century and focuses on transborder mobility of pictures and artists. We will examine the emigration of film directors from Babelsberg, the epicenter of the ‘Golden Age’ in German cinema to Hollywood. From celebrated directors such as Fritz Lang, Friedrich Murnau, and Ernst Lubitsch, to stars, such as Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, we will trace the careers of those working in exile in the 1930s and 1940s. The course will continue with an exploration of the postwar period and the export of West German films into the US, while we look at the work of directors Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarete von Trotta and Harun Farocki who also significantly shaped the perception of North America in Germany. We will conclude with discussions of more recent works by Tom Tykwer and Michael Hanneke, well-known among cineastes today for their international coproductions, Hollywood remakes, or Netflix series. Key issues in the course will be the transformation of film financing and material production circumstances as a result of European funding structures and a persistent ‘transnational aesthetic’ emerging in the work of the above directors. Both big budget blockbusters and independent films will be considered in their implications for film content, style, and social content. Conducted in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
ITALIAN 497FL /697FL Fellini- The Liar (Also available as FILM 497FL)
(Also available online)
Instructor: Andrea Malaguti
Credits: 3
Tue 4:00-6:30
The course examines the most important films by Federico Fellini (whose "La dolce vita" and "8 1/2" both entered the 100 greatest movies list of the British Film Institute) to understand how his work both contends with his contemporaries (especially Hollywood) and still has a strong grip on our film imagery today. Lectures and discussions in English.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
JUDAIC 344 - Film and Society in Israel
Olga Gershenson Cap: 10, 4 Credits
We 4:00PM - 6:45PM
This course uses film to discuss Israeli society. Topics include: foundation of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust survivors, religion, gender, and interethnic relations. All film showings are with English subtitles. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
SPANISH 397W – Special Topics: Latin American Cinema
Barbara Zecchi Cap: 15, 3 Credits
Lec: Mo 4:00PM-6:30PM
The course is designed to introduce students to the films of some of the most important Latin American directors. The course will center on a variety of topics that are vital to the understanding of the most significant political, historical, social and cultural events that have shaped Latin America.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: N
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies
https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
ELECTIVES - Track C: Filmmaking Film production
Every semester we offer one production class taught by a visiting filmmaker, through the Visiting Professor Series
Please check this semester offering:
Filmmaking in the 21st Century: Visiting Professors Series
Other courses that count for the production track are:
FILM-ST 497V – Video Essay in Film Criticism
Daniel Pope
3 Credits
This is a course in planning, scripting, and editing video essays in film criticism, working with films from around the world and across film history. The field of film criticism is taking new forms in recent years, with social media, podcasts, websites and blogs dedicated to analyzing and discussing movies. Out of this trend, the video essay emerges as an exceptionally attractive and powerful medium for the film critic. In this class, we examine a wide array of video essays and explore the unique analytical and expressive opportunities the medium offers. A primary emphasis in the course is the study and practice of film criticism as an intellectual and creative endeavor with its own particular objectives, challenges, and expressive powers. With this foundation, we develop the critical, creative, and technical skills necessary for making effective video essays addressing films, directors, genres, national cinemas, and cultural and social issues. Making a video essay is in many ways like making a movie. As such we are engaged not only in film analysis and film writing but also in video editing, image composition, sound design, and other aspects of moving image media.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR THROUGH BDIC CATEGORY: D&G, T
FILM-ST 497P Film Podcasting
Instructor: Daniel Pope
Credits: 3 credits
This is, above all, a course in film criticism. For as long as there has been cinema there has also been film criticism, from print and broadcast media to web sites and social media in recent decades. The swiftly growing field of audio podcasting offers a versatile new digital medium for film criticism, drawing on many of the strengths of traditional media and bringing its own unique qualities of engagement. In this course, we will study varieties of film writing and explore the craft of creating compelling and illuminating film criticism and the key techniques for producing rich, engaging podcast content. We will work with films across a variety of genres and time periods and do hands-on work in all aspects of producing a film criticism podcast - research, analysis, writing, planning, conducting interviews, moderating, recording, editing, and posting your finished podcasts.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: II, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: T, E
FILM-ST - 493L – S-Experimental Film & Video
Kevin Anderson
3 Credits
This course explores the genre of Experimental Film and Video with a critical eye toward the history and current articulations of this form of production in both feature film and short form movies; videos. The course begins with an introduction to the genre, then explores Experimental Film; Video according to three different categories: Experimentation with Narrative, Experimentation with Structure; Form, and Experimentation with the line between Fact and Fiction. Students will emerge from this course with a solid foundation in the history and theory of experimental film; video as evidenced by writing projects, research papers, and student-produced experimental media projects.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: III, IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: D&G
FILM-ST- 497S Untold Screenwriting
Daniel Pope, 3 Credits
This is a course in writing unconventional screenplays, singular film scripts that not only take innovative forms but also tell stories not often found in established film and media production. We will read from an international selection of screenplays, examine clips from unconventional films, and address questions of representation, inclusion, and the work of writing underrepresented characters and untold narratives for the screen. “Untold” signifies in two ways—it can mean boundless or limitless, and it can refer to a narrative that is not recounted. We are witnessing the beginnings of a film and media renaissance, with new works emerging and evolving that tell stories not commonly told and take innovative forms that can surprise, edify, delight, and enrich us. In this class, we will write screenplays for such works, starting with an appreciation for established forms and conventions of screenwriting and pushing to expand the boundaries of what stories films can tell, and how.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: IV, V
FILM STUDIES MAJOR IN BDIC CATEGORY: E
FILM-ST 397M: MAKING SHORT FILMS (Offered ONLINE through CPE/UWW)
Instructor: David Casals-Roma
Credits: 3
Making short films is a step by step course that goes through the basic aspects you need to know in order to make a film. We will start with the preproduction process and how to find engaging stories. You will learn how to break-down scripts, cast actors, find crew, scout locations, prepare budgets, shooting plans, call sheets and other important paperwork. For the production process the course will focus on shooting, blocking, lighting, directing actors, cinematography, sound and other important aspects to be aware of when you are on set. In the postproduction process you will learn the basics of editing images, sound design, music, effects and color correction. Finally, we will analyze the film market and the possibilities that new filmmakers have in the industry. (Important: There will be some practical exercises appointed by the professor. As film equipment is not provided for the class, you will need to have access to a camera)
Certificate Category: V
FILM MAJOR through BDIC requirement: E
Film-St 397EF - Experiments in Film (Offered ONLINE through CPE/UWW)
Instructor: Christopher Janke
Credits: 3
Let’s Break Some Rules Together: Experiments in Film. Is Christopher Nolan experimental? Richard Linklater? Marjane Satrapi? Abbas Kiarostami? The language of contemporary cinema is made from the bold experiments of the past. Filmmakers like Chris Marker and Maya Deren turned budgetary problems into films that stand the test of time. Adrian Piper’s radical experiments in racial identity: are these films? How would we talk about how they were cast – or about the set? We will look at the risks filmmakers take and why they take them, and we will wonder how they (or we) can know if their risks have paid off. And then we will use our creative resources to turn our own challenges into artistic constraints – into visions where our problems and concerns, our inspirations and quirks, spur us to create the unusual, the unique, and the daring. Come risk and play. Requirements include: short weekly experiments, reflections, risks, and films; watching films; and an independent project. In addition to a computer and internet access, you will need access to a camera that shoots video (a cellphone can work) as well as to video editing software and to a way to transfer between the two.
Certificate Category: V
FILM MAJOR through BDIC requirement: E
FILM-ST 497DF- Short Documentary Filmmaking (Offered ONLINE through CPE/UWW)
Instructor: David Casals Roma
Credits: 3
In the same way that fiction films are the mirror of our imagination, documentaries are the mirror of our surrounding reality. But making a documentary requires a creative point of view by the director and the knowledge of some filmmaking techniques. In this course you will learn how to develop your ideas for documentary, how to write a script, how to plan de production, how to shoot interviews and how to structure your movie in the editing room. Moreover, you will write, shoot and edit a 5-minute documentary during the course. It is important that you can have access to a camera, a computer and an editing software to edit your documentary.
Certificate Category: V
FILM MAJOR through BDIC requirement: E
FILM-ST 397K - Screenwriting: Film & Video (Taught ONLINE through CPE/UWW)
Instructor: Tom Benedek
Credits: 3
In this class students will learn character and plot creation techniques in feature films, TV, short films, online media and develop their own stories and scripts for selected formats. This course is an elective for the film studies major through BDIC.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: V
FILM MAJOR through BDIC requirement: E
FILM-ST 397K - Screenwriting: Film & Video (Taught ONLINE through CPE/UWW)
Instructor: Tom Benedek
Credits: 3
In this class students will learn character and plot creation techniques in feature films, TV, short films, online media and develop their own stories and scripts for selected formats. This course is an elective for the film studies major through BDIC.
UNDERGRADUATE FILM STUDIES CERTIFICATE CATEGORY: V
FILM MAJOR through BDIC requirement: E
To find other courses that fulfill this and other categories, please check also the 5-Colleges Course Catalogue in Film Studies
https://www.fivecolleges.edu/academics/courses/film
ELECTIVES - Track D: DIY (Design your own track) | |||||
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"Brian Formo"
] | 2023-11-23T00:00:00 | Upon May December’s release, Brian Formo chats with director Todd Haynes about the films that helped sculpt the multilayered tone of his psychological melodramedy, including Persona, Sunset Boulevard and The Graduate. | en | https://letterboxd.com/journal/todd-haynes-may-december-watchlist-interview/ | One of the most enjoyable aspects of watching a Todd Haynes film is the conversations afterward. He is an analytical filmmaker with many layers to his narrative, often without a clear ending; his films can occupy your brain long after they’ve ended. That’s just the effect that his psychological melodramedy May December is having on Letterboxd members—particularly Nora: “As a bit (a bit that is literally only funny to me) I’ve seen it three times in theaters to treat it like people treat blockbusters,” she writes. “But after a point it’s like okay no this movie actually is just very very good, biting and hilarious and weird, and it gets funnier every time I see it.” (She’s now onto her fourth watch, observing, “This whole movie is a beautiful mystery told through scenes of people talking to each other and about each other.”)
We interrogated Todd Haynes about some of the cinematic secrets to unravelling his beautiful mystery—video of which you can watch above—but before we get there, we have to go back to 2015, when May December is set. It all begins with the arrival of television actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) in Savannah, Georgia. She’s here to meet Gracie (Julianne Moore), the woman whose tabloid scandal she’s about to resurrect with her portrayal in an upcoming indie film. The tale is such: in the ’90s, a then 36-year-old Gracie worked at a local pet store, where she was caught having an illicit affair with a thirteen-year-old shopboy, Joe (Charles Melton plays the 2015-set version). In prison, Gracie gave birth to their first child (Piper Curda); when she was released, they married and had two more children (Elizabeth Yu and Gabriel Chung).
Twenty years later, and they’re still together. Joe is now a man about the same age as both the actress herself and as Gracie was when the story initially broke. With the embattled couple preparing to become empty nesters as their twins go to college, Elizabeth’s observational style starts conversations the two had avoided throughout their history.
“This delves into the homoerotic aspects of observing, studying, and embodying another woman’s persona,” writes danielleloucamp in a five-star review, continuing with praise for Samy Burch’s debut screenplay, and noting that “the remarkable evenness is profoundly compassionate. And Haynes skillfully infuses high camp with a rare blend of tenderness and confrontation.”
Because this is the first thing I thought of when I saw the film and then it was on your list, let’s start withPersona. How do you see your film having a conversation with Ingmar Bergman’s?
Todd Haynes: Well, just to even say your film has a conversation with Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona is a tall order, but I couldn’t not think of Persona when I first read Samy’s script, in the clear way that it’s such a unique example of a film that pairs these two women and where likenesses are being exchanged, or that one character is learning about the likeness of the other and trying to incorporate her into her process as an actor. And in Persona, Liv Ullmann plays an actress who’s been stricken with stage fright and has stopped speaking. Bibi Andersson is a nurse and a caretaker, called in to look after her.
Bergman’s original instinct for the film, I read somewhere, was an image. Sometimes it just starts there; that’s happened for me before. You just sort of get an image or a feeling, and that’s where the whole movie kind of derives from. And for him it was this image of these two attractive blonde women, who resembled each other, in matching straw hats, in the sun, comparing hands.
That shot figures into the film Persona, but it’s not necessarily the shot you think of when we all think of Persona. The ultimate shot is where these two are almost playing as if they’re in a mirror, and their gaze turns to the lens of the camera. It’s like a dream. It’s coming out of a dream that Bibi Andersson is having, and one of them sort of brushes the bangs of the hair from the other. It’s a moment where time stops in cinema. There were opportunities in this movie to play with scenes in mirrors and to play with watching these two complicated, powerful women in a dance of resemblances and a power dynamic and watching all those things. So, it was impossible to not be inspired by Bergman.
You mentioned that Liv Ullmann plays an actress in Persona, so let’s stick with performance: the next one we want to get to is Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, who also has a breakdown. Is all acting a form of madness?
I love that question. I mean, I don’t think Samy Burch or Natalie Portman or Julianne Moore would necessarily disagree, and they’d be interested in what that question opens up. Sunset Boulevard, in this context, however, is the first film that I think about when I think about a story of an older woman, younger man relationship.
When this script first came to me, and it evoked our memories as a culture of Mary Kay Letourneau and how distinctive a story that was and how much that dominated the tabloid landscape when it came out, it made me go, “Wait a minute. These stories about older women and younger men have been a through line in some of the most formative and influential and most beautiful films ever made in Hollywood.” Sunset Boulevard, again, it’s about acting and it’s about an actor, and it’s about an aging actor. So, the actor side of the continuum is switched or swapped in Sunset Boulevard, because Natalie Portman is the actor in our movie, who’s the younger woman. But that alone set in motion themes that have already been out there that I thought [Sunset Boulevard] was the place to start in my preparation.
And the most famous line from that film, of course, is, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” I wanted to ask about your use of closeups in May December, specifically the pet-shop scene when Natalie is acting out the seduction scene alone.
They’re selective, the closeups. I used a lot of zooms in the film and some of them have been discussed with a great deal of curiosity and attention by journalists, but this isn’t a scene that usually comes up, so thank you, but the zoom is part of that language of the movie.
The whole scene is just a series of zooms as we walk her into the corner where Gracie and Joe ostensibly had sex all those years ago. Then zooming in on the reverse angle, we start at the closest end of the zoom, in an intimate closeup of her as she’s imagining what it might be like to be in the throttles of this young man’s arms and be in the throes of that experience. We’re slowly zooming out and kind of pulling her out of the spell that has been cast by her moment alone, and it’s a moment where she has the freedom alone to really experience what the acting feels like.
We’ve got to get into the music. The next film you sent us isThe Go-Between—did you use Michel Legrand’s score directly or was it recreated?
All recreated and all rearranged and re-recorded by Marcelo Zarvos, my composer, and added to with original music. He filled it out; it really became Marcelo’s own score, but it uses the melodic signature from The Go-Between, which is a film that I had forgotten about. While I was collecting more directly relevant sources and ideas and reference films for May December—primarily to put into my image book and create a visual example of what the script did in words to start to share with my creative departments—The Go-Between was on Turner Classic Movies, and I watched it. I think I saw it when it came out when I was a kid, but it’s a film that’s sort of fallen out of sight and is not something you see brought up much, and so I hadn’t seen it in so many years, and I had forgotten so much about it.
The score asserts itself at the beginning of that movie with such force, an ominous sense of foreboding, and puts you truly on the edge of your seat as a viewer. Because the story is this sort of pastoral coming-of-age story—set at the turn of the century—of a boy who visits his rich friend’s family for the summer and develops an infatuation with his [friend’s] older sister, Julie Christie. The score makes you read every piece of the frame as the film unfolds, looking for clues as to where this film is leading and what’s behind the manifest narrative that we get in the story. That was so exhilarating to me, and I thought it could be so applicable to the experience of watching this film.
When you were first editing, did you always include that score before the “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs” line? Because with the score and the zooms you speak of, that is such a great entry to the tone of the film.
Even more crazily, before filming, I put in every cue that I thought music would play. This was really for Marcelo, but I was on the plane to Savannah to begin pre-production, and I just made notes in the whole script for where I thought music would play, and I laid in cues from The Go-Between. This was basically a document I was creating for Marcelo to start getting the wheels of his brilliant mind going as early as possible.
I first shared the score with all my partners who were looking at the image book, but then on set, we were playing each cue and turning down the music for the dialogue recording and then turning it back up. I just started to use The Go-Between cues in every single shot that we shot on set. So, we were all inundated with this music. This music was how we experienced the shooting of the film—I’ve never done anything like that before. That informed so many things that followed: the editing and ultimately my choice to try to really use that melodic aspect of Legrand’s score.
Speaking of music, we’ll go toThe Graduate next. Iconic pop music, of course. What is your memory of the first time that you saw The Graduate, and how did that affect you?
Man, The Graduate was one of those films that I saw when I was young that, literally, I started to feel the pulse of creative desire as a filmmaker when I watched it, because of the way the movie is shot, the choices about how that movie is visualized. This is very relevant to what we did in May December, and it’s also relevant to another film on my list, Manhattan, which Gordon Willis shot for Woody Allen. Both of these films, of course, are comedies.
One thing that I wanted to focus on The Graduate for is the use of actual graduation. Graduation is a part of your storyline as well: it’s a natural transition but at different stages, different hopes and fears.
That’s interesting; I hadn’t necessarily thought of that aspect of The Graduate in relation to this story. Because The Graduate is the sort of malaise that follows a graduation and a successful series of years in college, ostensibly, as we learned in this sort of alienation that follows that moment of him leaving school and coming back home.
This is the reverse, where we’re leading up to the graduation that marks the end, the penultimate end of the story, and a kind of panic, a kind of anxiety that I think is being felt by Gracie and Joe throughout the film that is certainly compounded by Elizabeth’s emergence and entry into their lives. But it’s also about the empty nest that’s looming, and the fact that that house is going to be empty with each other in it and be forced to confront each other in ways they never had before.
But to me, the way The Graduate works is in the performances and the incredible script. The comedy is how it gets the audience thinking about what’s going on off the frame. The cuts have a suspenseful element to them, so they’re part of the humor of how that film works.
That’s true for Manhattan as well, where shots are allowed to play out and not move. The gorgeous compositions of Gordon Willis are setting the stage for this story about Manhattan contemporary social life and culture. And how actors [like in The Graduate] are used in blocking: these wide-angle frames that are locked off inside apartment rooms. Diane Keaton and Woody Allen have a conversation and they keep leaving the frame and coming back in and going down the hallway and coming around the corner.
That slight distance gives it its humor. If it was constantly cutting and covering every angle, it would’ve dissipated something really sharp and really observant about that film, and an entire tone that’s conducted through the whole film. It’s something that lent similar ideas about waiting for the cut and holding until you’re kind of squirming in your seat, in May December.
And with those two films grouped together, I think maybe it could be a good time to talk about the term “May-December romance”, which I didn’t even know prior to this. Many people reading this probably won’t, so, what is a May-December romance?
It’s interesting when something is known in the American vernacular and not in the British. It’s definitely a term that doesn’t translate out of the English language well. I’ve just always thought of it as a slightly old-fashioned, demure way of describing a relationship between an elder and a younger person with a big age gap. May is spring, December is winter—that range. But the film’s title plays into the month of May, too, and May is the bracketed month of an inevitability around the summer. It begins with a Memorial Day celebration and ends with graduation. So all this anxiety and nerves are circulating through that month and it plays into the title as well.
Well, since we’re on the calendar,Sunday Bloody Sunday is the last film on your list.
It’s always been a favorite film of mine. It also deals with an older, younger relationship, but in triplicate, because it’s an older woman and an older man who were both involved with a younger man, played by Murray Head. It’s Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch with him. It’s set in contemporary London in the early 1970s, and it’s about all these sophisticates who are aware that the same young man is having a relationship with an older woman and an older man. They even share somewhat of a social circle, the two elder characters, and it’s really hard on [them]. The young one has all the freedom and the prerogative to come and go, and they’re left with the desire to try to hang on. They desire, but they try to pretend that they’re more mature.
At the very end, the Murray Head character goes off to America to pursue his career as a sculptor. And finally, Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch meet at a park across the street from a mutual friend’s house. It shares a final setting with May December, where the two people who’ve been facing off through the movie have a face off in a park at the end. In Sunday Bloody Sunday, they haven’t seen each other through the whole film, so you’re building up anticipation for that scene. It’s just a beautifully shot and constructed film. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 83 | https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/ | en | How America Got Mean | [
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"David Brooks"
] | 2023-08-14T10:00:00+00:00 | In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. | en | https://cdn.theatlantic.com/_next/static/images/favicon-3888b0e329526a975703e3059a02b92d.ico | The Atlantic | https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/ | This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.
My second, related question is: Why have Americans become so mean? I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
We’re enmeshed in some sort of emotional, relational, and spiritual crisis, and it undergirds our political dysfunction and the general crisis of our democracy. What is going on?
Over the past few years, different social observers have offered different stories to explain the rise of hatred, anxiety, and despair.
The technology story: Social media is driving us all crazy.
The sociology story: We’ve stopped participating in community organizations and are more isolated.
The demography story: America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country, a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic.
The economy story: High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.
I agree, to an extent, with all of these stories, but I don’t think any of them is the deepest one. Sure, social media has bad effects, but it is everywhere around the globe—and the mental-health crisis is not. Also, the rise of despair and hatred has engulfed a lot of people who are not on social media. Economic inequality is real, but it doesn’t fully explain this level of social and emotional breakdown. The sociologists are right that we’re more isolated, but why? What values lead us to choose lifestyles that make us lonely and miserable?
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
Moral formation, as I will use that stuffy-sounding term here, comprises three things. First, helping people learn to restrain their selfishness. How do we keep our evolutionarily conferred egotism under control? Second, teaching basic social and ethical skills. How do you welcome a neighbor into your community? How do you disagree with someone constructively? And third, helping people find a purpose in life. Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.
For a large part of its history, America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its Founding Fathers had a low view of human nature, and designed the Constitution to mitigate it (even while validating that low view of human nature by producing a document rife with racism and sexism). “Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “as they are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.”
If such flawed, self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent neighbors to one another, they were going to need some training. For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. In 1788, Noah Webster wrote, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities ; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” The progressive philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality “every moment of the day, five days a week.” Hollis Frissell, the president of the Hampton Institute, an early school for African Americans, declared, “Character is the main object of education.” As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers’ unions, stated that “an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values continues to be a top priority for education.”
The moral-education programs that stippled the cultural landscape during this long stretch of history came from all points on the political and religious spectrums. School textbooks such as McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers not only taught students how to read and write; they taught etiquette, and featured stories designed to illustrate right and wrong behavior. In the 1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine for Black children, The Brownies’ Book, had a regular column called “The Judge,” which provided guidance to young readers on morals and manners. There were thriving school organizations with morally earnest names that sound quaint today—the Courtesy Club, the Thrift Club, the Knighthood of Youth.
Beyond the classroom lay a host of other groups: the YMCA; the Sunday-school movement; the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts; the settlement-house movement, which brought rich and poor together to serve the marginalized; Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which extended our moral concerns to include proper care for the natural world; professional organizations, which enforced ethical codes; unions and workplace associations, which, in addition to enhancing worker protections and paychecks, held up certain standards of working-class respectability. And of course, by the late 19th century, many Americans were members of churches or other religious communities. Mere religious faith doesn’t always make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart toward some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the underserved—those things tend to.
An educational approach with German roots that was adopted by Scandinavian societies in the mid-to-late 19th century had a wide influence on America. It was called Bildung, roughly meaning “spiritual formation.” As conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Bildung approach gave professors complete freedom to put moral development at the center of a university’s mission. In schools across Scandinavia, students studied literature and folk cultures to identify their own emotions, wounds, and weaknesses, in order to become the complex human beings that modern society required. Schools in the Bildung tradition also aimed to clarify the individual’s responsibilities to the wider world—family, friends, nation, humanity. Start with the soul and move outward.
The Bildung movement helped inspire the Great Books programs that popped up at places like Columbia and the University of Chicago. They were based on the conviction that reading the major works of world literature and thinking about them deeply would provide the keys to living a richer life. Meanwhile, discipline in the small proprieties of daily existence—dressing formally, even just to go shopping or to a ball game—was considered evidence of uprightness: proof that you were a person who could be counted on when the large challenges came.
Much of American moral education drew on an ethos expressed by the headmaster of the Stowe School, in England, who wrote in 1930 that the purpose of his institution was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” America’s National Institute for Moral Instruction was founded in 1911 and published a “Children’s Morality Code,” with 10 rules for right living. At the turn of the 20th century, Mount Holyoke College, an all-women’s institution, was an example of an intentionally thick moral community. When a young Frances Perkins was a student there, her Latin teacher detected a certain laziness in her. She forced Perkins to spend hours conjugating Latin verbs, to cultivate self-discipline. Perkins grew to appreciate this: “For the first time I became conscious of character.” The school also called upon women to follow morally ambitious paths. “Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go,” the school’s founder implored. Holyoke launched women into lives of service in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Perkins, who would become the first woman to serve in a presidential Cabinet (Franklin D. Roosevelt’s), was galvanized there.
These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted, through books and lectures. But we learn most virtues the way we learn crafts, through the repetition of many small habits and practices, all within a coherent moral culture—a community of common values, whose members aspire to earn one another’s respect.
The other guiding premise was that concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste: An objective moral order exists, and human beings are creatures who habitually sin against that order. This recognition was central, for example, to the way the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s thought about character formation. “Instead of assured progress in wisdom and decency man faces the ever present possibility of swift relapse not merely to animalism but into such calculated cruelty as no other animal can practice,” Martin Luther King Jr. believed. Elsewhere, he wrote, “The force of sinfulness is so stubborn a characteristic of human nature that it can only be restrained when the social unit is armed with both moral and physical might.”
At their best, the civil-rights marchers in this prophetic tradition understood that they could become corrupted even while serving a noble cause. They could become self-righteous because their cause was just, hardened by hatred of their opponents, prideful as they asserted power. King’s strategy of nonviolence was an effort simultaneously to expose the sins of their oppressors and to restrain the sinful tendencies inherent in themselves. “What gave such widely compelling force to King’s leadership and oratory,” the historian George Marsden argues, “was his bedrock conviction that moral law was built into the universe.”
A couple of obvious things need to be said about this ethos of moral formation that dominated American life for so long. It prevailed alongside all sorts of hierarchies that we now rightly find abhorrent: whites superior to Blacks, men to women, Christians to Jews, straight people to gay people. And the emphasis on morality didn’t produce perfect people. Moral formation doesn’t succeed in making people angels—it tries to make them better than they otherwise might be.
Furthermore, we would never want to go back to the training methods that prevailed for so long, rooted in so many thou shall nots and so much shaming, and riddled with so much racism and sexism. Yet a wise accounting should acknowledge that emphasizing moral formation meant focusing on an important question—what is life for?—and teaching people how to bear up under inevitable difficulties. A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard. In some ways, the old approach to moral formation was, at least theoretically, egalitarian: If your status in the community was based on character and reputation, then a farmer could earn dignity as readily as a banker. This ethos came down hard on self-centeredness and narcissistic display. It offered practical guidance on how to be a good neighbor, a good friend.
And then it mostly went away.
The crucial pivot happened just after World War II, as people wrestled with the horrors of the 20th century. One group, personified by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, argued that recent events had exposed the prevalence of human depravity and the dangers, in particular, of tribalism, nationalism, and collective pride. This group wanted to double down on moral formation, with a greater emphasis on humility.
Another group, personified by Carl Rogers, a founder of humanistic psychology, focused on the problem of authority. The trouble with the 20th century, the members of this group argued, was that the existence of rigid power hierarchies led to oppression in many spheres of life. We need to liberate individuals from these authority structures, many contended. People are naturally good and can be trusted to do their own self-actualization.
A cluster of phenomenally successful books appeared in the decade after World War II, making the case that, as Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman wrote in Peace of Mind (1946), “thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses.” People can trust the goodness inside. His book topped the New York Times best-seller list for 58 weeks. Dr. Spock’s first child-rearing manual was published the same year. That was followed by books like The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). According to this ethos, morality is not something that we develop in communities. It’s nurtured by connecting with our authentic self and finding our true inner voice. If people are naturally good, we don’t need moral formation; we just need to let people get in touch with themselves. Organization after organization got out of the moral-formation business and into the self-awareness business. By the mid‑1970s, for example, the Girl Scouts’ founding ethos of service to others had shifted: “How can you get more in touch with you? What are you thinking? What are you feeling?” one Girl Scout handbook asked.
Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America : “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.” The postwar period saw similar change at the college level, Anthony Kronman, a former dean of Yale Law School, has noted. The “research ideal” supplanted the earlier humanistic ideal of cultivating the whole student. As academics grew more specialized, Kronman has argued, the big questions—What is the meaning of life? How do you live a good life?—lost all purchase. Such questions became unprofessional for an academic to even ask.
In sphere after sphere, people decided that moral reasoning was not really relevant. Psychology’s purview grew, especially in family and educational matters, its vocabulary framing “virtually all public discussion” of the moral life of children, James Davison Hunter, a prominent American scholar on character education, noted in 2000. “For decades now, contributions from philosophers and theologians have been muted or nonexistent.” Psychology is a wonderful profession, but its goal is mental health, not moral growth.
From the start, some worried about this privatizing of morality. “If what is good, what is right, what is true is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ ” Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1955 collection, Essays in the Public Philosophy, “then we are outside the traditions of civility.” His book was hooted down by establishment figures such as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the de-moralization of American culture was under way.
Over the course of the 20th century, words relating to morality appeared less and less frequently in the nation’s books: According to a 2012 paper, usage of a cluster of words related to being virtuous also declined significantly. Among them were bravery (which dropped by 65 percent), gratitude (58 percent), and humbleness (55 percent). For decades, researchers have asked incoming college students about their goals in life. In 1967, about 85 percent said they were strongly motivated to develop “a meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2000, only 42 percent said that. Being financially well off became the leading life goal; by 2015, 82 percent of students said wealth was their aim.
In a culture devoid of moral education, generations grow up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the interviewees had not given the subject of morality much thought. “I’ve never had to make a decision about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one young adult told the researchers. “My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” many teenagers said.
The moral instincts that Smith observed in his sample fell into the pattern that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: Whatever feels good to me is moral. “I would probably do what would make me happy” in any given situation, one of the interviewees declared. “Because it’s me in the long run.” As another put it, “If you’re okay with it morally, as long as you’re not getting caught, then it’s not really against your morals, is it?” Smith and his colleagues emphasized that the interviewees were not bad people but, because they were living “in morally very thin or spotty worlds,” they had never been given a moral vocabulary or learned moral skills.
Most of us who noticed the process of de-moralization as it was occurring thought a bland moral relativism and empty consumerism would be the result: You do you and I’ll do me. That’s not what happened.
“Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy,” the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind. When you are raised in a culture without ethical structure, you become internally fragile. You have no moral compass to give you direction, no permanent ideals to which you can swear ultimate allegiance. “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” the psychiatrist (and Holocaust survivor) Viktor Frankl wrote, interpreting a famous Nietzsche saying. Those without a why fall apart when the storms hit. They begin to suffer from that feeling of moral emptiness that Émile Durkheim called “anomie.”
Expecting people to build a satisfying moral and spiritual life on their own by looking within themselves is asking too much. A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call “vulnerable narcissists.” We all know grandiose narcissists—people who revere themselves as the center of the universe. Vulnerable narcissists are the more common figures in our day—people who are also addicted to thinking about themselves, but who often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.
“The breakdown of an enduring moral framework will always produce disconnection, alienation, and an estrangement from those around you,” Luke Bretherton, a theologian at Duke Divinity School, told me. The result is the kind of sadness I see in the people around me. Young adults I know are spiraling, leaving school, moving from one mental-health facility to another. After a talk I gave in Oklahoma, a woman asked me, “What do you do when you no longer want to be alive?” The very next night I had dinner with a woman who told me that her brother had died by suicide three months before. I mentioned these events to a group of friends on a Zoom call, and nearly half of them said they’d had a brush with suicide in their family. Statistics paint the broader picture: Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, according to the CDC.
Sadness, loneliness, and self-harm turn into bitterness. Social pain is ultimately a response to a sense of rejection—of being invisible, unheard, disrespected, victimized. When people feel that their identity is unrecognized, the experience registers as an injustice—because it is. People who have been treated unjustly often lash out and seek ways to humiliate those who they believe have humiliated them.
Lonely eras are not just sad eras; they are violent ones. In 19th-century America, when a lot of lonely young men were crossing the western frontier, one of the things they tended to do was shoot one another. As the saying goes, pain that is not transformed gets transmitted. People grow more callous, defensive, distrustful, and hostile. The pandemic made it worse, but antisocial behavior is still high even though the lockdowns are over. And now we are caught in a cycle, ill treatment leading to humiliation and humiliation leading to more meanness. Social life becomes more barbaric, online and off.
If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.
According to research by Ryan Streeter, the director of domestic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, lonely young people are seven times more likely to say they are active in politics than young people who aren’t lonely. For people who feel disrespected, unseen, and alone, politics is a seductive form of social therapy. It offers them a comprehensible moral landscape: The line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, but between groups. Life is a struggle between us, the forces of good, and them, the forces of evil.
The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.
Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.
Politics also provides an easy way to feel a sense of purpose. You don’t have to feed the hungry or sit with the widow to be moral; you just have to experience the right emotion. You delude yourself that you are participating in civic life by feeling properly enraged at the other side. That righteous fury rising in your gut lets you know that you are engaged in caring about this country. The culture war is a struggle that gives life meaning.
Politics overwhelms everything. Churches, universities, sports, pop culture, health care are swept up in a succession of battles that are really just one big war—red versus blue. Evangelicalism used to be a faith; today it’s primarily a political identity. College humanities departments used to study literature and history to plumb the human heart and mind; now they sometimes seem exclusively preoccupied with politics, and with the oppressive systems built around race, class, and gender. Late-night comedy shows have become political pep rallies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily during the pandemic because people saw a virus through the lens of a political struggle.
This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment, by feelings that society does not respect or recognize me. Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed. The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.
The politics of recognition doesn’t give you community and connection, certainly not in a system like our current one, mired in structural dysfunction. People join partisan tribes in search of belonging—but they end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.
If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war. The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level—only 8 percent did the same in 1990.
America’s Founding Fathers studied the history of democracies going back to ancient Greece. They drew the lesson that democracies can be quite fragile. When private virtue fails, the constitutional order crumbles. After decades without much in the way of moral formation, America became a place where more than 74 million people looked at Donald Trump’s morality and saw presidential timber.
Even in dark times, sparks of renewal appear. In 2018, a documentary about Mister Rogers called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released. The film showed Fred Rogers in all his simple goodness—his small acts of generosity; his displays of vulnerability; his respect, even reverence, for each child he encountered. People cried openly while watching it in theaters. In an age of conflict and threat, the sight of radical goodness was so moving.
In the summer of 2020, the series Ted Lasso premiered. When Lasso describes his goals as a soccer coach, he could mention the championships he hopes to win or some other conventional metric of success, but he says, “For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It’s about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field.”
That is a two-sentence description of moral formation. Ted Lasso is about an earnest, cheerful, and transparently kind man who enters a world that has grown cynical, amoral, and manipulative, and, episode after episode, even through his own troubles, he offers the people around him opportunities to grow more gracious, to confront their vulnerabilities and fears, and to treat one another more gently and wisely. Amid lockdowns and political rancor, it became a cultural touchstone, and the most watched show on Apple TV+.
Even as our public life has grown morally bare, people, as part of their elemental nature, yearn to feel respected and worthy of respect, need to feel that their life has some moral purpose and meaning. People still want to build a society in which it is easier to be good. So the questions before us are pretty simple: How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century? What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?
A few necessities come immediately to mind.
A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.
The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.
Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.
I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”
Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.
These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.
A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?
These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.
Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.
There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)
Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.
These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.
Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.
In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.
Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.
Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.
Politics as a moral enterprise. An ancient brand of amoralism now haunts the world. Authoritarian-style leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping embody a kind of amoral realism. They evince a mindset that assumes that the world is a vicious, dog-eat-dog sort of place. Life is a competition to grab what you can. Force is what matters. Morality is a luxury we cannot afford, or merely a sham that elites use to mask their own lust for power. It’s fine to elect people who lie, who are corrupt, as long as they are ruthless bastards for our side. The ends justify the means.
Those of us who oppose these authoritarians stand, by contrast, for a philosophy of moral realism. Yes, of course people are selfish and life can be harsh. But over the centuries, civilizations have established rules and codes to nurture cooperation, to build trust and sweeten our condition. These include personal moral codes so we know how to treat one another well, ethical codes to help prevent corruption on the job and in public life, and the rules of the liberal world order so that nations can live in peace, secure within their borders.
Moral realists are fighting to defend and modernize these rules and standards—these sinews of civilization. Moral realism is built on certain core principles. Character is destiny. We can either elect people who try to embody the highest standards of honesty, kindness, and integrity, or elect people who shred those standards. Statecraft is soulcraft. The laws we pass shape the kinds of people we become. We can structure our tax code to encourage people to be enterprising and to save more, or we can structure the code to encourage people to be conniving and profligate. Democracy is the system that best enhances human dignity. Democratic regimes entrust power to the people, and try to form people so they will be responsible with that trust. Authoritarian regimes seek to create a world in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Look, I understand why people don’t want to get all moralistic in public. Many of those who do are self-righteous prigs, or rank hypocrites. And all of this is only a start. But healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended by people who think and talk in moral terms, who try to model and inculcate moral behavior, who understand that we have to build moral communities because on our own, we are all selfish and flawed. Moral formation is best when it’s humble. It means giving people the skills and habits that will help them be considerate to others in the complex situations of life. It means helping people behave in ways that make other people feel included, seen, and respected. That’s very different from how we treat people now—in ways that make them feel sad and lonely, and that make them grow unkind. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 20 | https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-ooze/201804/why-pretty-girls-can-be-so-vulnerable-bullying | en | Why Pretty Girls Can Be So Vulnerable to Bullying | [
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"Frank T. McAndrew Ph.D"
] | 2018-04-22T10:51:30-04:00 | For women, beauty can be a curse as well as a blessing—it bestows undeniable advantages on those who possess it, but also paints a target squarely on their backs | en | https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/favicon.ico | Psychology Today | https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-the-ooze/201804/why-pretty-girls-can-be-so-vulnerable-bullying | On January 14, 2010, 15-year-old Phoebe Prince hanged herself in her family’s apartment in South Hadley, Massachusetts, following a relentless campaign of taunting, gossip, and bullying by other teens at her high school. Phoebe’s body was discovered by her 12-year-old sister, and one of her last text messages began with the phrase: “I can’t take much more.”
Phoebe was a pretty girl who had moved to South Hadley from Ireland a little more than a year before her death. The bullying began after she had a brief romantic fling with the boyfriend of one of her principal tormentors. The five teenagers who orchestrated Phoebe's persecution were eventually convicted on charges of criminal harassment and sentenced to probation and community service.
The most consistent flavor of the insults hurled at her was that she was a “slut” and an “Irish whore.” As it turns out, looks and reputation for sexual fidelity are prime targets for women engaged in competition with each other for romantic partners.
Unfortunately, the tragic story of Phoebe Prince is not an isolated incident. Fifteen-year-old Cora Delille of Ohio killed herself in exactly the same way following an almost identical campaign of gossip and harassment in 2014. In 2017, 10-year-old Ashwanty Davis hanged herself in her Colorado home after being bullied for weeks. Only a few weeks after Ashwanty's death, 13-year-old Rosalie Avila of California suffered the same fate—suicide by hanging after being ostracized, gossiped about, and bullied.
“Mean Girls” Are More Than Just a Stereotype
It has been well-established that men are more physically aggressive than women. However, women are much more likely to engage in what is called indirect “relational” aggression, and gossip is often the weapon of choice. Consequently, women are more likely than men to ostracize others, a sex difference that shows up as early as age 6.
Writer Danielle Herzog related her anguish upon hearing about the “mean girls” in her daughter’s kindergarten class. According to her daughter, the mean girls would tell her that she was "ugly" and exclude her from games because “they didn’t like her clothes.” Herzog’s anguish eventually turned to embarrassment when her own mother reminded her that she had made one of her best friends cry in first grade by telling her that she would only be her friend on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, because “she was not important enough to be all five days.”
The motivation for relational aggression can be as trivial as simple boredom, but it more often transpires in retaliation for perceived slights, envy over physical appearance, or romantic competition.
Beauty in One Woman Can Bring Out the Beast in Others
The fact that highly attractive adolescent girls like Phoebe Prince are at greater risk for victimization is consistent with the notion that mate competition is a primary motive for such behavior.
Women are aware of how easily many men are drawn to physically attractive potential partners, so it follows that they are the ones who can have their reputations savaged through gossip as a way of making them seem less desirable as girlfriends, preventing them from establishing a network of friends and allies, and keeping them socially powerless. In one junior high school, two girls circulated a petition after a cute new girl moved in. The petition was signed by boys who promised that they would “never go out with the Megawhore.”
If all else fails, direct physical intimidation can make pretty girls afraid of turning their beauty to their mating advantage. Recently, four Russian girls uploaded a video of them forcing another girl to drink from a mud puddle, because she was “too pretty.”
Less attractive women are also bullied, of course, but usually for other reasons. A girl not perceived as competition in the mating market may be as likely to be ignored as she is to be bullied.
A forthcoming study by social psychologist Tania Reynolds and her colleagues confirms that women are more likely to spread malicious gossip about other women who are either attractive or who dress provocatively—in other words, women who might distract the attention of potential partners. The fact that the peers who bully attractive girls are generally at least moderately attractive themselves is no coincidence, but rather a reflection of the bullies' recognition that they are likely to find themselves in romantic competition with the targets of their aggression.
Psychologist Gail Gross, an internationally recognized expert on bullying, summarized the relationship between being attractive and being bullied as follows:
"It is important to note that not only are the weak targeted, but often a girl that is considered to be too pretty, too smart, too nice and therefore making the other girls feel inferior. In fact, bullies may describe a target as 'too full of herself.' And, because of the competition and striving for popularity as well as positions of power, peer groups may form alliances to cast out and isolate the offending girl."
There are endless examples of physically attractive girls being bullied by other girls, and parents regularly share such stories on social media. One North Shore Chicago mother of a girl who modeled professionally spoke of the frequency with which her daughter has been told that she is ugly and that she should kill herself. Swedish supermodel Paulina Porizkova reports that she was bullied mercilessly throughout her childhood. Model/actress Brittany Mason, a former “Miss Indiana,” thought about killing herself to escape her peers' gossip and bullying: At a homecoming rally at her high school, for example, a group created a poster with her picture on it and waved it around while chanting, “You are ugly.”
Regardless of the trigger for relational aggression, the goal is almost always the same: to exclude competitors from one’s social group and damage their ability to maintain a reliable social network of their own.
As it turns out, this is a highly effective way of hurting other women. Because women invest more in building friendship networks, the disruption of these networks and other social connections is all the more crushing. Beauty can be a curse as well as a blessing: It bestows some undeniable advantages on those who possess it—but it can also paint a target on their backs. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 39 | https://time.com/6287484/barbie-male-fragility-ken/ | en | Ken's Journey in Barbie Is a Story About Male Fragility | [
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"Eliana Dockterman"
] | 2023-07-21T14:54:13+00:00 | Along with Don't Worry Darling and Promising Young Woman, Barbie asks what to do with the modern man who feels emasculated by women's power. | en | /favicon.ico | TIME | https://time.com/6287484/barbie-male-fragility-ken/ | This story contains spoilers for Barbie
Who knew that “He’s just Ken” was more than a marketing joke? The Barbie movie centers, of course, on its titular character played by Margot Robbie. But Ken (Ryan Gosling) plays an important role in the drama as he wrangles with the notion that he’s long been an accessory in Barbie’s dream life more than an equal partner. I’ll say the quiet part out loud: Even though this is a movie that leans heavily into a feminine aesthetic and is, as writer-director Greta Gerwig told me during an interview for TIME’s Barbie cover story, a film at its core for mothers and daughters, Ken has the most intriguing and funniest part to play, offering a searing social commentary on modern man’s insecurities dressed up in bubble-gum pink.
Read More: Our Cover Story on Barbie
More from TIME
Perhaps we shouldn’t have expected less from the mind behind Lady Bird and Little Women. Gerwig transforms a joke about the forgettable male doll into a meditation on the state of masculinity at a moment when so many young men, feeling disempowered, have found misguided solace in the patriarchy. It’s a B-plot that’s so compelling it often outshines the somewhat dated girl-power mantras of Barbie’s A-plot.
Ken’s awakening
From the start of the film, Ken smarts at Barbie’s small rejections. He seethes when she talks to other Kens, particularly the one played by Simu Liu, whom he sees as a rival. He doesn’t have a real job or home or purpose outside of Barbie. Then Ken leaves Barbieland, a feminist utopia, and enters the real world, where men run, well, everything. In short, Ken discovers the patriarchy and decides to bring it back to Barbieland, establishing his own “Kendom.”
In a clever bit of screenwriting, Ken cares more about the sartorial manifestations of the patriarchy than the patriarchy itself. He is, after all, a fashion doll. When he discovers that demolishing feminism involves more than donning Sylvester Stallone-inspired fur coats, riding horses, and redecorating Barbie’s Dreamhouse into what he dubs his Mojo Dojo Casa House, he loses interest. He’s easily distracted by acting out war games with the other Kens, allowing the Barbies take back Barbieland from the boys.
By the end of the movie, Barbie and Ken have to have a serious conversation about their relationship. Barbie makes it clear she’s not interested in Ken romantically and urges him to find his own personal passions. The finale not only flips the normal script on female-centric films—in which a woman discovers she doesn’t need a man to find her inner power (Legally Blonde, Eat Pray Love, etc.)—but offers a commentary on how men ought to reassess their own desires outside of their need to both control and depend on women.
Read More: How Greta Gerwig Got Barbie—From the Clothes to the Dream House—Just Right
A story that will resonate with men
During interviews for the cover story on Barbie in this magazine, producer David Heyman suggested that men of all ages would find resonance with Ken’s journey. “I think Ryan is undeniable and so affecting in the film. People really care for Ken even when he’s misguided,” he says. “I think a lot of boys and men will find there’s a lot to relate to in Ken as they try to find their place in the world. But it’s all done with such a light touch and such generosity, and Ryan is just, I think, extraordinary.”
Gosling does, indeed, pull off what could have bene a tricky character. If Ken weren’t so ridiculous, he’d be threatening. Ken isn’t an incel exactly. Short for “involuntary celibate,” incel is a term that certain men use for themselves to describe a state where they feel rejected by women, and resentful toward them as a result. These men spend a lot of time on internet forums bashing feminists and longing for the days when women didn’t work, men controlled women’s bodies, and men’s mere earning power could all but “guarantee” them a sexual partner or wife. These online misogynist groups are a breeding ground for toxic language that has also spilled over into real-world violence.
Ken is more mild-mannered than that. He doesn’t have the, um, parts down there to even really understand what sex is. When he tries to kiss Barbie goodnight, she stares at him blankly. When he asks to stay over, she asks innocently what they would do. He charmingly replies that he doesn’t know. But the implication is certainly that Ken would really prefer if he had more of Barbie’s attention: He can never stay over because Barbie tells him “every night is girls’ night,” and while the Barbies live in the dream houses, the Kens don’t seem to have their own homes. (Maybe they live on the beach and that’s why Ken’s job is, nonsensically, “Beach.”)
Read More: We’re Ignoring the Real Reason Barbie Might Dominate the Box Office
When Ken enters the real world, people suddenly call him “sir” and ask for his advice or help. While men on Venice Beach ogle Barbie, they treat Ken with a certain degree of respect. Ken is enthralled by this newfound power. Unfortunately, he learns that he can’t just walk his way into a job as a banker or doctor. He complains to one man in a business suit that his company must not be “doing patriarchy right” if a man without any qualifications can’t get a job. The businessman assures him that they are doing patriarchy correctly, they just need to hide it better than they used to. So Ken eventually decides that if he cannot participate in the patriarchy in the real world, he’ll bring the philosophy back to Barbieland, transforming it into the Kendom.
When Ken quickly falls under the sway of the patriarchy and returns to Barbieland to preach its gospel, one can’t help but think of certain male rights activists recruiting impressionable young followers.
Male fragility onscreen, beyond Ken
Gerwig isn’t the first director to wrestle with this problem in recent years. Watching Barbie, I couldn’t help but think of last year’s Olivia Wilde movie Don’t Worry Darling. These films seemingly have nothing to do with one another. One’s a musical romp, the other a sci-fi inspired psychodrama.
But the third-act twist of Don’t Worry Darling—major spoilers ahead for this fraught film—is that Florence Pugh’s character isn’t actually living in a 1950s suburban utopia. She’s trapped in a simulation by her partner (Harry Styles). Feeling emasculated by his wife’s taxing job as a doctor and his own unemployment, Styles’ character listens to a men’s rights podcast and falls under the influence of its host, played by Chris Pine. Wilde says Pine’s character was inspired by Jordan Peterson, whom she describes as a “hero to the incel community.” The hypnotic podcast host convinces Styles that both he and Pugh would be happier living in a fantasy throwback to an era where the men worked and the women played housewife. Pugh eventually figures out the trick and comes into violent confrontation with her captor.
Read More: Breaking Down the End of Don’t Worry Darling
Other shows and films have explored similar territory: The excellent 2017 Black Mirror episode USS Callister reveals over the course of its runtime that a talented but oft-mocked coder (Jesse Plemons) has stolen the DNA of the people in his life he resents (mostly women of color) and forced them into a simulation where he plays the captain of a Star Trek-like ship.
Emerald Fennell (who makes a cameo in Barbie) explored the simmering violence lurking beneath the surface of self-styled “nice guys” in her 2020 thriller Promising Young Woman, even casting actors who cultivated those reputations in other projects like Adam Brody (The O.C.) and Max Greenfield (New Girl) to drive home the point to the audience.
All of these films draw at least some inspiration from the original Stepford Wives book (and its various film and television adaptations). The satirical feminist horror story chronicles a husband’s conspiracy to subjugate his working wife after they move to a community filled with strangely robotic women who live to serve their spouses.
Read More: Promising Young Woman, I May Destroy You, and Normal People Reckon With #MeToo in Radical New Ways
The fantasy of finding equilibrium
Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of Ken in Barbie is lighter and funnier than these more serious takes on the resentful man who works to repress the women around him. Heyman is right that we empathize with Ken when he’s ignored by Barbie and root for him to find his meaning.
But at its root, his energy—or “kenergy”—is not dissimilar from the men in these other stories. His feelings of emasculation manifest in shows of aggressive behavior, albeit satirical ones. Like Styles in Don’t Worry Darling, he seems not just resentful but without a purpose in a world where women pursue their passions. Both movies are deeply interested in the idea that modern men feel uncomfortable ceding power to women and what it means for their identities.
Read More: Every Single Barbie Partnership That We Could Find
What, in the end, are women to do about this male fragility? Barbie offers a complicated and not entirely satisfying answer. The Barbies eventually overthrow the Kendom and reach a detente with the Kens. They will give the Kens as much power in Barbieland as women have in the real world. Just a few judgeships, not half of them. And cabinet positions, but not the presidency.
It’s not exactly equality, but it’s a compromise. Whether such an equilibrium can or should be reached in the real world the film doesn’t try to answer. Nor is it necessarily the responsibility of a fun musical romp to do so. In the end, Ken, specifically, learns that he’s “Kenough” without Barbie, a resolution that plays better as a pun than an edict for the modern man. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 22 | https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coin-and-medal-programs/american-women-quarters | en | American Women Quarters Program | [
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"Stephanie Meredith"
] | 2021-04-12T15:50:29+00:00 | The 2022-2025 American Women Quarters™ Program celebrates the contributions made by American women with up to five new quarter designs each year. | en | https://www.usmint.gov/wordpress/wp-content/themes/us-mint/favicon.ico | United States Mint | https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coin-and-medal-programs/american-women-quarters | The American Women Quarters Program is a four-year program that celebrates the accomplishments and contributions made by women of the United States. Beginning in 2022, and continuing through 2025, the U.S. Mint will issue up to five new reverse designs each year. The obverse of each coin will maintain a likeness of George Washington, but is different from the design used during the previous quarter program.
The American Women Quarters may feature contributions from a variety of fields, including, but not limited to, suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science, space, and the arts. The women honored will be from ethnically, racially, and geographically diverse backgrounds.
The American Women Quarters Program is authorized by the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020 (Public Law 116-330).
Look for these quarters in your change or shop online for American Women Quarters products.
American Women Quarters
The pioneering American women celebrated on the quarters are listed below in the order the quarters will be released.
2022
Maya Angelou – celebrated writer, performer, and social activist
Dr. Sally Ride – physicist, astronaut, educator, and first American woman in space
Wilma Mankiller – first woman elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation
Nina Otero-Warren – suffrage leader and the first woman superintendent of Santa Fe public schools
Anna May Wong – first Chinese American film star in Hollywood
2023
Bessie Coleman – first African American and first Native American woman licensed pilot
Edith Kanakaʻole – indigenous Hawaiian composer, custodian of native culture and traditions
Eleanor Roosevelt – leader, reformer, first lady, and author
Jovita Idar – Mexican-American journalist, activist, teacher, and suffragist
Maria Tallchief – America’s first prima ballerina
2024
Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray – poet, writer, activist, lawyer, and Episcopal priest
Patsy Takemoto Mink – first woman of color to serve in Congress
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker – Civil War era surgeon, women’s rights and dress reform advocate
Celia Cruz – Cuban-American singer, cultural icon, and one of the most popular Latin artists of the 20th century
Zitkala-Ša – writer, composer, educator, and political activist
2025
Ida B. Wells – investigative journalist, suffragist, and civil rights activist
Juliette Gordon Low – founder of Girl Scouts of the United States of America
Dr. Vera Rubin – astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation
Stacey Park Milbern – activist for people with disabilities
Althea Gibson – multi-sport athlete and first Black athlete to break the color barrier at the highest level in tennis
Obverse Design
The obverse of each American Women Quarters coin will feature a portrait of George Washington facing right, originally composed and sculpted by Laura Gardin Fraser. It was the recommended design for the 1932 quarter to mark Washington’s 200th birthday, but then-Treasury Secretary Mellon ultimately selected the left-facing John Flanagan design.
Laura Gardin Fraser was one of the most prolific women sculptors of the early 20th century. She designed the Alabama Centennial Half Dollar in 1921, becoming the first woman to design a U.S. coin. The Mint used her George Washington design on a 1999 gold commemorative coin marking the 200th anniversary of Washington’s death.
Design Selection Process
The Secretary of the Treasury selects the honorees following consultation with the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Initiative, the National Women’s History Museum, and the Congressional Bipartisan Women’s Caucus. In 2021, the public was invited to submit recommendations for potential honorees through a web portal established by the National Women’s History Museum.
Step One – Appoint Liaisons
The United States Mint (Mint) will initiate the design process by contacting the appropriate officials within the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Initiative (SIWHI) and the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) (hereafter referred to as “legislated consultants”) to appoint one or more individuals to serve as the liaisons to the Mint for this coin program.
Step Two – Develop Design Concept Pool
In consultation with our legislated consultants, as well as representatives from other federal institutions they recommend, such as the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Gallery of Art, the Mint will develop a pool of design concepts that celebrate the important accomplishments and contributions made by women of the United States to the development and history of our country. The pool of concepts will be developed in part based on the solicitation of recommendations from the general public and in consultation with the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus. The pool of concepts should represent a wide spectrum of accomplishments and fields that include, but are not limited to, suffrage, civil rights, the abolitionist movement, government, science, space and arts, and should honor women from ethnically and geographically diverse backgrounds. The Mint will produce each concept in title or narrative format and will work with the legislated consultants and other subject matter experts to verify the concept pool as accurate and appropriate.
Step Three – Formal Concept Recommendation & Secretarial Approval
In further consultation with the legislated consultants and appropriate subject matter experts, and in consultation with members of the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC), the Mint will develop formal concept recommendations using the pool of recommended design concepts established in Step Two. The recommendations may include the individual women to be honored for a single year or multiple years of the program, the number of quarter designs to be featured on quarters in each year of the program, any suggested groupings of design concepts, and the order of design concepts. The Director of the United States Mint will submit the formal concept recommendations to the Secretary of the Treasury (Secretary) for approval.
Step Four – Design Production
Upon Secretarial approval of the formal concept recommendations, the Mint will proceed to produce original quarter designs, focusing on aesthetic beauty, historical accuracy, appropriateness, and coinability. The Mint will collaborate with its legislated consultants and other subject matter experts as appropriate to ensure historical accuracy and proper representation with respect to candidate designs.
Step Five – Candidate Design Review
The Mint will present candidate designs, along with comments or recommendations from the legislated consultants, to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) for comment, and to the CCAC for review. The Mint will consider all comments and recommendations, and modify the candidate designs as appropriate. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 77 | https://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-people-make-more-money-2014-11 | en | 11 scientific reasons why attractive people are more successful in life | https://i.insider.com/5d9b7bf352887937733b2aa6?width=1200&format=jpeg | https://i.insider.com/5d9b7bf352887937733b2aa6?width=1200&format=jpeg | [
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"Drake Baer",
"Allana Akhtar"
] | 2014-11-10T14:58:53+00:00 | Attractive people get paid more, get considered for more jobs, and have stronger social skills than unattractive people, according to science. | en | /public/assets/BI/US/favicons/apple-touch-icon-192x192.png?v=2023-11 | Business Insider | https://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-people-make-more-money-2014-11 | This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .
Advertisement
Physically attractive workers are considered more able by employers.
We're inclined to pay people more depending on how they look. In a 2005 experiment modeling the hiring process, would-be employers looking at photographs of would-be employees were ready to give 10.5% higher salaries to attractive people over unattractive people.
Hiring managers carried that premium over to interactions that only happened on the phone. In other words, you only need to sound attractive to benefit from our biases toward beauty.
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Physically attractive workers are more confident, and higher confidence increases wages.
We all suffer from the "halo effect" — without realizing it, we take someone's appearance to be telling of their overall character.
Experiments have shown that we consider attractive people "as more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, intelligent, and socially skilled" than unattractive people.
By the time cute kids become attractive adults, they've benefited from this bias for years, giving them higher levels of confidence.
It's a "self-fulfilling prophecy," say information scientists Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat.
"Teachers expect better-looking kids to outperform in school and devote more attention to children who are perceived to have greater potential," Mobius and Rosenblat write in their 2005 paper "Why Beauty Matters." "Preferential treatment in return builds confidence as well as social and communication skills."
That confidence, the literature suggests, translates into academic achievement and professional success.
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Physically attractive workers have social skills that raise their wages when they interact with employers.
Attractive people had higher-rated communication skills than unattractive people.
"Physical attractiveness raises social and communication skills, which in return raise an employer's estimate of the worker's productivity," researchers Mobius and Rosenblat write. "We assume that the employer is unaware of these biases and hence does not correct for them."
This has a major impact over the course of a career. Research shows that raising kids' social skills is a better predictor of lifetime earnings than raising their intellectual ability.
Beautiful people are more sociable than everybody else, the science says — or at least we're biased to think so.
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Attractive people are more likely to get elected to public office.
Better-looking candidates fared better in the 2016 midterm elections, a 2019 study published in American Politics Research finds. Attractive incumbent candidates vying in male-only districts fared especially better.
"Our study thus lends additional support to the idea of a beauty premium: even when controlling for many relevant covariates, attractiveness still exerts an influence on House candidate's electoral performance," the study states.
Other research from Finland found both male and female political candidates who look better than their competitors are more successful, as voters enjoy watching good looking candidates.
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Women who wear makeup appear more competent and trustworthy.
When comparing women who wore makeup versus what they look like bare-faced, participants in a 2011 Harvard study viewed the groomed woman as more attractive, competent, likeable, and trustworthy.
"When inferring trustworthiness, likeability, or competence from an image, we are influenced significantly not only by the attractiveness of the inherited phenotype but by the effects of the 'extended phenotype,' in this case, makeup," the paper states.
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Attractive people get called back for job interviews more often.
A 2013 study sent out 10,000 resumes changing only the name, address, and photo to analyze the call-back rates.
While the average call back rate was 30% of all resumes, attractive women got invited for an interview 54% of the time, while attractive men got called back 47% of the time.
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Attractive women have a better advantage when negotiating with men.
Men are more likely to tolerate unfairness — such as a hefty salary negotiation — when dealing with attractive women, one study finds.
Researchers at Zhejiang University's School of Management in China gave 21 male participants 300 photos of women, and were asked to answer if they would accept each subject's offer to split a sum of money.
Results indicated men were more likely to engage in unfair negotiations with attractive women.
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Good-looking CEOs bring better stock returns for their companies.
Joseph T. Halford and Hung-Chia Hsu, researchers from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, tested whether the appearance of a company's CEO is related to shareholder value.
They found stock prices rose higher for businesses with attractive CEOs after positive news about the company aired on TV.
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Attractive teachers can better teach students, both in grade schools and in college.
One study from the '80s found that when comparing teachers who were better looking to those who were worse looking, about 100 students in the first and sixth grade reported they feel they would learn more from attractive educators.
The study's findings were somewhat replicated in a more recent study from 2016, which found college students retain more information when the lecturer is good looking.
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Attractive women get better grades.
A study from 2015 analyzed 77,067 ID pictures of students who attended Metropolitan State University of Denver. The researchers asked volunteers to rate how attractive the student was on a 10-point scale. After rating each student, researchers found women perceived to be better looking had higher grades on average.
The trend did not hold true for male students.
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Attractive people are more sought after as romantic partners.
Researchers at Chapman University studied what traits people view are "desirable" or "essential" in a long-term partner. The study found that 92% of male participants reported wanting a potential partner to be good looking, compared to 84% of women.
Read next
Psychology Beauty Success
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5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminine_beauty_ideal | en | Feminine beauty ideal | https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico | https://en.wikipedia.org/static/favicon/wikipedia.ico | [
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The feminine beauty ideal is a specific set of beauty standards regarding traits that are ingrained in women throughout their lives and from a young age to increase their perceived physical attractiveness. It is experienced by many women in the world, though the traits change over time and vary in country and culture.[1]
The prevailing beauty standard for women is heteronormative,[2] but the extent to which it has influenced lesbian and bisexual women is debated.[3][4] The feminine beauty ideal traits include but are not limited to: female body shape, facial feature, skin tones, height, clothing style, hairstyle and body weight.
With fairy tales, mass media, advertisements, fashion and beauty-centered dolls such as Barbie dolls playing a prominent role in women's lives, it adds to the pressure to conform to the feminine beauty ideal starting from a young age. Handling the pressure to conform to a certain definition of "beautiful" can have psychological effects on an individual, such as depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia and low self-esteem that can start from an adolescent age and continue into adulthood.
Cultural ideals
[edit]
Body modification
[edit]
The idea of what is considered the ideal of beauty for women varies across different cultural ideals and practices.[5] In Myanmar, Kayan Lahwi girls from the age of about five years have metal rings put around their necks. Additional rings are added to the girl's neck every two years. This practice gradually deforms the clavicles and placement of the ribs through the weight of the rings to create the illusion of a longer neck. These women eventually carry up to 24 rings around their necks. The older generation seems comfortable and proud of their beauty by wearing rings as tourism booms in eastern Myanmar, but younger women and parents of young girls face a choice between observing an ancient cultural tradition, or being able to fit in better if they pursue education or employment outside of their community.[6]
In China, the practice of foot binding involved a girl's feet being bound at age six to create the "ideal" image of feet. The girl's feet were bound to become 1/3 of the original size, which crippled the woman, but also gave her a very high social status and was much admired. After the revolution of 1911, the practice of foot binding was ended.
Skin and hair color
[edit]
Skin color contrast and cosmetics
[edit]
Skin color contrast has been identified as a feminine beauty standard observed across multiple cultures.[7] Women tend to have darker eyes and lips than men, especially relative to the rest of their facial features, and this attribute has been associated with female attractiveness and femininity,[7] yet it also decreases male attractiveness according to one study.[8] Women may use cosmetics such as lipstick and eye shadow to increase their facial color contrast, or to increase the apparent distance between their eyes and eyebrows.[7] A 2009 study found that East Asian people had more facial skin contrast than white people, owing to their consistently darker eyes.[8]
Hair color
[edit]
A 2008 study sought to find whether blond hair or dark hair was the feminine beauty ideal in the Western world. The authors found that dark hair, rather than blond hair, was the feminine ideal. Women with dark hair were over-represented in Western fashion and pop-culture media, which may explain the finding that men in England generally rated dark-haired women as more attractive than women with blond hair.[9][10] A 2018 study conducted in Florida produced similar results.[11] In East Asia, women with black hair are presented as the beauty ideal, while blonde women are denied the ideal status. Blonde Swedish women have reported low self-esteem while living in Singapore, as local beauty standards reduced their sense of femininity.[12][13] Japanese advertisements have occasionally depicted blonde women as envious of black-haired women.[14]
Skin color standards
[edit]
The practise of skin whitening is common amongst women in the Middle East,[15][16][17] South Asia, and Africa.[18][19] while sun tanning, indoor tanning and self tanning is common among white women in the Western world.[20]
The colonization of non-white countries by European migrants sometimes led to the establishment of inter-racial beauty ideals, such as in Dutch Indonesia, where white Dutch male colonists defined beauty standards that ranked Southeast Asian women as more attractive than white women, on the basis of their darker skin and black hair.[21] Some studies using Caucasian male subjects from Western countries have identified a preference for women with darker skin, which indicates that there is no innate preference for lighter skin within the Western world.[22] Thus, there is a preference for tan-skinned women that is largely specific to Western culture.[23] Some studies from Western countries have found that, among young women, those with a tanner skin color have higher self-perceived attractiveness.[24]
Regional standards
[edit]
Southeast Asian women
[edit]
Dutch Indonesia
[edit]
In the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, the feminine beauty ideal created by white male colonists was for women to have a brown skin color with black hair. In the 1920s, an American consul wrote a letter to the United States Secretary of State in which he observed that white European Dutch men in colonial Indonesia preferred to marry local women of color over white Dutch women, primarily because the brown skin and black hair of Indonesian women was perceived to be more beautiful than the pale and fair-haired complexions of white Dutch women.[25] The frequency at which young Dutch men married Indo women was considered an embarrassment for the conservative element of Dutch society.[26] The legacy of this interracial beauty ideal continues to be reflected in local literature, as it was written in a popular novel that "a golden colored skin is the greatest gift Allah can bestow upon a woman", in reference to a blonde haired girl who did not inherit her grandmother's complexion.[27]
East Asian women
[edit]
China
[edit]
In ancient China, pale skin was seen as a prerequisite for beauty for both men and women, and it was also a marker of one's place in the social class system.[28] However, according to recent research, tan-colored skin has emerged as the new feminine beauty ideal, with many Chinese women now viewing their tanned skin as healthier and more attractive. According to Tai Wei Lim, Chinese women in media now sport bronze complexions, and this is viewed as a reclamation of women's autonomy from the declining Chinese patriarchy.[29]
Historically, Tang dynasty women with a plump figure were considered the standardized view of beauty, contrasting with the expectations of tall, slim figures of today.[30]
Starting from Song elites and eventually popularized and ended in the Qing dynasty, foot binding was seen as an idolized representation of women's petite beauty, and the practice was referred to as "三寸金莲", 'three inch golden lotus'.[31]
In Chinese literature and poetry, Chinese beauties were almost always of noble or middle-class status, and depictions often portrayed them as court ladies or servants of court ladies, wearing immaculate clothing. This implies that beauty in ancient China was not only a matter of physical appearance, but also of social status and wealth.[30]
Japan
[edit]
Though sharing some aspects of Confucian culture with China, beauty standards between China and Japan have differed historically. Dating back to the Heian period (794–1185), Japanese court ladies would colour their teeth black (a practice known as ohaguro) upon reaching adulthood. This custom was practiced by the nobility; samurai clans could be seen at a large number of temples, but were not generally seen among commoners. The practice of teeth blackening lasted until the Meiji Restoration of 1868.[32]
Hairdressing and apparel were of supreme importance in the Heian period; eyebrows were plucked and replaced with darker, wider ones that were painted higher on the forehead, a practice known as hikimayu. Hair had to be at least long enough to touch the ground when seated. The use of pale makeup known as oshiroi was common, which emphasized the colour combinations of Heian-period clothing - jūnihitoe for women and suikan for men - which were chosen for their seasonality and symbolism.
Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Kakuzō stated in his compilations of lectures in 1905, that the considerable bases of beauty for modern Japan is:
...to make a beautiful women, She is to possess a body not much exceeding five feet in height, with comparatively fair skin and proportionally well-developed limbs; a head covered with long, thick, and jet-black hair; an oval face with a straight nose, high and narrow; rather large eyes, with large deep-brown pupils and thick eyelashes, a small mouth, hiding behind its red, but not thin lips, even rows of small white teeth; ears not altogether small; and long thick eyebrows forming two horizontal but slightly curved lines, with a space left between them and the eyes...a very high as well as a very low forehead being considered not attractive.[33]
Research suggests that Japanese beauty ideals may be affected more by individuality than Korean or Chinese culture.[34] Japanese people are more likely to incorporate anti-aesthetics, incompleteness, uncertainty, pluralism, and deconstruction of what is considered to be 'beautiful' which is against the normal Japanese beauty standard which was based on aesthetics.[35] This is allowing Japanese women to embrace their 'flaws' that society used to turn against them and to instead use their features and embrace the uniqueness of one's moles, birthmarks, eye shape, teeth shape and various facial elements.[34] In the late 20th century, the emergence of the ganguro and gyaru sub-cultures was considered an act of rebellion and against the Japanese feminine beauty ideal. These trends were characterized by spray tans, dyed blonde or orange hair color, and brightly colored contact lenses.[36] Women who adopted these fashion trends faced extreme social pressures from family members and punishment from school authorities, leading some to drop out of school and enter the labor force at a young age.[37]
South Korea
[edit]
The traditional female beauty ideal in Korea is for a woman to have a wide, large, moon-like face,[38][39] with narrow eyes, and full, red lips.[40] These are seen as the attributes of female fertility and motherhood, within Korea.[39][38] More recently, as Korean women's wealth and social empowerment have improved, they have increasingly sought cosmetic surgery to produce the opposite look: a narrower face and wider eyes. According to Debra Gimlin, this trend suggests that Korean women are resisting the traditional ideal aesthetic, by distancing themselves from the "maternal body".[39][38]
As of 2018, South Korea has the highest rate of cosmetic surgery per capita.[41] Between 1990 and 2006, the number of surgeries specializing in plastic surgery in South Korea grew to the total rate of 8.9 percent per year, where the majority fraction undergoing these procedures were young people. A survey in 2004 showed that out of 1,565 female students attending college, 25.4 percent of them had undergone plastic surgery for double eyelids, 3.6 percent for nose, and 1 percent for jaw/cheekbone.[42] Polling from 2015 in South Korea indicates that as many as 30% of young women age 19-29 may have undergone plastic surgery in South Korea.[43] Due to the rise of idol culture, beauty aesthetics in South Korea have undergone drastic changes, where women associate beauty with professional success. In workplaces, women are expected to be physically attractive; headshots are required when submitting resumes to some companies, and the appearance of female applicants is often scrutinized, with both professional skill and physical beauty idealized.[44][45]
In addition to idol culture, researchers have found that due to South Korea's hypercompetitive society, Korean women have gradually come to believe that they could achieve more from superior beauty even though they may have a limited amount of social resources.[34] In one study, it was found that Korean women associated beauty with having an easier time searching for jobs, finding spouses and higher income levels.[34] There is also a concept called the halo effect in Korea, where being beautiful and being smart leads to the ultimate level of beauty. If a woman is considered to be smart, by attending a prestigious university like Seoul National University, and up to South Korea's strict beautiful standards, she is considered to be "untouchable" and "no one can beat her".[34]
The latest 'activist'-like movement that young girls in South Korea are promoting is called the "pro-ana" movement. Young girls will go onto various websites and social media outlets to promote behaviours related to the eating disorder anorexia,[46] such as how to throw away lunch at school without getting in trouble with the staff members and how to not get caught by parents. The majority of the girls who are involved in this movement are not eating properly and starving themselves until their weight drops to a fragile amount of 30 to 40 kilograms. Individuals who are extremists about losing weight will take vast amounts of constipation pills to flush food out of their system quickly, as the lack of nutrition will cause them to lose weight drastically.[46] On rare occasions where the girls eat proper meals, they feel guilty for indulging, leading them to turn to bulimic tendencies and force themselves to vomit to maintain their thin shape.
In South Korea, psychotropic appetite suppressants also increased in popularity by 31.5 percent from 93.2 billion won (US$77.4 million) in 2014 to 122.5 billion won (US$102.8 million) in 2018, while the sales in non-psychotropic appetite suppressants increased 126.8 percent from 34.9 billion won (US$29.3 million) to 79.1 billion won (US$66 million) during the same time.[46] The long-term use of psychotropic appetite suppressants increases the risk of side effects such as pulmonary hypertension and severe heart disease. This, in combination with the lack of nutrients that girls receive due to anorexic tendencies, can cause malnutrition, osteoporosis, heart disease and hair loss.[46] Taking into account that it is more harmful to teenagers as their brains and bodies are still in development, their extreme dieting happens can lead to irregular menstruation, loss of menstruation, stunted growth, and in extreme cases, death.[46]
Girls who are active in the pro-ana movement are often not unaware of the risk of anorexia.[46] They are aware that anorexia is a disorder, but they believe their actions are justified due to their culture which harshly criticizes the perceived beauty of individuals based on their body shape.
South Asia
[edit]
The idea of beauty standards in South Asia has had a long history with fair skin tone. The normative societal expectation of beauty of people has been associated with the gradient of their skin colour. The fairer one becomes, the more attractive they are. Fairness is also a tool of belongingness and social acceptance within the dominant society. Whiteness is the most ideal beauty standard of coloured women in South Asia.[47]
In India, 'fairer' skin is viewed as a beauty aesthetic ideal disproportionately targeted at women.[48] The skin colour of many young women is perceived as an obstacle to social mobility. The preference for lighter skin tones has been perpetrated by exposure to idealized images conveyed in visual media, as well as through discriminatory practices that favour lighter skin tones.[48]
In North India, where there is increasing importation of brides from the darker-skinned regions Southern India, families face insecurities around the fact that they have a darker-skinned daughter compared to themselves.[49] Many regions in South Asia still believe in the practices of arranged marriage and women who are dark-skinned face higher rejection.[49] In terms of marriage, choices, and life outcomes, fair-skinned women are in a better position than those with darker complexions, since lighter skin is traded for a less expensive dowry.[49]
Advertisements
[edit]
Models often set a standard of beauty for audiences by endorsing various products and displaying perfect portions of their bodies.[50] Hyper-commercialized facial products like Fair and Handsome and Fair and Lovely were in trend in the South Asian society until very recently. For women, products like Glow & Lovely were not only a marker of social acceptance but also an emotional strength, making them 'happy and confident'.[51] Multi-billion-dollar skin lightening products have grown throughout the world in part because of colourism, as millions of people of colour, most of whom are women, purchase and use products intended to permanently lighten their skin. Skin whitening products are also known as skin bleaching products and come in creams, gels, and lotions that are directly applied to the skin.[48] The factors motivating the use of skin lightening products are rejection and pressure from primary parents and misunderstanding of how lighter skin influences attractiveness, marriageability, social status, self-esteem, or respect received from others.[52] According to estimates, the market size for 'fairness' creams and lotions in India is about US$450 million. A growth rate of 15 to 20% is reported each year for 'fairness' products.[53]
The preference for fair skin has similarity made fair skin a desirable quality for South Asian men. For instance, skin whitening products have been established as a marker of masculinity and deemed as a desirable beauty standard for men in West Nepal.[54]
French women
[edit]
There have been multiple beauty ideals for women in France. The 16th-century memoirist Brântome lists as many as thirty things are needed to make a woman beautiful, a common but rigid ideal might include Brântome's "three white things". These "things" or traits refer to skin, teeth, and hands. There are also the "three black things", including the color of the person's eyes, eyebrows and eyelashes.[55] This leaves three other areas to embark on, including the cheeks, lips, and nails. This beauty standard also was noted to pull from "sections on alchemy, medicine, astrology, cooking and the art of looking beautiful".[56]
According to Wandering Pioneer, beauty standards in France seem to concern someone's style rather than the body shape.[57] In addition, the French approach to beauty is about enhancing natural features rather than achieving a specific look.[58] According to some dermatologists, looking young is not a beauty criterion. Instead, women want to look toned and their skin to look firm.[59]
Black women
[edit]
While most research on appearance ideals tends to emphasize the importance of a slender and lean body, research specific to Black women suggests that a more curvaceous or "hourglass-shaped" body ideal may be more salient for Black women than the mainstream thin ideal.[60] Studies conducted in the United States have indicated that Black women generally have a greater tolerance for heavier body sizes compared to White and Asian women. Research has found that Black women generally perceive larger curvy body ideals, as well as larger buttocks and thick thighs, as more desirable compared to White women.[60] The curvier body ideal also exists among Black Caribbean women.[61] Black women undergoing cosmetic surgery generally request the largest and fullest possible buttocks and thighs compared to other women seeking similar procedures, and they also often request an extreme prominence of the upper buttocks.[62][63][64] The internalization of this curvaceous body ideal has been suggested as being a possible factor in the overweight and obesity epidemic among African-American women, as Black women are the demographic in the United States with the highest rates of being overweight or obese, and they additionally often underestimate the weight and size of their own bodies.[65][66][67] Overweight and obesity are also highly prevalent among Black female populations living in Europe, including the United Kingdom, where Black Caribbean and Black African women have higher obesity rates compared to the general British population, which has also been attributed to a greater cultural tolerance for heavier bodies.[68][69][61] Black South African women similarly have higher obesity rates than other demographics in South Africa, which has similarly been attributed to Black South African women idealizing heavier body sizes consisting of larger buttocks and hips.[70][71][72] In addition to overweight and obesity, other health concerns from this idealized body image include the use of products such as Apetamin, an unapproved appetite stimulant with dangerous health risks that has gained popularity among Black women in the United Kingdom and the United States who seek curvier bodies with larger buttocks and hips.[73][74][75]
Sarah Baartman was a 19th-century Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who gained notoriety for the large size of her buttocks caused by a genetic condition known as steatopygia, which is prevalent among Khoikhoi women.[61] Her large buttocks were exoticized and treated as a spectacle in Europe where she was displayed in freak show attractions, and she both aroused and repelled White society. Although White society viewed such women as "savage" and "wild", there was also an enchantment and sense of eroticization of this body type. White women of that era adopted the bustle dress, which created the appearance of larger buttocks, leading to some scholars to make comparisons with the buttocks of Baartman and suggest that the bustle was influenced by her physique.[76][77][78] Since the 2010s, a considerable number of non-Black women have gotten buttocks implants to fulfill this beauty ideal, with the number of procedures nearly doubling from 2014 and 2015.[79][80] The "Brazilian butt lift" surgery also gained popularity, with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimating that the number of procedures increased by 38 percent between 2017 and 2019.[81] Female non-Black celebrities such as Kim Kardashian have achieved recognition for their large buttocks and curves. Twerking, an Afro-diasporic dance characterized by isolation and movement of the buttocks, gained greater publicity in pop culture after Miley Cyrus performed it at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.[82] Some Black feminists such as Yomi Adegoke view this beauty trend as cultural appropriation of Black feminine beauty. In her Guardian article titled "Why does a black butt only look good in white skin?", Yomi Adegoke argues that this trend seeks to imitate the curvier body ideal of Black women, who have faced negative stigma rather than receiving similar praise for possessing the same bodies.[81][83][84] Some Black women have additionally found Sarah Baartman's story as a source of inspiration and empowerment to celebrate curvier bodies, seeing parallels between her life and the modern cultural appropriation and societal treatment of curvy Black female bodies.[61][85]
As racial minorities in the United States, African Americans were historically pressured by white beauty ideals that conflict with their own natural features and beauty ideals. Paradoxically, Makkar and Strube observe that modern-day black women view themselves more favorably than white women, and are less likely than them to pursue the conventional beauty ideal.[86][87] Makkar and Strube asked black women with both low and high self esteem to judge themselves in relation to images of white and black supermodels. Both low and high-self esteem black women rated themselves as more attractive than the white models, but less attractive than the black models. However, women with stronger black identity perceived themselves as substantially more attractive.[88] The authors found that black women who have a stronger sense of black identity were less likely to be impacted by external beauty ideals than black women with a weaker sense of black identity, which suggests an explicit rejection of white beauty standards.[89]
Colourism can be defined as discrimination towards people within the same racial or ethnic group or community based on the shade of one's colour.[90] Colourism can also affect Latin Americans, East Asians, South Asians, and even Europeans, leading to complexion discrimination.[91]
Colourism in the United States dates back to during slavery, where lighter-skinned men or women were required to work indoors while the darker-skinned individuals were to work out on the fields. The shade of their skin colour determined their job as well as the treatment they were to receive.[92]
In the documentary film Dark Girls, interviews of black women in the documentary shine light on the unspoken topic of colourism.[93] Experiences and experiments mentioned in the film conclude how women of darker skin suffered socially, mentally, and personally. Some of the women in the film mention how they did not see themselves as beautiful because of their darker skin.[93]
In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson discusses the ancient beauty ideals for African women. The ideals were there were no ideals. Beauty was rarely accepted if you were "too perfect" or "overly handsome". Being "too much" of something was a red flag because it threw off the spectrum according to Yoruba society. It was called "iwontunwonsi". This is the opposite of what the standards for society are today because they set a middle ground to compare people to, yet the middle ground consists of high standards.[94]
According to Laura Engel, Black women (but not other women of colour), have been whitewashed. Whitewashing of black women is not only limited to whitening black individuals' skin tones, but also giving them straight hair textures and Eurocentric features. Magazines and beauty companies have been criticized for whitewashing the images of black female celebrities on covers and advertisements, mostly photoshopping them with lighter skin.[95]
According to a 2020 study, black women who were online beauty content creators had lower salaries, fewer brand endorsements, more difficulty receiving sponsorships, and a significantly slower rise to popularity compared to non-Black online beauty content creators.[96] Resesrchers were unable to determine why this was the case, as their study provided no information on causality and the sample size consisted of just nine women.[96]
The research of Marway has additionally found that the beauty norm for fair skin limits career goals and opportunities for black women and women of colour, as they practice self-censorship when applying for jobs because they have an expectation that they will not be chosen to play lead roles in a workplace due to the disproportionate racial portrayals in various professions.[97]
Body and facial hair
[edit]
Body hair and facial hair have long been stigmatized in women across many cultures, which regard them as masculine attributes that are undesirable in the opposite sex.[98][99] For this reason, many women feel pressured to remove the body hair from their legs and arms,[98][100] while those who do not are often scrutinized. The same standard does not exist for men, and although manscaping has existed since the early 20th century, it has never achieved popularity in the Western world.[98]
Mass media
[edit]
Mass media is one of the most powerful tools for young girls and women to learn and also understand feminine beauty ideals. As mass media develops, the way people see feminine beauty ideals changes, as does how females view themselves. "The average teen girl gets about 180 minutes of media exposure daily and only about 10 minutes of parental interaction a day," says Renee Hobbs, EdD, associate professor of communications at Temple University.[101] In most advertisements, female models are typically homogeneous in appearance. "Girls today are swamped by [ultra-thin] ideals not only in the form of dolls but also in comics, cartoons, TV, and advertising along with all the associated merchandising."[102]: 290 In addition to this, the feminine beauty ideal in the mass media is manipulated by technology. Images of women can be virtually manipulated creating an ideal that is not only rare but also nonexistent.[103] The Encyclopedia of Gender in the Media states that "the postproduction techniques of airbrushing and computer-generated modifications 'perfect' the beauty myth by removing any remaining blemishes or imperfections visible to the eye."[104] Advertisements for products "such as diets, cosmetics, and exercise gear [help] the media construct a dream world of hopes and high standards that incorporates the glorification of slenderness and weight loss."[105]
With a focus on an ideal physical appearance, the feminine beauty ideal distracts from female competency by prioritizing and valuing superficial characteristics related to beauty and appearance. When physical beauty is idealized and featured in the media, it reduces women to sexualized objects.[106] This creates the message across mass media that one's body is inadequate apart from sex appeal and connects concepts of beauty and sex.[106]
Celebrities achieve perfection through photoshopped images that hide every blemish or flaw while also editing body parts to create the ideal hourglass body type.[107] The Dove Beauty and Confidence Report interviewed 10,500 females across thirteen countries and found that women's confidence in their body image is steadily declining – regardless of age or geographic location. Despite these findings, there is a strong desire to fight existing beauty ideals. In fact, 71% of women and 67% of girls want the media to do a better job of portraying different types of women. Studies done by Dove reveal low self-esteem impacts women and girls' ability to release their true potential. 85% of women and 79% of girls admit they opt out of important life activities when they do not feel confident in the way they look. More than half of women (69%) and girls (65%) allude to pressure from the media and advertisements to become the world's version of beautiful, which is a driving force of appearance anxiety.[108] Studies done by Dove have also revealed the following statistics: "4% of women consider themselves beautiful, 11% of girls globally are comfortable with describing themselves as beautiful, 72% of girls feel pressure to be beautiful, 80% of women agree that every woman has something about her that is beautiful, but do not see their own beauty, and that 54% of women agree that when it comes to how they look, they are their own worst beauty critic."[109]
Online platforms that focus on interactions through image-sharing and visual content, such as Instagram, tend to emphasize physical appearance and aesthetics.[110] According to evidence gathered from a study focusing on general Instagram use in young women, researchers suggest Instagram usage was positively correlated with women's self-objectification.[110] This same study also considered the effect of Instagram on the internalization of the Western beauty ideal for women, and the evidence gathered in the study agrees with the idea that Instagram use encourages women to internalize the societal beauty ideal of Western culture. Because users have the opportunity to shape and edit their photographs before sharing them, they can force them to adhere to the beauty ideal.[110] Viewing these carefully selected pictures shows the extent to which women internalize the Western beauty ideal.[110] In addition to researching the effects of general Instagram use, the study also researched the effects of "fitspiration" Instagram pages on young women's body image. "Fitspiration" pages aim to motivate the viewer through images of healthy eating and exercising.[110] Although these pages aim to be a positive way to promote a healthy lifestyle, they are also appearance-based and contain images of toned and skinny women.[111] According to the study, there is a positive correlation to young women's viewing "fitspiration" pages and a negative body image.[110]
A case study conducted about Instagram use and the Western feminine beauty ideal focused on the specific account @effyourbeautystandards, a body-positive Instagram page created by feminist plus-size model Tess Holliday.[112] Through her page, Holliday instructed women to share pictures of themselves on Instagram with the hashtag #effyourbeautystandards.[112] Images posted with this hashtag would be selected by the account administrators and posted to the @effyourbeauutystandards page.[112] The evidence gathered in this case study suggested that while these selected pictures attempt to take an intersectional approach to the content women view on social media, they may still have an effect on how women view their bodies.[112]
Social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok may promote unrealistic beauty standards for women and teenage girls for various reasons. A large part of this may be due to the use of photoshop and heavy filters that change one's facial structure and features. When there is such a large influx of content catered to achieving a certain beauty standard it can leave many feel dissatisfied with their own.[113]
Selfies are standard among social media platforms, but even that can negatively effect someone's self esteem.[114] A study published by Jennifer Mills- a professor at York University in Toronto found that in general, women felt more self conscious after taking a selfie than they did prior.[115] She had two groups that were instructed to take a selfie and post it online; one was only allowed to take one selfie while the other was able to take unlimited and edit them. Both groups were left with the same result despite the differing circumstances. There was always a factor they felt dissatisfied with whether it was the lighting, how their face looked, the angle, etc. Another factor was validation from others whether it was approving the selfie or looking at likes and comments.
Fairy tales
[edit]
The feminine beauty ideal is portrayed in many children's fairy tales.[1] It has been common in the Brothers Grimm fairy tales for physical attractiveness in female characters to be rewarded.[116] In those fairy tales, "beauty is often associated with being white, economically privileged, and virtuous."[116]
The Brothers Grimm fairy tales usually involve a beautiful heroine. In the story Snow White, the protagonist Snow White is described as having "skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony wood" and as being "beautiful as the light of day."[117] By contrast, the antagonist of Brothers Grimm fairy tales is frequently described as old and physically unattractive, relating beauty with youth and goodness, and ugliness with aging and evil.[116] Ultimately, this correlation puts an emphasis on the virtue of being beautiful, as defined by Grimm fairy tales.
Almost 100 years after the Grimm Brothers wrote their fairy tales, Walt Disney Animation Studios adapted these tales into animated feature films. Other common traits of female Disney characters include thin bodies with impossible bodily proportions, long, flowing hair, and large, round eyes.[118] Disney animated princess films associate beauty with the good qualities in a character.[119] A 2019 study suggests that Disney heroines have extremely small waists that are nearly impossible to achieve naturally.[120]
Fashion and beauty-centred dolls
[edit]
When young girls are playing with fashion and beauty-centred dolls, they begin to idealize beauty standards and associate what they find "beautiful" in the doll with attributes that they feel that they need to uphold. Girls who played with thin Barbie dolls reported lower body image and a greater desire to be thinner than the girls who played with a curvier doll or no doll at all.[121]
When taking Barbie's "beautiful" proportions and translating that physique into an actual human, Barbie is estimated to be 5'9" (175 cm) tall, have a 39" bust, an 18" waist, 33" hips, children's size 3 feet, and her weight would be 110 pounds (50 kg).[122] Taking into consideration Barbie's 'human' height and weight, Barbie would have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 16.24; this number fits the weight criteria for anorexia.[122] Additionally, being below a BMI of 17 suggests that an individual cannot afford to lose more weight as it is detrimental to one's health and that they are severely underweight.[123] Continuously playing with fashion and beauty-centred dolls with such idealistic body proportions can cause psychological effects to an individual and can later stem into the development of eating disorders and other negative mental health outcomes sch as depression and anxiety.[124][125] They may also cause young girls to associate thinness with attractiveness, success, and happiness.[126] Another study suggests that girls continue to internalize the thin ideal even after playing with more realistic dolls.[127]
LGBT ideals
[edit]
Transgender women
[edit]
Within the transgender community and those attracted to trans women, women of East Asian descent are regarded as the feminine ideal, because there is a racialialized stereotype that Asian features are 'prettier' than white women's. According to Chong-suk Han, this explains why East Asian drag queens typically win trans beauty pageants, because they are thought to pass more easily as female.[128] Charlie Anders notes that the best-selling transsexual pornographic films depict Asian trans women, and they are highly esteemed and sought after by men identifying as straight.[129]
A 2020 study interviewed trans women from Black, Australian Aboriginal, South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern trans women living in Australia. Researchers interviewed participants about the risk factors of transmisogyny and sexual violence.[131] Trans women of East Asian or Southeast Asian descent felt that white Australian men tend to fetishize them. This fetishization and exoticization of trans women of color left them vulnerable to sexual violence as trans women, which some felt could have been avoided if they could pass as white. Ussher's research suggests that the poor health outcomes experienced by many trans women are closely associated with their exposure to sexual violence as well as the social inequities and transphobia to which they are subjected. Trans women of color experience additional prejudice and discrimination due to the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and social class. Swami's research also suggests that understanding these intersectionalities is vital in understanding the sexual violence experiences of trans women of color.
The construction of femininity within the transgender community largely has to do with how well (or how poorly) they are able to utilise the tools of "corporeal beautification provided by the commercial industries."[134] According to Lovelock, "trans women such as Jenner are accepted as women so long as they adhere to the visual codes of female attractiveness."[134]
Drag queens
[edit]
Studies of RuPaul's Drag Race, a show that features a competition between drag queens, notes that contestants who have a smaller/skinnier body type are treated as though their femininity is more valid than larger drag queens.[135] RuPaul's Drag Race has also been known to encourage racialized performances that play into stereotypes based on the ethnicity of the queens performing; one incidence, a queen was discouraged from putting on an Amy Winehouse performance because the queen herself was a person of color.[136] Although drag is an important part of the LGBTQ community, most of the inspiration from which drag queens draw to formulate their looks abides by the standard of heteronormative, western beauty.[135]
Psychological effects
[edit]
Feminine beauty ideals have been shown to have correlations with many psychological disorders, including lowered self-esteem and eating disorders. Western cultural standards of beauty and attractiveness promote unhealthy and unattainable body ideals that motivate women to seek perfection.[137] Since 1972, there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the United States who experience dissatisfaction with their bodies.[138] Research indicates that women's exposure to television, even for a very short time, can experience decreased mood and self-esteem.[139] It has been consistently found that perceived appearance is the single strongest predictor of global self-esteem among young adults.[138] Awareness of the ideal female shape is linked to increasingly negative self-esteem.[138] Through peer interaction and an environment of continual comparison to those portrayed in the media, women are often made to feel inadequate, and thus their self-esteem can decrease from their negative self-image. A negative body image can result in adverse psychosocial consequences, including depression, poor self-esteem, and diminished quality of life.[140]
There is significant pressure for girls to conform to feminine beauty ideals, and, since thinness is prized as feminine, many women feel dissatisfied with their body shape. Body dissatisfaction has been found to be a precursor to serious psychological problems such as depression, social anxiety, and eating disorders.[141] Feminine beauty ideals have influenced women, particularly younger women, to partake in extreme measures. Some of these extreme measures include limiting their food intake, participating in excessive physical activity, or fixating on one's diet to try to achieve what is considered the "ideal beauty standards". One aspect of the feminine beauty ideal includes having a thin waist, which is causing women to participate in these behaviors. When trying to achieve these unnatural standards, these dangerous practices are put into place. These practices can eventually lead to the woman developing eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. With eating disorders as such, the obsession over one's body image and being thin reaches new levels, evolving into a rational fear of putting on weight. As achieving the "beauty ideal" becomes a more popular phenomenon, these eating disorders are becoming more prevalent, especially in young women.[142] Researchers have found that magazine advertisements promoting dieting and thinness are far more prevalent in women's magazines than in men's magazines, and that female television characters are far more likely to be thin than male characters.[143] Eating disorders stem from individual body dysmorphia, or an excessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in appearance.[137] Researchers suggest that this behavior strongly correlates with societal pressure for women to live up to the standards of beauty set by a culture obsessed with being thin.[137] Research has shown that people have subconsciously associated heavier body sizes with negative personality characteristics such as laziness and lack of self-control.[144] Fat-body prejudice appears as young as early childhood and continues into adult years.[144] Negative body image worsens as females go through puberty; girls in adolescence frequently report being dissatisfied with their weight and fear future weight gain.[145] According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), the age of the onset of eating disorders is getting younger.[137] Girls as young as elementary-school age report body dissatisfaction and dieting in order to look like magazine models.[144]
Ellen Staurowsky characterized serious psychological and physical health risks that are associated with girls' negative body images. Negative body image is often associated with disordered eating, depression, and even substance abuse. There is widespread evidence of damaging dissatisfaction among women and young girls with their appearance.[146]
Evolutionary perspectives
[edit]
Ideas of feminine beauty may have originated from features that correlate with fertility and health.[147] These features include a figure where there is more fat distribution in the hip and thigh area, and vary between different cultures. In both Western and Eastern cultures, having a larger waist to hip ratio (WHR) is considered attractive.[148] While it has been shown consistently that men find women with larger WHR more attractive, this body feature does not actually show any indication of health or fertility. It is more agreeably hypothesized that attraction to WHR is an adaptive cue of parity or current pregnancy, rather than a cue of fertility.[149] The heterosexual evolutionary perspective suggests that men, over time and across cultures, prefer youthful features (smooth skin, white eyes, full lips, good muscle tone, leg length, lumbar curvature, facial symmetry, long/full hair, feminine voice) as indications of fertility or healthy genes.[150] These physical cues pair with behavior cues of youth (high energy, short stride, animated facial expressions) to ancestrally assess a woman's "reproductive value."[151] These theories can help us understand why certain beauty or body trends fluctuate or remain stagnant, but some scholars argue that "unsound theoretical foundations will lead to imprecise predictions which cannot properly be tested, thus ultimately resulting in the premature rejection of an evolutionary explanation to human mate preferences."[149]
Gallery
[edit]
Venus at a Mirror, Peter Paul Rubens, 1615. In the 17th century, fleshier bodies were idealized.[152]
Victorian women were highly body conscious. They wore corsets to reduce their waistline, and bustles that magnified their buttocks.[152]
During the 1920s, women aimed to hide their curves, bobbed their hair and wore bold makeup.[152] The feminine ideal was no longer "frail and sickly" like in the Victorian era, so women danced and did sports.[153]
Actress Marilyn Monroe was perceived as the queen of curves in the 1950s.[153] Her image has been used to popularize the hourglass figure.
Farrah Fawcett and Cher in 1976. From the 1960s up to the 1980s, women aimed to look skinny. Tanned skin also became popular.[152]
The 1980s beauty ideal was still thin, but toned without being too muscular; thus aerobics became popular. The decade also epitomized over-the-top fashion.[152]
See also
[edit]
Masculine beauty ideal | ||||
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Spanish Letters
Letter #1
Copied
Ever since our first date, I've noticed changes in my world. Work at the office seems easier, and I'm getting more accomplished in less time. My boss has noticed the changes, too, and has been very complimentary of late.
I continue to be pleasantly surprised as I discover more about you, yet there is still so much that I'd like to know. I get excited at the thought of spending more time with you because our time together will help me to learn more about you. Already, I'm learning that we have so much in common. I enjoy our differences, but I'm happy that we share so many similar opinions and experiences. Whatever differences exist can only broaden our horizons and our outlook on life.
I've lost interest in seeing anyone else, Katie, because I'm falling in love with you!
P.S. I hope we can get together Friday evening. I'll call you.
Letter #2
Copied
Is it my imagination or am I getting smarter? I think the glow from your electric personality must be energizing my brain as well as my heart. I aced my statistics test on Monday--even after we were out so late on Sunday night. All the more surprising as your pretty face kept coming up between my calculator and all the formulas I had to deal with!
I like to think I'm getting to know you better each time we go out, but the truth is you're still full of surprises. I didn't expect to hear that you not only studied German and Russian, but you aced a statistics course too! I'd really like to read the results of all your statistical tests in your thesis when you finish your first draft. And if you need any help, I'm your man! Stats is a language I'd be happy to converse in any time.
That's the great thing about this relationship--we have so many things in common, like politics and hiking (and statistics!), but each of us also has interests that are out of the other one's familiar world. This makes the time we spend together especially interesting and helps us widen our worlds a little, too. I was surprised to hear you had never played chess before, but you really showed a knack for it when we played together on Saturday night and you beat me! I demand a rematch! And I was amazed to learn about the importance of intonation in nonnative comprehension of English. I need another lesson, though, because I still don't understand the difference between segmentals and suprasegmentals!
I hope you know how much I enjoy being with you. My feelings for you keep growing all the time. I've run into a few girls I've gone out with a few times before (before you!), but I'm really not interested anymore. I find myself thinking only about you (and less about statistics) and not wanting to see anyone else. I hope you're starting to feel the same way about me, too. Let's get together on Saturday evening--please tell me that's become our regular date night! I'm looking forward to another chess game with you as well as another lesson in phonology.
With love and anticipation...
Letter #3
Copied
I wish I could really express the happiness I have found in spending time with you over the last few weeks. Getting to know you has brought a dimension to my life that it just never had before. Every time we are together, the world looks a little better and the sun shines a little brighter.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that you're the kindest, most animated, and most amazing person I have ever met. The more I learn about you, the more I want to know. You're incredible! You have, in a way, changed the way I see the world. I am a better person, and I want to be an even better person, just because I have known you. I'm so glad that your love for humanity matches my own. I was serious about joining the Peace Corps, if you really want to go!
It's not just our desire to serve others, though. I love that you enjoy playing sports and spending time in the great outdoors as much as I do. I can't wait to do some hiking and backpacking together this summer. When are we going to take that trip down the Colorado that you talked about? I still can't believe you've already gone down it ten times, and yet you say that it's a new adventure each time. Well, that's how I feel every time that we go out together. Every day that I'm with you is full of bright hope and offers a new adventure.
I can't wait to see you again. I hope you know how much you're starting to mean to me. The other girls I've dated in the past just fade in comparison. You're quickly becoming the only one for me. I hope that I will soon be the only one for you.
Letter #4
Copied
Before I met you, I had never taken much notice of flowers or dew or grass or birds. But this morning I walked outside, breathed in the crisp, spring air, sat quietly on the porch, and watched life happen. Then, when time forced me back into the real world, I arrived at work and tried to concentrate, but couldn't. When I looked at my computer screen, I saw your beautiful face and when I jotted notes, I found myself printing your name. Even when I broke for lunch, I remembered our date, the smell of your hair, your perfume, your playful laugh. Everywhere I looked, I remembered you!
Since I met you, my world is coming alive. The more I get to know you the more I feel something warm and beautiful stirring within me. Is this feeling what poets have struggled to describe as love? All I know is that I feel happy and complete when I am with you. When we are apart, I am lethargic and unfocused. I find myself watching the clock as it ticks off the moments until we can be together again.
I learn something new with every conversation. I am impressed that you can easily converse about Bach one moment and French cuisine in another. I was so pleased to learn that we share a common interest in educating children. I have often wondered if I was alone in my thinking, but you confirmed that these ideas might have real merit. That's just the point: you're full of surprises--I never know what new and wonderful thing I will learn when I'm with you.
Please pardon my awkward attempt at saying how much I treasure our growing relationship. I hope you feel the same way. The girls I've dated in the past are like vague memories. I've totally lost interest in anyone but you.
I've planned a surprise for our date this Saturday night, but I'm only giving one hint--please wear a formal dress. That's all I'll say for now. I hope you can come. I'll call you tomorrow night.
Letter #5
Copied
I know you are staying late at the office tonight, but I wanted to tell you about my incredible day. I thought a letter wouldn't disturb you too much. It seems there have been many reminders of you in the air today. It all started when I woke up early to go to aerobics. When the instructor began the warm-up music, what should I hear but Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now." Because we talked about our mutual passion for '80s music last night, I thought of you immediately. I'm glad you have such great taste in music! I also remembered how you sang "Love Shack" in your car the first time we went out, and it got my heart rate up quickly this morning. I had an exceptional work out!
Later, in the office, I received several comments from co-workers who told me that I have been particularly efficient and energetic since we started spending time together. I love being a hygienist and I was thrilled to find out that you have spent time in the dental field yourself. I am learning new things about you all the time. I think the excitement of my growing feelings for you has not only helped me at the office, but has also improved my outlook on life in general. You are on my mind constantly and my days are more fulfilling.
When I stopped at a red light while I was on my lunch break, I found myself surrounded by a group of cyclists. I thought of you again! Normally I wouldn't have given them a second look, but now that you have taught me all kinds of new things about biking, I was much more interested in them. I pictured you riding along in your fluorescent yellow biking outfit. I love how you have many unique interests and that you are willing to share them with me. We are broadening each other's horizons as we spend more and more time together.
An old friend called me tonight asking if she could line me up with a guy she knows. Truthfully, the thought of spending time with anyone else didn't interest me. I quickly tried to think of an excuse to turn down my friend's suggestion because, after all, we haven't defined our relationship in terms of dating other people yet. I told her I couldn't be lined up with anyone right now because I'm seeing someone who is incredibly handsome. Do you like being with me as much as I like being with you? If so, should we consider only dating each other and seeing where our relationship could go?
It was funny how you made my day good, even though I didn't get to see you. It seemed like everything I heard and saw reminded me of you. I may be falling for you, Michael! We both deserve a break from work, so would you fall into my arms for a good movie tomorrow night? How about "Lord of the Rings"? Give me a call and we'll work out the details.
I am still thinking of you.
Letter #6
Copied
Ever since I met you my life hasn't been the same. Knowing you is really bringing out the best in me and helping me to see the world through a rich, new lens. Although we have a lot in common, our differences are also important because they broaden our ranges of interest. Before I met you, I didn't think that classical music was something I could enjoy, but you showed me that I could and that has added a new dimension to my life. I've actually bought Handel's "Music for the Royal Fireworks" on CD to play in my car! I hope you are enjoying my "Credence Clearwater Revival Greatest Hits" CD as well! My boss has noticed the change in me, too. He tells me that I'm more energetic and that my work is more creative.
I'm falling in love with you. Dating other girls seems useless now because I have found what I want. My day isn't complete anymore unless I've seen you or at least talked to you on the phone. Could we go out on Friday night and carry this relationship a step further? I think dinner and a movie would be a good place to start, don't you? I'll call you tomorrow and we'll work out the details.
I miss you already.
Letter #7
Copied
You make me feel like singing--and I don't sing. You make me feel like dancing--even with my two left feet. When you're near me, my life is in focus. Everything I do is better because you believe in me. When the copy machine jams, I don't kick it anymore. When my computer crashes, I calmly reboot it without losing my temper. I even laughed today when the paper shredder jammed. My co-workers enjoy my new, relaxed attitude and send you their warmest regards!
Getting to know you is such an exciting adventure. Your creative problem-solving continues to pleasantly surprise me. Most of all, I enjoy so many things about you--the way you always crinkle your nose when you smile, and how you tilt your head and lower your eyes when I tell you you're beautiful.
Despite our individual natures, we seem to be cut from similar cloth. Most importantly, we share important values and beliefs. We have so much in common that we just feel right together. I love the fact that you follow a strong moral compass that always points you true North. Your strong personal standards are apparent in all that you do. These characteristics are important to me and serve as a strong foundation for our relationship.
I'm beginning to feel that I'm learning so much since you've broadened my horizon. I've even started to gain a better appreciation of art and really enjoyed seeing your favorite museum last week and learning about modern art! Would you like to go to the Art Expo Friday night? You've got me anxious to see the "surprise unveiling." Please be patient, though, my seventh grade art teacher described me as "artistically challenged."
I'm happy that you're letting me teach you the finer points of hockey, too. After the Art Expo, we could go to Calgary's playoff hockey game. I heard you cheering more loudly than I did when Conroy scored last game's winning goal! But when it comes right down to it, I'm happy going anywhere, so long as I'm with you.
I've fallen head-over-heels for you, yet I've never felt firmer on my feet. There is no one else with whom I'd rather be. Our relationship offers me more than I could have ever imagined. It may sound corny, but it's true--you're the girl of my dreams.
I'll call you Thursday to see if you're available. Please say, "Yes."
Letter #8
Copied
I've noticed something recently--I'm happy. My attitude at work has improved. My attitude about life has improved. I smile most of the time and sometimes I find myself humming as I walk down the street. Other people have noticed it too and asked me what's different now and what has made me so much happier. The answer? I can trace the change back to the time when I first met you.
I love spending time with you. The more I learn about you, the more I want to be with you. You make me want to try new things. Who would ever have thought that I would try rock climbing? I'm usually afraid of heights and afraid of falling, and yet there I was, halfway up the side of a mountain and enjoying it. I hardly felt scared at all!
We're so different and yet we're so alike. You're an extrovert and I'm more of an introvert. You love doing adventurous outdoor activities, and I tend to be afraid of doing anything out of the ordinary. Our political differences may lead to some heated discussions, but we also complement each other in so many other ways. We have the same quirky sense of humor and the same desire to learn new things. And we respect each other's opinions, whether we agree with them or not. I think I could talk to you nonstop for a week and not run out of things to say!
I think I'm falling in love with you. I don't have any desire to be with anyone else; I just want to be with you. I hope that we can continue down this path and see where it leads. I can't wait until our next date. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 35 | https://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/10619 | en | Inspiring Movies | [
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] | null | [] | null | en | https://assets.nflxext.com/us/ffe/siteui/common/icons/nficon2023.ico | null | Music & Musicals
Beats
A Week Away
ReMastered: Tricky Dick & The Man in Black
ONEFOUR: Against All Odds
Four Minutes
ReMastered: Who Shot the Sheriff
13: The Musical
The Black Godfather
Shania Twain: Not Just a Girl
Mario Lanza - The Best of Everything
Travis Scott: Look Mom I Can Fly
GIMS: On the Record
Fezeka's Voice
The Prom
Mon Laferte, te amo
Shawn Mendes: In Wonder
Enzo Avitabile Music Life
Emicida: AmarElo - It’s All For Yesterday
The Forty-Year-Old Version
Blitzed!
Ramoncín: A Life on the Edge
BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky
HOMECOMING: A film by Beyoncé
Emicida: AmarElo - Live in São Paulo
An Irish Story: This Is My Home
Manolo Sanlucar, The legacy
Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square
One Take
Daiki Tsuneta Tokyo Chaotic
Racionais MC's: From the Streets of São Paulo
Bigflo & Oli: Hip Hop Frenzy
Crossing Rachmaninoff
Angèle
Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World
LiSA Another Great Day
Beethoven’s Ninth - Symphony for the World
We Are One
Flip a Coin -ONE OK ROCK Documentary-
John Lennon - Love Is All You Need
Alalá | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 76 | https://hbr.org/2014/12/rethink-what-you-know-about-high-achieving-women | en | Rethink What You “Know” About High-Achieving Women | [
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] | null | [
"Robin J. Ely",
"Pamela Stone",
"Colleen Ammerman"
] | 2014-12-01T15:00:00+00:00 | On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School’s MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies. What their comprehensive survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women’s careers doesn’t always square with reality. The survey showed, for instance, that: The highly educated, ambitious women and men of HBS don’t differ much in terms of what they value and hope for in their lives and careers. It simply isn’t true that a large proportion of HBS alumnae have “opted out” to care for children. Going part-time or taking a career break to care for children doesn’t explain the gender gap in senior management. The vast majority of women anticipated that their careers would rank equally with those of their partners. Many of them were disappointed. It is now time, the authors write, for companies to consider how they can institutionalize a level playing field for all employees, including caregivers of both genders. The misguided assumption that high-potential women are “riskier” hires than their male peers because they are apt to discard their careers after parenthood has become yet another bias for women to contend with. HBR Reprint R1412G | /resources/images/favicon.ico | Harvard Business Review | https://hbr.org/2014/12/rethink-what-you-know-about-high-achieving-women | On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School’s MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies. What their comprehensive survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women’s careers doesn’t always square with reality.
The survey showed, for instance, that:
The highly educated, ambitious women and men of HBS don’t differ much in terms of what they value and hope for in their lives and careers.
It simply isn’t true that a large proportion of HBS alumnae have “opted out” to care for children.
Going part-time or taking a career break to care for children doesn’t explain the gender gap in senior management.
The vast majority of women anticipated that their careers would rank equally with those of their partners. Many of them were disappointed.
It is now time, the authors write, for companies to consider how they can institutionalize a level playing field for all employees, including caregivers of both genders. The misguided assumption that high-potential women are “riskier” hires than their male peers because they are apt to discard their careers after parenthood has become yet another bias for women to contend with.
HBR Reprint R1412G | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 21 | https://www.esquire.com/uk/life/sex-relationships/g9904/the-25-most-beautiful-women-of-all-time/ | en | The Most Beautiful Women Of All Time | [
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"Beautiful Women",
"hot women",
"sexy women",
"Most Beautiful Women Of All Time"
] | null | [] | 2018-02-05T00:00:00+00:00 | Beautiful women - here is the definitive, irrefutable list of the women who deserve the accolade of most beautiful women of all time. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/esquire/static/images/favicon.9bd3ce0.ico | Esquire | https://www.esquire.com/uk/life/sex-relationships/g9904/the-25-most-beautiful-women-of-all-time/ | For her turn in 12 Years a Slave, Nyong'o won the 2013 Best Supporting Actress Oscar becoming the first African actress to win the award and the first Kenyan actress to win an Oscar of any kind. It also happened to catapult her to the top of every magazine in the world's 'best-dressed' and 'most beautiful' lists, where she has remained ever since.
Lively's breakthrough role came in teen drama Gossip Girl, during the filming of which she dated her onscreen boyfriend - life imitating art and all that. She's since appeared in multiple films including an impressive performance in The Shallows and married Ryan Reynolds. A lucky man.
The original blonde bombshell, 'B.B.' was an actress, model and one of the biggest sex symbols of the 50s and 60s before becoming an animal rights activist and - somewhat regrettably - a convicted race hate inciter in her later years.
"I don't understand why people see me as beautiful" the British actress - regarded as one of the greatest screen icons of all time - apparently used to tell her son, leading to the obvious question: what hope is there for any of the rest of us?
Oscar-winning actress and Harvard University graduate, Natalie Portman is someone with talent to burn who also happens to be one of the great beauties of the modern celebrity era. Oh, and she's also a promising director now. Expect her to cure cancer around 2035.
2008's Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire was an over-rated film in all but one respect: it launched the career of Freida Pinto. A darling of fashion magazines ever since, she is also considered in her home country as "arguably the biggest global star from India."
Over the past 5 years Jessica Chastain has quietly established herself as one of the most talented and versatile screen actress working today. We say quietly because - the odd jaw-dropping red carpet appearance aside - she keeps her private life private, preferring to let a growing body of work speak for itself.
Best known as the original Bond girl having starred alongside Sean Connery in Dr. No, Ursula Andress' entrance in that film as (cringe) 'Honey Ryder the shell diver' was voted #1 'greatest sexy movie moment' in a Channel 4 survey some forty years later. "This bikini made me into a success. As a result of starring in Dr. No as the first Bond girl, I was given the freedom to take my pick of future roles and to become financially independent," she later said of the white two-piece still etched into the minds of generations of movie-goers.
Starting her career as a model, Monica Belucci moved into acting in the early 90s. You may know her as the star of The Matrix Reloaded, Enter the Matrix or The Matrix Revolutions - all the Matrix films that aren't The Matrix, basically - or for making rather patronising headlines as 'the oldest ever Bond girl' in 2015's Spectre. But perhaps her most interesting work known by English audiences was as a rape victim in Gaspar Noé's extremely controversial Irréversible.
There is little new to observe about Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, arguably the most powerful female celebrity in the world. Celebrated musician, businesswoman and activist, in her spare time she makes Jay-Z look like the luckiest man in the world.
2002 was the Great Year of Halle Berry, when she'd just won a Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball and had enough credibility banked to slum it as asex symbol in the ludicrous Swordfish and Die Another Day, which actually made Swordfish look like Citizen Kane. Anyway - then came Catwoman and Cloud Atlas and bunch of other crap and now she's perhaps best known as looking better with short hair than any other woman in history.
No name is as immediately synonymous with female beauty than Marilyn Monroe, the 1950s screen siren whose glamorous public life obscured an often tragic private life. Despite playing the 'dumb blonde' stereotype demanded by her era, off camera she was integral in building her own star power and in 1954 founded her own film production company because she was unhappy with the derisory contract offers from major studios.
They say there is no beauty like a French beauty (it's the French who say that, by the way), and in the case of model-turned-actress Marine Vacth they may have a point. The star of 2013's foreign language hit Jeune & Jolie ('Young & Beautiful'), her upturned gaze briefly adorned the sides of buses and tube stations across London causing more than a few commuter collisions.
Many journalists have made fools of themselves over the years trying to capture the essence of Scarlett Johansson's beauty in words, so we won't. What we will venture is that beside the obvious, a lot of it is to with her voice: husky, sardonic and - would you guess it - beautiful when she sings. Still too much? OK we'll stop.
The only celebrated Australian beauty known in Britain not to have once had a part on Neighbours, Miranda Kerr became at model at 13 and has never looked back, becoming one of the most bankable faces in the world for beauty companies, fashion labels and magazines looking to sell copies including, in 2013, us.
Anyone who has seen Carey Mulligan's mournful 5 minute-long singing scene in Shame will be left in no doubt she deserves her place on this list. A BAFTA-winner with a string of quality films to her name, the fact she is married to one of Mumford & Sons can be taken as proof she has a generous heart and tolerant spirit, too.
The biggest pop star in the world is, as these things tend to go, also one of the world's most beautiful women. With an output of ridiculous consistency - eight albums in 10 years tell its own story - there's barely a day that goes by the average person in the west doesn't see Rihanna's face somewhere, doing something - usually somewhere and something pretty cool. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 38 | https://filmfestival.tcm.com/programs/ | en | TCM Classic Film Festival 2024 | [
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] | null | [] | 2021-10-18T16:44:35+00:00 | Join us for the 15th Annual TCM Classic Film Festival on April 18-21, 2024. TCM invites you and the usual suspects to the big movie house for Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film. | en | TCM Classic Film Festival 2024 | https://filmfestival.tcm.com/programs/ | The 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival will cover a wide range of programming topics, including our central theme, Most Wanted: Crime and Justice in Film. We work directly with the Hollywood studios, the world’s notable film archives, and private collectors to program some of the most revered movies of all time alongside forgotten gems, many in stunning new restorations.
In keeping with TCM tradition, all Festival screenings include special introductions to provide context about each film. Specific details about this unique fan experience will be announced in the weeks and months ahead, including guest appearances by actors, actresses, directors, producers and other key figures. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 8 | https://archive.org/details/phantom-lady-1944 | en | Phantom Lady (1944) Directed By Robert Siodmak, Starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Alan Curtis : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive | [
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] | null | [] | null | Phantom Lady is a 1944 American FILM NOlR directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, and Alan Curtis. IThe film was Siodmak's first... | en | Internet Archive | https://archive.org/details/phantom-lady-1944 | Phantom Lady is a 1944 American FILM NOlR directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, and Alan Curtis. IThe film was Siodmak's first Hollywood noir and was based on the novel of the same name written by Cornell Woolrich but published under the pseudonym William Irish.
You can find out more about this movie from Wikipedia and read an article from FILM NOlR of the Week. A detailed article from online blog Film Noir Board may still be available. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 82 | https://www.purewow.com/news/best-movie-couples-of-all-time | en | The 40 Most Iconic Movie Couples of All Time | [
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"Nakeisha Campbell"
] | 2022-01-13T19:00:00-04:00 | From Princess Leia and Han Solo to Vivian and Edward, here are 40 of the best movie couples of all time. | en | PureWow | https://www.purewow.com/news/best-movie-couples-of-all-time | Some movies are remembered for their incredible endings and others for their to-die-for costumes. But nothing beats an unforgettable movie couple.
Classics like Titanic, Dirty Dancing and Pretty Woman have introduced us to swoon-worthy romantic leads (and taught us a thing or two about how to navigate our own relationships). Of course, these examples only scratch the surface when it comes to standout on-screen romances. Keep reading for 40 of the best movie couples of all time.
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Vestron Pictures
1. Baby And Johnny (dirty Dancing)
Like we’d ever put these two in a corner…
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2. Tony And Maria (west Side Story)
Their tragic romance always tugs at the heartstrings—but it comes as no surprise, given that their story took inspiration from Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
3. Quincy And Monica (love & Basketball)
Childhood BFFs and aspiring athletes, Quincy (Omar Epps) and Monica (Sanaa Lathan), develop romantic feelings for each other as they grow older and pursue their careers. But even as their success threatens the future of their relationship, it doesn’t change their off-the-charts chemistry.
Lionsgate Films Inc.
4. Katniss And Peeta (the Hunger Games Series)
No disrespect to fans who are #TeamGale, but it’s impossible to watch the films and not see that these two belong together. (Need proof? Watch this scene.)
Loew's Inc.
5. Rhett And Scarlett (gone With The Wind)
We think of their relationship as a sort of Kim-Kanye situation: They’re both kinda kooky, but it works.
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Paramount Pictures
6. Sandy And Danny (grease)
Do we love that Sandy totally changed herself for a guy? No. Can we recreate the entire “You’re the One That I Want” choreo from memory? Proudly.
Touchstone PIctures
7. Vivian And Edward (pretty Woman)
Not including these two would’ve been a big mistake…huge.
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
8. Darius And Nina (love Jones)
A chance encounter at a Chicago club leads to a casual fling between these two creatives. It doesn't take long for them to realize that they might have something more.
Act III Communications
9. Westley And Buttercup (the Princess Bride)
Any guy who’s willing to put up with intense duels and torture chambers to win your heart is certainly a keeper. Princess Buttercup knows that all too well.
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
10. Princess Leia And Han Solo (star Wars)
No lie, these lovebirds shared some of the best scenes in this movie franchise, from Leia's brave profession of love (followed by Han's classic "I know") to that steamy first kiss on the Falcon.
Wild Bunch
11. Adele And Emma (blue Is The Warmest Color)
Think: Young love, with a whole bunch of twists.
Ronald Siemoneit/Sygma/via Getty Images
12. Neo And Trinity (the Matrix)
Get this: Their love for one another was so powerful that they brought each other back to life. If that's not true love, then we don't know what is.
13. Peter And Lara Jean (to All The Boys I've Loved Before)
What started as a silly ruse to make an ex jealous turned into a swoon-worthy high-school romance.
Summit Entertainment
14. Edward And Bella (twilight)
Was their romance problematic? Definitely. But admit it, those dreamy romance scenes still gave you all the feels.
Universal Pictures
15. Mark And Bridget (bridget Jones's Diary)
You know it's true love when your partner tries to convince you that your blue-colored soup is cool.
20th Century Fox
16. Gus And Hazel (the Fault In Our Stars)
John Green's got a knack for crafting teen love stories that would make even Nicholas Sparks proud.
17. Lois And Clark (superman)
There would be no Superman without Lois. There, we said it.
Universal Pictures
18. Elizabeth And Mr. Darcy (pride & Prejudice)
Can we agree that some of the best romances can come out of bitter rivalries?
Summit Entertainment
19. Mia And Sebastian (la La Land)
Must they choose between love and their careers? Or is it possible to have it all? La La Land addresses these very questions as two ambitious artists (played by Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling) fall in love.
20th Century Fox / Getty
20. Romeo And Juliet (romeo + Juliet)
We know, we know. They both tragically die in the end. But if there’s one thing these star-crossed lovers got right, it’s that first loves can be seriously intense.
Walt Disney Pictures
21. Jasmine And Aladdin (aladdin)
Yes, we’re total suckers for fairytale romances. Especially when they include a feminist hero. *Cue “A Whole New World”*
20th Century Fox
22. Stella And Winston (how Stella Got Her Groove Back)
Angela Bassett’s Stella Payne embarks on a journey of self-discovery as she travels to Jamaica and starts a whirlwind romance with Winston, a young islander who's 20 years younger.
Sony Pictures Classics
23. Oliver And Elio (call Me By Your Name)
In this poignant story about first love, 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) is smitten with a 24-year-old grad student, Oliver (Armie Hammer). If you’ve yet to see it, keep some tissues handy when you watch.
Mirror Releasing
24. Tish And Fonny (if Beale Street Could Talk)
Best friends turned lovebirds Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) are thrown the ultimate curveball when Fonny gets wrongfully convicted of a crime in ’70s New York. Their story will send anyone on a rollercoaster of emotions.
Universal Pictures
25. Queen And Slim (queen & Slim)
Disclaimer: It’s not a run-of-the-mill love story. The two went from having a disastrous first date to bonding while on the run from police, which makes their relationship even more fascinating.
Warner Bros. Pictures
26. Ron And Hermione (harry Potter Series)
We certainly didn’t see this relationship coming (in fact, we were leaning more towards Harry and Hermione). But now that we look back, their romance makes total sense.
Columbia Pictures
27. Mary Jane And Peter (spider-man)
Peter (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) will go down in history as the couple who inspired us to try that infamous upside-down kiss.
Warner Bros.
28. Joe And Kathleen (you've Got Mail)
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star as enemies-turned lovers in this charming tale, where they meet and fall for each other online.
Relativity Media
29. Jane And Jake Adler (it's Complicated)
We’ve seen plenty of examples of how rewarding love can be, but with Jane (Meryl Streep) and Jake’s (Alec Baldwin) on-and-off romance, we’re reminded that it’s often messy and complicated.
Miramax Films
30. Sara And Jonathan (serendipity)
When Sara (Kate Beckinsale) and Jonathan (John Cusack) meet for the first time, sparks fly. But when they part ways, they leave it up to fate to bring them back together.
Columbia PIctures
31. Vada And Thomas J. (my Girl)
We’re not sobbing, you’re sobbing.
Columbia PIctures
32. Sally And Harry (when Harry Met Sally)
Honestly, we were thisclose to going with Marie and Jess.
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20th Century Fox
33. Jane And John (mr. And Mrs. Smith)
R.I.P. Brangelina. Your on-screen chemistry was super hot.
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Warner Bros.
34. Ilsa And Rick (casablanca)
Bogart and Bergman were the heart eyes emoji before the heart eyes emoji existed.
Focus Features
35. Jack And Ennis (brokeback Mountain)
We can’t quit this movie.
Paramount PIctures
36. Jack And Rose (titanic)
We’ll let it slide that there was definitely room for both of them on the door.
MTV Films
37. Sara And Derek (save The Last Dance)
Yes, it’s a predictable teen movie, but you’ll be rooting for Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas the whole damn time.
RELATED
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New Line Cinema
38. Allie And Noah (the Notebook)
Confession: We watch Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams accepting the award for Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards at least once a year.
RELATED
40 Movies to Watch When You Need a Good Cry
Fox Searchlight Pictures
39. Latika And Jamal (slumdog Millionaire)
Movie suspense is only acceptable when the payout is as tear-jerking as this one.
Paramount Pictures
40. Molly And Sam (ghost)
Two words: Pottery scene.
RELATED
The 60 Best Romantic Comedies of All Time | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 16 | https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-coming-of-age-movies/ | en | The 25 Best Coming-Of-Age Movies | [
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] | null | [] | 2023-05-18T00:00:00 | Read Empire's list of the greatest films documenting the transition to adulthood. | en | /assets/empire/favicon.ico | Empire | https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/best-coming-of-age-movies/ | John Hughes once explained why he loved stories about young people caught between childhood and adulthood. “One of the great wonders of that age is your emotions are so open and raw,” he said. “At that age it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.”
The poet laureate of the coming-of-age film wasn’t wrong. These movies are built on some of the biggest feelings there are – first love! True friendship! Desperately trying to find a decent party and some booze! – and put you right back in the time when you felt everything so much, you thought you might actually burst. The arc is simple: a young person (or little gang of them) goes through some kind of quest or experience which opens their eyes to the world and shows them how innocent they were, and now never can be again. Come the credits, everyone’s done a lot of growing up, but nothing is ever really over. We’re actually at the start again, looking out at the next stage of life.
But filmmakers have spun that arc into hundreds of different shapes. That’s the power of coming-of-age stories: whether you’re in revolutionary Iran or a New Zealand backwater, that desperation to make your own way in the world while pining for the friends and times that can’t come again is pretty universal. Coming-of-age movies only become more poignant as you get older, too. When you’re 16 you get Lady Bird’s romantic ideas about being a writer in New York and feel her boredom with small town life; when you’re 35, you want to get her mum a cup of tea and give her a hug. Here’s our pick of the finest coming-of-age movies out there. Cue Simple Minds. Air punch. Freeze frame.
25. Bend It Like Beckham
Like almost everyone in England around the turn of the millennium, Jess Bhamra is obsessed with David Beckham. To her he’s not just a footballer with a sweet right foot and a pioneering attitude toward sarongs: he’s a symbol of everything exciting and glamorous which her parents mistrust. “Anyone can cook aloo gobi,” as Jess points out, “but who can bend a ball like Beckham?” Jess has mad skills too, and she’s taken under the wing of Keira Knightley’s Jules as she secretly sets out to follow in Becks’ Adidas-booted footsteps without her mum and dad finding out. Director Gurinder Chadha brings such energy and originality to a genre which can deliver a fair few nil-nil bore-draws, as Jess realises that she can be both her parents’ daughter and her own woman – both West Londoner and second generation British Punjabi – while Bend It Like Beckham’s queer undertones have made it even more cherished since release.
Read the Empire review.
24. Mermaids
Yes, it’s the movie where Cher and Bob Hoskins are a couple, quite possibly the unlikeliest one since Roger and Jessica Rabbit. But more importantly, it’s the movie that brought us two iconic performances from young rising stars, in the form of Winona Ryder’s Charlotte Flax (15 years old) and Christina Ricci’s Kate Flax (nine). The two sisters are growing up in the town of Eastport, Massachusetts, being served up marshmallow kebabs by their mum and, in Charlotte’s case, grappling with some complex new feelings. (“Please God, don’t let me fall in love and want to do disgusting things,” goes her inner voice as she clocks a desirable young man). Capturing the volatility and confusion of teenagerdom perfectly — Charlotte, despite being Jewish, yearns to be Catholic — it’s sweet, funny, eccentric and boasts fantastic chemistry between the four leads. It doesn’t even leave you irked that there’s no actual mermaids in it, just Cher dressed as one.
Read the Empire review.
23. The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
Adapted by Stephen Chbosky from his own book, this is a definitive mid-millennial totem, a great Tumblr-era touchstone. It’s also one of the most tender – and darkest – coming-of-age movies of recent memory. Struggling to recover from a bout of severe depression, Charlie (Logan Lerman) is a freshman at high school who struggles to find friends until senior Sam (Emma Watson) brings him into her gang. Absolutely everyone’s emotionally raw in some way: Charlie and Sam share some of the same demons, while Sam’s brother Patrick is having a clandestine relationship with the school quarterback Brad. Usually, coming-of-age stories are about putting away childish things and letting them drift from your mind. But The Perks Of Being A Wallflower suggests that those childish things can grind away at your soul unless you confront and purge them, and it’s that which gives it such power.
Read the Empire review.
22. Turning Red
Puberty can feel like you’re transforming into some kind of monstrous beast, and getting your period for the first time (and all the times after, come to think of it) feels like a curse – two things that Turning Red director Domee Shi understands extremely well. In her poppy Pixar feature debut, Shi expertly relays the bodily, emotional and familial struggles of adolescence through her protagonist Mei (Rosalie Chiang), who discovers her inherited ability to turn into a giant red panda when she experiences extreme feelings. A diversion from the usual Pixar adventure fare, Turning Red is a coming-of-age tale through and through, with Mei learning how to handle friendships, strengthen her relationship with mother Ming (Sandra Oh), and be proud of exactly who she is, all in time to get to the concert of fictional dreamy boyband, 4*TOWN.
Read the Empire review.
21. Beautiful Thing
Hettie Macdonald’s estate-set rom-com is a pioneering queer coming-of-age story that still strikes a chord today. Beautiful Thing follows classmates and neighbours Jamie (Glen Berry) and Ste (Scott Neal) as their new relationship ebbs and flows across their South London estate. Released in 1996, in the aftermath of the Margaret Thatcher era and the implementation of Section 28, it was a joyful curio in the LGBTQIA+ cannon, with the two boys ignoring prejudiced peers and committing to exploring their newfound sexuality together. The film is awash with sunny shots of the Thamesmead estate, sternly subverting the kitchen sink dramas that were so readily linked to British realism at the time, and a soundtrack brimming with The Mamas And The Papas greatest hits to bring home that this is a romance worth celebrating. Charming, bitingly funny and with a tender closing scene for the ages, this is a formative teen movie must-see.
20. Raw
Putting a visceral, body-horror spin on the coming-of-age genre, Julia Ducournau’s instant classic of a feature debut sees Justine (Garance Marillier) follow in her familial footsteps and head to veterinary school. A staunch vegetarian when she arrives, she is forced to eat raw meat during hazing from older students – after a painful and skin-crawling physical reaction, she develops a taste for it, going to increasingly extreme lengths to feed her growing appetite. Ducournau masterfully blends Justine’s cannibalistic impulses with her emerging sexual desires, as well as sisterly feuds and discovering family secrets. It’s a bloodier take on the cinematic transition to adulthood than most, but perfectly evokes the violent intensity of adolescence, the overwhelm of exposure to a world of partying and hedonism, and the panicked feeling that your body is changing in ways you don’t understand. Tasty, tasty stuff.
Read the Empire review.
19. Persepolis
In Revolutionary Iran, Marji Satrapi watches as fundamentalist Islamist strips away freedoms and war breaks out with Iraq, and finds solace in Nike trainers, dodgy Iron Maiden tapes and rocking out with a tennis racquet for a guitar. As things get bleaker for Marji and her family, she is sent away to Europe and apparent safety. Once there, though, she starts to lose herself. Satrapi, who also created the graphic novel Persepolis is based on, directs with Vincent Paronnaud, and the spare, black and white hand-drawn animation is both full of character and usefully universal: live action “would have turned into a story of people living in a distant land who don't look like us,” Satrapi explained. There’s so much darkness and pain in Persepolis, but while the adult Marji doesn’t wear her ‘punk is not ded’ denim jacket any more, she realises the sense of rebellion which got her through Tehran will serve her in Paris too.
Read the Empire review.
18. Moonrise Kingdom
Every Wes Anderson movie feels like the most Wes Anderson movie Wes Anderson has ever Wes Anderson’d. But Moonrise Kingdom has a fair shout as the real high point of Wes Anderson doing Wes Anderson things. Over a summer Scout camp, 12-year-olds Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward) fall for each other on a faintly magical New England island, and decide to run away together. Their Scout group sets off after them, as does a social worker (Tilda Swinton, whose character is simply named ‘Social Services’) who wants to chuck Sam off into an orphanage. By the end, the secret ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ beach where Sam and Suzy pitched camp together (and danced to French pop records on the sand) has been obliterated by a storm, and they can never go back – but they find something more exciting and grown-up along the way. Anderson's usual archness and mannered style are there, but with a different kind of wistfulness and existential undertow to his more grown-up features.
Read the Empire review.
17. Boy
Before Taika Waititi became Marvel’s go-to guy, he made oddball family dramas which mixed dry, wry New Zealand wit with something harder-edged. In Boy, it’s December 1984 in the left-behind community of Waihau Bay, and a Michael Jackson-obsessed boy called, er, Boy (actually Alamein, named after his absent father) is waiting for his dad to come home. This dad is, apparently, a “master carver, deep-sea treasure diver, captain of the rugby team, and he holds the record for punching out the most people with one hand”. While Boy’s grandmother is away, dad finally returns – and after they have their fun threatening bullies with a machete, he ropes Boy into a weed-selling ring. Things quickly get out of hand when they step on a rival gang’s patch, and eventually Boy shakes off his childish delusions when he hits that startling and disturbing truth: not only is his dad far from the fantasy hero he imagined, but adults are just people who are making it up as they go too.
16. Rocks
Most coming-of-age stories are about a young person who’s not seen enough of the world to be cynical, but by the time we meet teenaged Londoner Rocks she’s already running the household for her single mum and looking after her little brother Emmanuel. Then one morning, her mum isn’t there at all. Rocks tries to keep up the pretense that nothing’s wrong, but drifts away from her friends and into a sketchy twilight world on the capital’s mould-flecked underside. Having built up a tough, spiky exterior since before she can remember, Rocks finally learns enough to stop pushing people away, and to realise that she’s still a child who deserves to be cared for too. Bukky Bakray earned a Bafta Rising Star award at 19 for her performance as Rocks here, and she’s absolutely extraordinary: playful and vivacious but with a real toughness beneath.
Read the Empire review.
15. Booksmart
Right-on Amy and bullish Molly are two extremely mature high schoolers who’ve done everything right – they grinded as hard as possible, gone to bed early, handed in homework on time – and now they’ve got the college spots they always wanted. Unfortunately, all the kids they thought would be burn-outs have too. Realising they missed out on their entire teenage experience, they resolve to go on one last epochally-huge night out – if only they can find out where the party is. Most coming-of-age movies are about teens dipping a toe into adulthood and maturity and realising it’s a bit scary and strange, but that they can’t go back to the way they were. Olivia Wilde’s movie is a deliriously funny and visually inventive (see the bit where they trip on LSD-spike strawberries and turn into animated plastic dolls) flip, and a paean to making the kind of impulsive, stupid decisions which mark real independence.
Read the Empire review.
14. Girlhood
Being one of the modern masters of the coming-of-age film – whether she’s penning My Life As A Courgette, or directing tender masterpieces like Water Lilies and Tomboy – makes picking just one entry from Céline Sciamma in this list a tough choice. However, with its profound and astutely-observed tale of a teen girl finding new life through a vibrant group of local friends, set against the sunny, poor Parisian suburbs, Girlhood takes the biscuit. The film can be perfectly crystalised in a single scene: Marieme (Karidja Touré) and her new friends muck in for a hotel room, where they try out their shoplifted clothes, swig booze and flawlessly lip sync to Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’, all under inky blue lighting. The rapture and carelessness of teen years spent with found family has rarely been captured any better than this.
Read the Empire review.
13. Almost Famous
It sounds like an adolescent fantasy: a teenager hitting the road with a massive rock band, and writing about it for Rolling Stone no less. Unbelievable as it sounds, it really happened to filmmaker Cameron Crowe – who fictionalised his experiences into the tale of Patrick Fugit’s William Miller, thrust into a world of sex, drugs, parties, and Elton John singalongs as he follows the chaotic Stillwater on tour. Along the way, he witnesses mid-tour meltdowns, falls for Kate Hudson’s ‘Band Aid’ Penny Lane, and learns who his real friends are, all while avoiding calls from his disapproving mother (Frances McDormand). It’s a supercharged set of seminal experiences that hits on fundamental truths, from the transformational power of rock’n’roll (“Look under your bed… it will set you free,” William’s older sister imparts as she bequeaths her LPs to him), to wise words from Philip Seymour Hoffman as legendary rock critic Lester Bangs: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
Read the Empire review.
12. Whisper Of The Heart
Plenty of Studio Ghibli movies could be considered coming-of-age stories – from Kiki’s Delivery Service to Spirited Away. But where those films wrap relatable feelings in fantastical contexts, Whisper Of The Heart faces the trials of youth dead-on – a gorgeously-crafted, distinctive film from the legendary Japanese anime studio whose only fantasy sequences derive from the imaginative writings of its central character, 14-year-old budding author Shizuku. The film, set in then-contemporary Tokyo (actually 1995), not only depicts Shizuku falling for Seiji – a boy who checked out all the same library books as her – but also explores the discovery and pursuit of her passion. Seiji plans to devote his life to making violins; Shizuku sets herself the task of writing her first novel. It’s a tale not only of discovering purpose, but of committing to a craft – the work it takes to both grow as a person, and develop your own abilities. It’s that same dedication to craft that makes Ghibli films like Whisper Of The Heart so magical.
11. The Breakfast Club
John Hughes got to be the king of the coming-of-age movie because he understood two inalienable truths: teenagers are far tougher and smarter than any adult things they are; and a few short hours on a suffocating Saturday morning can change your young life. Hauled into detention for various misdemeanours, Claire (skipped school), Brian (smuggled in a flare gun), Bender (misuse of fire alarm), Andrew (taped boy’s buttocks together) and Allison (had nothing else on) have nothing to do with each other. All of them wish, for their own reasons, to disappear before adulthood comes. As Allison puts it: “When you grow up, your heart dies.” But slowly they realise how much they have in common, how much the tribes of teenagedom in modern America are a fictional construct, and that together they can run rings around their principal and lift each other up. Air-punching excellence.
Read the Empire review.
10. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Kelly Fremon Craig knows how to do this. She already served up a low-key coming of age classic with 2016’s The Edge Of Seventeen, so hopes were high for her take on Judy Blume’s utterly beloved – hell, sacrosanct – 1970 novel about an 11-year-old girl navigating friendship, religion, and menstruation. And kissing. And bras, and tampons. It’s hard to recall another film of late that has such warmth and compassion for its young characters and what they’re going through – all the little things that seem like life and death. As the wide-eyed, sensitive Margaret, Abby Ryder Fortson breaks your heart with every pained expression, every bit of longing and yearning, every flicker of heartache and humiliation. Engulfed by peer pressure, surrounded by friends who seem to be developing faster than she is, she just longs to be part of it all, and Fremon Craig turns her odyssey into an epic. Tears will flow.
Read the Empire review.
9. Lady Bird
Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut doesn’t just understand what it’s like to be an over-serious youngster desperate to break out of a seemingly humdrum life for something more alluringly artistic – in this case, an illustrious East Coast college. No, the real heart of Lady Bird is powered by the tension between Saoirse Ronan’s high school senior Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson and her mum Marion (Laurie Metcalf). Everything turns into an argument: the way Marion scrambles eggs, the way Lady Bird drags her feet, even buying a magazine to read in bed. “That’s something that rich people do,” Marion snaps without stopping the trolley, “we’re not rich people.” Lady Bird chases the things she thinks will get her closer to her dream life – including a very dishy Timothée Chalamet – while Marion tries to get her to see sense. And by the time she does get where she wants to be? She realises she never appreciated how special her home life was. It’s an utterly gorgeous movie with a stellar performances from Ronan and Metcalf, and the last scene will make you want to call your mum immediately.
Read the Empire review.
8. Dazed And Confused
Set across a single day in 1976, Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused might be primarily about the immediacy of the moment – but it’s also about the yawning chasm of the future opening up, the highway of life expanding before your very eyes and seeing where it might take you. For Jason London’s ‘Pink’ Floyd, it’s his choice to reject conformity (snubbing an anti-drugs form foisted on him by his baseball coach) in pursuit of freewheeling good times with friends; for little Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), it’s his first glimpse of everything that awaits him at high school – namely girls, parties, cruising, and weed – as his middle school years end. Linklater dialled into his own youth to create an authentic ‘70s Texas for his ensemble to inhabit – an honest snapshot of a time and place, and a reminder from the past to embrace the here and now. “Don’t you ever feel like everything we do and everything we’ve been taught is just to service the future?” asks Marissa Ribisi’s Cynthia at one point. “If we’re all gonna die anyway, shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves now?” Amen.
Read the Empire review.
7. American Graffiti
In 1972, George Lucas was at a low. His austere, futureshock sci-fi debut THX-1138 had turned into a fiasco. His friend Francis Ford Coppola encouraged him to make something warmer and more upbeat, so Lucas reached into his own teen years cruising around California. Over one night in Modesto, American Graffiti follows four friends through a series of drifting vignettes on their last night together before college: they try to impress girls, listen to music, and work out how far they really want to push away from home. It’s all the more wistful for memorialising a scene which, despite being only a decade past, felt like an impossibly innocent world where Vietnam, Watergate and the Summer of Love hadn’t corrupted young America’s hope and energy. It also introduced Lucas to a young carpenter called Harrison Ford. Decent future, that kid.
Read the Empire review.
6. The 400 Blows
François Truffaut’s debut kicked open the door to the 1960s and the Nouvelle Vague. Its hero Antoine is a cherubic little delinquent who talks tough and dreams of running away and raising hell. So, after a little while playing truant and trying to convince his teachers his mother is dead, he nicks his dad’s typewriter and tries to flog it to finance his plans, only to find himself hauled in to explain himself to psychiatrists. There’s a real toughness to The 400 Blows: Antoine is shuttled between institutions which don’t even try to understand him, and it’s an implicit indictment of a stuffy France which wasn’t listening to its young people even a decade before the 1968 student riots. And, like all good coming-of-age movies, it’s staunchly on the side of the kid. As Antoine stares out from the final frame, you can see so many things in his eyes: fear, cynicism, reproach. But, crucially, you’re seeing him, and that’s what Antoine has desperately wanted all along.
Read the Empire review.
5. Eighth Grade
Probably the first great coming-of-age movie of the internet era, Bo Burnham’s debut channelled his own anxiety and disorientation into Kayla (Elsie Fisher), who’s leaving middle school with little but her classmates’ ‘Most Quiet’ award to her name. Rather than spend time with her dad, she makes self-affirming YouTube videos (“Gucci!”) absolutely nobody watches. An invite to a pool party draws her out of her shell, and she starts to make friends with older kids – but suddenly the adult world rushes in all too quickly. In the end, it’s not sex or boys or friendship which show Kayla who she might become, but the sharp realisation that there’s a person underneath her online persona that she’s been running away from. Burnham’s ear for how teenagers talk is uncanny, and Eighth Grade perfectly captures the post-social media school landscape where cliques are gone but constant-running online battles endlessly simmer.
Read the Empire review.
4. The Graduate
At his audition to play post-college drifter Benjamin Braddock, Dustin Hoffman was uncertain. He’d never done a love scene, for one thing, and doubted very much whether anyone would buy that a woman like Katherine Ross would ever fancy him. Ross looked at Hoffman and agreed. “This is going to be a disaster,” she later recalled thinking. Alienated Benjamin is being ushered toward a career in plastics and the approval of his distant parents, but he fills a lazy summer with an affair with Anne Bancroft’s bored, urbane Mrs Robinson. Soon, though, Benjamin has to choose whether he keeps the fantasy going or makes a go of it with Mrs Robinson’s daughter. Hoffman and Bancroft are an exquisitely uneasy pairing, and director Mike Nichols’ unsentimental eye makes clear that though Benjamin chooses in the end not to compromise, every choice he makes is its own kind of compromise anyway. The soundtrack slaps, too.
Read the Empire review.
3. Moonlight
In Barry Jenkins’ Best Picture-winner, we follow the protagonist through three stages of his life – as a child, Little (Alex Hibbert), taken under the wing of local drug dealer Juan (Mahershala Ali); as a teenager, Chiron (Ashley Sanders), isolated at school and tentatively experimenting with his burgeoning sexuality; and as an adult, Black (Trevante Rhodes), who hides his desire for tenderness under exaggerated trappings of traditional masculinity. Moonlight is pure poetry, the sensual story of a young man rarely ever given permission to be his true self, set against the backdrop of a deprived, dog-eat-dog Miami. The grainy, pop-of-colour visuals; the deep, melancholy score; the director’s signature soul-wrenching gazes down the barrel of the lens – we dare you not to be in floods of tears by the end.
Read the Empire review.
2. Boyhood
For most coming-of-age movies, the coming-of-age thing is a shorthand. It’s a rough outline of where you’re heading, not a promise. But Richard Linklater’s 12-year project is not most coming-of-age movies. Boyhood follows young Mason from the age of six to his college graduation, and in waiting for star Ellar Coltrane to age in real time shows a boy literally coming of age. Its greatest achievement is both to make you forget the enormous faff involved in making it, and to simultaneously never let you forget that you’re watching the pure miracle of a young man growing up. It’s not just Mason who feels the ache of the years either. You really feel for Patricia Arquette as Mason’s mum Olivia, breaking down as her boy gets ready to leave for college: “I just thought there would be more.” Boyhood organically captures that painful, happy-sad feeling of watching the years vanish. It’s a gentle, heartbreaking, beautiful thing.
Read the Empire review.
1. Stand By Me
For a genre that’s all about young people, death is absolutely everywhere in coming-of-age movies. Its shadow is all over Stand By Me: when we meet 12-year-old Gordie, he’s lost his brother and his parents are too deep in grief to notice, and he and his three pals go on a quest to find the corpse of a boy their age. Along the way they chat about nothing much and unlock some big feelings. It’s just the kind of caper Rob Reiner wasn’t known for having just made This Is Spinal Tap, but by adroitly nicking bits of the American Graffiti playbook – turn-of-the-Sixties songs, bullies trying to muscle our heroes out, bittersweet epilogue about what happened to the gang next – Reiner made something that was both fun and deeply wise. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I did when I was 12,” Richard Dreyfuss’ old Gordie writes at the end. “Jesus, does anyone?” Probably not – but at least we have movies like Stand By Me. | ||||
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] | 2024-02-14T00:00:02+00:00 | By now, we’re all used to staying home. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still have date nights. Find the best date night movies for every kind of night in. | en | What to Stream on Hulu | Guides | https://www.hulu.com/guides/rom-coms-on-hulu | A good rom-com will make you laugh, cry, and leave even the most scorned lovers open to the idea of falling in love again.
From classics like Pretty Woman (1990) to new flicks like Maybe I Do (2023) — Hulu has the best rom-coms of all time available to stream now.
Sign up for Hulu
What Is a Rom-Com?
“Rom-com” is short for romantic comedy — a generally lighthearted genre of film that mixes elements of romance with comedy. The best part of a rom-com? They usually have a feel-good ending.
Best Rom-Coms on Hulu
Valentine’s Day (2010)
Before The Eras Tour film came to theaters, Taylor Swift made her silver screen debut in the rom-com film, Valentine’s Day. See Swift alongside a star-studded cast, including Taylor Lautner, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Garner, and Ashton Kutcher.
Watch: Valentine’s Day
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)
When it comes to rom-coms, few are more iconic than My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It has everything you want in a classic romantic comedy — an extravagant wedding, an over-the-top family, feel-good moments, running jokes, and a dreamy groom.
Watch: My Big Fat Greek Wedding*
*My Big Fat Greek Wedding is available on Hulu with a Max® add-on subscription.
Crazy Rich Asians (2018)
Elements of romance and comedy are used to explore themes of family, culture, and social status in the Golden GlobeⓇ-winning film, Crazy Rich Asians, starring Constance Wu, Henry Golding, and Michelle Yeoh.
Watch: Crazy Rich Asians
When in Rome (2010)
The whimsy and lore of the Trevi Fountain in Rome can bring hope to even the most skeptical people. That’s why Beth Harper (Kristen Bell) decides to snag a coin from the fountain in a moment of frustration. But instead of a magical whirlwind romance, she ends up getting much more than she wished for.
Watch: When in Rome
How to Be Single (2016)
There’s no right or wrong way to be single, especially in the age of dating apps, hook-up culture, and social media. But there’s one rule according to the single ladies in the rom-com flick, How to be Single — a night in New York City should never be wasted.
Watch: How to Be Single
Love, Simon (2018)
When Simon Spier (Nick Robinson) is outed by a classmate, his online relationship with a boy at school (codename: Blue) is revealed. Here’s the catch — Simon doesn’t know who the person behind “Blue” is. Get all the feels with the romantic coming-of-age LGBTQ+ movie, Love, Simon.
Watch: Love, Simon
2000s Rom-Coms
The Proposal (2009)
How far would you go to impress your boss? In The Proposal, Andrew Paxton (Ryan Reynolds) goes as far as agreeing to marry his Canadian-born boss, Margaret Tate (Sandra Bullock), so she can stay in the U.S. and he can advance his career. It’s a win-win situation — right?
Watch: The Proposal
Hitch (2005)
Alex “Hitch” Higgens (Will Smith) is a professional “date doctor,” aka someone who helps chronically single people improve their dating and relationship skills. But when Hitch falls head-over-heels for Sara (Eva Mendes), he has to put his own dating rules to the test. Is the Date Doctor everything he’s cracked up to be?
Watch: Hitch
27 Dresses (2008)
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. In 27 Dresses, Jane Nichols (Katherine Heigl) has been a bridesmaid 27 times and is preparing for number 28 — her little sister’s wedding. The icing on top of the wedding cake? She’s getting married to Jane’s dream man.
Watch: 27 Dresses
Just My Luck (2006)
Ashley Albright (Lindsay Lohan) has always had good fortune on her side. When she accidentally kisses the perpetually unlucky Jake Hardin (Chris Pine) at a party, their fortunes switch. Now, they have to navigate the consequences of their swapped fortunes as Ashley goes from being a good luck charm to a bad luck magnet.
Watch: Just My Luck
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell) is a late bloomer. At the age of 40, he still hasn’t done the deed, despite being kind, polite, and genuine. When Andy’s buddies discover his virgin status, they decide to play wingmen by setting up dates and sharing advice that ultimately leads to the iconic waxing incident that will leave you screaming, “OW, KELLY CLARKSON!”
Watch: The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Date Movie (2006)
The rom-com genre gets the spoof treatment in the parody film, Date Movie. It features a star-strewn cast, including Alyson Hannigan, Jennifer Coolidge, Carmen Electra, and rapper Lil Jon.
Watch: Date Movie
The Wedding Planner (2001)
Mary (Jennifer Lopez) has a knack for organizing, scheduling, preparing, and planning — that’s why she’s a talented and successful wedding planner. But when her new client, Dr. Steve Edison (Matthew McConaughey), comes along, Mary discovers there are some things in life you can’t plan for.
Watch: The Wedding Planner
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)
Magazine writer Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) is assigned a piece about how to get a guy to fall out of love with you when you’re just not into the relationship anymore. To prove it can be done, Andie sets her sights on the charming and handsome Benjamin Berry (Matthew McConaughey). Can she get him to fall for her, and then drive him away?
Watch: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days*
*Live TV plan required to watch live content on Hulu. Regional restrictions, blackouts, and additional terms apply.
13 Going on 30 (2004)
Feeling uncool and overlooked, all 13-year-old Jenna Rink (played by Christa B. Allen and then Jennifer Garner) wants for her birthday is for this chapter of her life to end. When she wakes up the next morning 17 years in the future, she quickly discovers that being an adult isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Watch: 13 Going on 30*
*Live TV plan required to watch live content on Hulu. Regional restrictions, blackouts, and additional terms apply.
90s Rom-Coms
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
According to her overprotective father, high schooler Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) isn’t allowed to start dating until her older sister, Kat (Julia Stiles), does. This rule is unfortunate for their classmate, Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who’s infatuated with Bianca. The only solution? Find a guy to date Kat — even if Cameron has to bribe him.
Watch: 10 Things I Hate About You
The Wedding Singer (1998)
With Adam Sandler and Drew Berrymore at the forefront, you know The Wedding Singer is just as funny as it is romantic. Laugh along to this 80s-themed flick as wedding singer Robbie Hart (Sandler) discovers that getting left at the altar might just be the best thing to ever happen to him.
Watch: The Wedding Singer*
*Live TV plan required to watch live content on Hulu. Regional restrictions, blackouts, and additional terms apply.
Father of the Bride (1991)
Today, we think of Steve Martin as Charles Haden Savage — the amateur crime sleuth turned murder-mystery-maven in the Hulu Original series, Only Murders in the Building. But 32 years ago, he was George Banks — a loving, witty, and slightly neurotic father grappling with the idea of his little girl growing up and getting married (and the price tag attached to her “small” backyard wedding).
Stream Father of the Bride Part 2 (1995) for a plot twist no one in the Banks family saw coming!
Watch: Father of the Bride
Classic Rom-Coms
Pretty Woman (1990)
Despite his extreme wealth, good looks, and charming personality, businessman and corporate raider Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) can’t seem to keep a relationship. It isn’t until he stumbles upon free-spirited Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) that he learns how to let loose and enjoy life in one of the most iconic rom-coms of all time, Pretty Woman.
Watch: Pretty Woman
Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)
The modern classic rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love — starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Emma Stone — is all about the unpredictable nature of relationships and what happens when you give yourself permission to embrace change.
Watch: Crazy, Stupid, Love
Splash (1984)
Don’t you just love a romantic comedy with undeniable chemistry between the lead actors? So do we. That’s why we can’t get enough of Tom Hanks and Daryl Hanna in the classic rom-com, Splash. Part rom-com, part mythical fantasy — this mermaid tale will make you laugh and swoon over this wonderfully perfect, yet unlikely pair.
Watch: Splash
(500) Days of Summer (2010)
In the mood for a rom-com and a movie to make you cry? The classic romance film (500) Days of Summer chronicles the 500 days of Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Finn’s (Zooey Deschanel) relationship — including the good, the bad, the funny, and the heartbreaking moments.
Watch: (500) Days of Summer
New Rom-Coms
Maybe I Do (2023)
Michelle (Emma Roberts) and Allen (Luke Bracey) are at the point in their relationship where it’s time for their parents to meet. But what they don’t realize is that their parents already know each other from their own sordid affairs. Rom-com icons Diane Keaton and Richard Gere star alongside Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy in the 2023 rom-com, Maybe I Do.
Watch: Maybe I Do
My Favorite Girlfriend (2022)
Conrad (Tyler Johnson) has finally met the perfect girl in Vanessa (Bonnie Piesse) — and Sarah, and Silk, and a couple of others. But it’s not what you think. They’re all the same girl.
Watch: My Favorite Girlfriend
Palm Springs (2020)
Rom-com meets sci-fi in this Groundhog Day (1993)-esque Hulu Original film, starring Adam Samberg and Cristin Milloti. When Nyles (Samberg) and Sarah (Milioti) wake up in a time warp, they have to find a way out — or else they’re doomed to relive their best friends’ Palm Springs wedding over and over again.
Watch: Palm Springs
Vacation Friends (2021)
One of the best parts of meeting people while on vacation is that you never have to see them again. But for Marcus (Lil Rel Howery) and Emily (Yvonne Orji), what happens on vacation in Mexico doesn’t stay in Mexico.
The good times don’t stop here — Vacation Friends 2 (2023) is streaming now on Hulu.
Watch: Vacation Friends
Plus One (2019)
Best friends Ben (Jack Quaid) and Alice (Maya Erskine) vow to help each other through an unusually busy wedding season by being each other’s plus ones. It seems like a flawless plan — they don’t have to attend weddings alone and if the opportunity strikes, they can be each other’s “wingman.”
What could go wrong?
Watch: Plus One
The Swing of Things (2020)
Tropical destination weddings have it all: sun, sand, and… swingers?
When Laura Jane (Olivia Culpo) entrusts her soon-to-be husband, Tom (Chord Overstreet), with booking the resort for their wedding, he accidentally books their wedding and honeymoon at a swingers resort in Jamaica.
Watch: The Swing of Things*
*Live TV plan required to watch live content on Hulu. Regional restrictions, blackouts, and additional terms apply.
The Ultimate Playlist of Noise (2021)
Before losing his hearing from an upcoming tumor-removal surgery, Marcus (Keean Johnson) decides to travel across the country to take in as many sounds as possible. When his trip unexpectedly includes Wendy (Madeline Brewer), Marcus ends up finding more than just his favorite sounds.
Watch: The Ultimate Playlist of Noise
Plan B (2021)
After being denied the Plan B pill from her local pharmacy, typical “good girl,” Sunny (Kuhoo Verma), and her edgy best friend, Lupe (Victoria Moroles), set out on a road trip to get to a Planned Parenthood before the 24-hour window closes.
Watch: Plan B | |||||
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"The Ringer Staff"
] | 2021-12-09T00:00:00 | From the iconic closing notes of ‘The Breakfast Club’ to the era-encapsulating mix of ‘Dazed and Confused’ to the work of the Purple One himself, these are the best mixes of cinema and sound since 1971 | en | https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8991993/favicon.0.ico | The Ringer | https://www.theringer.com/movies/2021/12/9/22824332/best-movie-soundtracks-ranking | On Thursday, Ringer Films will debut the latest installment of its HBO Music Box series, Mr. Saturday Night, on the legendary producer Robert Stigwood. Before that film examines the man who forever changed the way music and film interact with his work on Saturday Night Fever, The Ringer will spend the day celebrating the world of movie soundtracks that he so heavily influenced.
Before we get to the list of the best movie soundtracks—and argue the qualities of Pulp Fiction over, say, The Muppet Movie—there are a couple of things to point out:
This ranking was composed by polling the Ringer staff and aggregating their personal lists.
There were two rules that voters had to follow: First, they had to stick to the past 50 years, from 1971 onward. Our humblest apologies to The Graduate and The Wizard of Oz. Second, in the spirit of Saturday Night Fever, only pure soundtracks were permitted—no scores. A tough beat for John Williams, to be sure.
Now that that’s covered, here are the 50 best soundtracks from the past 50 years.
50. 8 Mile
There’s a lot of baggage around this, so I’m going to try to tread lightly. The 8 Mile soundtrack is a good soundtrack. It’s a lot like most Eminem albums, but with more features. It’s got a Freeway verse on “8 Miles and Runnin’” where the Philly MC is at his barrelling peak (Hov manages to stretch his legs out for a bit on the track too).“Wanksta” may have looked like a mixtape-cut from 50 Cent’s “How to Rob” days, but it still holds up. “Lose Yourself” won an Oscar. It’s just that the cultural trappings of the record, like everything with Eminem, are so souped-up on testosterone, so acidic and sometimes just plain gross, that it no longer gets to be simply a piece of music. 8 Mile is technically brilliant. It can also be appalling. It’s a soundtrack that functions as legend-building at its most audacious. If you asked Em, he’d probably swear it was worth it. —Lex Pryor
49. High School High
The ’90s marked the Golden Age of the rap soundtrack. As hip-hop was becoming a titanic commercial force early in the decade—both on the Billboard charts and at the box office—heralded movies like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society enlisted a bevy of established stars while unearthing new talents for their accompanying albums, and sold a boatload of copies in the process. Later in the decade, projects for The Nutty Professor and Bullworth produced massive hits that have far outlived the vehicles that showcased them. Long-forgotten movies like Soul in the Hole, Sunset Park, and Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood were all accompanied by minor-classic soundtracks, while Hype Williams’s Belly and its music have both endured as cult favorites.
There’s no better example of the power of the ’90s rap soundtrack than the one for High School High, the 1996 Jon Lovitz–helmed sendup of inner-city-schools-as-a-war-zones flicks like The Substitute and Dangerous Minds. The movie itself was a straight turkey (though I’m still partial to the “Rhinestone Cowboy” scene), but the soundtrack tracklist reads like a rap purist’s fever dream: Two Wu-Tang Clan songs! A Large Professor and Pete Rock collaboration! De La Soul! The best A Tribe Called Quest deep cut post–Midnight Marauders! Also mixed in: some of the biggest R&B stars of the era in Faith Evans, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Jodeci, plus a gigantic R&B radio hit in the Braids’ cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and a Quad City DJ’s remix. A soundtrack this stuffed for a movie this forgettable couldn’t exist today. But High School High wasn’t an anomaly in its era—it was one of its defining documents. —Justin Sayles
48. Judgment Night
Is there any greater chasm between the reception of a movie and its soundtrack than Judgment Night? (Perhaps a better question: Has anyone who adores the Judgment Night soundtrack actually seen the movie?) The plot to the movie is fairly standard fare as 1993 action thrillers go: Some dudes (Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy fuckin’ Piven) witness some drug dealers (led by Denis Leary) kill someone, so they go on the run. The soundtrack, however, offered a concept that was daring at the time: getting rap and rock acts to collaborate. Just a few years after “Walk This Way”—and just a few before “Nookie”—the Judgment Night soundtrack envisions a rap-rock future where Helmet and House of Pain, Biohazard and Onyx, and Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill are not just contemporaries but peers working in tandem, with raps exploding over pulverizing licks. (The best song here, however, remains De La Soul and Teenage Fanclub’s “Fallin’,” the only track that feels like a home game for the hip-hop artist.) The album posits the intersection of riffs and rhymes as an aesthetic choice to aspire to, not a gimmick for nu-metal weirdos. We would’ve been better off if this version of rap-rock won out, but as it stands, the Judgment Night OST remains a testament to experimentation and daring choices, even if the film does not. —Sayles
47. American Honey
I can’t fault anyone for not seeking out this small indie from 2016—after all, it’s almost three hours long. But I will implore you to dive into American Honey’s wandering, motley soundtrack with every chance I get. Scoring a tale of lost, disillusioned teenage dirtbags who travel through the dingy corners of the United States selling magazines door-to-door, the soundtrack is in kind a remarkable picture of both America and mid-2010s adolescence. Rae Sremmurd sits next to the Raveonettes; ILoveMakonnen mixes company with folk singer Steve Earle. If the road trip of American Honey ever feels transcendent, it’s thanks to the contributions of the music. Watch these two scenes if you don’t have three hours: the kids rapping E-40’s “Choices” in harmony as a “go sell some shit” pump-up; and much later, belting out Lady A’s “American Honey” in a moment of weird bonding that’s too beautiful to put into words. —Andrew Gruttadaro
46. The Breakfast Club
With one needle drop and a fist in the air, Jack Antonoff’s career was born. Seriously, the prolific producer has talked at length about John Hughes’s influence on his music, and he even once performed an original score for The Breakfast Club. While Antonoff has certainly beaten those ’80s synths to death, he’s not wrong in admiring the director responsible for maybe the most iconic ending song of all time. Yes, Emilio Estevez hurdling over bookshelves to Keith Forsey’s “I’m the Dude” and the subsequent dancing montage to Karla DeVito’s “We Are Not Alone” are memorable moments in their own right. But it’s Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” that leaves us with the lingering adolescent joy of finally feeling understood. Whether you blame Hughes or thank him for inventing Jack Antonoff is up to you. —Julianna Ress
45. Grease
Even the most hardened Broadway musical skeptics can’t help singing along to the Grease soundtrack. Every song, from the Barry Gibb–written, Frankie Valli–crooned title track, to John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s climactic chart-topping duet “You’re the One That I Want,” is almost painfully catchy. Only “Hopelessly Devoted to You” got an Academy Award nomination, but there were several more that could’ve earned that designation. “Summer Nights,” “Greased Lightnin,’” “Beauty School Dropout,” and “Sandy” are all karaoke staples to this day. With Grease, Robert Stigwood assembled a blockbuster movie/soundtrack combo for the second straight year. Like 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, which he also masterminded, the record went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time. —Alan Siegel
44. The Muppet Movie
There are nine original songs in The Muppet Movie, and seven of them are stone-cold, 9/10-or-better masterpieces. From the iconic “The Rainbow Connection” to the road-trip anthem “Movin’ Right Along” to the boozy (it’s implied, this is a kids’ movie) barroom piano lament “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along,” there’s not a bad musical moment in this 1979 classic. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you haven’t wept openly to “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday,” you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
The Muppet Movie is operating on such a high level it just throws away the coolest band name of all time—the Electric Mayhem—on a comedy band of puppets created to spoof Dr. John. And their song, “Can You Picture That,” is not just a throwaway but a rollicking, saxophone-blaring monster. This is, to paraphrase Electric Mayhem frontman Dr. Teeth, a soundtrack of very heavy-duty proportions. —Michael Baumann
43. Moulin Rouge!
Moulin Rouge! rode so many cultural waves just as they were cresting—jukebox musicals, pop music tie-ins for movie soundtracks, that weird six-year period when Baz Luhrmann got a blank check for some reason—and rode all of them to shore with delightful felicity. The cover of “Lady Marmalade,” produced by Missy Elliott and sung by a murderer’s row of ’90s pop chanteuses, is a heater, a jam, and a bop.
This being a Luhrmann movie, sometimes Moulin Rouge! poured it on a little thick. (Medical infomercial voice-over: If you lived in a college dorm between 2001 and 2007, or were exposed to theater kids singing “Elephant Love Medley” or “El Tango de Roxanne,” you may be entitled to financial compensation.) But it’s hard to find fault with the soundtrack’s sole original number, “Come What May,” which brought tears to audiences’ eyes and poor Ewan McGregor to his tippy-toes as he tried to belt out those high notes, and almost 20 years later, convinced the world that two Canadian figure skaters were more than just teammates. The greatest love you’ll ever learn is for this one duet from Moulin Rouge! —Baumann
42. Boogie Nights
What else would you expect with Paul Thomas Anderson directing a movie called Boogie Nights? With a title like that, the soundtrack simply had to to be good. From the three-plus-minute tracking that opens the movie, the viewer is viscerally transported to the ’70s with probably the best use of the Emotions’ iconic “Best of My Love” put to film. Marvin Gaye; the Commodores; Electric Light Orchestra—Boogie Nights drops classic after classic to infuse its scenes with the mood of ’70s disco, dancing, drugs, and beyond. What’s so great about this soundtrack is not simply how infectious the songs are, but also how vital they are to establishing the pace and energy of the movie. The film could’ve been average had the music disappointed; it’s one of PTA’s all-time bests because the soundtrack absolutely delivers. —Aric Jenkins
41. Trainspotting
The best soundtracks somehow capture the sensibility of the film and something about the world into which the movie is released. With this in mind, Trainspotting is truly some wizard shit: at once a mixtape you could imagine the criminally minded junkies of Danny Boyle’s kinetic masterpiece listening to, as well as a soundtrack for the rising of a second British invasion. The first sound you hear is the cacophonous drums of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” and from there we drift into Saturday nights (New Order’s “Temptation”) and Sunday mornings (Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day”; Brian Eno’s “Deep Blue Day”). At the same time, this is a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of the best British music happening at the time of Trainspotting’s 1996 release, with entries from Blur, Primal Scream, Elastica, and the club sounds of Leftfield and Underworld. —Chris Ryan
40. Top Gun
When remembering the Top Gun soundtrack, I and probably most people think of two songs: Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone” and Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away,” both of which are used in the film three or more times. While there are other fun music cues in the film—most notably the karaoke rendition of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” by Maverick and his wingmen—those two songs represent the equal parts action and romance that defined Top Gun and the now-obsolete “date night” movie genre that thrived in the 1980s and ’90s. Top Gun, though, is still very much alive, and hopefully the perpetually delayed sequel will have as many memorable music moments. For now, I’m just glad they didn’t use a gritty cover of “Danger Zone” in the Maverick trailer. —Ress
39. Batman
Who else would Tim Burton choose to curate the 1989 revival of Batman? Prince already won an Academy Award (Best Original Music Score) for Purple Rain in 1985; four years later, he delivered a quirky, eclectic mix of soul, funk, rock, and ballads for Burton’s blockbuster movie. “Batdance” held the no. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 for six consecutive weeks, becoming Prince’s first no. 1 song since “Kiss.” The soundtrack contains songs that give listeners an adrenaline rush and an excuse to dance (“Batdance,” “Trust,” “Partyman”) and bob their heads (“The Future,” “Electric Chair”; “Vicki Waiting”), as well as sensual ballads to vibe to (“Lemon Crush,” “Scandalous”). As a Black man, we have to address the nuance in our lives. Watching the “Batdance” video, you see the many facets of Prince: His identity as an artist, the POV of both Batman and the Joker. Prince never worried about identity. He confidently and unapologetically performed as himself every time he picked up an instrument. He never gave a damn about what people thought, which is a trait that was always ahead of its time. —Logan Murdock
38. The Royal Tenenbaums
Wes Anderson’s magnum opus about successful children stunted by the disappointments of adulthood is soundtracked by a longing for the past. Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” plays while Gene Hackman’s Royal teaches his disciplined grandsons the importance of childhood recklessness; an instrumental version of “Hey Jude” accompanies introductions to the family; and the theme from A Charlie Brown Christmas recurs with Gwyneth Paltrow’s sulking Margot. But the best needle drop of all most effectively evokes the Tenenbaums’ poignant nostalgia. As Margot steps off a bus to see her (adoptive, and also lovestruck) brother, Anderson’s usual whirlwind pace slows as the tender guitar plucks of Nico’s “These Days” enter. “These days I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do / And all the times I had the chance to” sums up not just the two siblings’ relationship, but the exact feeling that brought the Tenenbaum family back together. —Ress
37. The Prince of Egypt
Like the movie itself, The Prince of Egypt’s soundtrack starts throwing heat from the very first frame of animation, and it does not relent until the very last. The film’s showstopping number, “When You Believe,” became a mainstream radio hit in the form of a duet by Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, but—at the risk of blaspheming against two-thirds of the godhead—the film’s version, sung by Michelle Pfeiffer and Sally Dworsky, carries far more emotional weight. And even that might not be the best song in the movie. Few movie musicals, if any, bounce from the desperate brutality of “Deliver Us” to the conflict of “All I Ever Wanted” to Brian Stokes Mitchell’s jubilant baritone lead in “Through Heaven’s Eyes.” The Prince of Egypt is not only a great soundtrack, but it’s pivotal to the emotional heft of the movie; Disney has never done anything this good. —Baumann
36. Trouble Man
Trouble Man always takes me back to Marvin Gaye’s performance of the title song during his 1974 concert at the Oakland Coliseum. Years after the death of his onetime lover Tammi Terrell, he sought to conquer his stage fright on a winter evening in front of a packed Bay Area crowd. Throughout the night, he powered through his most famous tracks, including a voluptuous 11-minute “Fossil Medley,” while fighting through his notorious introversion. To understand Gaye’s performance that night is to understand his personal state of affairs during the time period: his serious battles with the IRS, his budding, tumultuous love affair with Janis Hunter, and his complicated relationship with fame. But his performance of “Trouble Man,” the third number of that 1974 evening, gives a glimpse of his fortitude. The song chronicles the life of a James Bond–like protagonist named Mr. T, who fights crime with a distinct level of cool. Moreover, T is a symbol of triumph for Black cinema in the 1970s, showing that melanin skin has agency in a predominantly white Hollywood. At the Coliseum, Gaye is attempting to achieve the same feat in his first on-stage performance in years. And with his infinite-octave voice still momentarily intact, he belts out a triumphant message two minutes into “Trouble Man” that doubles as a battle cry that will resonate for all eternity: “I come up hard, I had to win. Then start all over and win again.” —Murdock
35. The Big Chill
It’s no surprise that Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 elegy for a generation fueled by sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll would have a banging soundtrack. As Kasdan’s stacked cast of baby boomers gather together after the funeral of their friend, the feel-good Motown hits from their youth underscore the cynicism of their adulthood. The film’s most iconic scene, an impromptu kitchen dance number, has everyone in their WASPiest sweaters and khakis grooving down to the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” In a time before mixtapes took off and playlists even existed, this soundtrack—assembled by Lawrence’s Detroit-born wife, Meg Kasdan, and featuring Marvin Gaye, Three Dog Night, Aretha Franklin, and Procol Harum—was such a nostalgia-fueled hit with baby boomer audiences that it inspired a sequel: More Songs From the Original Soundtrack of the Big Chill. The original, an enduring bestseller, has been certified platinum six times. In other words, The Big Chill soundtrack walked so the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack could fly. —Joanna Robinson
34. Juno
2007: the year defined by side bangs, deep V-neck T-shirts, the frenzy of Facebook, and the Diablo Cody indie cut Juno. This film catapulted the exploitation of (hi, MTV!) and interest in teen pregnancy. Oh, and hamburger phones. It also simultaneously turned all 12-year-olds into Moldy Peaches fans. This soundtrack is the precursor to the wave of lo-fi indie rock to come, full of sweet songs that accurately depict the coming-of-age story Elliot Page so brilliantly portrays. Cat Power, the Velvet Underground, and Sonic Youth explain the heartache and confusion that comes with being a self-deprecating teen. “All I Want Is You” by Barry Louis Polisar is unforgettable in a Napoleon Dynamite–esque opening sequence in which Juno chugs Sunny D. I also really loved Michael Cera in those tight-ass shorts running to the Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man.” It was hot then. Maybe not so much now. —Lani Renaldo
33. Friday
As much as 1995’s Friday has been deified as one of the greatest stoner comedies of all time, it’s often forgotten how much of the movie unfolds like a coming-of-age tale. Fittingly, Friday’s soundtrack mirrors the arrested development of its protagonists, as if Craig’s fictional collection of new G-Funk and gangsta rap classics (Ice Cube’s “Friday,” Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’”) sits one rung below his father Willie’s funk and soul vinyls. At times the soundtrack marries the two periods—like the movie’s opening number, “Tryin’ to See Another Day” by the Isley Brothers, which is in the running for best song to sum up the entire plot of a movie and still sound good. But the film is at its funniest when it juxtaposes Craig and Smokey’s childish antics—getting high on a Friday afternoon, catcalling Nia Long—with the type of retro music their parents were probably listening to as they did the same years before (Rick James’s “Mary Jane,” Rose Royce’s “I Wanna Get Next to You”). Some things are timeless. —Charles Holmes
32. Donnie Darko
Today, using era-appropriate new wave bangers to set the mood of an angsty ’80s teen period piece might seem run-of-the-mill. But when future cult classic Donnie Darko was released in 2001, that genre hadn’t, well, become cool again. “We were just in that moment where people were not clamoring to license those songs yet,” director Richard Kelly told The Ringer in January. “Three, four years later, everyone started coming after ’80s songs.”
Donnie Darko features needle drops by Echo & the Bunnymen, Duran Duran, the Church, and, most memorably, Tears for Fears, whose “Head Over Heels” scores a captivating tracking shot through Donnie’s high school. But the film is actually best known for another Tears for Fears song, one that they didn’t even sing. Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’s stripped-down version of “Mad World,” which plays over the closing sequence, became an international hit. “It ingrained Gary and I into the fabric of culture, and sort of became almost like a verb,” Andrews said. “Like, ‘Oh, let’s “Mad World” that.’ Where you take something and you kind of turn it on its head.” —Siegel
31. Juice
Tupac Shakur was an actor before he was a rapper. A student at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the 1980s, he was known for the charm and fiery intensity he would later bring to wax. This is crucial to the mythology surrounding the rapper: When he auditioned for the role of Bishop in Juice, he wasn’t the superstar who would become one of his genre’s defining artists; he was an unknown, handsome kid who had to beat out a score of others for the part. He won the role and turned in a world-historically great villainous performance, which helped catapult him into fame, both at the cineplex and on the radio. But he’s entirely absent from the Juice soundtrack, a completely defensible decision at the time which seems like an enormous missed opportunity in retrospect.
In Pac’s stead, the Juice soundtrack includes some of the most important rap acts of 1991: Big Daddy Kane, EPMD, Queen Latifah, Too $hort, Cypress Hill, etc. Those artists all turn in solid, if not exactly earth-shattering tracks. But Juice makes this list off the strength of two songs: Naughty by Nature’s “Uptown Anthem,” which despite what the Billboard charts say may be their finest song, and Eric B. & Rakim’s “Know the Ledge.” The latter will go down as one of the best moments from the original God MC—over menacing upright bass and neck-snapping break, Rakim spits pure bragaddocio and street smarts for four minutes. It’s a rap staple—an ode to both the five boroughs and shit-talking—and the most important musical artifact from one of rap’s most important big-screen excursions (not counting the much-derided, but still lovable, DJ battle scene). That’s enough to secure this album’s legacy, even with the absence of Pac. —Sayles
30. Do the Right Thing
As much as the neighborhood, the color palettes, and the various dramatic spectacles, the soundtrack for Do the Right Thing enshrines the themes in the film. Transmitted by Samuel L. Jackson’s groovy We-Love Radio (108 FM), the music manages to convey the very climate at hand. So when Steel Pulse’s crooning reggae serenade “Can’t Stand It” appears about a third of the way into the movie, what we know is that the block is hot in more than one way—it is steaming outside and people are boiling inside. What truly sets the soundtrack apart, however, is how it’s able to wield the currents of love and hate simultaneously—how the most effective revolutionary anthem in the history of rap, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” appears perfectly in concert with Al Jarreau’s silky ballad “Never Explain Love.” On the soundtrack for Do the Right Thing, as in the film itself, the distance between love and hate is nonexistent. —Pryor
29. Space Jam
WELCOME TO THE JAM, IT’S YOUR CHANCE. From early ’90s house to techno to R&B, whoever curated this soundtrack knew and deeply understood the assignment. The beloved soundtrack features Seal, Quad City DJs, even Monica—and that barely covers the brilliance of this perfectly packaged hour and four minutes. (There’s an iconic song here that will go unmentioned, sullied as it is by its creator. But you know it, and probably remember your first time hearing it.) I’ll never forget the bliss of naively thinking Seal’s version of “Fly Like an Eagle” (originally by Steve Miller) was the best thing he’d ever penned. Not to mention, this is a children’s film that has a D’Angelo deep cut and an entire number whose sole purpose is to make fun of Charles Barkley. Finally, can someone please get “Buggin’,” the four-minute Bugs Bunny rap ghostwritten by Jay-Z, on Spotify? —Renaldo
28. Good Will Hunting
“I think even before we started shooting I was thinking in terms of Elliott’s music,” Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant told Boston Magazine about the multiple lush, melancholic songs by the late Elliott Smith that underlie Van Sant’s 1997 film. “No Name #3” plays during the “how do you like them apples?” scene. “Angeles” makes it even sadder when Minnie Driver hangs up a pay phone and convulses with just-dumped devastation. “Miss Misery,” which Smith wrote for the movie, kicks up right as Robin Williams reads the note that his client has gone to go see about a girl. (Smith performed the song at the Oscars that year, though it didn’t win, falling to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”)
The music in Good Will Hunting also includes other work, like the rollicking “Fisherman’s Blues” and the sleazy “Baker Street,” as well as Danny Elfman’s tinkling score. But it’s Smith’s music that defines some of the film’s most affecting moments and traces the moody, hopeful relationship between the characters of Will and [extremely Boston accent] Skylar. —Katie Baker
27. Black Panther
If the degree of hype surrounding Black Panther’s release—the dashikis upon arrival, the children entranced, the idolizing acclaim—has dulled in recent years, the film’s soundtrack stands as an indelible monument to that moment. A collection of songs that grew into a stand-alone project, Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther: The Album, was a herculean task. It is a record made by the most critically acclaimed rapper of his generation and a stirring supplement to the most well-received outing of the most popular film franchise ever. And it’s excellent, by the way, even if its excellence differs from Kendrick’s standard fare. The Album understands all the ways a drum can talk. It conveys the infinite formats of African existence. It’s got a great verse from Future. Most of all, you can’t listen to it without thinking that if the album has all this, the film must be limitless. —Pryor
26. Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola’s historical drama about the last queen of France is a stylistic display of monarchical decadence, from immaculately decorated pastries, to intricate pastel gowns, to a soundtrack of loud punk and indie rock. The film opens with Kirsten Dunst as the titular queen in a large feather headpiece, sticking a finger in cake frosting while Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” blares in the background. But Marie Antoinette is more than just lavish style—it also deals with themes of loneliness and adolescence, which are reflected in the music: The Strokes’ “What Ever Happened?” plays as Marie Antoinette longs for the extramarital affair that just ended, and the lush New Order cut “Ceremony” fades in over her 18th birthday party. Through it all, the Marie Antoinette soundtrack proves that teen angst is timeless. —Ress
25. Forrest Gump
The Forrest Gump soundtrack isn’t the soundtrack of a movie; it’s the soundtrack of America in the 20th century. It’s Now That’s What I Call Music: GOAT Classics. Everyone who’s anyone is on here. Aretha Franklin. Bob Dylan. Fleetwood Mac. Gladys Knight. Shoot, even Elvis, too (hilarious that he co-opts Forrest’s leg brace dance for “Hound Dog”; the King has a habit of stealing ideas from marginalized people.) If a movie is going to document the ebb and flow of American society over the course of 40 years, the music has to be integral—and Forrest Gump gets it spot on. From the “Fortunate Son” entrance into Vietnam to the subsequent “Turn! Turn! Turn!” peace protest, Forrest Gump consistently pairs the right tunes to the right scenes. And despite the vast range of emotion present in this movie, pretty much every song save for Joan Baez’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a banger (still a banger, in a different way). Go ahead and put on the Forrest Gump soundtrack at your next cookout or something—see if anyone really complains. —Jenkins
24. Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen brothers reunited with O Brother, Where Art Thou? super-producer T Bone Burnett to dig into the ’60s folk explosion in Greenwich Village. As with O Brother, the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack is packed with lesser-known traditional songs reimagined by modern performers like bluegrass legend Chris Thile and Marcus Mumford. Unlike O Brother, this album features multiple performances by its star, a pre-mega-fame Oscar Isaac, as well as vocally gifted supporting players Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Driver. From the lone original track, the goofy “Please Mr. Kennedy,” to Isaac’s wailing solo on “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song),” the soothing folk harmonies blanket over the tumultuous struggle of trying to make it as an artist. The album could stand on Isaac’s emotional vocals alone, but Burnett sneaks in preexisting gems like Llewyn Davis’s real-life inspiration Dave Van Ronk on “Green, Green Rocky Road” and an unreleased studio recording of Bob Dylan’s “Farewell.” —Robinson
23. Dirty Dancing
You put a song from the Wall of Sound era on a soundtrack and I’m in (spoiler: Goodfellas is coming). But beyond including the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Dirty Dancing OST pulls off the remarkable feat of capturing the vibes of both the time the movie’s set in and the time when it was released. The Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night” and Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs’ “Stay” firmly place Dirty Dancing in the era just before music would change teendom forever, while Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes” and the Patrick Swayze/Wendy Fraser collab “She’s Like the Wind” evoke the soft-rock glory of the 1980s. And is there any movie song bigger than “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”? No one puts that song in a corner. —Gruttadaro
22. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Fake movie music is a perplexing genre. Real musicians can barely manage to conjure a decent hit on their best days, so the process of watching an actor try to accomplish the same feat onscreen is often brutal. If filmmakers are lucky, they might trip into an Oscar-winning tune like Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” but usually you end up with a monstrosity like Ally’s weird pop song “Why Did You Do That” in 2018’s A Star Is Born. That’s what makes 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, a movie ostensibly about a battle of the bands, such a peculiar artifact.
Based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s successful graphic novels, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a rom-com centered on a battle of the bands where most of the characters have the fighting talents of a shonen manga. Through all of this, it’s Scott Pilgrim’s music that possibly ages the best. Most of the bands in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are played by real musicians from 2000s-era indie rock: Beck created Sex Bob-Omb’s coarse and amateurish sound within 72 hours after being approached by director Edgar Wright and music producer Nigel Godrich. But Metric’s “Black Sheep,” played by the fictional Clash at Demonhead, is the film’s crown jewel. Sung in the movie by a pre–Captain Marvel Brie Larson, “Black Sheep” is the rare fake movie song that’s as good as the genre it’s riffing on. The world didn’t need a movie full of the type of early-aughts indie rock that’d make a Pitchfork critic salivate, but we got it. And Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the best version of what could’ve been an insufferable timeline. —Holmes
21. Hustle & Flow
It got Triple Six an Oscar. That’s really all that needs to be said. We could talk about the fact that the soundtrack to Hustle & Flow contains some of the few decent rap performances by an actor ever (courtesy of Terrence Howard). We could discuss the collection of features from Juvenile, T.I., Trina, and 8Ball & MJG that furnish the record, one of which even charted in the Billboard Top 100. But really, all that matters when it comes to this soundtrack is that Three 6 Mafia, the Memphis polymaths behind “Slob on My Knob,” went up on stage at the 78th Academy Awards and deservedly accepted the Best Original Song prize for the song “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” —Pryor
20. The Harder They Come
Years before Bob Marley’s Legend introduced a mostly white American audience to reggae, there was The Harder They Come, the 1972 Jamaican film starring Jimmy Cliff and its blockbuster soundtrack featuring Cliff and Trojan Records staples like Toots and the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, and the Melodians. Arguably, the soundtrack has had a bigger influence than the movie over the past five decades: While the noir lives on mostly as a film-school and cult concern, the OST routinely places in historical best-album lists, holds a place in the Library of Congress, and has been the recipient of massive deluxe reissues. That’s a credit to Cliff’s aching, all-time great performance on the title track, but also the infectious riffs of album cuts like “007 (Shanty Town).” Reggae didn’t need The Harder They Come in order to break out in the States, but it gave many listeners their first—and for many, their most enduring—taste of music from the Island. —Sayles
19. Velvet Goldmine
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and for his jukebox musical about the rise and fall of glam rock, director Todd Haynes faced quite the constriction: While he initially set out to make a straightforward David Bowie biopic, Bowie famously refused his blessing, leaving the director without the right to use his muse’s name—or, crucially, any of his songs.
Haynes has since proved himself one of our finest living chroniclers of pop legends, actually matching the creative genius of his subjects instead of merely depicting them. I’m Not There cast Cate Blanchett, among others, as a facet of Bob Dylan; the documentary The Velvet Underground uses a scarcity of actual footage to its advantage, using abstraction that does John Cale proud. Before either of these projects, though, there was Velvet Goldmine, which used Bowie’s absence to tell a story at once more oblique and more explicit than an overt Bowie tribute. Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Brian Slade is a bit Bowie and a bit Jobriath; Ewan McGregor’s Curt Wild has bits of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. The fictional songs they play include works by both Reed and Bowie producer Brian Eno, plus contemporaries like Roxy Music and T. Rex, with originals artfully woven in between. (“The Ballad of Maxwell Demon,” named for Slade’s in-text alter ego, has Ziggy Stardust written all over it.) As a movie about music, Velvet Goldmine’s soundtrack was always going to be crucial to its success. But without any one source to lean on, it became a proxy for the film’s roving curiosity and clever conceit. Bowie didn’t realize it at the time, but he did us all a favor. —Alison Herman
18. Lost in Translation
The soundtrack of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a model for contrast. Squarepusher, Air, Death in Vegas, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and Phoenix provide the synth-pop vibes that paint such a full picture of and give immense meaning to Bob and Charlotte’s “Is this it?” wanderings through Tokyo. It’s the music video for a whole sub-era of music starring Scarlett Johansson. Elsewhere, Patti Smith, Carly Simon, the Pretenders, and Roxy Music lend the soundtrack an air of maturity and wisdom (and stand alone as great karaoke picks). But it’s all beautiful and wistful and light. Until, of course: “suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me.” The Peaches needle drop in Lost in Translation is legendary, in large part because of the sonic context it’s forced into. “Fuck the Pain Away” isn’t nearly as triumphant if it’s not next to “More Than This.” —Gruttadaro
17. Romeo + Juliet
It’s safe to say critics were divided on Baz Luhrmann’s made-for-MTV spin on Shakespeare’s most famous love story. The film’s legacy only grew as its devoted teenage female fans sent its soundtrack up the charts. Album producers Nellee Hooper and Marius de Vries remixed a lesser-known Garbage B-side, “#1 Crush,” into the band’s only no. 1 single. Bouncy pop hit “Lovefool” made Swedish rockers the Cardigans a household name. Des’ree’s showstopper, “Kissing You,” performed during Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio’s electric fish tank meet cute, may be the song most iconically associated with the film. But, controversially, a track written for the film, Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” isn’t on the album at the band’s request—they saved it for 1997’s OK Computer instead. No worries, though: Hooper’s remix of Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” is more than a consolation prize. —Robinson
16. Garden State
Look, you just had to be there, OK?! This legend of LimeWire, this dean of the dorm room, this setlist of indie infamy: It’s Zach Braff’s ambient and once-omnipresent 2004 Garden State soundtrack, which the then-man-child himself described as “a mix CD with all of the music that I felt was scoring my life at the time I was writing the screenplay.” (He even went so far as to send prospective actors a copy of an actual mix CD along with said screenplay.)
Featuring moody Coldplay, multiple Shins songs, trippy Zero 7 and Thievery Corporation, and older tracks by Nick Drake and Simon & Garfunkel, the Garden State album sounded the way a dark, dank New Jersey basement with garish powder room wallpaper near an abandoned quarry felt. Braff’s choice of music, like his movie itself, is often discussed in a spirit of retrospective mockery and embarrassment, but it was extremely popular—even perceived by some, uh, friends of mine as profound!—at the time. And it has a lasting legacy: You gotta see this one meme. It will change your life, I swear. —Baker
15. Shaft
Isaac Hayes is a somewhat odd avatar for Blaxploitation soundtracks. By the time he penned his first, he was already a massive mainstream success, with two Billboard top-10 albums and a third just a few months away. A composer today with a similar résumé wouldn’t be pigeonholed in Black, largely underground cinema. But the times being what they were, Hayes was tapped for his first soundtrack for Shaft, Gordon Parks’s film that punched its way out the trappings of its genre and became one of the biggest movies of 1971. At least part of that success can be traced to Hayes’s ubiquitous soundtrack, which included an iconic theme and perhaps the most instantly recognizable hi-hats in recorded history. The song would top the singles chart and later win an Academy Award. (Another song, the vocal number “Do Your Thing,” would land in the top 40.) The Shaft score cemented Hayes as one of the key figures of the Blaxploitation world—three years later, he’d both create the music for and star in Tough Guys and Truck Turner, which both failed to reach Shaft’s heights at the box office or the music charts but live on as samples for classic rap tracks. In the years that followed, the Blaxploitation genre fell out of favor and mostly disappeared. The Black Moses would never helm another soundtrack again. But with one as enormous as Shaft under his belt, he didn’t need to in order to go down as one of the greatest of all time, Blaxploitation or otherwise. —Sayles
14. Drive
It’s hard to flesh out a character who doesn’t even have a name, but as Ryan Gosling prepared for his lead role in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, he clued into how the Driver was essentially a caricature of brooding antiheroes. “This is a guy that’s seen too many movies, and he’s started to confuse his life for a film,” Gosling told Rotten Tomatoes in a 2011 interview. “He’s lost in the mythology of Hollywood and he’s become an amalgamation of all the characters that he admires.” That philosophy certainly extends to Drive’s soundtrack: a collection of Europop and synthwave tracks that, along with Cliff Martinez’s ambient score, sounds like what someone who wants to be cool thinks should belong on a cool guy’s driving playlist. Nevertheless, from the foreboding throb of Chromatic’s “Tick of the Clock” to Desire’s dreamy “Under Your Spell,” the Drive soundtrack is as irresistible as it strives to be. We can only hope the soundtrack to our own lives can sound as suave as this. —Miles Surrey
13. Singles
A myth about Cameron Crowe’s Singles is that it shamelessly capitalized on Seattle’s then-fertile music scene. But the truth is that the movie was shot in the spring of 1991, several months before Nirvana’s Nevermind came out and alt-rock went mainstream. The soundtrack to the romantic comedy, which wasn’t actually released until September 1992, is a perfect introductory sampler to grunge. There are songs by Pacific Northwest–bred bands like Mother Love Bone, Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Screaming Trees. Chris Cornell, who makes a cameo in the film just like Pearl Jam, also contributed the memorably moody solo track “Seasons.” (Smashing Pumpkins, from Chicago, gave Crowe “Drown.”) The album is certainly Seattle-centric—Jimi Hendrix’s ballad “May This Be Love” is in there as well—but two of its best songs, “Waiting for Somebody” and “Dyslexic Heart” are by former Replacements frontman and Minneapolis-born Paul Westerberg. Singles is universal. —Alan Siegel
12. Clueless
From its raucous album-opening treatment of “Kids in America” to its sassy (and Sassy-inspired) “Supermodel” kicker, the Clueless soundtrack is a reminder that just because you’re young, rich, beautiful, and rolling with the homies in Southern California doesn’t mean life isn’t hard, too. Overseen by music supervisor GOAT Karyn Rachtman—whose other work includes Reality Bites, Pulp Fiction, and Romeo + Juliet—the Clueless soundtrack is filled with angsty covers and performances from then-up-and-comers like Luscious Jackson, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Radiohead. (The latter being “complaint rock,” as Cher puts it to her stepbrother, Josh, echoing the real-life views of director Amy Heckerling.)
Not every song from the movie made its way into the soundtrack; most notably, “Just a Girl,” which Rachtman included in the film shortly before No Doubt released it as their first single from Tragic Kingdom, was left off the official soundtrack because of competing record label pettiness. But plenty of other work did, including from the Beastie Boys, Coolio, and Counting Crows. The result is a mostly high-tempo album that brims with the teenage frustration and heady energy of 1990’s adolescence, putting “As if!” into music. —Baker
11. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Hitting no. 1 on the Billboard 200 and winning three Grammys doesn’t automatically make a soundtrack great, but very few soundtracks can make similar claims of cultural popularity and penetration. O Brother coursed over the cultural landscape like floodwater, bringing banjos, folk music, and three-part harmonies to turn-of-the-century Hollywood. This soundtrack turned folk standards into modern earworms: “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow” became a mainstream hit thanks to the Soggy Bottom Boys. Bluegrass icon Alison Krauss’s influence made “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby” into a literal siren song, and put “Down to the River to Pray” into the repertoire of every high school choir in North America. This would’ve been an all-time great soundtrack if it had left no shadow at all, but you can draw a direct line from O Brother to the hipster-folk-and-Americana revival that shaped so much of the late 2000s and 2010s. Would there otherwise have been a Trampled by Turtles, Mumford and Sons, or the Lumineers? Would Chris Thile have remained a genre artist instead of becoming a MacArthur-anointed “genius” had Everett and the boys not busted up Homer Stokes’s gubernatorial campaign? I think not. —Baumann
10. Saturday Night Fever
No offense to rug-cutting Academy Award nominee John Travolta, but without its soundtrack, Saturday Night Fever would not be considered an American classic. Producer Robert Stigwood’s brainchild, which stayed on top of the Billboard chart for six months, is one of the best-selling albums of all time. (The only soundtrack that’s sold more copies is Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard.) Three of the songs that the Bee Gees contributed—“Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” and “Night Fever”—hit no. 1. Yvonne Elliman’s version of “If I Can’t Have You,” which the Bee Gees wrote, also topped the chart. The movie’s music cues have been referenced so much that they became too much of a cliché to even spoof in a fresh way. Not that that doesn’t make them any less iconic. —Siegel
9. Dazed and Confused
Richard Linklater’s 1993 high school classic, set at the cusp of the summer of 1976, was a film with music so good and so densely packed that it spawned not one but two soundtrack albums that became absolute CaseLogic staples. (The tag line to the second one: “They Found Your Stash…Again!”) Dazed and Confused’s music captures what it feels like to be a teen driving around, and around, and around, on an endless quest for a moon tower of one’s own. Many of the songs appear in the film by way of someone’s car radio.
As Steven Hyden wrote for The Ringer, Linklater’s musical choices throughout the film were not cheap, with songs from Bob Dylan and Aerosmith running in the five figures. But the payoff came in the form of a specificity that keeps Dazed and Confused feeling fresh and familiar. Those opening chords of “Sweet Emotion” shimmer like a hot Texas sunrise. (That song, along with “Hurricane,” are in the movie but not on either soundtrack album.) “Jim Dandy” sounds exactly like a bunch of dudes up to no good. “Love Hurts” will forever equate to junior-high slow dance; “Why Can’t We Be Friends” will always mean mustard. And “Tuesday’s Gone” is the official song of a hungover glance in one’s rearview mirror, that moon tower having finally been found. —Baker
8. Almost Famous
In putting together the soundtrack for Almost Famous, former rock journalist Cameron Crowe set himself two impossible tasks. He had to both create a believable hit for his fictional band Stillwater and assemble an album worthy of a film that worships at the church of 1970s rock ’n’ roll. For the former, Crowe had an ace up his sleeve: his then-wife, ex-Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson. The track, “Fever Dog,” with howling lead vocals from Aerosmith producer Marti Frederiksen and guitar from both Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Wilson herself, easily makes the case for Stillwater. For the latter challenge, Crowe mixed deeper cuts like the Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows” and a bootleg David Bowie cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man” with familiar hits like Cat Stevens’s “The Wind,” and, most memorably, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” Crowe’s semi-autobiographical love letter to 1970s rock is so pure it inspired Led Zeppelin to allow their songs on a soundtrack for the first time ever. Though the original Grammy-winning album is a banger, it barely scratches the surface of the music used in the fim. Thankfully, in 2021, a 20th anniversary “super deluxe” edition of the soundtrack was released featuring over 50 additional songs. —Robinson
7. The Bodyguard
It is undeniable that Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston are infatuated with one another in this film. (They should’ve been together. Fight me.) It is also undeniable that Ms. Houston can sing her ass off. The Bodyguard is the bestselling soundtrack of all time, and it’s easy to see why. It’s built on a foundation of genius. The track list is laden with emotionally charged hits like “I Will Always Love You” (shout-out Dolly Parton, nothing will ever top that key change) and “I Have Nothing.” Plus, Whitney’s funky Chaka Khan cover, produced by C+C Music Factory, “I’m Every Woman” is extraordinary. There’s also an LA Reid–Babyface cut, in which Kevin Costner is surrounded and wrapped up in Whitney’s brilliance. Whitney had us all trying to sing like her. Especially that girl on Vine. —Renaldo
6. Above the Rim
Unlike when he starred in Juice, Tupac was a known commodity by the time he was cast as Birdie in the street-ball parable Above the Rim. And Death Row Records, getting its first shot at a soundtrack showcasing its blockbuster might, took full advantage of the rapper’s rapidly rising star. Pac appears on two songs on the Above the Rim OST: the classic “Pour Out a Little Liquor” and the deep cuts “Pain” and “Loyal to the Game” (the latter two only appearing on the deluxe version of the album not available on streaming). Those alone would land Above the Rim on any soundtracks ranking, but the project is also packed wall-to-wall with massive songs from the contemporary Death Row roster (Lady of Rage’s “Afro Puffs,” Tha Dogg Pound’s “Big Pimpin’”) and songs that showed the full potential of the marriage between hip-hop and R&B (SWV’s “Anything” and its Wu-Tang Clan remix remains a throwback anthem, while Sweet Sable’s “Old Time’s Sake” flips an Eddie Kendricks staple into something both rugged and sultry). The centerpiece is one of the finest songs G-funk ever produced: Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate,” a tale of chasing women, dice games gone wrong, car crashes, and smoking weed backed by Michael McDonald. It’s as engrossing as any soundtrack named on this list. —Sayles
5. Super Fly
Shortly after I got my driver’s license at 18, I made a habit of driving around Oakland in the late hours of the night—through East 14th, up Fruitvale, and past Bancroft to the San Leandro border—before driving back home. On most nights I’d play Marvin Gaye or some out-of-pocket contemporary rap. But no album captured the essence of my route quite like Curtis Mayfield’s magnum opus Super Fly. “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” brings memories of driving by the Ira Jenkins Community Center, remembering all the childhood homies trying to make a better way. “Freddie’s Dead” provides vivid images of Highland Hospital, where many souls left us too soon, while “Pusherman,” Mayfield’s most famous track, provides a reminder that it’s time to get on the 580 freeway and head home. Those drives encapsulated Mayfield’s goal of making the score for the iconic soundtrack: to provide context to a community forgotten by society, and hopefully spark a positive change. —Murdock
4. Goodfellas
I could write about the way Martin Scorsese leans on a heaping of music from 1960s girl groups—the Crystals, the Shangri-Las, the Ronettes, Darlene Love—in Goodfellas as a way to contrast a feminine innocence with the hyper-masculine violence of his movie’s characters. I could go on and on about the sonic tour de force that scores the helicopter scene near the end of the film, as the frantic cuts between Harry Nilsson, Mick Jagger, The Who and George Harrison mimic Henry Hill’s coke-addled mania; about the brilliant needle drop of Sid Vicious’ cover of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” in the credits, a perfect musical accompaniment to Henry’s closing treatise on how the good old days are dead and gone. But really, I just wanna drop in the clip of the piano keys of “Layla” kicking in as the camera pans up on a pink Cadillac, signaling the end times for a certain kind of gangster.
My work here is done. —Gruttadaro
3. Pulp Fiction
Recently, Quentin Tarantino described raiding his record collection as an integral part of the process of finding “the spirit of the movie.” “If you do it right, if you use the right song, in the right scene; really when you take songs and put them in a sequence in a movie right, it’s about as cinematic a thing as you can do,” he explains.
When the opening guitar riff of Dick Dale’s 1962 cover “Miserlou” transitions with the flick of a radio knob to Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” during the opening credits of Pulp Fiction, it does more to explain the scrapbook nature of the movie than any dialogue can. And the film’s best needle drops often have an undercurrent of dark humor. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” soundtracks the first tense meeting between Marsellus and Butch, two individuals stuck in an excruciating game of cat and mouse. Vincent and Mia’s iconic twist scene—a momentary reprieve from Vega’s tense date with his boss’s new wife—is heightened by the inclusion of Chuck Berry’s ode to a teenage wedding, “You Can Never Tell.”
Does all this mean you should play the Pulp Fiction soundtrack at your next get-together? No. Some things are simply best loved in solitude. —Holmes
2. The Lion King
The Lion King is the reason you and/or your child became a musical person; the reason you could share an emotional connection with any number of strangers on the other side of the world just by shouting “Naaaaaziveniiaaaaa babadibabada.” You still have no idea what the exact order of letters are in those words, or even what it translates to, but it doesn’t matter. The Lion King soundtrack transcends language and borders. Never mind that Simba is essentially singing “I can’t wait for my father to die” in “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King”—the song is so damn catchy. And “Hakuna Matata” became an actual phrase in the English lexicon that someone could say out loud and you’d nod and be like, “True.” It speaks to the musical genius of Elton John and his collaborators, and you should totally listen to John’s versions of the tracks to grasp the genius that went into making some of the finest songs written for film—children’s movie or not. —Jenkins
1. Purple Rain
At the end of Purple Rain, Prince sings a statement that acts like a self-affirmation but, after everything you’ve just seen, reads like the biggest understatement ever uttered: “Baby, I’m a star.”
Prince’s 1984 movie and accompanying soundtrack is a moment of pure genius and vision, on a level rarely committed to film and wax. From the opening of “Let’s Go Crazy” to the overflowing passion of “The Beautiful Ones” to the catharsis of the title track, every song on Purple Rain is mindblowing, and the true gift of the movie—aside from its good-bad leanings, which are sublime in their own right—is being able to witness Prince perform them. The way he writhes and thrusts through “Darling Nikki”! The “Computer Blue” breakdown! With one movie, and the best soundtrack ever made, Prince makes sure you know and never forget: baby, he’s a star. —Gruttadaro | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 41 | https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/trilogy/ | en | The 33 Greatest Movie Trilogies | [
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] | null | [] | 2022-06-04T00:00:00 | Why watch one when you can watch three? Empire has the definitive guide to the best trilogies out there, including Back to the Future and The Lord of The Rings. | en | /assets/empire/favicon.ico | Empire | https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/trilogy/ | We asked you to vote for your favourite all-time movie trilogies, and you answered in your thousands. Some of you plumped for pure three-somes, untinged by inconvenient further sequels; others specified which three films in a series you meant - and, where there's a coherent narrative to back you up, we've allowed it. So here, without further ado, are the greatest film trios for your enjoyment...
33. The Jersey Trilogy
Clerks (1994)
Mallrats (1995)
Chasing Amy (1997)
Director
Kevin Smith
Starring
Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith, Shannon Doherty, Jeremy London, Claire Forlani, Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, Ethan Suplee
A loose trilogy, this, but we're assuming you readers felt this list was a little light on profanity and needed some explicit discussion of oral sex to balance out the selection. And on that basis it's hard to surpass Kevin Smith's first three films, a more grounded group than his follow-ons and, in the case of Chasing Amy especially, a near perfect mix of foul mouthery, far too in-depth geek discussions and warm heart. Smith hasn't surpassed Amy yet, but we can only hope he keeps trying to at least equal it. It just goes to show you don't need fallen angels, chimps or even Rosario Dawson to make a great movie.
Weakest link? Mallrats, which didn't deserve the kicking it got on release but is also by far the weakest of the three.
Fun fact: Wondering where the letters in the Clerks logo came from? Well, C is from Cosmopolitan, L is from Life, E is from Rolling Stone, R is from Ruffles potato chips, K is from Clark Bar and S is from a Goobers box.
What to say... "I'm not even supposed to be here today."
...and what not to say. "Hasn't it become abundantly clear during the tenure of our friendship that I don't know shit?"
32. Hannibal Lecter Trilogy
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Hannibal (2001)
Red Dragon (2002)
Director
Jonathan Demme, Ridley Scott, Brett Ratner
Starring
Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Ted Levine, Scott Glenn, Julianne Moore, Ray Liotta, Gary Oldman, Giancarlo Giannini, Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, Mary Louise Parker, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Anthony Hopkins' performance as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs is the shortest ever to win Best (leading) Actor at the Oscars. He's only onscreen for 16 minutes, but such is his domination of the film that you'd swear it was two or three times that. It's no wonder that studios kept trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle, recruiting cinema's best ever villain for a sequel and a prequel (there's another prequel, not starring Hopkins and not included here) which saw diminishing returns but which still benefitted from that uncanny, barely blinking performance. So why not settle down with a nice Chianti and enjoy the cannibal holocaust?
Weakest link? For perhaps the only time in history, we're going to argue that a Ridley Scott film is weaker than a Brett Ratner one. Hannibal suffers from the world's worst last act (in fairness, hamstrung by the source novel and improving slightly on it) whereas Red Dragon is a decent if unexceptional thriller.
Fun fact: The Silence of the Lambs is one of only three films ever to win all "Big Five" Oscars: Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Actor and Actress. The other two are It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
What to say... "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."
...and what not to say. "I wonder what human liver tastes like. "
31. The Ingmar Bergman Trilogy
Through A Glass Darkly (1961)
Winter Light (1962)
The Silence (1963)
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Starring
Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max Von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Jorgen Lindstrom
Although it's too much of a stretch to call it Bergman's franchise, this early '60s troika are exquisite chamber pieces built around themes of sanity, madness and the wavering of religious faith, thus earning the right to be called a trilogy. Through A Glass Darkly charts a family's descent into madness on a remote island. Winter Light sees a pastor in a spiritual meltdown and might be the grimmest film Bergman ever made (and that's saying something). The Silence ticks all the art house boxes, depicting lesbianism, a troupe of dwarves, symbolism and Ingrid Thulin dying of tuberculosis; it was a surprise hit due its explicit (for the time) rumpy-pumpy scenes. Each film is marked by eerie settings, minimal dialogue, great Sven Nykvist photography and superb performances from Bergo's stock company. If you're feeling a bit down in the dumps, however, best stick with Glee.
Weakest link? Although it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (What did you expect? Best Visual Effects?), Through A Glass Darkly is the least affecting of the three. Still compelling stuff though.
Fun fact: When Kabi Laretei (Bergman's wife at the time) saw Winter Lights for the first time, she said, "Ingmar, it's a masterpiece. But it's a dreary masterpiece."
What to say... "These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly - conquered certainty. Winter Light - penetrated certainty. The Silence - God's silence - the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy. - Ingmar Bergman"
...and what not to say. "Through A Glass Darkly? Is that the Keanu Reeves cartoon?"
30. Mission: Impossible 1-3
Mission: Impossible (1996)
Mission: Impossible II (2000)
Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Director
Brian De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams
Starring
Tom Cruise, Jon Voigt, Emmanuelle Beart, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Redgrave, Dougray Scott, Thandie Newton, Richard Roxburgh, Michelle Monaghan, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Billy Crudup, Simon Pegg, Kerry Russell
Opening with the death of most of its cast, Mission: Impossible made it clear from the get-go that it was going to keep you on your toes. And that's something that the series has largely managed since, with a succession of cunning disguises, plans-within-plans and daring heists unfolding in a way that may dizzy the logic but keeps the entertainment centres of the brain hopping. The second film suffered some setbacks, but JJ Abrams' third effort marked a return to form and some of the most intricate scheming yet. We're still not sure it's possible to make silicone masks that convincing though.
Weakest link? Mission: Impossible II, which takes the whole people-peeling-off-their-faces thing to ridiculous levels, and definitely places style (and floppy hair) over substance.
Fun fact: At one point, Kenneth Branagh was set to be the bad guy in Mission: Impossible III, but dropped out when delays caused the film to conflict with his own film, As You Like It.
What to say... "This message will self-destruct."
...and what not to say. "It's more of a Mission: Quite Difficult though, isn't it? Because he keeps managing it."
29. Trilogy of the Dead
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (1985)
Director
George A. Romero
Starring
Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, Ken Foree, David Emge
George A. Romero loosed a plague upon the world. Before his 1968 salvo, there was essentially no such thing as a zombie - certainly nothing in the mainstream, apt to spawn survival guides and HBO shows and twists on Jane Austen. But such was the power of the ultra low-budget Night of the Living Dead and its equally scathing, satirical sequels, that the zombie became the cultural powerhouse we all know and love. While the three zombie follow-ups Romero's made since have met with mixed receptions, there's no question that these three will gnaw their way into your brain and stay there. Triumphant.
Weakest link? Well, parts four, five and six actually; the original three are all rather brilliant. But if we have to choose, we'll say Day, which has suffered more than the other two from the endless imitations.
Fun fact: Need some fake blood for your black-and-white genre-creating zombie movie? Why, just buy some stocks of Bosco Chocolate Syrup! Delicious and gruesome.
What to say... "This situation must be controlled before it's too late. They're multiplying too rapidly!"
...and what not to say. "Braaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnssss!"
28. The Mariachi Trilogy
El Mariachi (1992)
Desperado (1995)
Once Upon A Time In Mexico (2003)
Director
Robert Rodriguez
Starring
Carlos Gallardo, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Cheech Marin, Joaquin de Almeida, Steve Buscemi, Quentin Tarantino, Danny Trejo, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Eva Mendes, Mickey Rourke, Enrique Iglesias
From humble beginnings with funding gained by the director's willingness to undergo medical experimentation to a star-studded finale, Robert Rodriguez' Mariachi trilogy has - and we're willing to put our reputations on the line on this one - more weapons hidden in guitar cases than any other series on this list. Like Evil Dead, the second film is more or less a remake of the first, and the moment when the series really hits its stride, but all three of them are stylish and improbably entertaining, what with the two-handed gunfights and the Mexican stand-offs (of course) and the thousands of squibs popping on every side. It'll make you want to learn guitar, and then want to carve out the middle of the guitar and hide a couple of machine guns in there.
Weakest link? The finale, which pays for its star power in narrative coherence and originality. We still love the bit with Johnny Depp's CIA agent wandering around in a T-shirt that reads CIA, but it can't quite push it to the top.
Fun fact: The villain in the third film and the Chihuahua in the third are both called Moco, which means boogers in colloquial Spanish.
What to say... "Bless me, Father, for I have just killed quite a few men."
...and what not to say. "Are you a Mexi-CAN or a Mexi-CAN'T?"
27. The Millenium Trilogy
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2010)
The Girl Who Played With Fire (2010)
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2009)
Director
Niels Arden Oplev, Daniel Alfredson, Daniel Alfredson
Starring
Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Peter Haber, Peter Andersson, Yasmine Garbi, Georgi Staykov, Anders Ahlbom, Micke Spreitz
Scientists have shown that every single London Underground train for the last two years has contained at least one person reading a Stieg Larsson book, and with great popularity comes great movie adaptations. What's nice is that the Swedes got a head-start on this, finishing their film trilogy while the English-speaking world was still waiting for the translation of the third book - and it's currently quite hard to imagine how David Fincher's film can measure up. The first film is the best of these, but filmed back-to-back and with exceptional unity of style, they've set a very high bar for future adaptations of the series. MVP for the series is Noomi Rapace, a stunningly well-cast Lisbeth Salander and a heroine for the 21st century.
Weakest link? Perhaps The Girl Who Played With Fire, which doesn't quite have the impact of the first film or the nicely rounded ending of the third. But they're all at least decent.
Fun fact: Dolph Lundgren was offered the part of German giant Ronald Niederman, and had he taken it it would have been his first role in his native Sweden.
What to say... "While I'm looking forward to David Fincher's take on the material, it remains to be seen if Rooney Mara can match Noomi Rapace's performance."
...and what not to say. "So is this some kind of sequel to The Girl With The Pearl Earring?"
26. The Blade Trilogy
Blade (1998)
Blade 2 (2002)
Blade: Trinity (2004)
Director
Stephen Norrington, Guillermo del Toro, David Goyer
Starring
Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Stephen Dorff, Ron Perlman, Luke Goss, Ryan Reynolds, Jessica Biel
Hard as it may be to remember, Blade was really the movie that started the current comic-book superhero trend. From the moment that Wesley Snipes growled his way onscreen and dusted a room full of clubbing bloodsuckers, it was clear that this was a strong, silent vampire slayer we could believe in. Originally paired only with Kris Kristofferson's equally gruff tech-guy, the series opened out to include del Toro's "Blood Pack" in the second film and the third film's Nightstalkers - which, it's fair to say, had mixed results. Still, the series always gave us imaginative vampire kills (we particularly like that UV bow) and Snipes was born to play the Daywalker.
Weakest link? By several country miles, Blade: Trinity. With the exception of Ryan Reynolds' delivery of one of cinema's greatest all-time insults, it has very little to recommend it.
Fun fact: Oliver Hirschbiegel was at one point in line to direct Blade: Trinity, but left to make Downfall instead when that came together. YouTube parodies or not, that's what we call a win.
What to say... "It's open season on all suckheads."
...and what not to say. "You cock-juggling thundercunt!"
25. The Mighty Ducks Trilogy
The Mighty Ducks (1992)
D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994)
D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996)
Director
Stephen Herek, Sam Weisman, Robert Lieberman
Starring
Emilio Estevez, Joss Akland, Joshua Jackson, Lane Smith, Heidi Kling, Kathryn Erbe, Carsten Norgaard
You guys! You were kidding, right? Or maybe it's just the nostalgia of a certain generation kicking in, or the fact that many people brought up on Dawson's Creek will forever love Pacey, or "Charlie Conway" as Joshua Jackson was known here. In any case, here we are, and the Mighty Ducks trilogy is higher up this list that Ingmar Bergman or George A. Romero. Let's just take a moment and think about that - or, even better, let's not. We'll be charitable, and credit it to Pacey love and a continuing admiration for Emilio Estevez and/or Joss Akland. And then let's draw a veil over this entire affair.
Weakest link? It's hard to say, but D3 is generally regarded as the weakest, what with its been-done snob team vs. ragtag team plot. Over. It.
Fun fact: Like, OMG, Charlie in the movie says he is allergic to nuts because - get this! - Joshua Jackson is allergic to nuts in real life. I know, right?
What to say... "Are you going to Pacey-Con next year? Wanna book our rooms now?"
...and what not to say. "Are you kidding?!"
24. The Austin Powers Trilogy
Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery (1997)
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)
Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)
Director
Jay Roach
Starring
Mike Myers, Elizabeth Hurley, Michael York, Mimi Rogers, Robert Wagner, Seth Green, Mindy Sterling, Heather Graham, Rob Lowe, Verne Troyer, Beyonce, Michael Caine, Fred Savage
After Wayne, but happily long before The Love Guru, there was Austin Powers and his wonderfully mediocre arch-nemesis, Dr Evil. Mike Myers dual performance may have paled from over-familiarity and a million pub mimics, but looked at with fresh eyes they're still genius. As the series wore on, however, it became crystal clear that it was Dr Evil who was the real star of the show, stealing most of the films along with his inspired pantheon of henchmen and hangers on (chief among them Scott Evil and Mini-Me; least among them Fat Bastard, an unfunny one-note effort). Last we heard, Myers was talking about a Dr Evil-focused fourth film; we can only hope.
Weakest link? Goldmember, where the smuttiness finally battled the cleverness into submission. The combination of the admittedly ace and star-studded opening number (with Spielberg, Cruise, Paltrow and Spacey) and Michael Caine almost saved the day, but couldn't quite make it.
Fun fact: Austin Powers' licence plates read SWINGER and SWINGER2. His dad Nigel, played by Michael Caine, got GR8SHAG on his Mini-Cooper.
What to say... "Groovy, baby, yeah!"
...and what not to say. "Are we still quoting lines from Austin Powers? That doesn't feel old to you?"
23. The Mad Max Trilogy
Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Director
George Miller, George Miller, George Miller & George Ogilvie
Starring
Mel Gibson, Steve Bisley, Joanne Samuel, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Tim Burns, Geoff Parry, Michael Preston, Bruce Spence, Vernon Wells, Tina Turner
Born out of the same mix of Aussie can-do attitude, dangerous stunt work and tiny budgets that spawned the likes of Razorback, Roadgames and Long Weekend, Mad Max takes a stripped-down concept and a couple of souped-up motors and makes them into a legend. The sequel amps up the action and feels a little like a do-over (as is practically the law for sequels to mega low-budget originals), while number three goes all large-scale and Hollywood - but also gives us Tina Turner as a sort of super-violent ringmaster and the theme song We Don't Need Another Hero, so what it loses in isolation and nihilism, it gains in glamour. The fact that the trilogy also gave us Mel Gibson may account for its current position outside the top 20.
Weakest link? Depends on your tastes, really. Beyond Thunderdome usually comes in for the most schtick, but that's more because it feels bigger and broader than the other two rather than down to a lack of quality.
Fun fact: In the first film, Max himself was the only cast member to wear real leather. The rest had to make do with vinyl.
What to say... "Be still, my dog of war. I understand your pain."
...and what not to say. "G'day, mate! Throw another shrimp on the barbie!"
22. The Infernal Affairs Trilogy
Infernal Affairs (2002)
Infernal Affairs II (2003)
Infernal Affairs: End Inferno 3 (2003)
Director
Lau Wai-keung & Alan Mak
Starring
Tony Leung, Andy Lau, Anthony Wong, Eric Tsang, Kelly Chen, Sammi Cheng, Edison Chen, Shawn Yue, Carina Lau, Francis Ng, Leon Lai
The first film has the greatest why-didn't-I-think-of-that plot ever: a police mole among the Triads and a Triad mole in the police force try to smoke one another out. But what makes it unique is the even-handed way that both characters are portrayed, and the compassion the film shows for the impossible situation in which each finds himself. The follow-ups, one a prequel and one a flashback-filled expansion on the original, expand on that theme but lack the simple elegance of the first film's structure.
Weakest link? There's a little back-and-forth between the second and third films, but conventional wisdom has it that the second is just a smidge superior. Perhaps that's because the third film's tricksy time-jumping between past and present makes it overly complicated.
Fun fact: The first film's psychiatrist is called Lee Sum Yee, which sounds very like the Cantonese for "your psychiatrist".
What to say... "Not being a Buddhist, I'm worried I'm missing some of the theological subtleties."
...and what not to say. "I prefer The Departed. Can't stand subtitles."
21. Terminator 1-3
The Terminator (1985)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)
Director
James Cameron, James Cameron, Jonathan Mostow
Starring
Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Lance Henriksen, Edward Furlong, Robert Patrick, Joe Morton, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, Kristanna Loken
The first Terminator film changed the world far beyond cinema. Without it, we might never have known about the current Governor of California, for it was this film that broke Arnold Schwarzenegger and introduced us all to the Austrian Oak. It also gave us James Cameron, a man who's made by far the highest grossing film in the world - twice. And it was, y'know, actually a good film to boot. You can get into a lengthy pub debate over the merits of the stripped-down original versus its bombastic successor, with Arnie reprogrammed as a good guy and Robert Patrick the new Most Sinister Thing Ever, but T2 is inarguably one of the slickest, most effective action thrillers the world has ever seen. And the belated threequel, Rise of the Machines, may not quite stand on the same level, but it's a respectable attempt.
Weakest link? That'd be Rise of the Machines, which is OK but further messes with the timeline, and really misses Linda Hamilton's steely presence.
Fun fact: Arnold Schwarzenegger earned $21,429 per word in the second film, given his reported $15m salary and 700 words of dialogue.
What to say... "Come with me if you want to live."
...and what not to say. "It's all horrendously paradoxical. I mean, if he's only born because he sends his own father back in time, he can't possibly change that future."
20. X-Men 1-3
X-Men (2000)
X-Men 2 (2003)
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
Director
Bryan Singer, Bryan Singer, Brett Ratner
Starring
Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Patrick Stewart, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Ian McKellen, Ray Park, Rebecca Romjin, Anna Paquin, Alan Cumming, Brian Cox, Shawn Ashmore, Kelsey Grammer, Aaron Standord, Ellen Page
Marvel's flagship superhero* team struck it lucky when Bryan Singer adopted them and proceeded to cast the perfect people for the roles in a first film that worked as a scene-setter, if rather skimping on the action. The second film, however, delivered both human drama and mutant mayhem in adamantium buckets, showing just what director and cast were capable of, and all looked rosy for the future. But then Singer went AWOL to hang out with Superman, the studio decided to introduce a couple of dozen new characters and it all went a bit wrong in the (still OK) third film. But at least we got to see them in one great film and two OK ones, right?
*Strictly, mutants rather than superheroes - but let's not split hairs.
Weakest link? That'd be The Last Stand, overloaded with characters and incoherent in its detail. While the Wolvie / Jean bit at the end is nearly perfect, the rest is a hot mess.
Fun fact: Hugh Jackman's last big job prior to starting work as Wolverine was as Curly in the National Theatre's production of Oklahoma! Altogether now: oh what a beautiful morning.
What to say... "Mutants are not the ones mankind should fear."
...and what not to say. "You know what happens when a toad gets struck by lightning?"
19. The Naked Gun Trilogy
The Naked Gun: From The Files Of Police Squad! (1988)
The Naked Gun 2 1/2 (1991)
The Naked Gun 33 1/3 (1994)
Director
David Zucker, David Zucker, Peter Segal
Starring
Leslie Nielsen, George Kennedy, OJ Simpson, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, Richard Griffiths, Robert Goulet, Fred Ward, Anna Nicole Smith
Police Squad only ran for six episodes, but they were six episodes of fried gold and eventually, with the as-silly but less funny Police Academy series going strong at the box office, Leslie Nielsen's Frank Drebin got his shot at the big time. And thank goodness for that. The first film is a treasury of silliness, crammed with one-liners, absurd visual gags and defiantly dead-pan performances. But then, it did still have the full Airplane! team of Abrams, Zucker and Abrams aboard. The two sequels, while not as packed with goodness, still provide at least 5 of your 5 recommended helpless giggles of the day. And in the words of Frank Drebin, "I like my sex the way I play basketball, one on one with as little dribbling as possible." Well you didn't expect him to say something relevant, did you?
Weakest link? The third entry, which still lands some zingers but feels more formulaic and less sharp than the previous two.
Fun fact: Recently Priscilla Presley was interviewed on BBC Radio. Returning from a music break, the presenter said, "Nice beaver!" and she smoothly replied, "Thank you; I just had it stuffed" just like in the first movie. Made our day.
What to say... "I promise you; whatever scum did this, not one man on this force will rest one minute until he's behind bars. Now, let's grab a bite to eat."
...and what not to say. "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit!"
18. The Vengeance Trilogy
Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance (2002)
Oldboy (2003)
Lady Vengeance (2005)
Director
Park Chan-Wook
Starring
Song Kang-Ho, Shin Ha-kyun, Bae Doona, Choi Min-Sik, Yu Ji-tae, Kang Hye-Jeong, Lee Yeong-ae, Oh Kwang-Rok, Kim Byeong-ok
Revenge is a dish best served cold, say the Klingons, but the Koreans might disagree. Park Chan-Wook's first film in this loose trilogy suggests that vengeance is a dish best not served at all, since it can lead to the death of everyone who gets involved in it. The second sees a rather more elaborate - and much longer-term - plan of revenge similarly backfire, with arguably even ickier consequences than the first. And the third, while boasting a sort-of happy ending, sees an uncomfortable amount of blood spilled along the way and makes it clear that this vengeance lark isn't easy. Any way you look at it, however, these cleverly plotted and twisty-turny thrillers are a worthy addition here, proving that Korean cinema's turning up some of the most interesting films in the world right now - and that it features a lot more octopus eating than the Europeans typically employ.
Weakest link? Probably Lady Vengeance, which lacks the intricate plotting of the other two and spends more time focusing on red eyeshadow.
Fun fact: Four octopuses were used to get Oldboy's famous eight-armed scene. Actor Chi Min-Sik is a Buddhist, and said a prayer for each one.
What to say... "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone."
...and what not to say. "Turn the other cheek, that's my motto!"
17. Scream 1-3
Scream (1996)
Scream 2 (1997)
Scream 3 (2000)
Director
Wes Craven
Starring
Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox-Arquette, David Arquette, Rose McGowan, Skeet Ulrich, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Liev Schreiber, Timothy Olyphant, Jerry O'Connell, Patrick Dempsey, Lance Henriksen, Parker Posey, Patrick Warburton
The slasher film was pretty much dead and buried in 1996. But Wes Craven, who'd spun a post-modern but relatively little-seen twist on it for New Nightmare two years before, managed to single-handedly bring it back to life with this witty deconstruction of the whole genre. So this time our unstoppable killer (who always comes back for one last scare just when you think he - or she - is dead) faces victims who know how to survive a horror movie, who don't always run upstairs and who frequently fight back. The first sequel riffed on the cliches of Part IIs, while the less-successful but still original third instalment got really meta, visiting a sequel movie within the movie. Oooh, our heads are spinning!
Weakest link? Scream 3, which isn't as effective as satire and perhaps stretches the willingness to suspend disbelief just a little far.
Fun fact: Much more blood was used in Scream (50 gallons) than Scream 2 (30 gallons) or Scream 3 (a measly 10). By that measure, the upcoming Scream 4 should be blood-free.
What to say... "The reason that Scary Movie doesn't work is that it's a spoof of a satire, which is just silly."
...and what not to say. "I'll be right back."
16. The Spider-Man Trilogy
Spider-Man (2002)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Director
Sam Raimi
Starring
Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Rosemary Harris, James Franco, Cliff Robertson, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Thomas Haden-Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bruce Campbell
Blade and X-Men had hinted that these superhero movies might be going places, but it was Spider-Man that actually went there. But its huge box-office success was thoroughly earned, director Sam Raimi placing Peter Parker's character front and centre (and casting indie star Tobey Maguire rather than some he-man), with Spider-antics taking a secondary - but nonetheless effective place. The sequel, pitting Spidey against Alfred Molina's brilliant Doc Ock, was a further step up, and if the third one tried to cram in too much, at least it gave us Thomas Haden Church's bittersweet take on the Sandman. Why on Earth anyone thinks this series needs a reboot we'll never know, but these three are first among superheroes for a reason.
Weakest link? Spider-Man 3, where a tussle over bad guys between director and studio led to a film overloaded with evildoers and short on focus.
Fun fact: In the first film, Norman Osbourne's presentation to the board opens with the same dialogue as a similar board meeting in The Hudsucker Proxy, which Raimi was a co-writer on.
What to say... "With great power comes great responsibility."
...and what not to say. "I want Venom! Narrative coherence be damned!"
15. The Star Wars Prequels
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005)
Director
George Lucas
Starring
Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Hayden Christensen, Natalie Portman, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Samuel L. Jackson, Temuera Morrison, Jimmy Smits, Ahmed Best, Christopher Lee
While each of them has come in for schtick from the fans (we're looking at you, Spaced), the fact that the Star Wars prequels made this list, and placed this high, suggests that there are those of you out there who love them despite their flaws. After all, each has (at least one) stand-out action sequence; each gave us full-on Jedis battling bad guys after twenty years of waiting, and each gave us the chance to revisit the Star Wars universe, which was a treat in itself. So let's ignore Jar-Jar, and focus on the Duel of the Fates, and the sight of Yoda drawing his lightsaber with the power of the Force, and Obi-Wan standing on the higher ground. If you just look at those bits, these are just as good as the originals.
Weakest link? Hmm. The Phantom Menace has the biggest helping of Jar-Jar, but also has that ace lightsaber fight at the end. Attack of the Clones is the most often derided, but has a bit where Yoda gets his 'saber out, and that has to get it bonus points. But while Phantom was the biggest disappointment relative to expectations, Clones still probably edges it overall.
Fun fact: If you look closely during the opening sequence when the second Separatist ship is destroyed, you might spot the kitchen sink that ILM threw into their digital footage.
What to say... "May the Force be with us all."
...and what not to say. "You so do not understand! You weren't there at the beginning! You don't know how good it was!"
14. Die Hard 1-3
Die Hard (1988)
Die Hard 2 (1990)
Die Hard: With A Vengeance (1995)
Director
John McTiernan, Renny Harlin, John McTiernan
Starring
Bruce Willis, Bonnie Bedalia, Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, William Sadler, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Irons
One man. One building. A handful of terrorists. There's no way Die Hard should be this good. And yet it's a nearly perfect action movie, combining one of history's best underdog heroes with a blast of great action and one of the all-time snarkiest villains. The second one ups the stakes, giving us a crowded airport - and the skies above it - packed with hostages and ready for disaster. And the third steps it up again, to an entire city, but adds in the least annoying sidekick in history (well he is Samuel L. Jackson) and plays a nice twist for good measure. Just think: before this movie Bruce Willis was best known as the romantic lead in Moonlighting. What a difference a white vest and no shoes makes, eh?
Weakest link? It's generally considered to be the second film, set at Washington's Dulles airport just before Christmas and featuring a slightly weaker villain than the trilogy's book-ends. This is all, of course, assuming you don't count Die Hard 4.0 - but we don't because that sits outside the definition of a trilogy and would just get messy.
Fun fact: Die Hard: With A Vengeance was originally called "Simon Says" and was at one point a possible fourth Lethal Weapon movie.
What to say... "Now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho."
...and what not to say. "Come out to the coast, we'll get together, have a few laughs..."
13. Pirates of the Caribbean 1-3
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
Director
Gore Verbinski
Starring
Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp, Geoffrey Rush, Mackenzie Crook, Jonathan Pryce, Jack Davenport, Lee Aranberg, Naomie Harris, Kevin McNally, Tom Hollander, Stellan Skarsgard, Bill Nighy
When we talked to Pirates screenwriter Terry Rossio last year, he was rather irate that the philosophy and plot twists of the Disney series haven't garnered the sort of academic attention that, say, The Matrix did. And it's certainly true that these intricately structured adventures resemble operatic farces as much as they do traditional summer blockbusters. But in the end, the main reason we love them is because of someone originally conceived as a supporting character, the barmy, brilliant Captain Jack Sparrow. "You're the worst pirate I've ever heard of!"; "Ah, but you have heard of me!" Proof that a single great character can elevate a film, and indeed a series, to greatness.
Weakest link? At World's End, which twists and turns and meanders far too often on its way to the conclusion, with every character betraying every other on their path.
Fun fact: While the series is based on one Disneyland ride, there's a reference to another in Dead Man's Chest: on their way to Tia Dalma's house, the crew sail past a shack identical to one in Disney World's Jungle Cruise.
What to say... "Captain Jack is very much a hero in the Figaro mould, the sort of trickster servant who crops up regularly in folk legend."
...and what not to say. "I've always preferred Space Mountain."
12. Alien / Aliens / Alien3
Alien (1979)
Aliens (1986)
Alien3 (1992)
Director
Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher
Starring
Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerrit, John Hurt, Ian Holm, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton, Paul McGann
Again, arguably not strictly a trilogy, what's interesting about the first three Alien films is how distinct they are in tone. Ridley Scott's shipbound film is essentially a haunted house movie in space, a claustrophobic, psychological horror. James Cameron's follow-up turns the tone to balls-to-the-wall action, establishing a tough-as-nails cadre of Marines and then giving them an enemy far beyond their capabilities. And Fincher's film (well, he shot it; he didn't edit it and disowned the result) sets the Ridley vs. xenomorph story in a prison and combines the scale of Aliens' kills with the sweaty, enclosed atmosphere of Alien.
Weakest link? No question: Alien 3, which saw directors come and go through a revolving door and the shooting director, David Fincher, walk out before editing began.
Fun fact: Apparently Michael Biehn was paid more for the use of his image early in Alien 3 than he was for his role in Aliens.
What to say... "Get away from her you bitch!"
...and what not to say. "I prefer Alien Vs. Predator myself."
11. Three Colours Trilogy
Three Colours Blue (1993)
Three Colours White (1994)
Three Colours Red (1994)
Director
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Starring
Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent, Emmanuelle Riva, Julie Delpy, Zbigniew Zamachowski Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant
Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy based on the French tricolor (thanks to French financing) was intellectually challenging, emotionally satisfying and cinematically ambitious; we haven't seen its like since. Blue (the best) stars Juliette Binoche as a bereaved wife and follows her attempts to liberate herself from her anguish. White follows the comic adventures of a divorced husband (Zamachowski) trying to get even with his ruthless wife (Julie Delpy). Red returns to the seriousness of Blue with the touching friendship between a retired Judge (Trintignant) and a model (Irene Jacob). Caracters criss-cross the films, which are united by stunning sumptuous filmmaking (all controlled colour palette and virtuoso camera moves), Zbigniew Preisner's score and that rare thing: three great roles for supremely talented women.
Weakest link? While still compelling, White is the slightest of the bunch, lacking the gravitas of the two heavyweight bookends that surround it.
Fun fact: For a close-up of Juliette Binoche allowing a sugar cube to soak up her coffee, Kieslowski demanded the shot last five seconds so he had his assistant director test multiple brands of sugar cubes (which took anywhere from 3 to 11 seconds) until he found the right one.
What to say... "Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Irene Jacob are symbolic of the Tricolor values of liberty, egality and fraternity."
...and what not to say. "Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, Irene Jacob - phwoar!"
10. The Evil Dead Trilogy
The Evil Dead (1981)
Evil Dead II (1987)
Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness (1992)
Director
Sam Raimi
Starring
Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Hal Delrich, Sarah Berry, Embeth Davidtz, Marcus Gilbert.
Made for next to nothing, the first Evil Dead hit our screens with such bloody bravado it was soon hailed as the ultimate in Video Nasties, all red-dyed corn syrup and seriously hammy acting, making up for what it lacked in production values with out-and-out gruelling horror. It scared the hell out of people, and they wanted more. Six years later and Raimi, Campbell and Tapert returned with more of a budget and more buckets of blood, creating what has now come to be regarded as a zombie-movie masterpiece and one of the most quotable films in horror history - nay, in history. And to complete the set, Raimi had long wanted Ash to get medieval on those deadites' asses and in 1993 he got his way, completing the finest horror trilogy ever created with a bigger, barmier finale. Groovy.
Weakest link? Essentially an odd Ray Harryhausen tribute, Army Of Darkness lacks the comedy / horror one-two punch of the first two, leaving it still enjoyable but by no means the finest of the three.
Fun fact: Bruce Campbell's Ash loses his hand in Evil Dead II, attaching a chainsaw to the stump. When his hand is trapped in a can, there are books on top of it, including "A Farewell To Arms." Badda boom!
What to say... "I think you'll find that they aren't zombies, but 'deadites'. There is a difference, you know."
...and what not to say. "What's with all this blood? Is this all really necessary?"
9. The Matrix Trilogy
The Matrix (1999)
The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
Director
The Wachowskis
Starring
Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, Joe Pantoliano, Gloria Foster, Monica Bellucci, Harold Perrineau, Jada Pinkett Smith, Gina Torres, Lambert Wilson, Helmut Bakaitis, Mary Alice
The first Matrix film was one of those films, like Star Wars, that seems to change cinema overnight. As Keanu Reeves set out to save humanity from the machines, it spawned a million imitators, a thousand parodies and almost no equals. The sequels delved deep into philosophical themes, and while they're rarely considered the equal of the first instalment, there's no question that the Wachowskis swung for the fences - both in terms of action and theme. The second film's freeway chase scene, and the third film's attack on Zion, remain benchmarks for big action, and whether you like or loathe the Architect or the ending, the scale of the undertaking is still impressive. Or as the Architect would say, concordantly the eventuality of the enterprise is inexorably well ambitious.
Weakest link? Opinion varies between the two sequels, but Reloaded is generally considered the weaker of the two. It's probably down to the much-derided rave in Zion.
Fun fact: That bench the Oracle is sitting on at the end of the third film? It has a plaque that reads "In memory of Thomas Anderson".
What to say... "Of course, philosophically the sequels are entirely successful."
...and what not to say. "Hey! They ripped off the bullet time bit in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo!"
8. The Dollars Trilogy
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
For A Few Dollars More (1965)
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966)
Director
Sergio Leone
Starring
Clint Eastwood, Marianne Koch, Jose Calvo, Klaus Kinski, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte, Luigi Pistilli, Joseph Egger
It's odd to think that Leone never envisioned The Dollars Trilogy as a unified whole, despite Clint's roles, known at times as 'Blondie', 'Joe', and 'The Man With No Name', having the same mannerisms and the same clothes throughout. But judging by the three films' lasting effect on cinema, they belong together. They gave us, after all, the Spaghetti Western genre, Clint's introduction to the Hollywood A-list, and, perhaps most strikingly of all, Ennio Morricone's flawless music. Clint's gruff attitude, look and tone, with Leone's close-ups, set pieces and threadbare, cheroot-chewing dialogue, together create some of the coolest films ever made, cleverly turning the moralistic Western world of John Wayne on its head and giving us a whole new way of looking at the gunslinging genre.
Weakest link? For A Few Dollars More is the lesser of the three, lacking the tight plotting of the first and third (Fistful helped somewhat by ripping off Yojimbo). But it remains an amazing watch, blessed with unforgettable supporting talent in the form of Van Cleef and Klaus Kinski.
Fun fact: Sergio Leone couldn't speak much English, and Eli Wallach barely any Italian, so throughout the production of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, the two spoke in French.
What to say... "Though the Dollars trilogy is excellent, I'm more of a Once Upon A Time In The West kind of guy."
...and what not to say. "Are these the film adaptations of Rawhide?"
7. Indiana Jones 1-3
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Director
Steven Spielberg
Starring
Harrison Ford, Denholm Elliot, Karen Allen, Sean Connery, Paul Freeman, Kate Capshaw, Jonathan Ke Quan, Amrish Puri, Alison Doody, Julian Glover, River Phoenix
We suspect this would be higher up the list if purist readers hadn't dismissed it following the release of a fourth film recently. After all, Raiders is pretty much a perfect film in every way; Temple of Doom is an impressively dark film and Last Crusade is (arguably) the funniest of the three and had Sean Connery and River Phoenix as a bonus. Indiana Jones himself, failing in his endeavours far more often than he succeeds, is a hero we can believe in - and ladies, he's smart too: check out that tweed and bow-tie combo he wears in class. Hubba!
Weakest link? For years, everyone hated Temple of Doom. Nowadays, you occasionally get people who'll defend that but attack Last Crusade (as too cute) instead. Either way, you're kinda looking for trouble.
6. The Bourne Trilogy
The Bourne Identity (2002)
The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Director
Doug Liman, Paul Greengrass, Paul Greengrass
Starring
Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Julia Stiles, Brian Cox, Joan Allen, David Straithairn, Albert Finney, Chris Cooper, Karl Urban, Clive Owen, Edgar Ramirez, Paddy Considine, Scott Glenn
Back in 2002, Matt Damon wasn't an action star. Hard to believe, right? And yet, his last starring role in a major movie was All The Pretty Horses, and there seemed a very real possibility that Doug Liman's Bourne Identity could fizzle the way that had. But here we are, in a world where Damon broke the critics and box office's neck with his bare hands, stabbing them with a pen and beating them to death with a book. Astonishingly well-shot action, real-world stakes and a withering contempt for Bond's slickness and womanising combine to give the Noughties an action hero to be proud of.
Weakest link? Unusually, the first one is generally considered the weakest - although only in comparison to Paul Greengrass's frantic, frenetic follow-ups.
Fun fact: When Bourne looks in the mirror and says something in foreign at the beginning of The Bourne Identity, he's speaking Dutch.
What to say... "But everyone pretends to be Bourne when they walk through Waterloo at rush hour, right?"
...and what not to say. "Oh, it's just like Bond really."
5. The Godfather Trilogy
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Godfather: Part III (1990)
Director
Francis Ford Coppola
Starring
Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Robert de Niro, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, John Cazale, Andy Garcia, Sofia Coppola, Eli Wallach, Joe Mantegna
Francis Ford Coppola's epic adaptation of Mario Puzo's equally epic book was a perfect marriage of director and subject. Coming from a large Italian-American family himself, Coppola understood the novel's themes about family, immigration and the American dream on a profound level, and just had to add a soupcon of crime and assassination to bring the mix to boil. Part II expertly layered past and present in a brilliant expansion and clarification of the world, while Part III, whatever its faults, completes the arc for Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) as he faces the consequences of the choices he's made and watches the next generation grow up.
Weakest link? Altogether now! The Godfather: Part III! In retrospect everyone agrees that Sofia Coppola is a better director than Corleone offspring, and while the third film has its defenders, no one would seriously claim it's up to the standard of the previous two.
Fun fact: Originally Winona Ryder was set to play Sofia Coppola's role - but backed out to appear in Edward Scissorhands.
What to say... "Of course, it's such a profound satire on the American dream."
...and what not to say. "Anyone who doesn't like it will sleep with the fishes."
4. Toy Story Trilogy
Toy Story (1995)
Toy Story 2 (1999)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
Director
John Lasster, John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich
Starring
Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Estelle Harris, Blake Clark
The release of the first Toy Story film was anticipated chiefly from a technological point of view, as the first entirely computer-animated film ever made. It was only as word from screenings leaked out that it became clear that this was also a storytelling milestone, a blast of fresh air to a moribund animation industry and one that took the world by storm. Incredibly, the sequel lived up to that standard, with Empire calling it an "upgrade" to the original - and even more improbably, the third instalment, fought over and delayed for years, became another triumph. Flawless characterisation, spot-on voice work and the relentless quest for perfection in both story and look may now just be SOP for Pixar, but it's worth remembering how special that is.
Weakest link? You could try to pick holes in them, but honestly, why bother? They're consistently excellent.
Fun fact: Lee Unkrich, who directed the third film, was an editor on the first and a co-director on the second.
What to say... "To infinity, and beyond!"
...and what not to say. "I think I'll just throw all these old toys in the dump."
3. Back to the Future Trilogy
Back to the Future (1985)
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Back to the Future Part III (1990)
Director
Robert Zemeckis
Starring
Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson, Claudia Wells, Elizabeth Shue, Mary Steenbergen
Show us a person who doesn't like Back to the Future and we'll show you a person who is tired of life. The Zemeckis-directed, Spielberg-produced time-travelling tale of Marty McFly races along at, oooh, around 88mph, fuelled by plutonium and Michael J. Fox's career-making, insanely charming performance as an average teen thrust 30 years back in time. Part II was a twisty, turny paradox-spinning puzzler, followed by a gorgeous mix of old West and space age in Part III. Consistently fun, funny and about as good an adventure romp as you could wish for, there's a reason that this is still wildly popular - and getting a re-release - 25 years on.
Weakest link? Funnily enough, conventional wisdom at the time tended to rate the second film lowest (as reflected by Empire's reviews) but nowadays you'll find more people slagging off the third. It all smacks of looking a gift horse in the mouth to us though.
Fun fact: Once upon a time, the time machine was going to be a fridge. Spielberg and Zemeckis nixed the idea because they were worried about kids copying the movie and getting trapped in old fridges.
What to say... "1.21 gigawatts?!"
...and what not to say. "There's simply no scientific basis for thinking that time travel like this is possible."
2. The Original Star Wars Trilogy
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Director
George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand
Starring
Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, Jeremy Bulloch
George Lucas' opening space-opera salvo changed the filmmaking landscape, energised a generation and set an impossible standard for any sequel. Irvin Kershner's sequel, with Lucas overseeing, delivered something even bigger and better, and also gave us perhaps the most famous twist in cinema history. And the third, while it may have cutesy teddy bears taking down an Empire, also has a series of fantastic action scenes, from the fight with the Rancor to the lightsaber battle on the Death Star - itself under attack from outside. It's a triple-whammy that has spawned imitators, prequels, endless other media permutations and even a religion - and how many trilogies can claim that?
Weakest link? Most of the fanboys would have you believe it's Jedi, but that's got some of the trilogy's best bits in it and - whatever they claim - no one hated the Ewoks even when they were a kid.
Fun fact: Pop quiz hotshot: who has the last line in New Hope? Answer: Chewbacca.
What to say... "Did you know that in some Spanish subtitled releases, R2-D2 name appears subtitled as "Arturito" or "little Arthur" in Spanish, since the pronunciation is similar?"
...and what not to say. "Dude, she's your sister! Yuck!"
1. The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Director
Peter Jackson
Starring
Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Sean Astin, Sean Bean, John Rhys-Davies, Christopher Lee, Andy Serkis, Orlando Bloom, Dominic Monahan, Billy Boyd, Liv Tyler, Hugo Weaving, Miranda Otto, Karl Urban, David Wenham, Bernard Hill, Ian Holm, Brad Dourif, John Noble
Peter Jackson's stunning trilogy, filmed back-to-back and released in the form of Christmas presents for three consecutive years, just pipped Star Wars to the top of the poll. Why? Well, there's the painstaking attention to detail (characters even had their coats-of-arms emblazoned on the never-seen linings of their costumes for maximum authenticity), New Zealand scenery so breathtaking you could feel the wind on your face, the pitch-perfect casting and the huge-scale effects. In the end, however, it all comes down to friendship, and fellowship, and a struggle against the odds (or, if you will, orcs). It's the fact that Peter Jackson was able to keep his eye on the emotion even while the spectacle swirled around him that makes this such a stunner.
Weakest link? There really isn't one - although a few people gripe about Return of the King's extended endings.
Fun fact: While Return of the King is tied with Titanic and Ben-Hur for the Most Oscars For A Single Film record (that'd be 11), it's notable for winning all the Academy Awards it was nominated for, which neither of the others managed to do.
What to say... "A spectacular achievement! I hope Jackson makes The Hobbit." | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 57 | https://www.thoughtco.com/native-american-stereotypes-in-film-television-2834655 | en | 5 Common Indigenous Stereotypes in Film and Television | [
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"Nadra Kareem Nittle",
"www.facebook.com"
] | 2013-06-22T16:49:31-04:00 | This roundup of Indigenous stereotypes in TV and film reveals how this group continues to be portrayed as warriors, medicine men, and maidens. | en | /favicon.ico | ThoughtCo | https://www.thoughtco.com/native-american-stereotypes-in-film-television-2834655 | The 2013 remake of “The Lone Ranger,” featuring Indigenous sidekick Tonto (Johnny Depp), renewed concerns about whether the media promotes stereotypical images of Indigenous peoples. In film and television, Indigenous tribal members have long been portrayed as people of few words with magical powers.
Often the Indigenous characters in Hollywood are dressed as “warriors,” which perpetuates the false notion that tribal members are savages. On the other hand, Indigenous women are often depicted as beautiful maidens who are available to White men. Collectively, the stereotypical images of Indigenous peoples in Hollywood continue to influence public perception of this long misrepresented group.
Beautiful Maidens
While the media often portrays Indigenous men as warriors and medicine men, their female counterparts are typically portrayed as beautiful objects of desire. This maiden stereotype can be found in Land O’ Lakes butter product labels and promotions, Hollywood’s various representations of “Pocahontas,” and Gwen Stefani’s controversial portrayal of an Indigenous princess for No Doubt’s 2012 music video for “Looking Hot.”
Indigenous author Sherman Alexie tweeted that with the video No Doubt turned “500 years of colonialism into a silly dance song and fashion show.”
Representations of Indigenous women as universally promiscuous beings or objects of sexual desire for White men have serious real-world consequences. In fact, Indigenous women suffer from high rates of sexual assaults, often perpetrated by non-Indigenous men.
According to the book Feminisms and Womanisms: A Women’s Studies Reader, Indigenous girls are also often subjected to derogatory sexual comments.
“Whether princess or squaw, Native femininity is sexualized,” writes Kim Anderson in the book. “This understanding finds its way into our lives and our communities. Sometimes, it means constantly having to fend off the advances of people with an appetite for the ‘Other.’ It may involve a continual struggle to resist crass, sexualized interpretations of one’s being…”
'Stoic Indians'
Unsmiling Indigenous peoples who speak few words can be found in classical cinema as well as in cinema of the 21st century. This representation of Indigenous tribal members paints them as one-dimensional people who lack the ability to experience or display a similar range of emotions as other racial groups.
Adrienne Keene of the Native Appropriations blog says that portrayals of Indigenous peoples as stoic can largely be traced to the pictures of Edward Curtis, who photographed tribal members in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“The common theme throughout Edward Curtis’s portraits is stoicism,” Keene explains. “None of his subjects smile. Ever. …To anyone who has spent any time with Indians, you know that the ‘stoic Indian’ stereotype couldn’t be further from the truth. Natives joke, tease, and laugh more than anyone I know—I often leave Native events with my sides hurting from laughing so much.”
Magical Medicine Men
Indigenous males are often portrayed in film and television shows as wise men with magical powers. Usually performing as medicine men of some kind, these characters have little function other than to guide White characters in the right direction.
Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “The Doors” is a case in point. In this film about the famed rock group, a medicine man appears at key moments in Jim Morrison’s life to shape the singer’s consciousness.
The real Jim Morrison may have really felt that he connected with a medicine man, but his thinking was likely influenced by Hollywood depictions of Indigenous peoples. In all cultures, there have traditionally been individuals with an impressive knowledge of the healing qualities of plants and herbs. Yet, Indigenous peoples have been portrayed in film and television time and time again as medicine men who have no other purpose but to provide spiritual guidance for White characters.
Bloodthirsty Warriors
In films such as “The Last of The Mohicans,” based on James Fenimore Cooper’s book of the same name, there is no shortage of Indigenous warriors. Hollywood has traditionally portrayed Indigenous peoples as tomahawk-wielding savages, ready to attack White characters and their families. These problematic representations also often have Indigenous characters engage in barbaric practices such as scalping people they have killed and sexually violating White women. The Anti-Defamation League has attempted to set this stereotype straight, however.
“While warfare and conflict did exist among Native Americans, the majority of tribes were peaceful and only attacked in self-defense,” the ADL reports. “Just like European nations, American Indian tribes had complex histories and relationships with one another that sometimes involved combat, but also included alliances, trade, intermarriage and the full spectrum of human ventures.”
As the character, Thomas-Builds-the Fire notes in the film “Smoke Signals,” many Indigenous peoples have no history of being warriors. Thomas points out that he came from a tribe of fishermen. The warrior stereotype is a “shallow” one the ADL asserts, as it “obscures family and community life, spirituality, and the intricacies inherent in every human society.”
In the Wild and on the Rez | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 81 | https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/cinema-palettes-famous-movie-colors/ | en | Color Palettes From Famous Movies Show How Colors Set The Mood Of A Film | [
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"DigitalSynopsis.com",
"www.facebook.com"
] | 2016-05-21T12:21:44+00:00 | Color sets the tone and mood of a film before any of the actors have even uttered a word. Directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski used a green tint in The | en | Digital Synopsis | https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/cinema-palettes-famous-movie-colors/ | Color sets the tone and mood of a film before any of the actors have even uttered a word. Directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski used a green tint in The Matrix (1999) to create a mood palette that was suggestive of the early monochrome computer monitors. Yellow was used in Kill Bill (2003) to depict Uma Thurman’s character’s madness and instability.
Romantic comedies use pastel shades like beige, pink and lilac. Sci-fi and cyborg films use shades of blue, grey, and green. Teal and orange seem to be the trend in Hollywood nowadays, especially in movie adaptations of graphic novels and comic books. Just as colors define the tone of a film, a write my essay service can help define the tone of your essays.
To highlight the significance of color in films, UK-based designer Gaby Smith has come up with an interesting project called Cinema Palettes, that features color palettes derived from memorable scenes of famous movies. So far, Gaby has compiled more than 250 palettes, some of which might even give you color ideas for your next design project. Check them out below.
1. Aladdin (1992)
2. Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)
3. American Beauty (1999)
4. American Psycho (2000)
5. Annie Hall (1977)
6. Birdman (2014)
7. Corpse Bride (2005)
8. Deadpool (2016)
9. Django Unchained (2012)
10. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
11. Forrest Gump (1994)
12. Frozen (2013)
13. Gone Girl (2014)
14. Grease (1978)
15. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
16. Inception (2010)
17. Inglourious Basterds (2009)
18. Jaws (1975)
19. Jurassic Park (1993)
20. Kill Bill (2003)
21. Kung Fu Panda (2008)
22. Life of Pi (2012)
23. Lost in Translation (2003)
24. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
25. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)
26. Nightcrawler (2014)
27. Peter Pan (1953)
28. Pulp Fiction (1994)
29. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
30. Romeo + Juliet (1996)
31. Spirited Away (2001)
32. Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
33. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
34. Suicide Squad (2016)
35. Taxi Driver (1976)
36. The Avengers (2012)
37. The Dark Knight (2008)
38. The Godfather (1972)
39. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015)
40. The Lion King (1994)
41. The Martian (2015)
42. The Revenant (2015)
43. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
44. The Shining (1980)
45. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
46. The Theory of Everything (2014)
47. The Truman Show (1998)
48. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
49. Titanic (1997)
50. Top Gun (1986)
Which one’s your favourite? Share this post with a movie buff/designer/artist and voice your views in the comments below. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 77 | https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/2/19/16739386/ayahuasca-retreat-psychedelic-hallucination-meditation | en | What an ayahuasca retreat showed me about my life | [
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"Sean Illing"
] | 2018-02-19T00:00:00 | 4 trips in 4 days was the best — and worst — thing I’ve ever done. | en | /static-assets/icons/favicon.ico | Vox | https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/2/19/16739386/ayahuasca-retreat-psychedelic-hallucination-meditation | When I finally puked on the fourth night, I felt an odd sense of pride.
Inside the loud, stuffy ceremony room, people were laughing, crying, chanting, gyrating, and, yes, vomiting, around me. When my time finally comes, I think: Just aim for the bucket and keep your ass above your head like the shaman told you.
I try to wipe my face but can’t grab the tissue paper because it melts every time I reach for it. Nearby, a man starts to scream. I can’t make out what he’s saying on account of the shaman singing beautiful Colombian songs in the other room.
I finish vomiting and start crying and laughing and smiling all at once. Something has been lifted in this “purge,” something dark and deep I was carrying around for years. Relief washes over me, and I slowly make my way back to my mattress on the floor.
For four consecutive nights, a group of 78 of us here at a retreat center in Costa Rica have been drinking a foul-tasting, molasses-like tea containing ayahuasca, a plant concoction that contains the natural hallucinogen known as DMT.
We’re part of a wave of Westerners seeking out ayahuasca as a tool for psychological healing, personal growth, or expanding consciousness.
I flew to Costa Rica hoping to explode my ego. And I was not prepared for what happened. Ayahuasca turned my life upside down, dissolving the wall between my self and the world. I also stared into what I can only describe as the world’s most honest mirror. It was a Clockwork Orange-like horror show, and it was impossible to look away. But I saw what I needed to see when I was ready to see it.
Ayahuasca exposes the gap between who you think you are and who you actually are. In my case, the gap was immense, and the pain of seeing it for the first time was practically unbearable.
An ayahuasca boom
Ayahuasca remains a fringe psychological medicine, but it’s slowly working its way into the mainstream. Until fairly recently, you had to travel to South America if you wanted to experiment with the plant, but now ayahuasca ceremonies are popping up in the United States and Europe.
Indigenous people in countries like Colombia and Peru have been brewing the concoction for thousands of years, mostly for religious or spiritual purposes. It’s considered a medicine, a way to heal internal wounds and reconnect with nature.
It wasn’t until 1908 that Western scientists acknowledged its existence; British botanist Richard Spruce was the first to study it and write about the “purging” it invokes. He was mainly interested in classifying the vines and leaves that made up the magic brew, and in understanding its role in Amazonian culture.
Ever wonder how your mind works? Watch The Mind, Explained, our 5-part miniseries on the workings of the brain. Available to stream now on Netflix.
Ayahuasca emerged again in the early 1960s with the counterculture movement. Beat writers like William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac all described their experiences with ayahuasca, most famously in Burroughs’s book The Yage Letters. Scientist-hippies like Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary then went to South America to research and experience the drug firsthand. All of this helped bring ayahuasca into Western culture, but it was never truly popularized.
Today, the tea is having a bit of a moment.
Celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Sting, and Chelsea Handler have spoken about their experiences with it. “I had all these beautiful images of my childhood and me and my sister laughing on a kayak, and all these beautiful things with me and my sister,” Handler told the New York Post after her first ayahuasca trip. “It was very much about opening my mind to loving my sister, and not being so hard on her.”
Handler’s experience appears to be common. The scientific evidence on ayahuasca is limited, but it is known to activate repressed memories in ways that allow people to come to a new understanding of their past. In some cases, it helps people work through memories of traumatic events, which is why neuroscientists are beginning to study ayahuasca as a treatment for depression and PTSD. (There are physical and psychological risks to taking it as well — it can interfere with medication and exacerbate existing psychiatric conditions.)
What I was looking for
My interest in ayahuasca was specific: I wanted to cut through the illusion of selfhood. Psychedelics have a way of tearing down our emotional barriers. You feel plugged into something bigger than yourself, and — for a moment, at least — the sensation of separation melts away.
Buddhists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers have all made persuasive arguments that there is nothing like a “fixed self,” no thinker behind our thoughts, no doer behind our deeds. There is only consciousness and immediate experience; everything else is the result of the mind projecting into the past or the future.
But this is a difficult truth to grasp in everyday life. Because you’re conscious, because it’s like something to be you, it’s very easy to believe that a wall exists between your mind and the world. If you’re experiencing something, then there must be a “you” doing the experiencing. But the “you” in this case is just an abstraction; it’s in your mind, not out there in the world.
One way to escape this trap, I hope, is to get the hell out of my head
I spent about five years as a philosophy graduate student and another few as a teacher. I understood these arguments in intellectual terms but not in experiential terms. I’ve tried meditating, and I’m terrible at it. My mind is a parade of discordant thoughts, and as a result, I’m rarely present — in conversations, during meditation, in daily life.
One way to escape this trap, I hope, is to get the hell out of my head.
There are many ways to reach the truth of non-selfhood. Think of it as a mountain peak, with meditators and certain spiritual traditions ascending different sides. Psychedelic drugs offer a kind of shortcut; you get a glimpse of this higher truth without all those years of serious, disciplined practice.
That shortcut is what I was after.
Night 1: dread
The approach at this retreat center, called Rythmia, is all-encompassing. During the day they pamper you with all the luxuries of a wellness retreat — massages, volcanic mud baths, organic food, yoga classes, colonic cleanses. Then at night, you drink ayahuasca and put yourself through emotional and physical hell.
One of the first things I was told is that I had to enter the ayahuasca ceremony with a clear goal or question in mind: What do you want to learn about yourself?
The trained facilitators who led the ceremonies recommend that you begin with a simple request: Show me who I’ve become.
The question implies that at some point you lost yourself, that when you were a child, your soul was pure, open, uncorrupted by culture. As you enter society, you lose that childlike love for the world. You start to judge yourself by external standards. You compare yourself to friends, neighbors, and peers. You develop an ego, an identity, and your well-being becomes bound up with these constructs.
Do I really want to see what I’ve become? I’m pretty sure I won’t like the answer.
There’s nothing new about these ideas, but they strike me as true all the same. So I decide to focus on self-discovery.
It’s now 5:15 pm, and the first ceremony starts in 15 minutes. I’m terrified. “Do I really want to see what I’ve become?” I keep asking. I’m pretty sure I won’t like the answer — almost no one does, it seems.
The doors open, and all 78 of us here for this week-long session pour into the ceremony room, called the “flight deck.” The room is big, divided into three sections, and there are two bathrooms on each side. It’s dimly lit, and mattresses are lined up on the floor against the walls. The beds are only a few inches apart. At the foot of each mattress is a roll of toilet paper and a blue or red bucket.
I pounce on the first mattress I see; it’s near the door and just a few feet from the bathroom. I feel safe here. To my right is Chad, a photographer from Ontario who looks as nervous as I am but somehow seems more prepared for this. To my left is a giant window that opens to a view of the courtyard.
The stuff is nasty, like a cup of motor oil diluted with a splash of water
There’s a nervous collective energy. Almost everyone here is doing ayahuasca for the first time, and we’re all scared shitless. They announce the first call to drink, and I make my way to the front of the line. One by one, we take our cups, silently reflect on the intention for the evening, and then drink.
It’s my turn to drink. The stuff is nasty, like a cup of motor oil diluted with a splash of water. I throw it back like a shot of cheap bourbon.
We’re instructed to sit up and lean against the wall after the first cup. The tea takes at least 30 minutes to work its way through the body. I sit quietly for 45 minutes, maybe an hour, and then I lie down on my mattress and wait.
Nothing happens. I feel a little dizzy but nothing overwhelming. I go outside, walk around a bit, feel my feet in the grass. Then they announce a call for the second drink. I remember the mantra here: “Drink, don’t think.” If you can hear the call, if you can move your body, you drink. So I awkwardly drag myself out of bed and head to the front for a second cup.
About 30 minutes pass, and I start to feel ... strange. I can see colors, shapes, and shifting shadows on the wall. I’m nervous that something is about to happen, so I go outside and gather myself. I settle in one of the hammocks and stare at the stars.
Suddenly the stars start to spin in a clockwise direction. Then a little faster. Then, for reasons that escape me, I start yelling at the moon. So it goes, for what feels like an hour or two. I keep hurling those two questions at the heavens but get no answers, no insights, just silence and spinning.
I walk back inside and collapse in my bed. For the rest of the night, I see sporadic visions of geometric figures, a few flashes of light, but that’s about it. Then one of the assistants starts to ring a gentle bell.
It’s 2 am, and it’s time to close the ceremony.
Night 2: “Don’t fight the medicine”
The next day I realize why I had no great revelations on the first night. I couldn’t let go. I thought I was prepared for the trip, but anxiety got the better of me. As soon as I thought something — anything — was about to happen, I tried to think myself out of the experience.
Tonight will be different. I’m going to stay in the moment, stay with my breath, and see what happens.
The facilitator is Brad, a kind, aggressively tanned guy from Indianapolis who was trained in ayahuasca by a tribe in Peru. The facilitators play an important role each night, even though there isn’t much one-on-one interaction. They set the tone, guide the ceremony, explain where the medicine came from and how it works, and they assist the people who need it throughout the night.
Brad tells us to let go and give in. “Don’t fight the medicine,” he says. “Just listen.”
It’s cooler tonight, but there’s a warm breeze rolling through the room. Most of the people around me are scribbling last-minute notes in their journals; others are sitting stoically waiting for the first call.
I take my first drink around 7:30 pm, though I can’t know for sure because phones and electronics are shut down as soon as you enter the flight deck. My intention is the same as it was the first night: Show me who I’ve become.
I can tell quickly that this will be different. It’s 30 or 40 minutes after the first drink, and already my senses are overwhelmed. Every time I open my eyes, the space around me starts to fold, kind of like what Einstein describes in his theory of relativity. But it also looks like a tightly woven spider web, and when I move my hand it starts to bend.
Before I know it, they make the call for a second drink. “Don’t think, drink,” I keep telling myself. So I stumble to the front and drink another cup. Then things get weird.
All of a sudden, Andrea has 40 or 50 yellow snakes gushing out of her mouth and into mine
I roll onto my right side and see Andrea, a woman from Toronto, struggling to vomit. Brad, the facilitator, had said the Peruvian and Columbian tribes that use ayahuasca see purging — vomiting, diarrhea, crying, laughing, and yawning — as a vital part of the healing the drug brings. When you purge, you’re expelling all the nastiness — the stress, the anxieties, the fears, the regrets, the hatred, the self-loathing.
All of a sudden, Andrea has 40 or 50 yellow snakes gushing out of her mouth and into mine. And then I’m immediately racked with the worst nausea I’ve ever experienced. First I curl up in the fetal position and then I spring onto all fours and try to puke. But I can’t get it out. I stay on my knees for another five or 10 minutes waiting for something to happen. Nothing.
Then I lie back down, roll onto my left shoulder, and am flooded with a resounding message for the rest of the night: It’s not about you! Andrea’s pain and suffering — the snakes — had passed into me, and that was the whole point.
For the rest of the night, maybe another three hours or so, I lie there thinking about how selfish I often am, and about the symbolism of the snakes. The feeling was so powerful that I started to cry. (Side note: people cry a lot on ayahuasca.)
The next day, Andrea tells me that she never managed to purge but that her nausea suddenly disappeared, after which she drifted into a peaceful half-sleep. I don’t know if that occurred around the time I saw those snakes, but the thought of it kept me up that night.
I’m not bothered by the thought of taking on her pain; it’s the whole wild scene — the snakes, the nausea, the visions. I can’t explain any of it and yet it was unshakably authentic.
Night 3: making love to my wife for the first time — again
I’m halfway through this thing, and so far it’s not at all what I expected. I still haven’t had to confront my past in the way I anticipated I would.
The third ceremony is led by two women. The facilitator is Abby, a young, quietly authoritative woman from Cincinnati who’s assisted by Kat from Montana. Both trained in Peru.
Abby begins by telling us that tonight is about the feminine spirit. “It’s a celebration of creation,” she says, “of birth and renewal.” The idea is calming.
I strike up a conversation with the guy next to me. His name is Brad and he’s another Canadian, a publisher from Toronto. This is his second trip to Rythmia, and he tells me that he plans to sell his business after this. “My whole identity is tied up in that,” he says, and “I don’t want that anymore.”
Before I can respond, there’s the first call to drink. The brew is thicker tonight, and it tastes like wax and vinegar. It hits hard and fast. I am hallucinating within 20 or 30 minutes.
I see myself floating in my mother’s womb, suspended in fluids and flesh. And then I see her life — it’s not quite like a movie; it’s more like a series of flashing visions that are just clear enough to resonate. I see her pain, her confusion. I see how hard it was for her to have me at 20 years old, and how little I’d thought about that.
I see her and my father, in a college apartment, wondering what the hell they’re going to do next. I realize how fucking terrified I would have been in that spot at that age. A wave of compassion washes over me; whatever resentments I was holding on to drop away.
Then the call for a second drink comes. I drink, walk outside, and then go right back to bed.
The scene shifts and I’m floating in what I assume is a kind of primordial soup. I think I’m a vibrating particle now, and string theory suddenly makes sense in a way I could never explain (I suck at math).
Abby starts to sing songs called icaros, which are performed in ayahuasca ceremonies throughout the Amazon. I sink deeper into a trance. My mind is speeding, and my body is frozen stiff. But a calm takes over me, and I start to smile and laugh.
I start to see every moment of our relationship in which she reached out to me and I missed it
I roll back onto my right side, and suddenly I see my wife’s face. I relive the first time we made love. We’re in college near a lake on campus. I can see our bikes behind us, the water in front of us, the blanket beneath us, and the grass all around us. I can smell the air. I relive this moment, understanding finally what made it so special.
There was no ego. I wasn’t an isolated “I,” a separate person with a separate consciousness. The feeling, I imagine, isn’t much different from what advanced meditators experience when their sense of self disappears. You simply have no awareness of anything but your body and the moment.
But then the vision turns dark.
I start to see every moment of our relationship in which she reached out to me and I missed it. I see her asking me to go to a meditation class, and I decline. I see her pause to ask me to connect at the peak of a mountain after a long hike in Boulder, Colorado, and I shrug it off. I see her ask me to go dancing at a show near our apartment, and I watch myself mindlessly decline.
I see myself stuck in my own head, my own thoughts, my own impulses. And I see the disappointment on her face. I see her see me miss an opportunity to reconnect.
Then I relive all those moments again, and this time I see myself do or say what I should have done or said. And I see the joy on her face. I see it so clearly that it hurts. I see how much time I wasted, how much love I withheld.
I’m crying again, this time even louder, and the smile on my face is so big that my jaw hurt the next day. And I think about how I’m going to look at my wife when I get back home, and how she’ll know I’m seeing her — really seeing her — for the first time all over again.
Then the bells start to ring, and it’s time to close the ceremony.
Night 4: the most honest mirror you’ll ever see
I knew the fourth night would be rough when I saw the ayahuasca brew (each night it’s a slightly different recipe from a different tribe or region or tradition). It was so thick and oily that you couldn’t drink it. Instead, you had to force it down like paste.
The shaman, an Israeli man named Mitra, tells us that it was a 5,000-year-old recipe taken from one of the oldest Amazonian tribes in Colombia, where Mitra was trained. He’s tall, with a shaved head and an assured demeanor. He looks like he could demystify the cosmos and dunk a basketball at the same time.
I see how much time I wasted, how much love I withheld
This final ceremony is longer than the rest. Normally, we gather around 5:30 pm and finish by 1 or 2 am. This time we meet around 7:30 pm and don’t finish until sunrise the next day.
Mitra hands me my first cup, and I fall back to my mattress. I think it’s maybe half an hour before I slip into what I can only describe as the most vivid lucid dream.
I watch my entire life unfold as though it were projected on a movie screen. But it wasn’t my whole life; it was every lie, every counterfeit pose, every missed opportunity to say or do something true, every false act and ingratiating gesture, every pathetic attempt to be seen in a certain light.
The highlight reel is way longer than I imagined.
I see myself as a child groveling for attention from the “popular kids.” I see my 12-year-old self throwing a tantrum in the mall because my dad wouldn’t buy me the Nautica shirt that all those popular kids were wearing. I see myself in high school pretending to be something I was not, and I see all the doubts piling up inside me. I see all the times I self-censored purely out of fear of judgment.
I see myself building my identity based on what I thought would impress other people. On it went — one trivial act after another building up an edifice of falsehood.
I should note how unpleasant it is to see yourself from outside yourself. Most of us aren’t honest with ourselves about who we are and why we do what we do. To see it so clearly for the first time is painful.
The movie rages on into college and adult life, with my self-consciousness expanding. I see myself not looking into the eyes of the person I’m talking to because I’m playing out all the ways they might be judging me. I see myself pretending like my hair wasn’t thinning years ago and all the times I tried to hide it. And every time, the reason for posing was the same: I cared too much about what other people thought.
The experience made me aware of how often we all do this. We do it at home, at work, at the grocery store, at the gym. Most interactions are either transactional or performative. No one wants to make eye contact, and most of the time people freak out if you really try. We’re too self-conscious to listen. We’re thinking about what we’ll say next or how we’re being perceived.
All the posturing destroys any chance for a genuine connection.
The movie ends, and I’m exhausted. The meaning of the previous two nights is clearer now. I needed to feel small and connected before I could appreciate the absurdity of self-involvement. I had to relive those fleeting moments of union to see what made them so transcendent. And I had to go straight through my shame and regret to get beyond it.
When the ceremony finally ended, I sat up in my bed and starting scribbling notes to myself. Before I could finish, Mitra walked up to me and asked how I was doing. I tried to explain what happened, but I couldn’t.
He just kneeled, put his hand on my head, and said, “Happy birthday.”
The day after
I leave the retreat center around 11 am on Saturday to board a shuttle to the airport. With me are three people from my group.
One of them is Alex, a garrulous guy from London. I think he’s in his mid-30s, though I can’t recall. He’s got this dazed look on this face, like he just saw God. His eyes are on fire with excitement, and he’s already planning his next visit.
“When are you coming back?” he asks me. “I don’t know,” I say. He doesn’t quite believe me. Everyone, he assumes, is coming back, either here or to some other place like this. I’m still processing what happened; the thought of the next “trip” hasn’t even occurred to me yet.
In four nights, I feel like I let go of a lifetime’s worth of anger and bitterness
We reach the airport, say our goodbyes, and then part ways. I’m standing in line waiting to go through customs, and I’m surprised at how relaxed I am. The line is long and slow, and everyone around me is annoyed. But I’m moving along, passport in hand, smiling for no particular reason.
Typically, I am one inconvenience removed from rage. Today is different, though. When a loud man rolls his heavy suitcase over my open toe, I shrug it off. Brief encounters with strangers like that are pleasant; the awkwardness is gone.
I’m not in my head, and so things aren’t happening to me; they’re just happening. It’s probably too much to say that my ego was gone — I don’t think it works like that. But seeing myself from a different perspective offered a chance to reassert control over it.
People say that a single ayahuasca trip is like a decade of therapy packed into a night. That’s probably an overstatement, but it’s not altogether wrong. In four nights, I feel like I let go of a lifetime’s worth of anger and bitterness.
What now?
At the time of this writing, I’ve been home three weeks. The ecstasy I felt in the days immediately after the trip has worn off as I’ve slipped back into my regular life. A tension has emerged that I still don’t quite understand.
I’m happier and less irritable than I was when I left. The tedium of everyday life feels less oppressive. Part of the reason is that I’m less anxious, less solipsistic. I really do find it easier to see what’s in front of me.
But there’s something gnawing at me. I want to go back to Costa Rica, and not for the reasons you might expect. Forget about the ayahuasca, forget about the tropical vistas, forget about all that. This experience was possible because a group of people came together with a shared intention. That creates an emotional intensity that’s hard to find elsewhere. Every person looks right at you, and you look right back.
But real life isn’t like that. I ride the Metro to work every day, and lately I’ve tried talking to random people. It’s a lot harder than you think.
Do you pay a price for taking this kind of shortcut?
A man sat across from me the other day wearing a Tulane hat (from the university in New Orleans). I used to live in the area, so I looked at him until he looked back, assuming I’d strike up a conversation. But once we locked eyes, I could sense his agitation and we both turned our heads. Nothing weird or hostile — just clumsy.
I’ve spent years making an heroic effort to avoid awkward exchanges, so I get it. But I’m honestly worried that in a few weeks or months, I’ll be that guy again. And in retrospect, this whole journey will feel like a brief holiday of awareness.
I asked my wife the other day if I seem different to her after the trip. She said that she always felt like she had to force me to offer my attention, especially in those quiet, simple moments, and that now I give it freely. I do find it easier to listen since I returned, and it’s amazing what a difference that can make.
I keep thinking about this idea that a night of ayahuasca is like a decade of therapy. Do you pay a price for taking this kind of shortcut? Are the effects short-lived? Maybe.
I know it’s hard to be in the world without being of the world. And the world is a lonely place full of lonely people. You can’t change that, but you can change your orientation to it. In my case, psychedelics made that a little easier.
And what of the self and the ego? I believed these things to be illusions before I took ayahuasca, and now I’m certain that they are. But what does that actually mean in day-to-day life? Not as much as it should. The ego might be a fiction or a construct or whatever you want to call it, but the sensation of it is near impossible to shake.
Even after taking what is arguably the most powerful ego-dissolving medicine on the planet, I still live in a world that reinforces the story of me all the time. There’s no easy way around all that.
I don’t know what life will be like in six months or a year, but I think ayahuasca was the greatest thing that has happened to my marriage. It wasn’t about becoming a better person; it was about appreciating the role my wife — and other relationships — play in my life. I had to escape my head to see that.
Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I’d say ayahuasca is the best and worst thing I’ve ever done. I spent a week staring down all my bullshit and all my insecurities and it was totally liberating. But it was also terrifying and not something I want — or need — to see again.
A question worth asking: If you looked into the world’s most honest mirror, what would you see?
Editor’s note: this story was originally published on February 19, 2018. | ||||
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] | null | [] | null | From the classics (Roman Holiday, Sleepless in Seattle, Pretty Woman) to modern-day hits (Brown Sugar, Crazy Rich Asians, The Big Sick), it's the rom-coms critics loved -- and you will, too! | en | https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/wp-content/themes/RottenTomatoes/static/images/icons/favicon.ico | https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-romantic-comedies-of-all-time/ | Hooking up? No problem. “Meet cute” at the book shop? Happens all the time. Finding the right one, falling in love, and getting married? What else are you gonna do? But compiling the ultimate list of the Freshest romantic comedies of all time? It’s complicated.
For our list of the 200 best romantic comedies of all time, we searched high and low throughout movie history for every permutation of (hilarious) courtship and love captured on camera. We have the dazzling wit of the early studio system (His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby), the realistic cynicism of the ’70s (Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl), and the sweeping romance in-between (The Apartment, Roman Holiday). There was plenty to find in the John Hughes, teen-driven era (Say Anything…, Pretty in Pink), and the bubbly ’90s decade that followed (Groundhog Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, While You Were Sleeping). Then we dabbled in 21st century raunch (Knocked Up) and twee ([500] Days of Summer), leading into our current era of new voices declaring that they too are entitled to their own messy relationship stories (The Big Sick, Crazy Rich Asians).
Movies are listed Certified Fresh movies first, followed by the Fresh-hearted. How did we reach our rankings? Because the rom-com has been around for so long and with masterpieces reaching back 100 years, first we said each movie needed at least 20 reviews. Then to make sure the selections played well to general audiences, each movie needed to also have a positive Audience Score (even if they’re Certified Fresh), which knocked out some surprise films, like About a Boy. Hey, don’t blame us – y’all voted! Finally, any more released after 2016 (when we revamped our critics pool and criteria) needed to be Certified Fresh to make the cut.
For our most recent update, we’ve added the latest in Certified Fresh love: the princely Red, White & Royal Blue, the adaptation of Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, and the all-in-a-day South London-set Rye Lane.
Ready to dive into the sea of love? Then continue on with open arms into Rotten Tomatoes’ 200 best romantic comedies of all time!
#1
The Philadelphia Story (1940) 100%
#1
Adjusted Score: 114930%
Critics Consensus: Offering a wonderfully witty script, spotless direction from George Cukor, and typically excellent lead performances, The Philadelphia Story is an unqualified classic.
Synopsis: This classic romantic comedy focuses on Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn), a Philadelphia socialite who has split from her husband, C.K.... [More]
Directed By: George Cukor
#2
His Girl Friday (1940) 99%
#2
Adjusted Score: 113778%
Critics Consensus: Anchored by stellar performances from Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday is possibly the definitive screwball romantic comedy.
Synopsis: When hard-charging New York newspaper editor Walter Burns discovers that his ex-wife, investigative reporter Hildy Johnson, has gotten engaged to... [More]
Directed By: Howard Hawks
#3
#3
Adjusted Score: 112716%
Critics Consensus: Deftly directed by Ernst Lubitsch from a smart, funny script by Samson Raphaelson, The Shop Around the Corner is a romantic comedy in the finest sense of the term.
Synopsis: Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) and Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan) are employees at Matuschek and Company, a general store in Budapest.... [More]
Directed By: Ernst Lubitsch
#4
The Lady Eve (1941) 99%
#4
Adjusted Score: 114807%
Critics Consensus: A career highlight for Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve benefits from Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda's sparkling chemistry -- and a script that inspired countless battle-of-the-sexes comedies.
Synopsis: It's no accident when wealthy Charles (Henry Fonda) falls for Jean (Barbara Stanwyck). Jean is a con artist with her... [More]
Directed By: Preston Sturges
#5
It Happened One Night (1934) 98%
#5
Adjusted Score: 123680%
Critics Consensus: Capturing its stars and director at their finest, It Happened One Night remains unsurpassed by the countless romantic comedies it has inspired.
Synopsis: In Frank Capra's acclaimed romantic comedy, spoiled heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) impetuously marries the scheming King Westley, leading her... [More]
Directed By: Frank Capra
#6
Broadcast News (1987) 98%
#6
Adjusted Score: 102941%
Critics Consensus: Blockbuster dramatist James L. Brooks delivers with Broadcast News, fully entertaining with deft, deep characterization.
Synopsis: Intelligent satire of American television news. A highly strung news producer finds herself strangely attracted to a vapid anchorman even... [More]
Directed By: James L. Brooks
#7
Big (1988) 98%
#7
Adjusted Score: 105103%
Critics Consensus: Refreshingly sweet and undeniably funny, Big is a showcase for Tom Hanks, who dives into his role and infuses it with charm and surprising poignancy.
Synopsis: After a wish turns 12-year-old Josh Baskin (David Moscow) into a 30-year-old man (Tom Hanks), he heads to New York... [More]
Directed By: Penny Marshall
#8
Say Anything... (1989) 98%
#8
Adjusted Score: 101980%
Critics Consensus: One of the definitive Generation X movies, Say Anything... is equally funny and heartfelt -- and it established John Cusack as an icon for left-of-center types everywhere.
Synopsis: In a charming, critically acclaimed tale of first love, Lloyd (John Cusack), an eternal optimist, seeks to capture the heart... [More]
Directed By: Cameron Crowe
#9
Defending Your Life (1991) 98%
#9
Adjusted Score: 101280%
Critics Consensus: With Defending Your Life, writer-director-star Albert Brooks softens his trademark caustic humor -- and proves he's every bit as funny when he's tugging heartstrings.
Synopsis: Daniel Miller (Albert Brooks) isn't having a good week. For starters, he died after he got hit by a bus.... [More]
Directed By: Albert Brooks
#10
The Big Sick (2017) 98%
#10
Adjusted Score: 114979%
Critics Consensus: Funny, heartfelt, and intelligent, The Big Sick uses its appealing leads and cross-cultural themes to prove the standard romcom formula still has some fresh angles left to explore.
Synopsis: Kumail is a Pakistani comic, who meets an American graduate student named Emily at one of his stand-up shows. As... [More]
Directed By: Michael Showalter
#11
Rye Lane (2023) 98%
#11
Adjusted Score: 105311%
Critics Consensus: Good news, rom-com fans: Anyone looking for a smart, funny, and heartwarming new addition to the canon can find it waiting on Rye Lane.
Synopsis: Yas (Vivian Oparah) and Dom (David Jonsson), two twenty-somethings both reeling from bad break-ups, connect over the course of an... [More]
Directed By: Raine Allen Miller
#12
Bringing Up Baby (1938) 97%
#12
Adjusted Score: 111659%
Critics Consensus: With Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant at their effervescent best, Bringing Up Baby is a seamlessly assembled comedy with enduring appeal.
Synopsis: Harried paleontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) has to make a good impression on society matron Mrs. Random (May Robson), who... [More]
Directed By: Howard Hawks
#13
Annie Hall (1977) 97%
#13
Adjusted Score: 111495%
Critics Consensus: Filled with poignant performances and devastating humor, Annie Hall represents a quantum leap for Woody Allen and remains an American classic.
Synopsis: Comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) examines the rise and fall of his relationship with struggling nightclub singer Annie Hall (Diane... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#14
Bull Durham (1988) 97%
#14
Adjusted Score: 103393%
Critics Consensus: Kevin Costner is at his funniest and most charismatic in Bull Durham, a film that's as wise about relationships as it is about minor league baseball.
Synopsis: In Durham, N.C., the Bulls minor league baseball team has one asset no other can claim: a poetry-loving groupie named... [More]
Directed By: Ron Shelton
#15
Sideways (2004) 97%
#15
Adjusted Score: 104784%
Critics Consensus: Charming, thoughtful, and often funny, Sideways is a decidedly mature road trip comedy full of excellent performances.
Synopsis: Struggling writer and wine enthusiast Miles (Paul Giamatti) takes his engaged friend, Jack (Thomas Haden Church), on a trip to... [More]
Directed By: Alexander Payne
#16
Appropriate Behavior (2014) 97%
#16
Adjusted Score: 99185%
Critics Consensus: Warm, funny, and quietly profound, Appropriate Behavior serves as a thoroughly compelling calling card for writer, director, and star Desiree Akhavan.
Synopsis: A secretly bisexual Brooklynite (Desiree Akhavan) from a traditional Persian family struggles with her identity and the disintegration of her... [More]
Directed By: Desiree Akhavan
#17
The Half of It (2020) 97%
#17
Adjusted Score: 102380%
Critics Consensus: For viewers in search of an uncommonly smart, tender, and funny coming-of-age story, The Half of It has everything.
Synopsis: A shy, introverted student helps the school jock woo a girl whom, secretly, they both want.... [More]
Directed By: Alice Wu
#18
The Princess Bride (1987) 96%
#18
Adjusted Score: 103756%
Critics Consensus: A delightfully postmodern fairy tale, The Princess Bride is a deft, intelligent mix of swashbuckling, romance, and comedy that takes an age-old damsel-in-distress story and makes it fresh.
Synopsis: A fairy tale adventure about a beautiful young woman and her one true love. He must find her after a... [More]
Directed By: Rob Reiner
#19
#19
Adjusted Score: 102157%
Critics Consensus: Hugh Grant ably snatches up the bouquet of leading man status with Four Weddings and a Funeral, a sparkling romantic comedy given real charm by its chummy ensemble and Richard Curtis' sharp-witted screenplay.
Synopsis: Lovable Englishman Charles (Hugh Grant) and his group of friends seem to be unlucky in love. When Charles meets a... [More]
Directed By: Mike Newell
#20
Adjusted Score: 99159%
Critics Consensus: To All the Boys I've Loved Before plays by the teen rom-com rules, but relatable characters and a thoroughly charming cast more than make up for a lack of surprises.
Synopsis: A teenage girl's love letters are exposed and wreak havoc on her life.... [More]
Directed By: Susan Johnson
#21
Spontaneous (2020) 96%
#21
Adjusted Score: 99110%
Critics Consensus: A dark teen comedy with an explosive twist, Spontaneous reaffirms Katherine Langford as a rising star -- and marks debuting director Brian Duffield as a filmmaker to watch.
Synopsis: When students in their high school inexplicably start to explode, seniors Mara and Dylan struggle to survive in a world... [More]
Directed By: Brian Duffield
#22
#22
Adjusted Score: 108561%
Critics Consensus: The Worst Person in the World concludes Joachim Trier's Oslo Trilogy with a romantic comedy that delightfully subverts the genre's well-worn tropes.
Synopsis: The Worst Person in the World is a modern dramedy about the quest for love and meaning in contemporary Oslo.... [More]
Directed By: Joachim Trier
#23
I'm Your Man (2021) 96%
#23
Adjusted Score: 102835%
Critics Consensus: With a thought-provoking concept brought to humorous life by a pair of well-matched leads, I'm Your Man is an AI rom-com whose intelligence is anything but artificial.
Synopsis: In order to obtain funds for her research, Alma (Maren Eggert) is persuaded to participate in an extraordinary study. For... [More]
Directed By: Maria Schrader
#24
City Lights (1931) 95%
#24
Adjusted Score: 103706%
Critics Consensus: One of the best underdog romance movies ever, with an ending that will light up any heart.
Synopsis: A hapless but resilient tramp (Charlie Chaplin) falls in love with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) on the tough... [More]
Directed By: Charlie Chaplin
#25
Ninotchka (1939) 95%
#25
Adjusted Score: 99951%
Critics Consensus: With Greta Garbo proving her comedy chops in the twilight of her career, Ninotchka is a can't-miss classic.
Synopsis: A no-nonsense diplomat of the Soviet Union, Nina Ivanovna "Ninotchka" Yakushova (Greta Garbo) arrives in Paris to ensure the sale... [More]
Directed By: Ernst Lubitsch
#26
Roman Holiday (1953) 96%
#26
Adjusted Score: 104704%
Critics Consensus: With Audrey Hepburn luminous in her American debut, Roman Holiday is as funny as it is beautiful, and sets the standard for the modern romantic comedy.
Synopsis: Overwhelmed by her suffocating schedule, touring European princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) takes off for a night while in Rome. When... [More]
Directed By: William Wyler
#27
Dave (1993) 95%
#27
Adjusted Score: 100714%
Critics Consensus: Ivan Reitman's refreshingly earnest political comedy benefits from an understated, charming script and a breezy performance by Kevin Kline.
Synopsis: Shifty White House chief of staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) hatches a scheme to use a double for the president... [More]
Directed By: Ivan Reitman
#28
The Artist (2011) 95%
#28
Adjusted Score: 108495%
Critics Consensus: A crowd-pleasing tribute to the magic of silent cinema, The Artist is a clever, joyous film with delightful performances and visual style to spare.
Synopsis: In the 1920s, actor George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a bona fide matinee idol with many adoring fans. While working... [More]
Directed By: Michel Hazanavicius
#29
Enough Said (2013) 95%
#29
Adjusted Score: 103806%
Critics Consensus: Wryly charming, impeccably acted, and ultimately quite bittersweet, Enough Said is a grown-up movie in the best possible way.
Synopsis: Eva (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a divorced single parent, seems generally happy but dreads her daughter's departure for college. Unexpectedly, Eva begins... [More]
Directed By: Nicole Holofcener
#30
Sabrina (1954) 89%
#30
Adjusted Score: 98800%
Critics Consensus: With its humorous script and its stars' immense charm, Sabrina remains a resonant romantic gem.
Synopsis: Chauffeur's daughter Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) returns home from two years in Paris a beautiful young woman, and immediately catches the... [More]
Directed By: Billy Wilder
#31
Some Like It Hot (1959) 95%
#31
Adjusted Score: 103341%
Critics Consensus: Some Like It Hot: A spry, quick-witted farce that never drags.
Synopsis: After witnessing a Mafia murder, slick saxophone player Joe (Tony Curtis) and his long-suffering buddy, Jerry (Jack Lemmon), improvise a... [More]
Directed By: Billy Wilder
#32
The Apartment (1960) 94%
#32
Adjusted Score: 108237%
Critics Consensus: Director Billy Wilder's customary cynicism is leavened here by tender humor, romance, and genuine pathos.
Synopsis: Insurance worker C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) lends his Upper West Side apartment to company bosses to use for extramarital affairs.... [More]
Directed By: Billy Wilder
#33
Manhattan (1979) 94%
#33
Adjusted Score: 100921%
Critics Consensus: One of Woody Allen's early classics, Manhattan combines modern, bittersweet humor and timeless romanticism with unerring grace.
Synopsis: Director Woody Allen's love letter to New York City stars Allen as frustrated television writer Isaac Davis, a twice-divorced malcontent... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#34
Groundhog Day (1993) 94%
#34
Adjusted Score: 108703%
Critics Consensus: Smart, sweet, and inventive, Groundhog Day highlights Murray's dramatic gifts while still leaving plenty of room for laughs.
Synopsis: Phil (Bill Murray), a weatherman, is out to cover the annual emergence of the groundhog from its hole. He gets... [More]
Directed By: Harold Ramis
#35
Juno (2007) 94%
#35
Adjusted Score: 102655%
Critics Consensus: One of the brightest, funniest comedies of the year, Juno's smart script and direction are matched by assured performances in a coming-of-age story with a 21st century twist.
Synopsis: When precocious teen Juno MacGuff becomes pregnant, she chooses a failed rock star and his wife to adopt her unborn... [More]
Directed By: Jason Reitman
#36
Palm Springs (2020) 95%
#36
Adjusted Score: 109643%
Critics Consensus: Strong performances, assured direction, and a refreshingly original concept make Palm Springs a romcom that's easy to fall in love with.
Synopsis: Stuck in a time loop, two wedding guests develop a budding romance while living the same day over and over... [More]
Directed By: Max Barbakow
#37
Fire Island (2022) 94%
#37
Adjusted Score: 99611%
Critics Consensus: Brought to life by a tremendously talented cast, the breezily entertaining Fire Island proves there are still fresh ways to update Austen.
Synopsis: Set in the iconic Pines, Andrew Ahn's "Fire Island" is an unapologetic, modern-day rom-com showcasing a diverse, multicultural examination of... [More]
Directed By: Andrew Ahn
#38
Enchanted (2007) 93%
#38
Adjusted Score: 100587%
Critics Consensus: A smart re-imagining of fairy tale tropes that's sure to delight children and adults, Enchanted features witty dialogue, sharp animation, and a star turn by Amy Adams.
Synopsis: Banished by an evil queen, Princess Giselle (Amy Adams) from a fairy-tale world lands in modern Manhattan, where music, magic... [More]
Directed By: Kevin Lima
#39
Midnight in Paris (2011) 93%
#39
Adjusted Score: 102089%
Critics Consensus: It may not boast the depth of his classic films, but the sweetly sentimental Midnight in Paris is funny and charming enough to satisfy Woody Allen fans.
Synopsis: Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a screenwriter and aspiring novelist. Vacationing in Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams), he has... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#40
Moonstruck (1987) 89%
#40
Adjusted Score: 95922%
Critics Consensus: Led by energetic performances from Nicolas Cage and Cher, Moonstruck is an exuberantly funny tribute to love and one of the decade's most appealing comedies.
Synopsis: No sooner does Italian-American widow Loretta (Cher) accept a marriage proposal from her doltish boyfriend, Johnny (Danny Aiello), than she... [More]
Directed By: Norman Jewison
#41
Shakespeare in Love (1998) 92%
#41
Adjusted Score: 101285%
Critics Consensus: Endlessly witty, visually rapturous, and sweetly romantic, Shakespeare in Love is a delightful romantic comedy that succeeds on nearly every level.
Synopsis: "Shakespeare in Love" is a romantic comedy for the 1990s set in the 1590s. It imaginatively unfolds the witty, sexy... [More]
Directed By: John Madden
#42
Hairspray (2007) 92%
#42
Adjusted Score: 100743%
Critics Consensus: Hairspray is an energetic, wholly entertaining musical romp; a fun Summer movie with plenty of heart. Its contagious songs will make you want to get up and start dancing.
Synopsis: In 1960s Baltimore, dance-loving teen Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) auditions for a spot on "The Corny Collins Show" and wins.... [More]
Directed By: Adam Shankman
#43
#43
Adjusted Score: 102193%
Critics Consensus: Worthwhile as both a well-acted ensemble piece and as a smart, warm statement on family values, The Kids Are All Right is remarkable.
Synopsis: Lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) have been together for almost 20 years and have two teenage... [More]
Directed By: Lisa Cholodenko
#44
Silver Linings Playbook (2012) 92%
#44
Adjusted Score: 104660%
Critics Consensus: Silver Linings Playbook walks a tricky thematic tightrope, but David O. Russell's sensitive direction and some sharp work from a talented cast gives it true balance.
Synopsis: After losing his job and wife, and spending time in a mental institution, Pat Solatano (Bradley Cooper) winds up living... [More]
Directed By: David O. Russell
#45
Love, Simon (2018) 92%
#45
Adjusted Score: 105000%
Critics Consensus: Love, Simon hits its coming-of-age beats more deftly than many entries in this well-traveled genre -- and represents an overdue, if not entirely successful, milestone of inclusion.
Synopsis: Everyone deserves a great love story, but for 17-year-old Simon Spier, it's a little more complicated. He hasn't told his... [More]
Directed By: Greg Berlanti
#46
The Heartbreak Kid (1972) 92%
#46
Adjusted Score: 100442%
Critics Consensus: An uproariously funny confluence of top-shelf talent, The Heartbreak Kid finds bittersweet humor in attitudes toward love and marriage in early '70s America.
Synopsis: Soon after Lenny (Charles Grodin) marries Lila (Jeannie Berlin), the needy and unrefined side of her personality begins to emerge,... [More]
Directed By: Elaine May
#47
Crazy Rich Asians (2018) 91%
#47
Adjusted Score: 111966%
Critics Consensus: With a terrific cast and a surfeit of visual razzle dazzle, Crazy Rich Asians takes a satisfying step forward for screen representation while deftly drawing inspiration from the classic -- and still effective -- rom-com formula.
Synopsis: Rachel Chu is happy to accompany her longtime boyfriend, Nick, to his best friend's wedding in Singapore. She's also surprised... [More]
Directed By: Jon M. Chu
#48
High Fidelity (2000) 91%
#48
Adjusted Score: 97589%
Critics Consensus: The deft hand of director Stephen Frears and strong performances by the ensemble cast combine to tell an entertaining story with a rock-solid soundtrack.
Synopsis: Rob Gordon (John Cusack) is the owner of a failing record store in Chicago, where he sells music the old-fashioned... [More]
Directed By: Stephen Frears
#49
When Harry Met Sally... (1989) 89%
#49
Adjusted Score: 101008%
Critics Consensus: Rob Reiner's touching, funny film set a new standard for romantic comedies, and he was ably abetted by the sharp interplay between Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.
Synopsis: In 1977, college graduates Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) share a contentious car ride from Chicago... [More]
Directed By: Rob Reiner
#50
Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) 91%
#50
Adjusted Score: 96552%
Critics Consensus: Smart, tender, and funny in equal measure, Hannah and Her Sisters is one of Woody Allen's finest films.
Synopsis: Three successive family Thanksgiving dinners mark time for Hannah (Mia Farrow), her younger sisters Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Dianne... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#51
The American President (1995) 91%
#51
Adjusted Score: 94739%
Critics Consensus: A charming romantic comedy with political bite, Rob Reiner's American President features strong lead performances and some poignant observations of politics and media in the 1990s.
Synopsis: With the end of his first term in sight, widowed U.S. President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas) knows that overwhelming public... [More]
Directed By: Rob Reiner
#52
L.A. Story (1991) 91%
#52
Adjusted Score: 94379%
Critics Consensus: A romantic comedy that doubles as a love letter to the titular city, L.A. Story is Steve Martin at his silly, sweetly soulful best.
Synopsis: Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) has the easiest job in the world: he's a TV weatherman in Los Angeles, where... [More]
Directed By: Mick Jackson
#53
Splash (1984) 91%
#53
Adjusted Score: 94522%
Critics Consensus: A perfectly light, warmly funny romantic comedy that's kept afloat by Ron Howard's unobtrusive direction and charming performances from Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah.
Synopsis: A young boy saved from drowning by a beautiful mermaid, falls in love with her 20 years later when she... [More]
Directed By: Ron Howard
#54
Show Me Love (1998) 91%
#54
Adjusted Score: 93078%
Critics Consensus: A naturalistic depiction of teenage life, Show Me Love has a charming, authentic feel.
Synopsis: Teens Elin (Alexandra Dahlström) and Agnes (Rebecca Liljeberg) are schoolmates. Elin is upbeat and popular, while Agnes is morose and... [More]
Directed By: Lukas Moodysson
#55
Licorice Pizza (2021) 90%
#55
Adjusted Score: 106722%
Critics Consensus: Licorice Pizza finds Paul Thomas Anderson shifting into a surprisingly comfortable gear -- and getting potentially star-making performances out of his fresh-faced leads.
Synopsis: LICORICE PIZZA is the story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around and falling in love in... [More]
Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson
#56
Obvious Child (2014) 90%
#56
Adjusted Score: 97525%
Critics Consensus: Tackling a sensitive subject with maturity, honesty, and wit, Obvious Child serves as a deeply promising debut for writer-director Gillian Robespierre.
Synopsis: An immature, newly unemployed comic (Jenny Slate) must navigate the murky waters of adulthood after her fling with a graduate... [More]
Directed By: Gillian Robespierre
#57
Much Ado About Nothing (1993) 90%
#57
Adjusted Score: 94414%
Critics Consensus: Kenneth Branagh's love for the material is contagious in this exuberant adaptation.
Synopsis: In this Shakespearean farce, Hero (Kate Beckinsale) and her groom-to-be, Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard), team up with Claudio's commanding officer,... [More]
Directed By: Kenneth Branagh
#58
Bridesmaids (2011) 90%
#58
Adjusted Score: 102040%
Critics Consensus: A marriage of genuine characters, gross out gags, and pathos, Bridesmaids is a female-driven comedy that refuses to be boxed in as Kristen Wiig emerges as a real star.
Synopsis: Annie (Kristen Wiig) is a single woman whose own life is a mess, but when she learns that her lifelong... [More]
Directed By: Paul Feig
#59
Knocked Up (2007) 89%
#59
Adjusted Score: 99251%
Critics Consensus: Knocked Up is a hilarious, poignant and refreshing look at the rigors of courtship and child-rearing, with a sometimes raunchy, yet savvy script that is ably acted and directed.
Synopsis: Rising journalist Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) hits a serious bump in the road after a one-night stand with irresponsible slacker... [More]
Directed By: Judd Apatow
#60
Amélie (2001) 90%
#60
Adjusted Score: 98724%
Critics Consensus: The feel-good Amelie is a lively, fanciful charmer, showcasing Audrey Tautou as its delightful heroine.
Synopsis: "Amélie" is a fanciful comedy about a young woman who discretely orchestrates the lives of the people around her, creating... [More]
Directed By: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
#61
Waitress (2007) 89%
#61
Adjusted Score: 95696%
Critics Consensus: Sweet, smart, and quirky, Waitress hits the right, bittersweet notes through this romantic comedy through its witty script and a superb performance by Keri Russell.
Synopsis: Jenna (Keri Russell) works in a diner in a small Southern town and is a genius at creating luscious desserts,... [More]
Directed By: Adrienne Shelly
#62
Plus One (2019) 88%
#62
Adjusted Score: 90618%
Critics Consensus: Plus One reinvigorates the rom-com with an entertaining outing elevated by well-matched leads and a story that embraces and transcends genre clichés.
Synopsis: Longtime single friends agree to be each other's plus one at every wedding they are invited to.... [More]
Directed By: Jeff Chan, Andrew Rhymer
#63
What's Up, Doc? (1972) 89%
#63
Adjusted Score: 95120%
Critics Consensus: Barbra Streisand was never more likable than in this energetic, often hilarious screwball farce from director Peter Bogdanovich.
Synopsis: Two researchers have come to San Francisco to compete for a research grant in music. The man seems a bit... [More]
Directed By: Peter Bogdanovich
#64
Bros (2022) 89%
#64
Adjusted Score: 101337%
Critics Consensus: Bros marks a step forward in rom-com representation -- and just as importantly, it's a whole bunch of fun to watch.
Synopsis: Universal Pictures proudly presents the first romantic comedy from a major studio about two gay men maybe, possibly, probably, stumbling... [More]
Directed By: Nicholas Stoller
#65
Submarine (2010) 88%
#65
Adjusted Score: 94005%
Critics Consensus: Funny, stylish, and ringing with adolescent truth, Submarine marks Richard Ayoade as a talent to watch.
Synopsis: Oliver (Craig Roberts) is a Welsh teen who has some things on his mind. First is losing his virginity before... [More]
Directed By: Richard Ayoade
#66
2 Days in Paris (2007) 88%
#66
Adjusted Score: 92338%
Critics Consensus: Delpy proves not only to be an adept actress, but makes her mark as a writer and director in this thought-provoking comedy that breaks the romantic comedy mold.
Synopsis: A European vacation was intended to repair the tattered relationship between American Jack (Adam Goldberg) and French native Marion (Julie... [More]
Directed By: Julie Delpy
#67
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) 88%
#67
Adjusted Score: 94477%
Critics Consensus: It contains some ugly anachronisms, but Blake Edwards is at his funniest in this iconic classic, and Audrey Hepburn absolutely lights up the screen.
Synopsis: Based on Truman Capote's novel, this is the story of a young woman in New York City who meets a... [More]
Directed By: Blake Edwards
#68
Strictly Ballroom (1992) 88%
#68
Adjusted Score: 91886%
Critics Consensus: As emotionally rich as it is eye-catching, Strictly Ballroom uses its infectious energy as the fuel for a modern dance classic with all the right moves.
Synopsis: A top ballroom dancer pairs with a plain, left-footed local girl when his maverick style earns him the disdain of... [More]
Directed By: Baz Luhrmann
#69
Saving Face (2004) 88%
#69
Adjusted Score: 90408%
Critics Consensus: A charming tale of a love affair that overcomes cultural taboos.
Synopsis: Wil (Michelle Krusiec) is a lesbian, but she not dare tell her widowed mother, Hwei-lan (Joan Chen), or her very... [More]
Directed By: Alice Wu
#70
Roxanne (1987) 88%
#70
Adjusted Score: 91482%
Critics Consensus: Though its sweetness borders on sappiness, Roxanne is an unabashedly romantic comedy that remains one of Steve Martin's funniest films.
Synopsis: In this modern take on Edmond Rostand's classic play "Cyrano de Bergerac," C. D. Bales (Steve Martin) is the witty,... [More]
Directed By: Fred Schepisi
#71
Funny Ha Ha (2003) 88%
#71
Adjusted Score: 88632%
Critics Consensus: This modest, unpretentious character study astutely captures the emotional states of the 20-something slacker.
Synopsis: After graduating from college, Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) is living in Boston. Looking for temporary work while trying to figure out... [More]
Directed By: Andrew Bujalski
#72
Italian for Beginners (2000) 87%
#72
Adjusted Score: 90002%
Critics Consensus: Unlike many romantic comedies, the charming Italian for Beginners feels natural and genuinely heart-warming.
Synopsis: "Italian for Beginners" follows the stories of six insecure singles whose lives interweave one dreary Copenhagen winter. Soon after arriving... [More]
Directed By: Lone Scherfig
#73
Chasing Amy (1997) 87%
#73
Adjusted Score: 92856%
Critics Consensus: Although Chasing Amy's depiction of queer sexuality is frustratingly clumsy, it handles an array of thorny themes with a mixture of sensitivity, raw honesty, and writer-director Kevin Smith's signature raunchy humor.
Synopsis: Holden and Banky are best friends and authors of a popular comic book. Holden falls in love with Alyssa, who... [More]
Directed By: Kevin Smith
#74
The Parent Trap (1998) 87%
#74
Adjusted Score: 89778%
Critics Consensus: Writer-director Nancy Meyers takes the winning formula of the 1961 original and gives it an amiable modern spin, while young star Lindsay Lohan shines in her breakout role.
Synopsis: In this update of a 1961 film, twins Annie and Hallie (Lindsay Lohan) are strangers until happenstance unites them. The... [More]
Directed By: Nancy Meyers
#75
EMMA. (2020) 86%
#75
Adjusted Score: 100950%
Critics Consensus: Other adaptations may do a better job of consistently capturing the spirit of the classic source material, but Jane Austen fans should still find a solid match in this Emma.
Synopsis: Beautiful, smart and wealthy, Emma Woodhouse navigates her way through misguided matches, romantic missteps and the challenges of growing up... [More]
Directed By: Autumn de Wilde
#76
Garden State (2004) 86%
#76
Adjusted Score: 92270%
Critics Consensus: Delivering a quirky spin on familiar twentysomething tropes -- with a cannily-placed soundtrack -- Garden State has enough charm to mark a winning debut for first-time director Zach Braff.
Synopsis: After many years away, television bit part actor Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) returns to his small home town in New... [More]
Directed By: Zach Braff
#77
Much Ado About Nothing (2012) 86%
#77
Adjusted Score: 94124%
Critics Consensus: Lighthearted to a fault, Much Ado About Nothing's giddy energy and intimate charm make for an entertaining romantic comedy -- and a Shakespearean adaptation that's hard to resist.
Synopsis: After a successful campaign against his rebellious brother, Don John (Sean Maher), Don Pedro (Reed Diamond) visits the governor of... [More]
Directed By: Joss Whedon
#78
Beginners (2010) 86%
#78
Adjusted Score: 92319%
Critics Consensus: Wearing its twee heart on its sleeve, Beginners explores the depths of modern, multi-generational romance with wit and depth.
Synopsis: After his mother dies, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is stunned when his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), recently diagnosed with terminal cancer,... [More]
Directed By: Mike Mills
#79
I Want You Back (2022) 87%
#79
Adjusted Score: 93487%
Critics Consensus: With a stellar cast playing well-rounded characters, I Want You Back is the rare rom-com that delivers its romance as capably as its comedy.
Synopsis: Peter (Charlie Day) and Emma (Jenny Slate) are total strangers, but when they meet, one thing instantly bonds them: they... [More]
Directed By: Jason Orley
#80
Paris, je t'aime (2006) 86%
#80
Adjusted Score: 90129%
Critics Consensus: Paris Je T'aime is uneven, but there are more than enough delightful moments in this omnibus tribute to the City of Lights to tip the scale in its favor.
Synopsis: A collection has 18 vignettes set in Paris. In "Bastille," a man (Sergio Castellitto) considers leaving his wife (Miranda Richardson)... [More]
#81
#81
Adjusted Score: 91548%
Critics Consensus: James L. Brooks and Jack Nicholson, doing what they do best, combine smart dialogue and flawless acting to squeeze fresh entertainment value out of the romantic-comedy genre.
Synopsis: Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) is an obsessive-compulsive writer of romantic fiction who's rude to everyone he meets, including his gay... [More]
Directed By: James L. Brooks
#82
Harold and Maude (1971) 86%
#82
Adjusted Score: 91543%
Critics Consensus: Hal Ashby's comedy is too dark and twisted for some, and occasionally oversteps its bounds, but there's no denying the film's warm humor and big heart.
Synopsis: Cult classic pairs Cort as a dead-pan disillusioned 20-year-old obsessed with suicide and a loveable Gordon as a fun-loving 80-year-old... [More]
Directed By: Hal Ashby
#83
(500) Days of Summer (2009) 85%
#83
Adjusted Score: 94407%
Critics Consensus: A clever, offbeat romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer is refreshingly honest and utterly charming.
Synopsis: Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), greeting-card writer and hopeless romantic, is caught completely off-guard when his girlfriend, Summer (Zooey Deschanel), suddenly dumps... [More]
Directed By: Marc Webb
#84
Top Five (2014) 85%
#84
Adjusted Score: 93450%
Critics Consensus: As smart, funny, and trenchant as writer-director-star Chris Rock's best standup work, Top Five is a career highlight for its creator -- and one of the comedy standouts of 2014.
Synopsis: Though he began in stand-up comedy, Andre Allen (Chris Rock) hit the big-time as the star of a trilogy of... [More]
Directed By: Chris Rock
#85
The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005) 85%
#85
Adjusted Score: 91847%
Critics Consensus: Steve Carell's first star turn scores big with a tender treatment of its titular underdog, using raunchy but realistically funny comedy to connect with adult audiences.
Synopsis: Three dysfunctional co-workers embark on a mission to help their newfound friend lose his sexual innocence.... [More]
Directed By: Judd Apatow
#86
Shortcomings (2023) 85%
#86
Adjusted Score: 91889%
Critics Consensus: Randall Park's directorial debut has humor and heart, giving star Justin H. Min a swoonworthy starring vehicle with few Shortcomings.
Synopsis: Ben, a struggling filmmaker, lives in Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend, Miko, who works for a local Asian American film... [More]
Directed By: Randall Park
#87
An Ideal Husband (1999) 85%
#87
Adjusted Score: 87835%
Critics Consensus: Brevity is the soul of wit, eh? This adaptation gets to the nitty gritty of Wilde's stage piece and plays on eternal human foibles.
Synopsis: Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam) is a respected government official and a loving husband. His friend, Lord Arthur Goring (Rupert... [More]
Directed By: Oliver Parker
#88
Emma (1996) 84%
#88
Adjusted Score: 87564%
Critics Consensus: Emma marks an auspicious debut for writer-director Douglas McGrath, making the most of its Jane Austen source material -- and a charming performance from Gwyneth Paltrow.
Synopsis: In this adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel, pretty socialite Emma Woodhouse (Gwyneth Paltrow) entertains herself by playing matchmaker for... [More]
Directed By: Douglas McGrath
#89
Trainwreck (2015) 84%
#89
Adjusted Score: 98153%
Critics Consensus: Trainwreck drags commitment out of all but the most rom-com-phobic filmgoers with sharp humor, relatable characters, and hilarious work from Amy Schumer.
Synopsis: Ever since her father drilled into her head that monogamy isn't realistic, magazine writer Amy (Amy Schumer) has made promiscuity... [More]
Directed By: Judd Apatow
#90
Your Sister's Sister (2011) 84%
#90
Adjusted Score: 89344%
Critics Consensus: Superbly acted and satisfyingly engaging, Your Sister's Sister subverts rom-com conventions with sensitive direction, an unconventional screenplay, and a big heart.
Synopsis: A man (Mark Duplass) falls into bed with his best friend's (Emily Blunt) sister (Rosemarie DeWitt), leading to an unexpected... [More]
Directed By: Lynn Shelton
#91
Notting Hill (1999) 84%
#91
Adjusted Score: 89067%
Critics Consensus: A rom-com with the right ingredients, Notting Hill proves there's nothing like a love story well told -- especially when Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts are your leads.
Synopsis: William Thacker (Hugh Grant) is a London bookstore owner whose humdrum existence is thrown into romantic turmoil when famous American... [More]
Directed By: Roger Michell
#92
Jerry Maguire (1996) 84%
#92
Adjusted Score: 90206%
Critics Consensus: Anchored by dazzling performances from Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Renée Zellweger, as well as Cameron Crowe's tender direction, Jerry Maguire meshes romance and sports with panache.
Synopsis: When slick sports agent Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) has a crisis of conscience, he pens a heartfelt company-wide memo that... [More]
Directed By: Cameron Crowe
#93
There's Something About Mary (1998) 84%
#93
Adjusted Score: 89157%
Critics Consensus: There's Something About Mary proves that unrelentingly, unabashedly puerile humor doesn't necessarily come at the expense of a film's heart.
Synopsis: Ted's (Ben Stiller) dream prom date with Mary (Cameron Diaz) never happens due to an embarrassing injury at her home.... [More]
Directed By: Robert Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
#94
Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) 83%
#94
Adjusted Score: 87028%
Critics Consensus: A trite but refreshing and comical spin on nature of love.
Synopsis: Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt) is at the end of her emotional rope. She happens upon an intriguing personal ad, whose only... [More]
Directed By: Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
#95
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) 83%
#95
Adjusted Score: 90377%
Critics Consensus: With ample laughs and sharp performances, Forgetting Sarah Marshall finds just the right mix of romantic and raunchy comedy.
Synopsis: Struggling musician Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) is better-known as the boyfriend of TV star Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell). After she... [More]
Directed By: Nicholas Stoller
#96
Working Girl (1988) 83%
#96
Adjusted Score: 86861%
Critics Consensus: A buoyant corporate Cinderella story, Working Girl has the right cast, right story, and right director to make it all come together.
Synopsis: Savvy New York City receptionist Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) gives her conniving boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), an excellent business... [More]
Directed By: Mike Nichols
#97
Cold Comfort Farm (1995) 83%
#97
Adjusted Score: 85385%
Critics Consensus: Cold Comfort Farm sends up high-minded classics with a wit and impressive restraint that rivals its inspirations.
Synopsis: In this adaptation of the satirical British novel, Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale), a plucky London society girl orphaned at age... [More]
Directed By: John Schlesinger
#98
Long Shot (2019) 82%
#98
Adjusted Score: 98089%
Critics Consensus: A sharp and deceptively layered comedy that's further fueled by the odd couple chemistry of its leads, this Long Shot largely hits its marks.
Synopsis: Fred Flarsky is a gifted and free-spirited journalist who has a knack for getting into trouble. Charlotte Field is one... [More]
Directed By: Jonathan Levine
#99
Happiest Season (2020) 82%
#99
Adjusted Score: 94067%
Critics Consensus: A jolly good time with heartfelt performances and more than enough holiday cheer, all you'll want for Christmas is Happiest Season.
Synopsis: This romantic comedy is about longtime lesbian couple Abby (Kristen Stewart) and Harper (Mackenzie Davis), who made plans to go... [More]
Directed By: Clea Duvall
#100
Adjusted Score: 86020%
Critics Consensus: Miranda July's debut feature is a charmingly offbeat and observant film about people looking for love.
Synopsis: Single dad Richard (John Hawkes) meets Christine (Miranda July), a starving artist who moonlights as a cabbie. They awkwardly attempt... [More]
Directed By: Miranda July
#101
Priceless (2006) 82%
#101
Adjusted Score: 84572%
Critics Consensus: Priceless is a light, farcical rom-com that features sharp performances from Audrey Tautou and Gad Elmaleh.
Synopsis: Irène (Audrey Tautou) loves nice things and loves to have wealthy men pay for them. One night, she mistakes Jean... [More]
Directed By: Pierre Salvadori
#102
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) 82%
#102
Adjusted Score: 86624%
Critics Consensus: A high-concept high school reunion movie with an adroitly cast John Cusack and armed with a script of incisive wit.
Synopsis: After assassin Martin Blank (John Cusack) has trouble focusing on his work, resulting in a failed assignment, he returns to... [More]
Directed By: George Armitage
#103
#103
Adjusted Score: 86227%
Critics Consensus: Lars and the Real Girl could've so easily been a one-joke movie. But the talented cast, a great script, and direction never condescends to its character or the audience.
Synopsis: Extremely shy Lars (Ryan Gosling) finds it impossible to make friends or socialize. His brother (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law (Emily... [More]
Directed By: Craig Gillespie
#104
Clueless (1995) 81%
#104
Adjusted Score: 90156%
Critics Consensus: A funny and clever reshaping of Emma, Clueless offers a soft satire that pokes as much fun at teen films as it does at the Beverly Hills glitterati.
Synopsis: Shallow, rich and socially successful Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is at the top of her Beverly Hills high school's pecking scale.... [More]
Directed By: Amy Heckerling
#105
While You Were Sleeping (1995) 81%
#105
Adjusted Score: 85247%
Critics Consensus: While You Were Sleeping is built wholly from familiar ingredients, but assembled with such skill -- and with such a charming performance from Sandra Bullock -- that it gives formula a good name.
Synopsis: Lonely transit worker Lucy Eleanor Moderatz (Sandra Bullock) pulls her longtime crush, Peter (Peter Gallagher), from the path of an... [More]
Directed By: Jon Turteltaub
#106
Muriel's Wedding (1994) 81%
#106
Adjusted Score: 83997%
Critics Consensus: Heartfelt and quirky, though at times broad, Muriel's Wedding mixes awkward comedy, oddball Australian characters, and a nostalgia-heavy soundtrack.
Synopsis: Socially awkward Muriel Heslop (Toni Collette) wants nothing more than to get married. Unfortunately, due to her oppressive politician father... [More]
Directed By: P.J. Hogan
#107
Sixteen Candles (1984) 81%
#107
Adjusted Score: 84418%
Critics Consensus: Significantly more mature than the teen raunch comedies that defined the era, Sixteen Candles is shot with compassion and clear respect for its characters and their hang-ups.
Synopsis: With the occasion all but overshadowed by her sister's upcoming wedding, angst-ridden Samantha (Molly Ringwald) faces her 16th birthday with... [More]
Directed By: John Hughes
#108
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) 80%
#108
Adjusted Score: 88593%
Critics Consensus: A beguiling tragicomedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona charms with beautiful views of the Spanish city and a marvelously well-matched cast.
Synopsis: Americans Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) arrive in Spain for a summer vacation at a friend's (Patricia Clarkson)... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#109
Bridget Jones's Diary (2001) 80%
#109
Adjusted Score: 85732%
Critics Consensus: Zellweger's Bridget Jones is a sympathetic, likable, funny character, giving this romantic comedy a lot of charm.
Synopsis: At the start of the New Year, 32-year-old Bridget (Renée Zellweger) decides it's time to take control of her life... [More]
Directed By: Sharon Maguire
#110
Man Up (2015) 80%
#110
Adjusted Score: 83232%
Critics Consensus: Thanks to fine performances from Lake Bell and Simon Pegg, Man Up largely strikes the deceptively difficult balance between romance and comedy.
Synopsis: When a man (Simon Pegg) mistakes her for his blind date, a woman (Lake Bell) decides to play along to... [More]
Directed By: Ben Palmer
#111
Crossing Delancey (1988) 80%
#111
Adjusted Score: 87304%
Critics Consensus: A small-scale delight fueled by Amy Irving's irresistible charm, Crossing Delancey celebrates love with contagious optimism.
Synopsis: Thirty-something Isabelle "Izzy" Grossman (Amy Irving) spends her time going from her tiny, solitary West Side apartment to that of... [More]
Directed By: Joan Micklin Silver
#112
The Lost City (2022) 79%
#112
Adjusted Score: 93974%
Critics Consensus: The Lost City doesn't sparkle quite as brightly as some classic treasure-hunting capers, but its stars' screwball chemistry make this movie well worth romancing.
Synopsis: Reclusive author Loretta Sage writes about exotic places in her popular adventure novels that feature a handsome cover model named... [More]
Directed By: Adam Nee, Aaron Nee
#113
#113
Adjusted Score: 94167%
Critics Consensus: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again doubles down on just about everything fans loved about the original -- and my my, how can fans resist it?
Synopsis: In 1979 young Donna, Tanya and Rosie graduate from Oxford University -- leaving Donna free to embark on a series... [More]
Directed By: Ol Parker
#114
Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) 79%
#114
Adjusted Score: 88529%
Critics Consensus: It never lives up to the first part of its title, but Crazy, Stupid, Love's unabashed sweetness -- and its terrifically talented cast -- more than make up for its flaws.
Synopsis: Cal Weaver (Steve Carell) is living the American dream. He has a good job, a beautiful house, great children and... [More]
Directed By: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa
#115
Punch-Drunk Love (2002) 79%
#115
Adjusted Score: 85745%
Critics Consensus: Odd, touching, and unique, Punch-Drunk Love is also delightfully funny, utilizing Adam Sandler's comic persona to explore the life of a lonely guy who finds love.
Synopsis: Although susceptible to violent outbursts, bathroom supply business owner Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is a timid and shy man by... [More]
Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson
#116
Ruby Sparks (2012) 79%
#116
Adjusted Score: 87485%
Critics Consensus: Cleverly written and wonderfully acted, Ruby Sparks overcomes its occasional lags in pace with an abundance of charm and wit.
Synopsis: Young author Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano), once a literary darling, is having trouble composing his next novel. Following a therapist's... [More]
Directed By: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
#117
Chinese Puzzle (2013) 79%
#117
Adjusted Score: 81370%
Critics Consensus: Pleasantly easygoing and consistently funny, Chinese Puzzle offers a suitably endearing conclusion to Cédric Klapisch's Trilogy of Xavier.
Synopsis: A 40-year-old divorced father of two cannot cope with his children moving to New York with their mother, so he... [More]
Directed By: Cédric Klapisch
#118
Singles (1992) 79%
#118
Adjusted Score: 83185%
Critics Consensus: Smart, funny, and engagingly scruffy, Singles is a clear-eyed look at modern romance that doubles as a credible grunge-era time capsule.
Synopsis: In Seattle during the era of grunge music, the lives and relationships of a group of young people, all living... [More]
Directed By: Cameron Crowe
#119
Get Real (1998) 79%
#119
Adjusted Score: 81288%
Critics Consensus: An authentic portrayal of homosexuality in high school, Get Real is an engaging dramedy that doesn't sermonize its audience nor trivialize its characters.
Synopsis: Steven (Ben Silverstone) spends his school days longing for all-star athlete John (Brad Gorton). But John has a gorgeous girlfriend,... [More]
Directed By: Simon Shore
#120
Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) 78%
#120
Adjusted Score: 87748%
Critics Consensus: Bridget Jones's Baby might be late on arrival, but fans of the series should still find its third installment a bouncing bundle of joy.
Synopsis: Breaking up with Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) leaves Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) over 40 and single again. Feeling that she... [More]
Directed By: Sharon Maguire
#121
#121
Adjusted Score: 81160%
Critics Consensus: Its characters' time-loop journey is a little bumpy and fairly familiar, but heartfelt charm and likeable leads make A Map of Tiny Perfect Things worth following.
Synopsis: The film tells the story of quick-witted teen Mark, contentedly living the same day in an endless loop whose world... [More]
Directed By: Ian Samuels
#122
#122
Adjusted Score: 80098%
Critics Consensus: Though it sometimes feels like a television sitcom, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is good-hearted, lovable, and delightfully eccentric, with a sharp script and lead performance from Nia Vardalos.
Synopsis: Everyone in the Portokalos family worries about Toula (Nia Vardalos). Still unmarried at 30 years old, she works at Dancing... [More]
Directed By: Joel Zwick
#123
Red, White & Royal Blue (2023) 75%
#123
Adjusted Score: 81166%
Critics Consensus: Amusing and endearing, Red, White & Royal Blue is a cheerfully formulaic rom-com that embraces inclusion without falling back on stereotypes.
Synopsis: Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez), the son of the President of the United States (Uma Thurman), and Britain's Prince Henry... [More]
Directed By: Matthew Lopez
#124
The Spanish Apartment (2002) 76%
#124
Adjusted Score: 78620%
Critics Consensus: This multicultural comedy captures the chaos and excitement of being young.
Synopsis: Xavier (Romain Duris) is a French university student who moves to Barcelona, Spain, to learn Spanish in order to score... [More]
Directed By: Cédric Klapisch
#125
Benny & Joon (1993) 76%
#125
Adjusted Score: 79439%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: Benny (Aidan Quinn), who cares for his mentally disturbed sister, Joon (Mary Stuart Masterson), also welcomes the eccentric Sam (Johnny... [More]
Directed By: Jeremiah S. Chechik
#126
#126
Adjusted Score: 82422%
Critics Consensus: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist combines a pair of charming leads, a classic New York backdrop, and a sweet soundtrack.
Synopsis: Nick (Michael Cera) cannot stop obsessing over his ex-girlfriend, Tris (Alexis Dziena), until Tris' friend Norah (Kat Dennings) suddenly shows... [More]
Directed By: Peter Sollett
#127
Wedding Crashers (2005) 75%
#127
Adjusted Score: 81847%
Critics Consensus: Wedding Crashers is both raunchy and sweet, and features top-notch comic performances from Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson.
Synopsis: Jeremy (Vince Vaughn) and John (Owen Wilson) are divorce mediators who spend their free time crashing wedding receptions. For the... [More]
Directed By: David Dobkin
#128
The Valet (2022) 75%
#128
Adjusted Score: 77744%
Critics Consensus: With a pair of likable leads and a story that subverts rom-com expectations, The Valet is a rare remake worth celebrating.
Synopsis: In "The Valet," world famous movie star, Olivia (Samara Weaving) faces a PR disaster when a paparazzi snaps a photo... [More]
Directed By: Richard Wong
#129
Sleepless in Seattle (1993) 75%
#129
Adjusted Score: 80606%
Critics Consensus: Sleepless in Seattle is a cute classic with a very light touch and real chemistry between the two leads -- even when spending an entire movie apart.
Synopsis: After the death of his wife, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) moves to Seattle with his son, Jonah (Ross Malinger). When... [More]
Directed By: Nora Ephron
#130
Pretty in Pink (1986) 75%
#130
Adjusted Score: 80326%
Critics Consensus: Molly Ringwald gives an outstanding performance in this sweet, intelligent teen comedy that takes an ancient premise and injects it with insight and wit.
Synopsis: Andie (Molly Ringwald) is an outcast at her Chicago high school, hanging out either with her older boss (Annie Potts),... [More]
Directed By: Howard Deutch
#131
My Best Friend's Wedding (1997) 74%
#131
Adjusted Score: 77699%
Critics Consensus: Thanks to a charming performance from Julia Roberts and a subversive spin on the genre, My Best Friend's Wedding is a refreshingly entertaining romantic comedy.
Synopsis: Childhood friends Julianne Potter (Julia Roberts) and Michael O'Neal (Dermot Mulroney) had a deal to marry each other if they... [More]
Directed By: P.J. Hogan
#132
Stranger Than Fiction (2006) 73%
#132
Adjusted Score: 80106%
Critics Consensus: A fun, whimsical tale about an office drone trying to save his life from his narrator, Stranger Than Fiction features a subdued performances from Will Ferrell that contributes mightily to its quirky, mind-bending affect.
Synopsis: A mentally unstable IRS auditor (Will Ferrell) hears an author's (Emma Thompson) voice in his head and discovers that he... [More]
Directed By: Marc Forster
#133
Populaire (2012) 73%
#133
Adjusted Score: 75196%
Critics Consensus: The cheerfully frothy Populaire may lack substance, but its visual appeal -- and director Roinsard's confident evocation of 1950s filmmaking tropes -- help carry the day.
Synopsis: An insurance agent (Déborah François) and his new secretary (Romain Duris) become locked in the grip of romance and competition... [More]
Directed By: Régis Roinsard
#134
Definitely, Maybe (2008) 71%
#134
Adjusted Score: 76665%
Critics Consensus: With a clever script and charismatic leads, Definitely, Maybe is a refreshing entry into the romantic comedy genre.
Synopsis: Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds), a thirtysomething Manhattanite, is in the middle of divorce proceedings when his young daughter (Abigail Breslin)... [More]
Directed By: Adam Brooks
#135
Celeste and Jesse Forever (2012) 71%
#135
Adjusted Score: 77372%
Critics Consensus: While it doesn't subvert the genre as incisively as it thinks it does, Celeste and Jesse Forever is a shrewd rom-com that benefits from its likable cast and trumpets the arrival of Rashida Jones as a bona fide big screen talent.
Synopsis: Longtime sweethearts Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) married young, but are now drifting apart. Celeste is an ambitious... [More]
Directed By: Lee Toland Krieger
#136
Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) 100%
#136
Adjusted Score: 101815%
Critics Consensus: Love and hope soar in Cyrano De Bergerac, an immensely entertaining romance featuring Gerard Depardieu as his peak.
Synopsis: Soldier and poet Cyrano de Bergerac (Gérard Depardieu) is in love with Roxane (Anne Brochet), but he's too ashamed to... [More]
Directed By: Jean-Paul Rappeneau
#137
Holiday (1938) 100%
#137
Adjusted Score: 105711%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: Johnny (Cary Grant) seems like a solid match for Julia (Doris Nolan), the socialite daughter of Edward Seton (Henry Kolker).... [More]
Directed By: George Cukor
#138
Desk Set (1957) 100%
#138
Adjusted Score: 102824%
Critics Consensus: Desk Set reunites one of cinema's most well-loved pairings for a solidly crafted romantic comedy that charmingly encapsulates their timeless appeal.
Synopsis: Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn) is a library reference clerk stuck in a dead-end relationship with a boring television executive (Gig... [More]
Directed By: Walter Lang
#139
Indiscreet (1958) 100%
#139
Adjusted Score: 102397%
Critics Consensus: Indiscreet spins rom-com gold out of a premise just sturdy enough to set the stage for typically delightful work from its wonderfully well-matched leads.
Synopsis: Famous theater actress Anna Kalman (Ingrid Bergman) has resigned herself to her single life, believing that she has missed her... [More]
Directed By: Stanley Donen
#140
Born Yesterday (1950) 97%
#140
Adjusted Score: 101817%
Critics Consensus: Marrying screwball romance with political satire, Born Yesterday is a substantive romp with a ferociously smart performance by Judy Holliday as an uncouth bombshell.
Synopsis: Brassy blonde moll Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday) hits Washington, D.C., with her unscrupulous millionaire sugar daddy, Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford),... [More]
Directed By: George Cukor
#141
My Man Godfrey (1936) 97%
#141
Adjusted Score: 103625%
Critics Consensus: A class satire in a class of its own, My Man Godfrey's screwball comedy is as sharp as the social commentary is biting.
Synopsis: Fifth Avenue socialite Irene Bullock needs a "forgotten man" to win a scavenger hunt, and no one fits that description... [More]
Directed By: Gregory La Cava
#142
Play It Again, Sam (1972) 97%
#142
Adjusted Score: 101411%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: Overanxious film critic Allan (Woody Allen) sinks into a depression after his wife leaves him. Concerned, his married friends Dick... [More]
Directed By: Herbert Ross
#143
The Wedding Banquet (1993) 97%
#143
Adjusted Score: 99141%
Critics Consensus: Ang Lee's funny and ultimately poignant comedy of manners reveals the filmmaker's skill across genres.
Synopsis: Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) and his boyfriend (Mitchell Lichtenstein) live happily as a gay couple in New York City. Wai-Tung has... [More]
Directed By: Ang Lee
#144
Stolen Kisses (1968) 97%
#144
Adjusted Score: 100115%
Critics Consensus: Stolen Kisses is a fine feature follow-up to The 400 Blows, transforming Antoine Doinel into a sympathetic, silly, and romantic figure that carries to the series' end.
Synopsis: The third in a series of films featuring François Truffaut's alter-ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the story resumes with Antoine... [More]
Directed By: François Truffaut
#145
Adam's Rib (1949) 96%
#145
Adjusted Score: 99913%
Critics Consensus: Matched by Garson Kanin's witty, sophisticated screenplay, George Cukor, Spencer Tracy, and Katherine Hepburn are all in top form in the classic comedy Adam's Rib.
Synopsis: A courtroom rivalry finds its way into the household when prosecuting lawyer Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) faces off against his... [More]
Directed By: George Cukor
#146
Belle Epoque (1992) 95%
#146
Adjusted Score: 96194%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: As Spain sits on the precipice of civil war in 1930, Fernando (Jorge Sanz) opts to go AWOL from the... [More]
Directed By: Fernando Trueba
#147
Pillow Talk (1959) 94%
#147
Adjusted Score: 96967%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: Playboy songwriter Brad Allen's (Rock Hudson) succession of romances annoys his neighbor, interior designer Jan Morrow (Doris Day), who shares... [More]
Directed By: Michael Gordon
#148
#148
Adjusted Score: 96342%
Critics Consensus: Lighthearted and sweet, The Purple Rose of Cairo stands as one of Woody Allen's more inventive -- and enchantingly whimsical -- pictures.
Synopsis: Unhappily married Depression-era waitress Cecilia (Mia Farrow) earns the money while her inattentive husband, Monk (Danny Aiello), blows their meager... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#149
Trouble in Paradise (1932) 90%
#149
Adjusted Score: 94469%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: Thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) and pickpocket Lily (Miriam Hopkins) are partners in crime and love. Working for perfume company... [More]
Directed By: Ernst Lubitsch
#150
The Awful Truth (1937) 91%
#150
Adjusted Score: 97174%
Critics Consensus: Great comic direction by Leo McCarrey and memorable onscreen chemistry from stars Cary Grant and Irene Dunne make this screwball comedy a charmer.
Synopsis: Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne) are a married couple who doubt each other's fidelity: Jerry suspects Lucy and... [More]
Directed By: Leo McCarey
#151
#151
Adjusted Score: 91570%
Critics Consensus: An artfully assembled cast, lovely set design, and direction solidly in service of the source material make The Importance of Being Earnest an adaptation that works.
Synopsis: Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Denison) is surprised to discover that his affluent friend -- whom he knows as "Ernest" -- is... [More]
Directed By: Anthony Asquith
#152
Arthur (1981) 86%
#152
Adjusted Score: 88957%
Critics Consensus: Dudley Moore brings a boozy charm to Arthur, a coming of age tale for a wayward millionaire that deploys energetic cast chemistry and spiffy humor to jovial effect.
Synopsis: Wealthy New York City playboy Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) is perpetually drunk and completely rudderless. Dutifully supported by his sharp-tongued... [More]
Directed By: Steve Gordon
#153
The Sure Thing (1985) 86%
#153
Adjusted Score: 88812%
Critics Consensus: Though its final outcome is predictable, The Sure Thing is a charming, smartly written, and mature teen comedy featuring a breakout role for John Cusack.
Synopsis: Gib (John Cusack), a college freshman, keeps striking out with women. When he learns that a beautiful Californian (Nicollette Sheridan)... [More]
Directed By: Rob Reiner
#154
Romantics Anonymous (2010) 86%
#154
Adjusted Score: 86572%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: A chocolate maker falls in love with a gifted worker.... [More]
Directed By: Jean-Pierre Améris
#155
Pat and Mike (1952) 85%
#155
Adjusted Score: 88943%
Critics Consensus: Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy take competition to a romantic-comic highpoint in this elegantly directed sports comedy by George Cukor.
Synopsis: Pat Pemberton, a college athletics instructor, enters a number of golf matches against female professionals; she holds her own until... [More]
Directed By: George Cukor
#156
#156
Adjusted Score: 87910%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: Schatze Page, Loco Dempsey and Pola Debevoise (Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe) are three women on a mission: They... [More]
Directed By: Jean Negulesco
#157
The Seven Year Itch (1955) 84%
#157
Adjusted Score: 87287%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: In the midst of a summer heat wave, New Yorker Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) ships his wife, Helen (Evelyn Keyes),... [More]
Directed By: Billy Wilder
#158
Valley Girl (1983) 84%
#158
Adjusted Score: 86611%
Critics Consensus: With engaging performances from its two leads, Valley Girl is a goofy yet amiable film that both subverts and celebrates the cheerful superficiality of teen comedies.
Synopsis: Lovely teen Julie Richman (Deborah Foreman) is steeped in the excessive, pink-clad culture of the San Fernando Valley, complete with... [More]
Directed By: Martha Coolidge
#159
Woman of the Year (1942) 83%
#159
Adjusted Score: 86966%
Critics Consensus: In the first romantic comedy pairing of Tracy and Hepburn, the stars' chemistry is off to a working start and the film's sparkling comedy smooths out any rough patches.
Synopsis: Tess Harding (Katharine Hepburn) is a progressively-minded political journalist. Sam Craig (Spencer Tracy) is a sports writer with very traditional... [More]
Directed By: George Stevens
#160
Love in the Afternoon (1957) 82%
#160
Adjusted Score: 85463%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: French private investigator Claude Chavasse (Maurice Chevalier) discovers his client's wife has been having an affair with an American playboy,... [More]
Directed By: Billy Wilder
#161
Love at First Fight (2014) 82%
#161
Adjusted Score: 82695%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: A small-town man (Kévin Azaïs) falls in love with an apocalyptic-minded woman (Adèle Haenel) and joins her at boot camp... [More]
Directed By: Thomas Cailley
#162
#162
Adjusted Score: 82959%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: After a woman fails to show up for their date, an artist (Terence Nance) ponders the divide between romantic and... [More]
Directed By: Terence Nance
#163
Edge of Seventeen (1998) 80%
#163
Adjusted Score: 80749%
Critics Consensus: A time capsule assembled with honesty and sensitivity, Edge of Seventeen overcomes youthful fumbles to capture a time of life -- and an era.
Synopsis: Set in 1984 in Sandusky, Ohio, it follows the coming-out of a naive 17-year-old at exactly the moment when gender-bending... [More]
Directed By: David Moreton
#164
Trick (1999) 79%
#164
Adjusted Score: 79374%
Critics Consensus: By portraying its love story as nothing less than conventional, Trick avoids genre tropes to create a simple, effective romance.
Synopsis: It's lust at first sight when Gabriel (Christian Campbell), a songwriter with Broadway ambitions, runs into Mark (John Paul Pitoc),... [More]
Directed By: Jim Fall
#165
Mighty Aphrodite (1995) 78%
#165
Adjusted Score: 80131%
Critics Consensus: Mighty Aphrodite may not stand with Woody Allen's finest work, but it's brought to vivid life by a thoroughly winsome performance from Mira Sorvino.
Synopsis: When Lenny (Woody Allen) and his wife, Amanda (Helena Bonham Carter), adopt a baby, Lenny realizes that his son is... [More]
Directed By: Woody Allen
#166
Little Manhattan (2005) 77%
#166
Adjusted Score: 77308%
Critics Consensus: Little Manhattan is a sweet story of young love that provides an enlightening if pragmatic view on love and courtship.
Synopsis: Gabe (Josh Hutcherson), a sixth grader, is partnered with Rosemary (Charlie Ray) in his karate class. Though he's known her... [More]
Directed By: Mark Levin
#167
Better Off Dead (1985) 77%
#167
Adjusted Score: 78753%
Critics Consensus: Better Off Dead is an anarchic mix of black humor and surreal comedy, anchored by John Cusack's winsome, charming performance.
Synopsis: Lane Meyer (John Cusack) is a teen with a peculiar family and a bizarre fixation with his girlfriend, Beth (Amanda... [More]
Directed By: Savage Steve Holland
#168
Twelfth Night (1996) 76%
#168
Adjusted Score: 77722%
Critics Consensus: Director Trevor Nunn makes some questionable choices, but his stellar cast -- which includes Helena Bonham-Carter, Ben Kingsley, and Nigel Hawthorne -- more than rises to the material.
Synopsis: A shipwreck separates Viola (Imogen Stubbs) from her twin brother, Sebastian (Steven Mackintosh). Believing him to be dead, Viola disguises... [More]
Directed By: Trevor Nunn
#169
What If (2013) 74%
#169
Adjusted Score: 79739%
Critics Consensus: Its narrative framework may be familiar, but What If transcends its derivative elements with sharp dialogue and the effervescent chemistry of stars Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan.
Synopsis: A medical-school dropout (Daniel Radcliffe) tries to hide his attraction to his new friend (Zoe Kazan), a bubbly artist who... [More]
Directed By: Michael Dowse
#170
Coming to America (1988) 73%
#170
Adjusted Score: 77571%
Critics Consensus: Eddie Murphy was in full control at this point, starkly evident in Coming to America's John Landis' coasting direction.
Synopsis: Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) is the prince of a wealthy African country and wants for nothing, except a wife who... [More]
Directed By: John Landis
#171
Something's Gotta Give (2003) 72%
#171
Adjusted Score: 77847%
Critics Consensus: Though it occasionally stumbles into sitcom territory, Something's Gotta Give is mostly a smart, funny romantic comedy, with sharp performances from Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, and Keanu Reeves.
Synopsis: When aging womanizer Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) and his young girlfriend, Marin (Amanda Peet), arrive at her family's beach house... [More]
Directed By: Nancy Meyers
#172
Tin Cup (1996) 72%
#172
Adjusted Score: 75327%
Critics Consensus: Breezy and predictable, Tin Cup is a likeable sports comedy that benefits greatly from Kevin Costner's amiable lead performance.
Synopsis: Roy McAvoy (Kevin Costner) was a golf pro with a bright future, but his rebellious nature and bad attitude cost... [More]
Directed By: Ron Shelton
#173
Russian Dolls (2005) 72%
#173
Adjusted Score: 72983%
Critics Consensus: Like its predecessor L'Auberge Espagnole, Russian Dolls is charmingly breezy and light.
Synopsis: A struggling writer (Romain Duris) becomes involved with two women while juggling assignments in Paris.... [More]
Directed By: Cédric Klapisch
#174
The Wedding Singer (1998) 72%
#174
Adjusted Score: 75827%
Critics Consensus: It's decidedly uneven -- and surprisingly sappy for an early Adam Sandler comedy -- but The Wedding Singer is also sweet, funny, and beguiling.
Synopsis: Set in 1985, Adam Sandler plays a nice guy with a broken heart who's stuck in one of the most... [More]
Directed By: Frank Coraci
#175
Liberal Arts (2012) 71%
#175
Adjusted Score: 75928%
Critics Consensus: While it's hard not to wish it had a little more bite, Liberal Arts ultimately succeeds as a good-natured -- and surprisingly clever -- look at the addictive pull of nostalgia for our youth.
Synopsis: A New York college adviser (Josh Radnor) becomes involved with a student (Elizabeth Olsen) when he returns to his alma... [More]
Directed By: Josh Radnor
#176
#176
Adjusted Score: 75380%
Critics Consensus: Julia Stiles and Heath Ledger add strong performances to an unexpectedly clever script, elevating 10 Things (slightly) above typical teen fare.
Synopsis: Kat Stratford is beautiful, smart and quite abrasive to most of her fellow teens, meaning that she doesn't attract many... [More]
Directed By: Gil Junger
#177
The Best Man Holiday (2013) 71%
#177
Adjusted Score: 74878%
Critics Consensus: The Best Man Holiday manages honest laughs out of broad humor, and affects convincing drama from a deeply conventional plot.
Synopsis: Nearly 15 years after they were last together as a group, college friends Lance (Morris Chestnut), Harper (Taye Diggs), Candace... [More]
Directed By: Malcolm D. Lee
#178
About Time (2013) 71%
#178
Adjusted Score: 78449%
Critics Consensus: Beautifully filmed and unabashedly sincere, About Time finds director Richard Curtis at his most sentimental.
Synopsis: When Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) is 21, his father (Bill Nighy) tells him a secret: The men in their family... [More]
Directed By: Richard Curtis
#179
The Science of Sleep (2006) 70%
#179
Adjusted Score: 76556%
Critics Consensus: Lovely and diffuse, Sleep isn't as immediately absorbing as Gondry's previous work, but its messy beauty is its own reward.
Synopsis: Soon after the death of his father, a distraught young man (Gael García Bernal) begins a job as a graphic... [More]
Directed By: Michel Gondry
#180
You've Got Mail (1998) 70%
#180
Adjusted Score: 75226%
Critics Consensus: Great chemistry between the leads made this a warm and charming delight.
Synopsis: Struggling boutique bookseller Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) hates Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), the owner of a corporate Foxbooks chain store... [More]
Directed By: Nora Ephron
#181
Jeffrey (1995) 71%
#181
Adjusted Score: 72624%
Critics Consensus: Jeffrey offends as readily as it amuses, but an outstanding performance from Patrick Stewart keeps it from going completely off the rails.
Synopsis: Jeffrey (Steven Weber), a gay man living in New York City with an overwhelming fear of contracting AIDS, concludes that... [More]
Directed By: Christopher Ashley
#182
Frankie and Johnny (1991) 69%
#182
Adjusted Score: 71483%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: When Johnny (Al Pacino) is released from prison following a forgery charge, he quickly lands a job as a short-order... [More]
Directed By: Garry Marshall
#183
Adjusted Score: 67924%
Critics Consensus: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers struggles to truly capture its subject's singular genius, but remains a diverting tribute -- and a showcase for the talents of Geoffrey Rush.
Synopsis: A biographical film about Peter Sellers' turbulent rise from popular BBC radio performer to one of the world's most gifted... [More]
Directed By: Stephen Hopkins
#184
Hitch (2005) 69%
#184
Adjusted Score: 75931%
Critics Consensus: Despite Hitch's predictability, Will Smith and Kevin James win praise for their solid, warmhearted performances.
Synopsis: Dating coach Alex "Hitch" Hitchens (Will Smith) mentors a bumbling client, Albert (Kevin James), who hopes to win the heart... [More]
Directed By: Andy Tennant
#185
Heartbreaker (2010) 68%
#185
Adjusted Score: 70547%
Critics Consensus: While definitely on the fluffier side of French comedy, Heartbreaker benefits from never taking itself too seriously -- and from the performance of the ever-charming Romain Duris.
Synopsis: Alex (Romain Duris) is a successful entrepreneur in a business he himself pioneered: Hire him, and he'll seduce any woman... [More]
Directed By: Pascal Chaumeil
#186
Baby Boom (1987) 67%
#186
Adjusted Score: 70795%
Critics Consensus: Baby Boom struggles to impart its feminist ideals, but Diane Keaton's winsome leading work helps keep things breezily entertaining.
Synopsis: J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton) is a New York City businesswoman who is married to her job and has a relationship... [More]
Directed By: Charles Shyer
#187
#187
Adjusted Score: 70521%
Critics Consensus: Faultless production and shining performances display the Bard's talent propitiously.
Synopsis: This version of the renowned comedic play finds the world of humans intersecting with the realm of magic. The lovely... [More]
Directed By: Michael Hoffman
#188
Away We Go (2009) 67%
#188
Adjusted Score: 74620%
Critics Consensus: Built on a set of quirks and charms that are as noticeable as they are interchangeable, Away We Go is a sweet but uneven road trip.
Synopsis: As they await the birth of their baby, a couple (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) travel across America in search of... [More]
Directed By: Sam Mendes
#189
Brown Sugar (2002) 67%
#189
Adjusted Score: 69386%
Critics Consensus: Though predictable and possibly too sweet, Brown Sugar is charming, well-acted, and smarter than typical rom-com fare.
Synopsis: Sidney (Sanaa Lathan) and Dre (Taye Diggs) can attribute their friendship and the launch of their careers to one single... [More]
Directed By: Rick Famuyiwa
#190
Fever Pitch (2005) 66%
#190
Adjusted Score: 73226%
Critics Consensus: While not a home run, Fever Pitch has enough charm and on-screen chemistry between the two leads to make it a solid hit.
Synopsis: When Ben Wrightman (Jimmy Fallon), a young teacher, begins dating pretty businesswoman Lindsey Meeks (Drew Barrymore), the two don't seem... [More]
Directed By: Robert Farrelly, Peter Farrelly
#191
Chances Are (1989) 67%
#191
Adjusted Score: 69354%
Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Synopsis: A man's love for his pregnant wife, Corinne Jeffries (Cybill Shepherd), is interrupted when a car accident sends him to... [More]
Directed By: Emile Ardolino
#192
Pretty Woman (1990) 65%
#192
Adjusted Score: 71224%
Critics Consensus: Pretty Woman may be a yuppie fantasy, but the film's slick comedy, soundtrack, and casting can overcome misgivings.
Synopsis: A prostitute and a wealthy businessman fall for one another, forming an unlikely pair; while on a business trip in... [More]
Directed By: Garry Marshall
#193
#193
Adjusted Score: 72962%
Critics Consensus: Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a modest success for Kevin Smith, due in large part to the charm of Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks.
Synopsis: Lifelong friends and now roommates, Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are buried under a mountain of debt. When... [More]
Directed By: Kevin Smith
#194
Sliding Doors (1998) 65%
#194
Adjusted Score: 67848%
Critics Consensus: Despite the gimmicky feel of the split narratives, the movie is watch-able due to the winning performances by the cast.
Synopsis: When Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow), a London ad executive, is fired from her job and rushes out to catch a train,... [More]
Directed By: Peter Howitt
#195
13 Going on 30 (2004) 65%
#195
Adjusted Score: 70739%
Critics Consensus: Although the plot leaves a lot to be desired, 13 Going on 30 will tug at your inner teenager's heartstrings thanks in large part to a dazzling performance from Jennifer Garner.
Synopsis: A girl who's sick of the social strictures of junior high is transformed into a grownup overnight. In this feel-good... [More]
Directed By: Gary Winick
#196
Love Actually (2003) 64%
#196
Adjusted Score: 72076%
Critics Consensus: A sugary tale overstuffed with too many stories. Still, the cast charms.
Synopsis: Nine intertwined stories examine the complexities of the one emotion that connects us all: love. Among the characters explored are... [More]
Directed By: Richard Curtis
#197
Broken English (2007) 64%
#197
Adjusted Score: 66203%
Critics Consensus: Though Broken English eventually settles into basic rom-com territory, it's pleasant and good-natured, and Parker Posey is spellbinding throughout the movie.
Synopsis: Nora Wilder (Parker Posey), a single woman, is heading deep into the doldrums as a result of disappointments in her... [More]
Directed By: Zoe R. Cassavetes
#198
Big Eden (2000) 64%
#198
Adjusted Score: 65438%
Critics Consensus: Though unrealistic, Big Eden has all the charm and sweetness of a fairy tale.
Synopsis: Henry Hart (Arye Gross) is a young gay artist living in New York City. When his grandfather has a stroke,... [More]
Directed By: Thomas Bezucha
#199
The Broken Hearts Club (2000) 64%
#199
Adjusted Score: 64288%
Critics Consensus: The Broken Hearts Club often feels like an amalgam of 70s sitcoms -- though a hunky lead and a sweet central romance provide soapy delights.
Synopsis: A fresh, funny, real story about a group of gay men in Hollywood, their lovers and friends, and the often... [More]
Directed By: Greg Berlanti
#200
Bride & Prejudice (2004) 64%
#200
Adjusted Score: 68074%
Critics Consensus: A colorful and energetic adaptation of Austen's classic.
Synopsis: With four beautiful daughters of marrying age, Manorama (Nadira Babbar) and Chaman Bakshi (Anupam Kher) frantically seek out the perfect... [More]
Directed By: Gurinder Chadha | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 20 | https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/g4726/best-film-plot-twists/ | en | 60 Best Movie Plot Twists of All Time | [
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"Julie Kosin",
"DeAnna Janes"
] | 2017-06-02T05:00:00-04:00 | We look back at the 60 riveting films with riveting plot twists we NEVER saw coming. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/harpersbazaar/static/images/favicon.9d827eb.ico | Harper's BAZAAR | https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/g4726/best-film-plot-twists/ | We love a great drama. Have zero issues with an ugly-cry tearjerker. And will never say no to an all-time best comedy. But when it comes to the ultimate big-screen, small-screen, any-screen experience, we LIVE for the art of the cinematic reveal, a.k.a. the movie plot twist.
Usually delivered as a fun surprise in the third act, this effective trickery on the part of the screenwriter and director throws viewers for a loop, pulling the rug out from underneath them, and when done exceptionally well, results in that elusive spark every filmmaker tries to achieve: movie magic. Ahead, some of the best plot twists in movies to date. And, yes, there are spoilers.
For more roundups, check out the scariest horror movies of all time, the most anticipated shows of 2024, and where to stream all the 2024 Oscar nominees.
The Plot: In town for an interview, Tess arrives at her Airbnb to find it’s been double-booked and is currently occupied by Keith, a kinda nice, but kinda creepy dude who refuses to leave.
The Twist: Mid-movie, there is a slight genre-shift that adds to the film’s intrigue and layers of twists, but ultimately, the biggest reveal is that it’s not Keith who Tess should fear. It’s the deformed mothering creature being held captive in the dungeon under the rental.
WATCH
The Plot: While investigating the murder of a man who was found at the base of a mountain, married detective Jang Hae-jun falls in love with Song Seo-rae, the dead guy’s wife.
The Twist: Yes, Song is the killer, and her husband isn’t the only victim. But the most profound reveal in this gorgeous and devastating romance has to be the ending. Song’s decision to leave—her decision to commit suicide and the ways she decides to leave—sees her dig a hole on the beach, climb in, and patiently wait for the tide to erase her forever.
WATCH
The Plot: A squad of all-female spelunking enthusiasts dive into a bat-infested cave inhabited also by some very hungry humanoids the director calls Crawlers.
The Twist: Main character Sarah is your final girl, dragging herself out of the ground and speeding away in her SUV from the bloody entombment she just experienced. Until, not so fast, an apparition of antagonist Juno riding shotgun jerks Sarah out of her own mania and puts her right back into the cave where she really is. The camera fades to black. And we hear the Crawlers drawing near.*
*This is the director’s final cut of the film. U.S. audiences were treated to a diluted ending in theaters.
Watch
The Plot: Briony Tallis has a crush on the son of her family's housekeeper, Robbie; when she walks in on her sister Cecilia having sex with Robbie, Briony misinterprets the situation. Later that night, she blames Robbie for an assault on her cousin Lola even though she didn't witness the attack. Robbie is sent to prison, later joining the army to fight in World War II, while Cecilia becomes a nurse. Years later, Briony, feeling guilty for derailing Cecilia and Robbie's lives, visits them in their apartment to apologize, but they turn her away.
The Twist: Cecilia and Robbie never had a life together; Robbie died in the war, while Cecilia died in a bombing in London. As an old woman, Briony wrote a book in which they lived happily ever after as repentance.
Watch | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 39 | https://www.friendsoffootballnz.com/2024/04/24/review-the-beautiful-game-a-feel-good-football-movie-with-a-serious-theme/ | en | good football movie with a serious theme | [
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] | 2024-04-24T00:00:00 | What happens to the players who don’t make it to the pro ranks?Where do they end up, those kids who are sucked in by the machine that is the English Football Academy system, then spat out again a few years later?Shining a light on the story of one such player is one of the serious threads running through The Beautiful Game, a feel-good movie playing on Netflix. | en | Friends of Football | https://www.friendsoffootballnz.com/2024/04/24/review-the-beautiful-game-a-feel-good-football-movie-with-a-serious-theme/ | By Rachel Lilburn
What happens to the players who don’t make it to the pro ranks?
Where do they end up, those kids who are sucked in by the machine that is the English Football Academy system, then spat out again a few years later?
Shining a light on the story of one such player is one of the serious threads running through The Beautiful Game, a feel-good movie playing on Netflix.
Director Thea Sharrock, writer Frank Cottrell Boyce and editor Fernando Stutz have crafted a lighthearted movie that tackles the serious themes of homelessness and addiction.
It’s a movie about second chances, teamwork, finding yourself and taking pride in what you achieve instead of dwelling on what you might not have done.
But most of all, it’s a message that being alone isn’t being strong; that strength comes from connection with others.
The film introduces us to Mal — played by the brilliant Bill Nighy — who manages a football team of homeless men who head to Rome to represent England in the Homeless World Cup (a real event, that started in 2003).
He persuades down-on-his-luck footballer Vinny (Michael Ward) to join the team.
Vinny’s rough edges and ego don’t make him a likeable character, but are also hiding huge insecurities. He struggles to be part of the team, who he sees as homeless losers. Each of the team has a backstory that’s led them to homelessness, with personal demons that they need to manage or overcome.
Being a teammate means accepting that he is just like his teammates, or indeed, that his teammates are just like him — some with bad luck, some with some bad decisions, but no one has planned to be homeless.
Vinny has internalized the negative messages he received from others, believing he’s not good enough.
Rooming with Nathan, a kind-hearted addict who looks up to him, Vinny’s words have a profound impact. Vinny tells Nathan that “real athletes don’t take drugs”; leading to Nathan not taking his methadone, then spiralling out of control.
As Nathan returns to England, Vinny is left grappling with the influence of his words on others.
While we spend more time with Vinny, the star of the movie is undoubtably Mal, the coach who is ambitious, excitable and emotional about football (he’s shown a red card in the first game); and equally emotionally tender as a leader of men with personal demons.
Mal plays a calming role, supporting others while respecting their autonomy. He understands that individuals are ultimately responsible for their own choices.
We’re left wondering about Mal’s backstory and motivations. How did he join the Homeless World Cup, and why has he stuck with it for 12 years? What’s happened to his wife and when?
By not showing us the back story, we are reminded to show compassion even without fully understanding others’ pasts.
Mal’s story in the film also highlights another sobering aspect of football: the weight of responsibility carried by coaches and scouts who select and then potentially reject young, aspiring elite players.
This can profoundly alter lives both for those who take it to the top professional leagues, and those who are ultimately knocked down by the system.
In other areas, the film resorts to somewhat shallow caricatures, particularly with the Japanese and South African teams, portraying them using simplified and not entirely accurate stereotypes.
The inclusion of an all-female team in an otherwise male competition seemed a little contrived and perhaps included to introduce a small romantic subplot.
The football itself — while not getting a huge amount of screen time — is 4v4, street style, and in true football-movie style, is much better than the initial training montage we see.
Overall, this was an enjoyable, feel-good watch.
I enjoyed this with my 11-year-old, who missed most of the more subtle elements, but the movie provided me with the opportunity to open some new discussions.
Rachel Lilburn
Taupō-based Rachel Lilburn is the mother of a football-mad youngster, a team manager and volunteer. She writes for Friends of Football, specialising in feature stories about young footballers, their pathways and junior/youth tournaments. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 83 | https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/does-handsome-only-describe-men | en | Does 'handsome' only describe men? | [
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"Editors of Merriam-Webster"
] | 2023-11-12T00:00:00 | A pretty problem. | en | /favicon.svg | https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/does-handsome-only-describe-men | Adjectives and nouns sometimes seem to come in pairs. There’s a magnetic connection between words such as delicious and meal or comfortable and shoes. Some of these pairings are so common that they nearly become idioms: frozen tundra and latest technology and blazing fire and existential angst and filthy habit.
But if the pairing delicious meal depends on circumstance (some meals are, sadly, not delicious), there are also pairings that are seemingly more limited and depend as much on linguistic habit and usage and history as on any precise circumstances. Take our use of the adjective handsome, for instance.
English does not have grammatical gender—nouns are not classified as “masculine” or “feminine” as they are in other European languages. But we do have words that indicate gender, like man or girl, stallion or mare, rooster or chicken. There is no grammatical agreement for gender for adjectives in English, but there is the weight of precedent. The frequency with which we encounter any given pairing influences the way we ourselves use a given adjective.
We typically use handsome to refer to an attractive man, and beautiful to refer to an attractive woman. But these uses aren’t governed by grammar, they are governed by convention. The fact is, handsome woman was formerly much more commonly used than it is today; a corpus of English text before 1700 shows that handsome woman was used ten times more frequently than beautiful man. A similar search for the same two-word pairs in a corpus of text published in the past twelve years shows a remarkable flip, with beautiful man occurring nearly twenty times more frequently than handsome woman.
Even though their current use is more or less parallel in meaning, handsome and beautiful have very different histories. These histories are observable in the spelling of these words: beautiful meaning “full of beauty,” coming from the French word beauté. Handsome originally meant “well-suited to the hands” of a tool or weapon, then jumped from referring to the thing wielded to the person doing the wielding to mean “good with the hands” or “dexterous.” It then came to mean “clever” or “fitting.” This idea of appropriateness or suitability led handsome to mean “elegant, well-proportioned,” and finally a rough synonym of beautiful.
This history of handsome shows that the word always had essentially pragmatic roots in English, rather than the purely esthetic meanings of beautiful through time. Maybe this deep background of the word’s use has contributed to the evolution of handsome as a near-synonym of beautiful, but one with different connotations. Shakespeare used handsome of a woman in The Two Noble Kinsmen:
His mother was a wondrous handsome woman;
His face methinks goes that way.
Its other uses in literature are many:
There is one thing, however, in it at present very handsome; and that is, the inn-keeper’s daughter. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy 1759
Lady Middleton was not more than six or seven and twenty; her face was handsome, her figure tall and striking, and her address graceful. —Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811
Mary Jane straightened herself up, and my, but she was handsome! —Mark Twain Huckleberry Finn 1884
She was still handsome and bore every sign of having in her youth been a very lovely woman. —Arthur Conan Doyle The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, 1911
May is a darling; I've seen no young girl in New York so handsome and so intelligent. —Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence, 1920
Mrs. Cavendish, who had married John’s father when he was a widower with two sons, had been a handsome woman of middle-age as I remembered her. —Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920
We can perhaps see that the word’s use in the 20th century showed a slight change in meaning: usually used to connote attractiveness, yes, but of a homey, comfortable, and unromantic kind. Ian Fleming’s use of the word in Casino Royale (1953) is a typical example: “She was younger than her husband, chubby and handsome and warm-eyed.” In journalistic writing, we see handsome used to describe a woman in TIME magazine into the 1980s, most often as “handsome wife.” | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 36 | https://www.timeout.com/film/best-movies-based-on-true-stories | en | The 24 best movies based on true stories | [
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"Matthew Singer",
"Phil de Semlyen"
] | 2024-04-01T23:00:00+00:00 | From Watergate to criminal strippers, these are the best true stories ever told on film | en | /static/images/favicon.ico | Time Out Worldwide | https://www.timeout.com/film/best-movies-based-on-true-stories | In Hollywood, it’s best to approach certain promotional tactics with suspicion, perhaps none more so than any movies that claims to be ‘based on a true story’. In many cases, what that typically means is a filmmaker took a small dollop of truth and stretched it as far as it could possibly go. It’s not a big deal, really – these are narrative films, not documentaries, and sometimes, a liberal sprinkling of creative licence is needed to make a story work on screen.
Every so often, though, a movie comes along that approaches its subject with something close to a journalistic eye, and those are the ones we’ve chosen to highlight here. Among them are Oscar-winning dramas covering major moments in history, salacious crime stories drawn from magazine articles, bizarre character studies and other wild tales no one would believe if they didn’t actually happen. Sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction — and in these specific situations, it makes for a hell of a great picture.
Recommended: | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 95 | https://beautyjunkiesanonymous.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/girl-vs-boy-pretty/ | en | Girl vs. Boy “Pretty” | [
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] | null | [] | 2014-07-28T00:00:00 | The age old debate. What Men think is pretty and what women find pretty or attractive can sometimes be a lot different or a lot alike. I know I've had this conversation with a few friends of mine and we have decided that there are just some styles of clothing, hair or makeup that most men find unattractive and too far… | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/481ffd80316403c86ccc0fc9dbe9987310fb6eb101f9d03f6215dde95f519163?s=32 | beautyjunkiesanonymous | https://beautyjunkiesanonymous.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/girl-vs-boy-pretty/ | The age old debate.
What Men think is pretty and what women find pretty or attractive can sometimes be a lot different or a lot alike.
I know I’ve had this conversation with a few friends of mine and we have decided that there are just some styles of clothing, hair or makeup that most men find unattractive and too far “out there” for them to even understand (Silly boys!).
I love “different” or weird things (probably because I’m little odd myself!) and I get to work in the beauty industry with all kinds of stylish people. We get to have fun and experiment with our clothes, makeup and hair! No boring cooperate suits for moi!! (not that there is anything wrong with that, just not for me 🙂 )
In the last few years from listening to guys I know and their unsolicited “opinions” , I’ve come to discover some things our male counterparts just don’t like or as I like to put it…”they just don’t ‘get’ about fashion”… Most Men like pretty, simple looks. Whether that’s a basic tee and jeans or a plain figure flaunting dress. Which by no means I don’t love too! but I’m just discussing the differences between what women and men can find attractive in women.
Above- faux leather crop top + slouchy printed pants = my father and bf’s worst nightmare in an outfit, yet all the women at the party loved it. I looked so “hip’ and “right out of new York” as one of my grand aunts stated….funny because this did come from my New York trip! Bam! 😉 Sorry, not sorry!!!!!!!
1) Crop tops, floral headbands, huge statement jewelry, Rompers, Baggy pants, harem pants, bright patterned tights, high waisted anything(skirts,pants, etc.) . Do I love them all? Yes, Definitely! I live for rompers and anything stylish yet comfortable. But take these comments from the males in my life for instance when I’ve worn any of these items, i.e. from my father “oh, you already have your pjs on” referring to my high waisted slouchy pants from last night or as Steve likes to fondly call my bright tights when I wear them “my wrestling pants” or “macho-man tights”…pfttt, but what do they know anyway!?!? 😦
2)Makeup- Now men “think” (yes, I know, I had no idea that men had thoughts too) but they think like “natural makeup”…..or no makeup at all. And I doubt they know that the natural look takes like 25 different products to make you look like you aren’t wearing any makeup!!!!!! wtf!? When really……
^^^^Pretty self explanatory.
I’m not saying some men don’t like smokey eyes or crazy colored lipstick, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the majority are just confused when it comes to this stuff. They confuse easily, so if your man doesn’t like these things, try and tone it down a little bit. Or if you’re anything like me, wear it anyway!! LOL 😉
Oh! and don’t forget those fake lashes and nails……men love those……………………..
3) Hair- I know tons of ladies that cut their hair off right after their wedding and after the long process of growing it out to wear it in a updo for their big day. I also know tons of ladies that have beautiful faces that are just emphasized by shorter dos. However, men are hardwired to like long luscious locks. Something to do with finding an “ideal” mate and fertility or whatever. Its programmed into them since the stone age and probably will never change. But if you want to hack your hair off, which I have done numerous times throughout my life, Do it! Hair grows and you don’t judge your men for his mismatched socks and scruff on his face, so he shouldn’t say anything but “that looks nice, dear!”
Hair color is another touchy subject. I’d say the majority of men like “natural” colored hair. No crazy purples, reds or blues. Personally, I love that stuff and if you can be confident and pull it off, that’s awesome!
Conclusion-
I think if a woman likes something and its not the norm, wear it anyway. Fashion and makeup are supposed to be fun and reflect everyone’s individual tastes. This also applies to men. If you look back at pictures of yourself and say “ew, I hate what I wore” or “what was I thinking with that hair cut”…least you have something to laugh at when your 90. No bodies perfect.
-Nicole xo 🙂
P.s.
Now all this being said, In my case I may be biased because I live in a small town. With a community where anything “really different” is judged. By men AND women alike. I know in bigger cities, it’s no biggie to have crazy colored hair and to wear whatever the hell you want and walk down the street without awkward stares! I really wish CB would just catch up already! | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 61 | https://www.buzzfeed.com/evelinamedina/must-watch-movies | en | See Movies That Everyone Should Watch Once | [
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"Evelina Zaragoza Medina"
] | 2022-10-06T17:46:02+00:00 | Movies so important, so 🤌iconique🤌, that you simply HAVE to watch them at least once. | en | /static-assets/_next/static/images/favicon-496b7cee633e6a7dca162654e1bb39c9.ico | BuzzFeed | https://www.buzzfeed.com/evelinamedina/must-watch-movies | 78 Must-See Movies That Everyone Should Watch At Least Once
Movies so important, so 🤌iconique🤌, that you simply HAVE to watch them at least once.
Behold, a list of the best films ever made. Just kidding! There is no such thing as "best" in this case. Taste is subjective.
Before you start reading, a few disclaimers:
– These are all great movies, but I won't call them "the best movies ever made." Just movies that are crucial viewing for a ~varied and comprehensive~ film vocabulary. Who decided what was crucial and what wasn't? Me, because I wrote the list. You are welcome to suggest additions (please do!)
– I did my best to keep it to one movie per director and per genre, but exceptions were made.
– This list will continue to grow! So, if your favorite movie isn't on here, leave it in the comments, and it might be added very soon!
1. Star Wars (1977), or Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope
2. The Birdcage (1996)
3. Groundhog Day (1993)
4. Brokeback Mountain (2006)
5. Amadeus (1984)
6. The Karate Kid (1984)
7. Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
8. Zodiac (2007)
9. Die Hard (1988)
10. In Bruges (2008)
11. Malcolm X (1992)
12. In the Mood for Love (2000)
13. Gattaca (1997)
14. Clue (1985)
15. Rocky (1976)
16. The Apartment (1960)
17. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
18. Pride and Prejudice (2005)
19. Chicago (2002)
20. How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
21. Moonstruck (1987)
22. Airplane! (1980)
23. Avatar (2009)
24. Raging Bull (1980)
25. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
26. Drive (2011)
27. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
28. Citizen Kane (1941)
29. The Princess Bride (1987)
30. Get Out (2017)
31. E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982)
32. Casablanca (1942)
33. Vertigo (1958)
34. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
35. Singin' in the Rain (1952)
36. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
37. 12 Angry Men (1957)
38. Dolemite Is My Name (2019)
39. Some Like It Hot (1959)
40. When Harry Met Sally... (1989)
41. Clueless (1995)
42. Dirty Dancing (1987)
43. Aliens (1986)
44. Pulp Fiction (1994)
45. Before Sunrise (1995)
46. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
47. The Lion King (1994)
48. Galaxy Quest (1999)
49. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
50. WALL-E (2008)
51. The Dark Knight (2008)
52. Love & Basketball (2000)
53. No Country for Old Men (2007)
54. There Will Be Blood (2007)
55. Spirited Away (2001)
56. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
57. Parasite (2019)
58. Moonlight (2016)
59. Bridesmaids (2011)
60. Train to Busan (2016)
61. Paddington 2 (2017)
62. Black Panther (2018)
63. Giant (1956)
64. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
65. The Godfather Part II (1974)
66. Goodfellas (1990)
67. Psycho (1960)
68. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
69. A League of Their Own (1992)
70. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
71. Thelma & Louise (1991)
72. The Truman Show (1998)
73. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
74. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
75. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
76. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
77. Casino Royale (2006)
78. And finally, Jurassic Park (1993)
Did we miss any of your favorites? Comment below!
Share This Article | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 4 | https://bechdeltest.com/ | en | Bechdel Test Movie List | [
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The Bechdel Test, or Bechdel-Wallace Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule is a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test was popularized by Alison Bechdel's comic, the name of which Google won't let me put on this page for inciting hate, in a 1985 strip called The Rule. For a nice video introduction to the subject please check out The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies on feministfrequency.com.
If you need access to the raw data, check out the docs for the api.
Add a movie
If you want to add a movie to this list, please go to the Add a movie page and fill in the form. If you disagree with a rating, please leave a comment on the appropriate movie page instead.
Recent activity
Currently 10377 movies in the database. The five latest additions:
2024-07-31 19:43: Fong Sai Yuk (1993)
2024-07-30 16:22: North Hollywood (2021)
2024-07-29 15:58: Double Down South (2022)
2024-07-29 01:30: A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
2024-07-28 10:39: Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna (2020)
The five latest comments were on:
2024-08-15 14:36: Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
2024-08-14 04:02: Bottle Rocket (1996)
2024-08-12 16:41: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
2024-08-12 03:41: The Hopeful (2024)
2024-08-12 02:16: It ends with us (2024)
The list
The list you see to the left of this text consists of an icon with the result of the tests (explained below), the title (clicking it will take you to its details page, where you can find the reviews and comments) and finally two optional icons, also explained below. Clicking the icon before the title will take you to the movie's IMDb page.
For the sake of practicality, I've taken the liberty to read the first criterion as only named female characters counting.
There are currently 10377 movies listed. Some stats and graphs are available. Be sure to check out Ten graphics on the Bechdel test on Reddit for more graphs.
You can also view the list sorted by title, date added (latest first), number of comments, number of reviews or rating.
An RSS feed is also available, listing the latest 50 movies added to the list.
You can view just the Movies in the IMDb Top 250 and last but not least, you can search the list.
Links
About the Bechdel test
Wikipedia: Bechdel test
The Bechdel Test: What It Is, And Why It Matters
TV Tropes Wiki: The Bechdel Test
Articles
The Dollar-And-Cents Case Against Hollywood's Exclusion of Women
The Female Character Flowchart
Memo to all women: No half for you in Hollywood
Cartoons are more than just entertainment
The 'Bechdel Rule,' Defining Pop-Culture Character
Review sites | ||||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 78 | https://screencraft.org/blog/101-short-film-prompts/ | en | 101 Story Prompts to Kickstart Your Short Film | [
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"Ken Miyamoto"
] | 2022-09-09T23:28:47+00:00 | Want to write a great bite-size movie? Here are 101 short film prompts that will help get you started on that great short script! | en | ScreenCraft | https://screencraft.org/blog/101-short-film-prompts/ | Do you want to write a short film but need help finding compelling concepts? Sometimes reading simple story prompts is the easiest way to get those creative juices flowing.
We get our ideas from many sources — news headlines, novels, television shows, movies, our lives, our fears, our phobias, etc. They can come from a scene or moment in a film that wasn’t fully explored. They can come from a single visual that entices the creative mind — a seed that continues to grow and grow until the writer is forced to finally put it to paper or screen.
They may inspire screenplays, novels, short stories, or even smaller moments that you can include in what stories you are already writing.
Keys to Writing Short Film Scripts?
Before we jump into our 101 Short Film Prompts, let's quickly go over a couple of important factors of writing short film scripts.
Concept is Everything
The rite of passage for any filmmaker is making a compelling short film. That is where filmmakers cut their teeth and truly come of age. It's also an epic journey through the highest of peaks and deepest of valleys as novice filmmakers quickly learn that it's not as easy as just having a few people, a boom mic, and a camera — you need a great concept.
Showcasing a talking heads short film isn't going to get you noticed by audiences or industry insiders. You need to capture their attention with compelling and engaging narratives that have a beginning, middle, and end within the short film running time of 40 minutes or less (you generally want to stick with 5-20 minutes most of the time).
Economize Your Storytelling
Short films should also focus on smaller story windows.
Instead of having your short film tell the dramatic story of your alcoholic character trying to go sober over the course of a year, why not focus on the last day of the last step in their 12-Step program?
Instead of having your short script tell the epic story of a historical World War II battle, why not focus on one soldier as they deal with the overarching conflict?
Instead of having your short story tell the horrifying story of a serial killer stalking and killing multiple victims, why not center the story on a single victim in their house watching the news reports of the killings and then hearing a floorboard creak from above?
Watch Short Films
It's as simple as that — watch short films. Here are 10 shorts you can watch online right now to get you started.
(And read a short film script if you can get your hands on one.)
Note: Because we’re all connected to the same pop culture, news headlines, and inspirations, any similarity to any past, present, or future screenplays, novels, short stories, television pilots, television series, plays, or any other creative works is purely coincidence. These true story writing prompts were conceived on the fly or were based on finding interesting true stories that are out there. While some may have proven to be told already, there are always alternative storylines not covered in what has already been written and produced.
101 Story Prompts to Kickstart Your Short Film
1. Someone watching a news report about a local serial killer hears a floorboard creak.
2. A young brother and sister survive after the apocalypse.
3. Someone reading a scary book hears a knock at the door.
4. An alcoholic struggles to decide between taking a drink or not.
5. Students in an elementary school dealing with surviving lunchtime.
6. Students in an elementary school dealing with surviving recess.
7. Teenagers surviving the school politics of lunchtime.
8. An addicted gambler sits at a table.
9. A day in the life of the first astronaut on Mars.
10. A day in the life of the first colony on Mars.
11. A man and a woman keep seeing each other during a night out with their respective friends.
12. The experience of a character invited to a graduation party of someone they don't know.
13. The first human clone awakens.
14. The lifespan of a dog.
15. The lifespan of a cat.
16. Dracula is in his coffin not being able to sleep and having to kill time until dusk.
17. An African-American child's walk to school in a dangerous urban neighborhood.
18. A character wakes up with a gun in their hand and blood all over them.
19. A day in the life of an astronaut living on the moon.
20. The first day of school for a new student as they struggle to make a friend.
21. The imaginary battle of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
22. The life of a handgun when it hits the streets.
23. The story of a pilot that sees a UFO in the skies.
24. A robot comes to life in an inventor's shop.
25. A person struggles to survive after being thrown from their car in an accident.
26. A remake of the original silent film The Great Train Robbery.
27. A day in the life of a puppy.
28. A German soldier trying to flee Nazi Germany.
29. A woman in a house is attacked by aliens.
30. A person is granted the wish to fly.
31. A person is granted the wish to be invisible.
32. A person makes a wish to be young again.
33. A man on his deathbed is taken on a road trip.
34. A woman spends a night with her newborn child, only to have to give it to adoptive parents.
35. A day in the life of a professional thief.
36. A day in the life of a homicide detective.
37. A day in the life of a teacher.
38. The new kid in the neighborhood struggles to make friends.
39. A slave struggles to escape its evil white pursuers.
40. A rock climber's solo ascent.
41. The day in the life of a professional gamer.
42. The world shown through the eyes of a drone.
43. A late-night call at a suicide prevention center.
44. The duel of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.
45. The duel of two samurai.
46. A day in the life of a maid that works for a rich family.
47. A mother working three jobs in a single day and then coming home to kiss their child goodnight.
48. A day in the life of a truck driver.
49. An astronaut lands on a desert planet.
50. A day in the life of an angel on Earth.
51. Teacher by day, stripper by night.
52. A vampire decides to commit suicide by sunlight after one last night on the town.
53. A day in the life of a Vegas stripper.
54. It's revealed that a sad person has been preparing for a loved one's funeral.
55. It's revealed that a child's friend is actually imaginary.
56. A babysitter must save a child when a forest fire bombards the neighborhood.
57. Surfers are lost at sea after riptides pull them out.
58. A park ranger discovers a dead body.
59. A travel agent struggles to hold onto a job that has no contemporary meaning.
60. A house that is haunted.
61. An astronaut returns home but no one remembers who he is.
62. A day in the life of the last man on Earth.
63. A day in the life of the last woman on Earth.
64. A day in the life of the last dog on Earth.
65. When the WiFi goes down, neighborhood kids discover how to keep themselves entertained.
66. Four female kindergarten teachers and their hilarious lives after the bell rings.
67. An assassin sent back in time struggles with killing Baby Hitler.
68. An Uber ride gone wrong.
69. An Uber driver picks up a hitman.
70. The Angel of Death, in human form, visits its victims.
71. Two people are stuck in an elevator together.
72. Two people are stuck in the rubble of a fallen building and struggle to survive — it's a 9/11 tragic story.
73. An actor goes through a day of auditions and life in Los Angeles.
74. A character finds a magical item in an antique store.
75. A man contemplates suicide and finds an unexpected reason to live.
76. A man tries to become a superhero.
77. A day in the life of a fighter pilot told within the cockpit.
78. A man and woman fall in love over the course of thirty years of chance encounters.
79. A man wins the lottery and does good deeds with the money until it's all gone.
80. A serial killer stalking a victim.
81. A human clone escapes a research facility to find their double.
82. A man discovers their doppelganger.
83. A woman discovers their doppelganger.
84. A child discovers their doppelganger.
85. A carjacker accidentally steals a car full of rascal children.
86. A man returns to his hometown only to discover that no one remembers him.
87. A knight duals with another.
88. A woman wakes up to discover that everyone else on Earth has vanished.
89. A young Sherlock Holmes in middle school solves a mystery.
90. A child wanders off on their big wheel only to be found later that night by a truck driver.
91. A woman awakens on an island and realizes she is the only survivor of a plane crash.
92. Someone wakes up with the ability to hear everyone's thoughts.
93. Someone wakes up with the ability to touch anyone and see when they are going to die.
94. A cowboy encounters a UFO.
95. A sailor encounters a UFO.
96. A reunion between old high school friends goes sour when past issues emerge.
97. A man in an interrogation room confesses.
98. A man stuck in a thankless corporate job one day walks out and goes on a road trip.
99. One day, a woman finally decides to leave her abusive husband.
100. A coming-of-age tale about a middle school boy confronting bullies.
101. A first-time bank robber is forced to take hostages as he instantly regrets his choices.
Share this with your writing peers or anyone that loves a compelling short film. Have some prompts of your own? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter!
Want More Ideas? Take a Look at Our Other Story Prompts!
Ken Miyamoto has worked in the film industry for nearly two decades, most notably as a studio liaison for Sony Studios and then as a script reader and story analyst for Sony Pictures. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 54 | https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/horizon-movie-review-2024 | en | Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 movie review (2024) | [
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] | null | A slow build of intersecting stories that takes so long to get going that Costner doesn’t even appear on screen until an hour in. | en | /assets/fav/apple-touch-icon-57x57-9e12b6d6d15bfb3e86f09c3fc7d58a6f8a2d808cb856df9c1ada23480cda1dae.png | https://www.rogerebert.com/ | https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/horizon-movie-review-2024 | For actor Kevin Costner, the film must surely have been at the forefront of his mind while making his ambitious directorial return—“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1,” a three-hour work attempting to rewrite past wrongs while suffering from the same glut that afflicted the film it most recalls.
“Horizon” isn't trying to subvert the Western, relying on many well-worn tropes. It's also a slow build of intersecting stories that takes so long to get going that Costner doesn’t even appear on screen until an hour in. Instead the first third of “Horizon” is merely a long preamble, a structural decision indicative of a film grinding and failing to prove itself as a standalone feature. The sizzle reel that ends Chapter One, in fact, featuring a library of clips and characters for future movies, does well to tease the kind of high-motoring film we could get but don’t necessarily find here.
Rather, Chapter One limps into 1859 in San Pedro Valley. A family surveying a plot of land by a creek is gruesomely murdered by Apache warriors who are none too happy to find white outsiders on their land. These deaths, however, do little to deter more from coming to the point of settling in a town guarded by armed citizens. At nightfall, during a town dance, the Apache warriors return: the grisly, vicious massacre—backgrounded by rumbling flames and deafening screams—is frankly edited and bluntly composed to the point that it feels as normalized as breathing. A few of the townsfolk survive. Some decide to hunt down their attackers in a bid for revenge. Others like Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail) and her mother Frances (Sienna Miller) leave with the Union Army led by Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) to the relative safety of a fort.
Even with the cataclysmic scenes of death, the first hour does little to endear these characters. They’re disparate people whose connections aren’t immediately clear and only become vaguely obvious toward the picture’s conclusion. Before long, we’re whisked away to the Wyoming Territory and introduced to some brand new characters: Costner finally appears as Hayes Ellison, a horse trader, among many other skills. He befriends local sex worker Marigold (a creaky Abbey Lee), who is hunted by a band of gunmen because of a secret she’s hiding. The series gains a minor pulse once Costner, featuring a gruff, low voice, appears on screen. But even when he does appear, he feels like an afterthought. As though Costner, the filmmaker and writer (he co-wrote the script with Jon Baird), knows how tall of a task he has introducing all of his main players. Consequently, the power of his presence is left limited to the film’s detriment.
The final arc, introduced in the final hour, is the high point: It involves a wagon train making its way with an unlikely cast of characters through the Montana territory. Luke Wilson, the head of this traveling group, is the strongest actor in this cast, too. He is more than a shadow of a Western archetype, imbuing Matthew Van Weyden with a groundedness that the series sorely lacks.
Because as much as Costner tries to play an even hand, attempting to give the Indigenous and settler perspective equal attention, it doesn’t wholly work. Yes, we meet the family of the Apache warriors, but their screen time pales in comparison to their white counterparts. It also doesn’t help that the white women characters are, for the most part, so clean and luminous—nary a speck of dust on them despite their grungy surroundings—that they appear angelic on screen. The score is equally telling: It’s a gorgeous, big, triumphant Old Hollywood score whose most sympathetic notes are reserved for the film’s white characters. Costner does at least include a diverse cast, nodding toward the presence of Black people and Chinese immigrants in the history of the West, tracing across the vast, sumptuously photographed landscape by DP J. Michael Muro.
While “Horizon” teases a kind of conspiracy theory—a mysterious publisher is printing and sending pamphlets promising a land of milk of honey that is only occupied by death—I can’t help but continue to think about the film in relation to “How The West Was Won.” That Western, ultimately, couldn’t overcome the weight of the era it was created in or genre conventions like forced, feeble romances. “Horizon” is arriving in a more “enlightened” time, especially considering the release of Martin Scorsese’s “Killer of the Flower Moon” and other Indigenous-made works, such as “Reservation Dogs,” “Wild Indian,” “The Body Remembers When the World Broken Open,” “Beans,” and more. That presence put even greater pressure on Costner. And so far, he hasn’t completely overcome being the director of “Dances with Wolves.” That filmmaker, for better or for worse, still exists here in every corner of this epic picture.
While the first film in the possible “Horizon” series does well in setting up future pictures, continuing the momentum Costner gained before he left “Yellowstone,” this single film is a chore to sit through. It rarely gives viewers what they want: seeing Costner on the open range. It gives us few memorable characters outside of Costner: I can’t remember the name of a single figure without looking at my notes. It feels like a debilitating mistake to bank on possible future films to land the entire concept. “Horizon” keeps far too many of the best bits far out of reach.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. It opens on June 28th. | ||||
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] | 2022-06-18T09:37:22-04:00 | From Jane Austen adaptations like 'Pride & Prejudice' to love story blockbusters like 'Titanic,' here are EW's 25 best romantic period films. | en | /favicon.ico | EW.com | https://ew.com/movies/best-romantic-period-movies-all-time/ | When it comes to period piece movies, there are a few patterns: Jane Austen, old time-y relationship problems, Emma Thompson, Merchant Ivory productions, or Keira Knightley dramatically storming away from someone. As Helena Bonham Carter once said, "Period movies are my destiny. I should get a few ribs taken out, because I'll be in a corset for the rest of my life."
And the thing is, some combination of these common tropes is probably why you're a fan of romantic period movies in the first place. But the genre exists outside of those themes (and England), too — whether it takes place in 1960s Wyoming or 19th-century China.
So, yes, there's plenty of Austen (Pride & Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma) and some repeat actors on this list, but there's also some more history to explore.
Check out EW's picks for 25 of the best romantic period movies that are sure to make you swoon.
01 of 23
Titanic (1997)
Why not start with a movie that is huge in every way? Titanic is famous for James Cameron's special effects that sent hundreds of passengers realistically hurtling from the side of a giant ship, but it's mainly remembered for the timeless love story between soulful vagabond Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and repressed socialite Rose (Kate Winslet). After all, it was their whirlwind romance that forever changed how we look at fogged-up windows. And floating doors. And drawing.
Where to watch Titanic: Paramount+
02 of 23
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
Before any Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle stans get up in arms, remember: This is a movies-only list. So, 2005's Pride & Prejudice is the clear favorite to represent Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel. This adaptation from Joe Wright stars Keira Knightley as the ever-defiant Elizabeth Bennet and Matthew Macfayden as the moody Mr. Darcy. Period drama enthusiasts will be interested to know that Wright set the movie in the late-18th century instead of the early-19th century in part because of his hatred of empire waist dresses.
Where to watch Pride & Prejudice: Peacock
03 of 23
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
It wouldn't be a period movies list without Emma Thompson, and this won't be the last you see of her here. Thompson wrote and starred in Sense and Sensibility, which was directed by Ang Lee (it won't be the last you see of him, either). The film tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor (Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet), as they deal with 19th-century-style relationship issues involving Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), and John Willoughby (Greg Wise). Many credit this essential dowry drama for launching Austen adaptations into the mainstream, and we're all forever in debt.
Where to watch Sense and Sensibility: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
04 of 23
A Room With a View (1986)
Here's another period piece theme: Merchant Ivory movies. The first one on our list directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant is A Room With a View. The 1986 film stars Helena Bonham Carter as the young Lucy Honeychurch, who visits Florence with her older cousin (Maggie Smith) and meets an array of fellow guests at their hotel. Of course, this includes an intriguing romantic interest played by Julian Sands, plus plenty of kissing in open fields.
Where to watch A Room With a View: Max
05 of 23
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
In Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Noémie Merlant plays an artist who is sent to paint a wedding portrait for a woman (Adèle Haenel) who does not want to enter an arranged marriage. The eerie, sensual French film was described by EW's critic as "an 18th-century lesbian love story set almost entirely within the windswept parameters of a remote seaside villa, with reams of meditative dialogue and almost no male roles to speak of." Consider us sold.
Where to watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire: Hulu
06 of 23
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Period pieces aren't all corsets and European history. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a wuxia movie and a love story between skilled warriors Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat). Bai entrusts his machete-wielding lover to transport his treasured sword, Green Destiny, but when she's robbed of the precious artifact, their relationship is pushed to the limit in this action-packed adventure. As Lee put it himself, "Sense and Sensibility, but with kick-ass."
Where to watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
07 of 23
Belle (2014)
Amma Asante's Belle is based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle, a multiracial woman who was brought up in the British aristocracy in the 1700s. While not much is known about the real Belle's life, the film (starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw) explores the prejudice she faces in high society, her romance with law student John Davinier (Sam Reid), and her ties to the abolitionist cause. "Belle is like a Jane Austen novel spiked with an extra shot of social conscience," EW's critic writes. "...[It] subtly skewers the absurd rules and hypocrisies of class."
Where to watch Belle: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
08 of 23
The Notebook (2004)
Moving things forward a couple of centuries, there's the romance to end all romances: The Notebook. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (who, by the way, hated each other at first) star as couple Noah and Allie, who begin a tumultuous relationship in the 1940s before the two are separated by World War II, though that's far from the end of their love story. The older versions of their characters are played to a full-on sobbing effect by James Garner and Gena Rowlands.
Where to watch The Notebook: Max
09 of 23
My Fair Lady (1964)
Based on the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison star in the classic musical My Fair Lady as Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. You know the story: She's a woman living in poverty and selling flowers; he's a wealthy professor who bets he can make her into a high-society lady. Romance ensues, obviously.
Where to watch My Fair Lady: Paramount+
10 of 23
Atonement (2007)
Another Keira Knightley–Joe Wright collab, Atonement stars Knightley as a wealthy woman, Cecilia, who falls in love with Robbie (James McAvoy), a worker on her family's property. But their romance is thwarted thanks to the accusations brought forth by her younger sister, Briony (a 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan). Beginning in the 1930s, the movie shows Briony's decades-long attempt to atone for her grievances, with older versions of her character played by Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave.
Where to watch Atonement: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
11 of 23
Little Women (1994 or 2019)
Gillian Armstrong's 1994 version or Greta Gerwig's 2019 version — your choice. Both adaptations of Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women feature touching meditations on sisterhood, as well as the complicated 19th-century romance between writer Jo March and boy-next-door Laurie. You just have to decide if you're more of a Winona Ryder and Christian Bale person or a Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet fan.
Where to watch Little Women (1994): Paramount+ With Showtime
Where to watch Little Women (2019): Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
12 of 23
Emma (1996 or 2020)
What goes around comes around...even if it first came around in 1815. Jane Austen's novel Emma was adapted in 1996 with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role, and again in 2020 starring Anya Taylor-Joy. In both cases, the story is about a wealthy young woman who plays matchmaker for the people in her life while facing romantic woes of her own. The book also inspired Clueless, which is more of a time capsule of 1995 than a period piece.
Where to watch Emma (1996): Paramount+ With Showtime
Where to watch Emma. (2020): Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
13 of 23
Romeo and Juliet (1968)
It would simply feel wrong not to include the most famous romantic tale of all time. The Franco Zeffirelli version of Romeo and Juliet is a classic — maybe you watched it in school at some point? — and stars Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in the title roles. (Honorable mention to 1996's Romeo + Juliet, which doesn't quite qualify as a period piece despite its Shakespearean dialogue.)
Where to watch Romeo and Juliet: Paramount+ With Showtime
14 of 23
Howards End (1992)
It all comes together with this one as period piece regulars Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter star in Howards End from Merchant Ivory Productions. The actresses play sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who become involved in the lives of the wealthy Wilcox family as they navigate relationships and the new ownership of a country estate called — you guessed it — Howards End.
Where to watch Howards End: Tubi
15 of 23
Carol (2015)
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett star in Carol, which follows Therese (Mara), a young department store worker who begins seeing the titular older woman (Blanchett) in the early-1950s. Their affair is complicated by their other relationships with men, Carol's custody battle for her daughter, and the intolerance of their time period.
Where to watch Carol: Netflix
16 of 23
The English Patient (1996)
Though Seinfeld's Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) didn't like it, the WWII epic The English Patient was a huge hit when it came out in 1996. The film by Anthony Minghella tells the story of a man (Ralph Fiennes) who has been badly burned and cannot remember his identity. As his memories trickle in, he recounts details of a past love affair to his nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), through a series of tender flashbacks.
Where to watch The English Patient: Paramount+ With Showtime
17 of 23
Loving (2016)
Loving tells the story of Mildred and Richard Loving who, following two arrests, won the 1967 landmark Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage. While the film does focus on the lawsuit, their defiant love is at the center of the narrative, thanks in part to the stellar performances by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton.
Where to watch Loving: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
18 of 23
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
Sure, there is some controversy surrounding Shakespeare in Love's enthusiastic Oscars campaign, but that doesn't mean it's not an acclaimed romantic period movie. (It just maybe wouldn't have won quite so many awards...) Either way, the film stars Joseph Fiennes as William Shakespeare in a (fictional) affair with a merchant's daughter, Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow). It's set during the time he wrote Romeo and Juliet, and indulges in more than a few literary parallels.
Where to watch Shakespeare in Love: Max
19 of 23
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Set between 1963 and 1983, Brokeback Mountain is the most modern period romance listed here, but it certainly still counts. The film stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two Wyoming cowboys who fall in love on a ranching trip before going their separate ways and marrying women (Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway). But their love affair is far from over.
Where to watch Brokeback Mountain: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
20 of 23
The Sound of Music (1965)
There's so much going on in The Sound of Music — catchy songs, rambunctious children, day-saving nuns, and a World War — that the romantic aspect moves down the list of things that come to mind. But the love between a strict naval officer (Christopher Plummer) and his carefree governess (Julie Andrews) is at the center of the story. What more is there to say? It's only been regularly airing on TV for the past several decades...
Where to watch The Sound of Music: Disney+
21 of 23
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)
Barry Jenkins' lyrical adaptation of James Baldwin's novel is a swoon-worthy yet urgent expression of love during trying times. Set in '70s New York, the film follows Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), a couple whose lives are disrupted when Fonny is wrongfully arrested, leading Tish to fight to prove his innocence.
Where to watch If Beale Street Could Talk: Amazon Prime Video
22 of 23
The Age of Innocence (1993)
Daniel Day-Lewis stars as a respected lawyer in 1870s New York who falls in love with his fiancée May's (Winona Ryder) cousin Ellen (Michelle Pfeiffer) in this absorbing period drama. While Martin Scorsese may seem an unlikely person to direct this adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel of the same name, the casual cruelty expressed in the ensuing love triangle is such that the director once called The Age of Innocence his most violent movie.
Where to watch The Age of Innocence: Amazon Prime Video (to rent)
23 of 23
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
No period romance has ever been quite so "spectacular, spectacular!" Set in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, Moulin Rouge! follows idealistic writer Christian (Ewan McGregor) and courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) as they express their doomed romance through modern pop songs against the backdrop of the famed titular windmill-roofed cabaret.
Where to watch Moulin Rouge!: Amazon Prime Video (to rent) | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 42 | https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/01/22/essay-films-man-ray-mysterious-encounters-realities-and-dreams/ | en | The Films of Man Ray: Mysterious Encounters of Realities and Dreams | [
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] | null | [] | 2020-01-22T00:00:00 | Timothy Baum muses on Man Ray’s foray into filmmaking in the 1920s, the subject of the exhibition Man Ray: The Mysteries of Château du Dé at Gagosian, San Francisco. | en | /image/gagosian-next.ico | Gagosian | https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/01/22/essay-films-man-ray-mysterious-encounters-realities-and-dreams/ | I sat up late last night munching on tasty squares of 90% cocoa dark chocolate and reading the “Dada Films and Surrealism” chapter of Man Ray’s splendid and informative 1963 autobiography Self Portrait. The squares of chocolate that I consumed are obviously irrelevant to this text, except that they helped keep me awake during the very relevant reading of Man Ray’s intimate account of the circumstances, techniques, and vague reasons as to why he elected in the 1920s, in endlessly inspirational Paris and other parts of France, to try his hand at making films.
After reading his recollections of his filmmaking days, my own memories of my experiences of the work of this masterful, eloquent (and particularly versatile!) artist and personality—many of which I shared with him personally—reawakened quite lucidly and journeyed instantaneously from the recesses of my mind to the fore, and suddenly I was ready to address this exciting subject—the early silent, very low-budget black-and-white films of Man Ray—and to share it with you. So here’s what I remember (fortified by seeing the films in question for the first time in years only a scant couple of weeks ago).
I am writing this text to accompany, and hopefully elucidate, the exhibition of the same subject (the 1920s films by Man Ray) at Gagosian, San Francisco. In this exhibition, three of the four films the artist made during that period (excluding the first one, a hastily improvised 3-minute sequence of rayograph-like images, titled Le retour à la raison, made in 1923) are presented, accompanied by vintage still photographs and an array of objects that correspond to the contents of the films.
Chronologically, the first more complete and comprehensive film is Emak Bakia, which was made in the summer of 1926. The film was sponsored by a wealthy retired (but not uninspired) American expatriate stockbroker named Wheeler, who, excited by the portraits Man Ray had made of his beloved wife, invited the artist to vacation at his villa in the French Basque region, near Biarritz, and perhaps to bring along his movie camera and make some sort of film that the businessman would back. Man Ray found the invitation sufficiently enticing and took him up on the offer. The result of this was Emak Bakia, which, edited, runs 22 minutes (the title derives from the name of the Wheelers’ rented villa).
Emak Bakia (subtitled “Cinépoème”) is a combination of a succession of cleverly interspersed images (an eye reflected in the camera’s lens; leaves; a field of flowers; fluttering carpenter nails; lights; spirals and other abstracted shapes; an opening and closing eye; a lady—Mr. Wheeler’s beloved wife—in her elegant motorcar; a sheepfold in its fullest density; a girl dancing the Charleston; a man playing the banjo; the cross-dressing circus performer Barbette at a dressing table; waves flowing gently onto a beach; fish swimming idly about; the artist’s object titled Fisherman’s Idol, composed of cork fishing-net floats; a cutout of a jumping male figure; the top of a violin; some undotted dice; another succession of sundry floating objects), all of which are followed by a very specific cinematic story sequence of a handsome and well-groomed man (portrayed by the former Dada-period dandy and playboy Jacques Rigaut), who appears in a room with a small leather case that when opened reveals a dozen or so celluloid collars that magically arise and fly about the room and then, one by one, disappear entirely. This scene is followed by another brief sequence of unrelated floating objects, and then by the sudden appearance of Man Ray’s muse and lover of that time, the then greatly celebrated Kiki de Montparnasse, opening and closing her eyes, the lids of which have been painted with a second pair of eyes, creating a most unexpected Surrealist effect. This enchanting little moment ends abruptly with the appearance, in capital letters, of the word FIN, and with that, the film comes to an end.
The next film, made in 1928, is the only one of the period that adheres to a vague story line. Bearing the title L’étoile de mer (The Starfish), it also has a running time of barely 20 minutes. For this film, Man Ray used as his guide a poem he had heard read by its author, the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, and in which he delighted. With Desnos’s permission, he decided to re-create the poem as a film. The (happily disjointed) story sequence, as much a dream as a story, is as follows: A man and a woman, obscured in a disquieting fog-like haze, are walking along a road (the woman is portrayed, as in the previous film, by Kiki de Montparnasse; the man by a non-actor acquaintance of Man Ray who lived in the same building as Desnos, and who probably was never seen in another film again). The two enter a building, climb a staircase to the first floor, and enter a small room containing a single narrow bed (or cot?). Immediately, the woman quite sensually but nonchalantly undresses, observed by her fully dressed gentleman companion. She then lies down upon the bed in an uncontestedly seductive way, and the man turns on his heel and departs. The scene fades out, and the word Adieu appears shakily on the screen.
The next scene is set in a street of factory-like edifices, in which a lone figure, again Kiki de Montparnasse, is standing (perhaps as a vendor?) alongside a tall pile of newspapers. Atop the papers rests a jar containing a single starfish. The man from the previous scene appears, and he greets the lady. They bend over to critically examine the starfish. The man lifts up the jar, and the newspapers, caught up in the wind, blow about all over the street. He runs madly about trying to regather all the newspaper sheets, but in the end only retains a single page, which he commences to read. The scene shifts quite abruptly to a brief tableau of the lady (apparently in an altogether different place) caressing the young man’s head.
Now a complete shift occurs, and we observe a view of a city silhouetted in a thick, fog-like mist. This is quickly supplanted by an image of several jars containing starfish, all revolving slowly about. Next we see a still-life composite of wine bottles, bananas, and other disparate objects, which is immediately followed by a totally separate view of Kiki seated on the cot again, this time with her bare foot resting atop an open book, with a starfish (also on the floor) alongside.
We next encounter Kiki walking along a road once again, where she is soon joined by her original male companion. A close-up reveals that Kiki is wearing a mask. The film cuts to the man standing by himself, studying a tracing in dark ink of the lines on the palms of his hands. Kiki (in a succeeding shot) reappears ascending the inner staircase once again. On one of the steps a starfish has settled. Once upstairs, Kiki is seen with a dagger in her hand, superimposed with the floating starfish.
At this point, the film cuts to a view of a vast array of stars in the dark night sky, then to a nocturnal view of trees by a river. Next we see Kiki seated by a burning fire, then a text reading belle comme une fleur de verre. This is succeeded by a frame showing her attired like a warrior: in a sheet, helmet, and staff. Then we see a close-up image of flames. After this, we gain a glimpse of the earlier factory-lined street; then we see Kiki asleep (was this all but a dream?).
Finally we return to the original road where we first encountered the man and woman walking together. Again Kiki encounters the man, and this time they stop and shake hands. They chat for a moment, and then are joined by another man, played by Desnos. Kiki turns her back on her original suitor and walks away with the new arrival.
The film ends with a cut to the jilted man, all alone, regarding the jar with the starfish inside. There is a second, very brief transition to Kiki, looking through a piece of glass, which subsequently shatters. This is followed very simply by the projection of two final words: the end.
This now brings us to the final May Ray film of the 1920s, the silent, black-and-white Les mystères du Château du Dé, with which the artist closed out the decade and, additionally, his brief and intentionally abandoned early filmmaking career, in the winter of 1929. This is a film neither intended nor initiated by Man Ray in any way. It reflects entirely the whimsical notion of the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, a blue-blooded aristocrat, who, alongside his wife, Marie-Laure, was an inveterate patron of the arts. The Vicomte enjoyed taking a midwinter break from what Man Ray referred to as “the rigors of the Paris climate,” and elected to descend to his domain (created by one of the most trendy architects of that era, Robert Mallet-Stevens) in the South of France.
Noailles’s idea for the film project was for Man Ray to join him and a group of his friends at his compound (a cluster of cube-shaped and rectangular buildings) and make an informal film of his property (inside and out), with the participation of his guests, as a form of divertissement. He also explained that this was to be a totally noncommercial venture, but that the artist would be compensated for his time and his expenses. Man Ray, respectful of the Vicomte, agreed to join him in the project.
For me personally, the success of this film is less aesthetic than as a valid period piece, chronicling the frivolous lifestyles of privileged families at that time (ironically just a few months before the demise of the world’s economy resulting from the calamitous Wall Street crash that would occur later that year). The only story line is that two men in a Parisian café roll a pair of dice and, when the number comes up affirmatively, go out to their car and drive away. The succeeding drive—which eventually lands them in the South of France—is sparsely recorded, showing a few bare changes of landscape along the way. Finally, the travelers arrive at their presumed destination: a cluster of houses meant to serve as a modern château. The men drive up the hill atop which the edifices stand, and enter the surrounding walls through a portal of some sort (at no point that I recall are these two travelers ever identified).
We next see, via Man Ray and his assistant’s cameras, the château itself. Great emphasis is placed on the corridors and public halls. Beyond that, the more eccentric spaces are highlighted: the indoor swimming pool and its lounging areas; the gymnasium, with its elaborate array of diversional equipment; and so on. The spaces fill up with people—the actual guests visiting the château at that time. All sorts of frivolous activity ensues in and around the pool and its surrounding area, and in the gymnasium, with all of its paraphernalia. Sometimes the guests are in costume, variously sporting masks that can conceal their identities. Nothing intimate ever occurs, and no exotic dining scenes or glimpses of any sleeping rooms are ever presented. At different times, dice of varying sizes are thrown; presumably to decide what actions would be taken according to their positive or negative outcomes. Aside from the sequences of guests cavorting, nothing really happens. Toward the end of the film, a woman and a man (the Comte de Beaumont, assuredly one of the more estimable of the guests) ascend the same hill as the unidentified duo who arrived at the beginning of the film, and, finding some oversize dice there, kick them around for a short bit of time before reverting to performing a brief session of other gyrational exercises. It is possible that this couple metamorphose into statues of stone—that, I don’t clearly remember. The final shot shows the oversize dice displayed in an articulated hand. This is followed by the word FIN, and so does this disjointed film end. The theme of the dice (and the suggestion of chance, as conjured by the outcome of the rolling of them) was evidently inspired by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé.
I suppose that because this film was created to fulfill a whim of the Vicomte de Noailles, and simply as a diversion for his friends, it does not have to be judged as a success or a failure. Luckily, the other two films mentioned previously—Emak Bakia and L’étoile de mer, pay ample tribute to the incontestable ingenuity and cleverness of their creator, Man Ray. Because of the artist’s variety of talents as painter, photographer, and renderer of unforgettable, ingenious objects, he really had no need to reenter the arena of filmmaking again.
December 30, 2019
New York City | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 17 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/03/09/a-psychologist-explains-why-pretty-privilege-only-gets-you-so-far/ | en | A Psychologist Explains Why ‘Pretty Privilege’ Only Gets You So Far | [
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"Beauty premium",
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"Beauty is fickle",
"Strong nonverbal presence",
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"Mark Travers"
] | 2024-03-09T00:00:00 | Here’s why coveted good looks don’t hold as much value as we think. | en | Forbes | https://www.forbes.com/sites/traversmark/2024/03/09/a-psychologist-explains-why-pretty-privilege-only-gets-you-so-far/ | The societal obsession with appearances can make us believe that being physically attractive is crucial to getting ahead in life. This is called “pretty privilege,” also known as the beauty premium, which refers to the benefits that individuals deemed conventionally attractive receive in various aspects of life, such as in employment spaces and social interactions.
However, society seems to be waking up to the fact that beauty privileges are often a double-edged sword.
Beauty premium biases seem to have a varied impact on different individuals. A 2017 study published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences concluded that attractive women and opposite-sex interactions benefit more from beauty biases than attractive men or same-sex interactions.
Moreover, not all domains of one’s life benefit from physical attractiveness. It appears that, in many cases, individual characteristics and contextual factors matter more.
Here are three reasons why physical attractiveness often has contradictory effects on a person’s life.
1. Beauty Is A Fickle Friend
Physical appearance can impact an individual’s financial compensation. The beauty premium dictates that attractive individuals have a systemic advantage and therefore will earn more than their less conventionally attractive counterparts.
However, research from a comprehensive survey conducted over a 13-year period has poked holes in this notion. The study concluded that unattractive individuals earned more than traditionally attractive people. Individuals’ higher earnings were influenced more by their health, intelligence, conscientiousness and extraversion than by their level of attractiveness. This indicates that while good-looking people might have an upper-hand at the selection stage, staying and making an impact is still a matter of hard skill and knowledge.
Additionally, preferred attractiveness levels seem to vary according to one’s career. For instance, a 2020 study assessed the influence of professionals’ attractiveness on the public’s willingness to buy tickets for their speeches.
Audiences preferred to pay more for presentations by attractive speakers from business and social science backgrounds but preferred less attractive speakers from the natural sciences. This is an interesting example of how one’s perceived professional prowess is a product of multiple biases, not just the beauty bias.
While attractiveness does impact monetary compensation, an individual’s unique characteristics, personality traits and career choices exert a stronger influence. Simply put, the beauty premium seems to fade in the face of individuality.
2. There Is No Such Thing As Objective Beauty
The perceived skills possessed by individuals seem to be unaffected by their attractiveness. A 2019 study found that during service encounters, service representatives’ physical attractiveness did not impact customers’ perceptions of their abilities at work.
Researchers found that people’s satisfaction with and liking for service professionals was influenced by subjective perceptions of their own and others’ attractiveness. Customers tend to compare themselves with attractive people and establish social distance based on the conclusions they draw. Upon finding an attractive individual similar to themselves, the customers might perceive a closer social bond of belongingness. On the other hand, if individuals find a greater social distance based on the differences between their own and others’ attractiveness, they might respond to them with prudence.
Additionally, research has attributed the successful careers of attractive individuals to the way they socialize, which often sets them apart. They exhibit a stronger sense of power and nonverbal presence which tends to increase management’s faith in their abilities.
The effects of the beauty premium could possibly be attenuated by enhancing one’s confidence, no matter what one looks like. For example, one can adopt a powerful posture to enhance their nonverbal presence and command attention. Exhibiting subject matter expertise, a strong command over one’s language and a collaborative spirit could also help one level out the playing field.
3. Beauty Does Not Guarantee Love
Physical attractiveness appears to have a damaging impact on the longevity of romantic relationships. Research conducted by psychologists at Harvard University found that attractive people were less likely to maintain long-term relationships. After assessing the relationships of attractive people and celebrities, they concluded that divorce rates were higher among attractive individuals.
Despite being in committed relationships, attractive individuals show more interest in alternative partners. Their attention towards attractive others increases if they feel dissatisfied with their current relationship.
Additionally, attractiveness offers a higher number of “potential options” which heightens the risk of comparison and dissatisfaction in one’s current relationship. Unfortunately, the perks of being beautiful cannot repair a struggling relationship.
Although the beauty premium offers significant advantages to attractive individuals, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Interestingly, focusing on cultivating valuable skills and tapping into one’s unique personality can have a highly positive influence on public perception and opportunities.
The contradictory effects of the beauty premium highlights the importance of cultivating authenticity and inclusivity no matter your level of “objective” attractiveness. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 15 | https://medium.com/%40jeffhaywardwriting/why-are-beautiful-people-always-cast-in-television-and-film-ec378e3b8413 | en | Why Are Beautiful People Always Cast in Television and Film? | https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*kSAN6Ya3ZM2ZC6UO | https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*kSAN6Ya3ZM2ZC6UO | [
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"Jeff Hayward",
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] | 2022-08-11T14:29:57.334000+00:00 | In this age of challenging what’s considered beautiful, most of us still gravitate to television shows and movies that feature gorgeous people. I get it — pretty people sell streaming… | en | https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19 | Medium | https://medium.com/@jeffhaywardwriting/why-are-beautiful-people-always-cast-in-television-and-film-ec378e3b8413 | In this age of challenging what’s considered beautiful, most of us still gravitate to television shows and movies that feature gorgeous people. I get it — pretty people sell streaming subscriptions/movie passes. But is this long-standing trend in Hollywood hurting people’s self-image, and maybe even the shows themselves?
We constantly obsess over the hottest new stars, what they’re wearing, and what they’re up to. However, is seeing beautiful people on screen a healthy escape from everyday life? Or is it actually bringing viewers down (women especially) by comparison, leading to issues such as eating disorders and dysmorphia?
While yes — many of the actors/actresses we see are physically beautiful — they have entire teams to make sure of it. It is not a reflection of the everyday person. (Unless you happen to have make-up, and wardrobe, and lighting crews following you around.)
Most top shows feature beautiful people | ||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 49 | https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movies | en | Movie Reviews | https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movie review, New York movies, NY movies, Brooklyn movies, Manhattan movies search | https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movie review, New York movies, NY movies, Brooklyn movies, Manhattan movies search | [
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"movie review",
"New York movies",
"NY movies",
"Brooklyn movies",
"Manhattan movies search"
] | null | [
"Alissa Wilkinson",
"Glenn Kenny",
"Ben Kenigsberg",
"Jeannette Catsoulis",
"Amy Nicholson",
"Manohla Dargis",
"Beandrea July",
"Chris Azzopardi",
"Beatrice Loayza",
"Natalia Winkelman"
] | 2024-08-15T00:00:00 | Our film critics on blockbusters, independents and everything in between. | en | /vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico | https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movies | Red Island
Not Rated
Drama
Directed by Robin Campillo
Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.
By Manohla Dargis
The Good Half
Not Rated
Comedy, Drama
Directed by Robert Schwartzman
Nick Jonas and Brittany Snow play siblings coordinating funeral logistics for their mom in this drama, a cross between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie.
By Natalia Winkelman
In the Rearview
NYT Critic’s Pick
Not Rated
Documentary
Directed by Maciek Hamela
Maciek Hamela’s documentary offers a compelling perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the stories of people fleeing the country in a van.
By Nicolas Rapold
The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe
Not Rated
Animation, Comedy
Directed by Vaughan Blakey, Nick Pollet
A mix of too much lousy animation and too little wave-riding footage.
By Glenn Kenny
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
Not Rated
Drama, History, Mystery
Directed by Tinto Brass
With the belief that a masterpiece lurks within the mangled original 1980 release, Thomas Negovan has patched together a new version (with less skin) from the Penthouse archive.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
Alien: Romulus
R
Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Directed by Fede Alvarez
The seventh installment of the series centers on Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a contract worker in an outer-space mining colony, and her friend Andy (David Jonsson), an android.
By Manohla Dargis
It Ends with Us
PG-13
Drama, Romance
Directed by Justin Baldoni
Blake Lively plays Lily Bloom, a flower lover with a thorny personal garden, in this gauzy adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel.
By Manohla Dargis
Girl You Know It’s True
Not Rated
Biography, Drama, Music
Directed by Simon Verhoeven
This film, based on the lives of the duo who lip-synced their way to stardom and downfall, fills in many of the details behind the facade.
By Glenn Kenny
Dance First
Not Rated
Biography, Drama
Directed by James Marsh
Samuel Beckett’s life is reduced to mommy and daddy issues in a biopic that offers simple explanations for the career of a complex writer.
By Ben Kenigsberg
Good One
NYT Critic’s Pick
R
Drama
Directed by India Donaldson
Lily Collias delivers an extraordinary lead performance in this exquisite debut feature about a camping trip and a moment of self-realization.
By Alissa Wilkinson
Cuckoo
NYT Critic’s Pick
R
Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Directed by Tilman Singer
Dan Stevens and Hunter Schafer face off in this unexpectedly fun and undeniably nutty horror-comedy about cross-species pollination.
By Jeannette Catsoulis
Borderlands
PG-13
Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Directed by Eli Roth
In Eli Roth’s caper movie, based on the best-selling video game franchise, Cate Blanchett plays a bounty hunter who is tasked with finding a tycoon’s daughter.
By Amy Nicholson
Trap
PG-13
Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Josh Hartnett stars as a father with a secret in this M. Night Shyamalan film set at a concert.
By Amy Nicholson
Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
Not Rated
Documentary
Directed by Nanette Burstein
The documentary blends audio interviews with footage from her life to provide a revealing look not so much at the actress, but at celebrity culture.
By Alissa Wilkinson
War Game
NYT Critic’s Pick
Not Rated
Thriller
Directed by Tony Gerber, Jesse Moss
This nail-biter of a documentary imagines it is Jan. 6, 2025, and armed supporters of the losing candidate are hatching a coup and maybe a civil war. What will the nation’s leaders do?
By Manohla Dargis
Rob Peace
R
Biography, Drama
Directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor
The actor Chiwetel Ejiofor directs a cohesive ensemble — featuring Mary J. Blige, Michael Kelly, Mare Winningham, Camila Cabello and Jay Will — in a heart-wrenching tale based on a true story.
By Beandrea July
Sebastian
Not Rated
Drama
Directed by Mikko Mäkelä
For inspiration, a writer moonlights as an escort in this drama from Mikko Makela.
By Chris Azzopardi
Peak Season
Not Rated
Comedy, Drama, Romance
Directed by Steven Kanter, Henry Loevner
In this modest second feature, a disillusioned business-school graduate, taking a breather in high-altitude Wyoming, meets a rugged fly-fishing instructor.
By Ben Kenigsberg
Kneecap
R
Comedy, Drama
Directed by Rich Peppiatt
Members of the pioneering Irish-language rap group play versions of themselves in a gleefully chaotic film that casts them as tall-tale heroes.
By Beatrice Loayza
Harold and the Purple Crayon
PG
Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy
Directed by Carlos Saldanha
Harold is an adult on a quest in this tale based on the beloved children’s book by Crockett Johnson.
By Glenn Kenny
Coup!
Not Rated
Comedy, Thriller
Directed by Joseph Schuman, Austin Stark
In this obvious satire set amid the 1918 influenza, a wealthy, muckraking reporter hires a new chef who disrupts the estate’s hierarchy.
By Natalia Winkelman
Swan Song
Not Rated
Documentary
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
The film follows a National Ballet of Canada production of “Swan Lake” as dancers and others deal with long-simmering issues of racism and sexism.
By Alissa Wilkinson
Dìdi
NYT Critic’s Pick
R
Comedy, Drama
Directed by Sean Wang
A vibrant coming-of-age story about an awkward teenager in California in 2008 is also a love letter to the director’s mother.
By Alissa Wilkinson | |||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 6 | https://therepproject.org/films/miss-representation/ | en | The Representation Project | [
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] | null | [] | 2020-05-14T18:06:29+00:00 | Miss Representation exposes how mainstream media and culture contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America. | en | The Representation Project | https://therepproject.org/films/miss-representation/ | MISS REPRESENTATION
Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Miss Representation exposes how mainstream media and culture contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America.
The film draws back a curtain to reveal a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see – how the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls makes it difficult for women to feel powerful and achieve leadership positions.
In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message we receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is 75th among 193 countries when it comes to women in the national legislature. And it’s not better outside of government. Women make up only 7.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 21% of directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.
Stories from teenage girls and provocative interviews with politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists, and academics, like Katie Couric, Rosario Dawson, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Cho, Condoleezza Rice, Rachel Maddow, and Nancy Pelosi, build momentum as Miss Representation accumulates startling facts and statistics that will leave the audience shaken, but armed with a new perspective.
BRING MISS REPRESENTATION INTO YOUR CLASSROOM, NONPROFIT OR CORPORATION
For schools, nonprofits, community organizations and corporations, learn more about our screening licenses available HERE.
Classroom Screening License: $49
Campus-wide Screening License: $99
Nonprofit Screening License: $295
Corporate Screening License: More info HERE
In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the message that young women and men overwhelmingly face is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in her capacity as a leader. Help challenge this status quo by hosting a screening of Miss Representation. With the right screening resources, you can arrange a screening in a few easy steps. Total Running Time: 1h 25m
THE ISSUE
The media is selling the idea that girls’ and women’s value lies in their youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders. Boys learn that their success is tied to dominance, power, and aggression. We must value people as whole human beings, not gendered stereotypes.
WHAT OUR VIEWERS SAY
RATINGS | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 50 | https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/ | en | The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines | [] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles. | en | favicon-32x32.png | The Pudding | https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/index.html | The Pudding
Film Dialogue
from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age
Lately, Hollywood has been taking so much shit for rampant sexism and racism. The prevailing theme: white men dominate movie roles.
But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?
We didn’t set out trying to prove anything, but rather compile real data. We framed it as a census rather than a study. So we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.
Let’s begin by examining dialogue, by gender, for just Disney films.
*Domestic gross over $45M, inflation-adjusted. Using IMDB box office, 2,500 have hit this threshold.
All Genres
Action
Drama
Comedy
Horror
Search
Screenplay Dialogue, Broken-down by Gender
2,000 Screenplays: Dialogue Broken-down by Gender
Only High-Grossing Films: Ranked in the Top 2,500 by US Box Office*
In January 2016, researchers reported that men speak more often than women in Disney’s princess films. We validated this claim and doubled the sample size to 30 Disney films, including Pixar. The results: 22 of 30 Disney films have a male majority of dialogue. Even films with female leads, such as Mulan, the dialogue swings male. Mushu, her protector dragon, has 50% more words of dialogue than Mulan herself.
This dataset isn’t perfect. As with Mulan, a plot can center around a character, even though the dialogue doesn’t reflect it. And all of our data is based on screenplays, not a perfect transcription of a film.
Methodology
For each screenplay, we mapped characters with at least 100 words of dialogue to a person’s IMDB page (which identifies people as an actor or actress). We did this because minor characters are poorly labeled on IMDB pages. This has unintended consequences: Schindler’s List, for example, has women with lines, just not over this threshold. Which means a more accurate result would be 99.5% male dialogue instead of our result of 100%. There are other problems with this approach as well: films change quite a bit from script to screen. Directors cut lines. They cut characters. They add characters. They change character names. They cast a different gender for a character. We believe the results are still directionally accurate, but individual films will definitely have errors.
2,000 Screenplays: Dialogue Broken-down by Gender
All Genres
Action
Drama
Comedy
Horror
Search
Each screenplay has at least 90% of its lines categorized by gender. If you notice a missing character from the analysis, their lines may be in the remaining 10%. If a character was cut from the film but is present in the screenplay, we inferred his or her gender based on the script’s pronouns.
Across thousands of films in our dataset, it was hard to find a subset that didn’t over-index male. Even romantic comedies have dialogue that is, on average, 58% male. For example, Pretty Woman and 10 Things I Hate About You both have lead women (i.e., characters with the most amount of dialogue). But the overall dialogue for both films is 52% male, due to the number of male supporting characters.
How many screenplays have women as lead characters?
In 22% of our films, actresses had the most amount of dialogue (i.e., they were the lead). Women are more likely to be in the second place for most amount of dialogue, which occurs in 34% of films. The most abysmal stat is when women occupy at least 2 of the top 3 roles in a film, which occurs in 18% of our films. That same scenario for men occurs in about 82% of films.
Aging out of Hollywood: Men vs. Women
For each film, we also determined the age of each cast member at the time of its release. This allowed us to quantify whether there is a bias toward younger women in Hollywood (or conversely, whether men enjoy a longer career).
Percent of Dialogue by Actors’ Age
Among 2,000 Screenplays, all genres, all years
The amount of dialogue, by age-range, is completely opposite for women versus men. Dialogue available to women who are over 40 years old decrease substantially. For men, it’s the exact opposite: there are more roles available to older actors.
Here’s another look at the same data, but for every age:
Why we made this
This project was born out of the less-than-stellar response to our analysis of films that fail the Bechdel Test. Commenters were quick to point out that the Bechdel Test is flawed and there are justifiable reasons for films to fail (e.g., they are historic). By measuring dialogue, we have much more objective view of gender in film.
Many of readers are drawing conclusions that were anecdotally obvious to women in the film industry. But nobody wanted to do the grunt work of gathering the data. We spent weeks just matching scripts to IMDB pages. It’s still not perfect, but we’re now in a much better place than “you know...women are never love-interests when they’re older than 40. ¯\_(ã)_/¯”
All of our sources are available in this Google Doc and as much data as we can share (without getting sued) is available here on Github. Here's an FAQ that addresses concerns about the methodology and data. Or if you don’t know how to code, here’s an easy way to comb through every film, genre, and year.
All Genres
Action
Drama
Comedy
Horror
All Years
2010s
2000s
1990s
1980s
embed this chart on your site
FILMS MATCHING YOUR CRITERIA | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 46 | https://www.thewrap.com/groundhog-day-movies-repeat-same-day-over/ | en | ‘Groundhog Day’ and 14 Other Movies That Repeat the Same Day Over and Over | [
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] | 2024-02-02T14:32:00+00:00 | Groundhog Day isn't the only movie to feature characters trapped in a time loop. We run down 14 other films that have a similar plot. | en | TheWrap | https://www.thewrap.com/groundhog-day-movies-repeat-same-day-over/ | “12:01” (1993) • The short story on which “12:01” is based actually pre-dates “Groundhog Day” by nearly 20 years. It’s about a man caught reliving the worst day of his life when his wife is shot and killed. After receiving an electrical shock at midnight, he relives the previous day and finds that things get worse.
“Run Lola Run” (1998) • Tom Tykwer’s action classic takes the time looping premise and turns it into a kinetic, real-time thrill ride. The title character Lola goes on a 20-minute dash as repeated several times, with each time depicting slight changes in the story that invoke ideas about parallel realities and moral choice.
“50 First Dates” (2004) • Leave it to Adam Sandler to make another rom-com aping a “Groundhog Day” premise. In this one, Drew Barrymore only thinks she’s living the same day over and over because she has an affliction in which she can’t remember the previous day, but it doesn’t stop Sandler from trying to win her over. Short-term memory loss is a real thing, but not Barrymore’s specific affliction.
“Primer” (2004) • One of the more creative indie time travel stories you’re likely to see, Shane Carruth’s lo-fi thriller is a densely plotted science fiction story about two entrepreneurial inventors who accidentally invent a device that allows them to travel back in time for a few hours at a time. Carruth keeps us in the dark as to what they’ve actually invented until well into the film, and it maintains its tension as it evolves into a character study of these two men trying to double cross the other.
“Source Code” (2011) • Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up in someone else’s body eight minutes before a terrorist attack blows up the train he’s riding on. It’s his job to use that time to find the terrorist and stop the attack. The movie’s first eight minutes are its best when he realizes that he’s living someone else’s final moments. Director Duncan Jones uses the sci-fi set up as a parable for the frustration of being used as a tool and the nature of free will within each alternate reality.
“Edge of Tomorrow” a.k.a. “Live. Die. Repeat.” (2014) • This is one of Tom Cruise’s most underrated roles. We watch him die on an endless loop as he tries to learn how to win in a war against aliens, with each of his lives playing out like a video game in which he gains experience and gets closer to winning. But its charm comes from a sardonic sense of humor and Cruise’s relationship with a hard-nosed soldier played by Emily Blunt. In the end, she ends up killing him in training more times than the aliens do.
“Naked” (2017) • It’s “Groundhog Day” with no clothes! Phil Connors at least didn’t have to relive the same humiliation Marlon Wayans does, where he wakes up naked hours before his wedding day and has to repeat things over and over until he gets things right. The film is actually a remake of a Swedish film from 2000.
“Before I Fall” (2017) • What if “Groundhog Day” was about a mean girl? Zoey Deutch stars as a San Francisco teen with a “perfect” high school life until she’s killed in a car accident. When she repeats the same day of her death, she starts to reassess her relationships and unravel the mystery around her accident.
“Happy Death Day” (2017) and “Happy Death Day 2U” (2019) • “Happy Death Day” is a horror movie about a woman played by Jessica Rothe who has to relive a murder at the hands of a killer in a baby face mask until she can outsmart him and survive. And following the success of that film, the sequel, “Happy Death Day 2U,” winks at that premise by having Rothe’s character dying all over again…again. And this time, both her and her friends are caught in this vicious death loop.
“See You Yesterday” (2019) • Stefon Bristol’s time-travel Netflix drama, produced by Spike Lee, features two high-school science geniuses (Eden Duncan-Smith and Dante Crichlow) who keep traveling back to the same day when their first trip back in time ends in tragedy. It combines critiques of racial profiling and over-policing with light moments, including a cameo from “Back to the Future” star Michael J. Fox.
“The Obituary of Tunde Johnson” (2019) • This drama played at TIFF and tells the story of a black, gay teenager who is killed in an unprovoked incident of police brutality, only to wake up on the same morning and relive the day of his death.
“Palm Springs” (2020) • This film starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti sold for a then-record $17.5 million to Neon and Hulu when it premiered at Sundance. The sci-fi comedy stars Milioti as a woman dreading attending a wedding, only to be drawn to Samberg and get caught up in his own infinite time loop. “Palm Springs” explores personal trauma, depression and guilt for as many wacky set pieces and dance numbers it also has.
“The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” (2021) • “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” directly name-drops “Groundhog Day” and “Edge of Tomorrow” but is a coming of age rom-com about two 17-year-olds who are the only ones aware they’re caught in the time loop. Kyle Allen and Kathryn Newton star in the film. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 13 | https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-film-songs-ever/ | en | Best Movie Songs: 50 Themes From Hollywood Film Classics | [
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] | 2024-02-15T05:22:15+00:00 | From the first talkie, theme songs in movies have found a treasured place in the popular consciousness, as these 50 best film songs prove. | en | uDiscover Music | https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-film-songs-ever/ | From the moment Al Jolson started warbling on screen in 1927, songs in movies have found a treasured place in the popular consciousness. Some of the best movie songs – such as “Mona Lisa,” “Moon River” and “Happy” – have been written specifically for movies, while some tunes will forever be linked to a film because they sync so wonderfully with the drama (as in Titanic’s love scenes, playing out to Céline Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On”), or add vibrancy (The Lion King’s “Hakuna Matata”). And some movie songs are just instantly engaging, such as Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme song.
Check out some of the greatest film soundtracks on vinyl here.
Here, then, is our pick of the 50 best movie songs of all time…
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Blue Moon (Manhattan Melodramaa, 1934)
“Blue Moon” evolved as a song from the MGM soundtrack-writing system, source of some of the best movie songs in their time; Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tailored the eventual finished version for a Clark Gable film called Manhattan Melodrama. The beautiful lyrics – “Blue moon/You saw me standing alone/Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own” – have been sung down the years by most of the greatest singers of popular music, including Elvis Presley, Mel Tormé, Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald. The classic movie theme was also featured in a tribute album called Blue Moon: Rodgers And Hart Covered By The Supremes.
Cheek To Cheek (Top Hat, 1935)
Russian-Jewish émigré Irving Berlin wrote “Cheek To Cheek” in a single day, on demand, for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat. The song lights up a memorable scene during which a tuxedoed Astaire declares his love for Rogers (dancing elegantly in a feathery white gown). The gorgeous words – “And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak” – and clever dance routine make this one of cinema’s most romantic moments. The song has also been covered numerous times down the years, including by jazz greats Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on their 1956 album Ella And Louis.
Ol’ Man River (Show Boat, 1936)
For a tune to really make its mark among the best movie songs it sometimes has to find the right singer. The 1927 Broadway drama Show Boat featured Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s song performed by actors, and, a year later, Paul Whiteman (with Bing Crosby on vocals) had a minor hit with it. But when it was sung in the 1936 film version by Paul Robeson, his moving baritone voice – and edgier interpretation – took the song to a new level.
Somewhere Over The Rainbow (The Wizard Of Oz, 1939)
Some songs are the perfect vehicle for a performer’s interpretation and improvisation, and certain numbers are remembered more for the singer than the writer. If you mention “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” people are more likely to think of Judy Garland’s soaring version for the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz than the gorgeous work of composers Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. The song was almost cut from the movie, though, because MGM thought the opening Kansas sequence was too long. Thankfully, it was left in, and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” earned its place among history’s best movie songs when it won an Academy Award for Best Original Song. There have been numerous cover versions since, from artists as diverse as Eric Clapton, John Martyn, and Ariana Grande.
When You Wish Upon A Star (Pinocchio, 1940)
Cliff Edwards, a middle-aged singer known as Ukulele Ike, voices the crow in Dumbo, but his voice is better known for singing the wonderfully sentimental “When You Wish Upon A Star” for the Disney classic Pinocchio. The movie theme was written by two giants of film music – Leigh Harline (“Whistle While You Work”) and Ned Washington (“High Noon”). Their song for Edwards became a jazz standard, covered by Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, among others. A recent version by Gregory Porter is featured on the Verve album Jazz Loves Disney.
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (Buck Privates, 1941)
Who would have thought that a song written for an Abbott and Costello comedy would become a wartime classic? Patty, Maxene, and Laverne Andrews based their early style on the close harmonizing of The Boswell Sisters, and the public loved it. The Andrews Sisters’ song about the boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company B survived World War II and was a hit again for Bette Midler in 1973.
As Time Goes By (Casablanca, 1942)
“As Time Goes By” was actually written by Herman Hupfeld for a short-lived 30s Broadway musical, Everybody’s Welcome, but took on a life of its own as one of Hollywood’s best movie songs, becoming embedded in the popular musical psyche after it was sung by pianist Dooley Wilson in the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman movie Casablanca. The same old story, and fight for love and glory, has echoed down the decades since, in versions by Frank Sinatra, Julie London, and even Bob Dylan.
White Christmas (Holiday Inn, 1942)
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was on an album of songs from the film Holiday Inn, and the lyrics resonated with thousands of American troops away on duty in the Second World War. “White Christmas” earned songwriter Irving Berlin a 1943 Academy Award and, well beyond being one of the best movie songs of all time, it has become the biggest-selling single of all time, racking up sales of 50 million. Crosby’s version – which took only 18 minutes to record – is definitive, but in the decades since, numerous stars have had tried their Yuletide hand, including Bob Marley, Willie Nelson, and U2.
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (Meet Me in St Louis, 1944)
This started as a dark Christmas song, but when Judy Garland complained that some of Hugh Martin’s lyrics were uncomfortably bleak, he altered them and “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last/Next year we may all be living in the past” became “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” The lyrical trick worked, and the movie theme, from the classic Christmas film Meet Me In St Louis, has become a standard. Among the numerous cover versions are those by Carpenters, Mel Tormé, and, more recently, by Tony Hadley. Meet Me in St Louis is also notable for the variety of songs that it introduced to the world, including “The Trolley Song” and “The Boy Next Door.”
Baby, It’s Cold Outside (Neptune’s Daughter, 1949)
Another song that made it into the movies only by chance, but which rightly deserves its place among the best movie songs of all time, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” replaced Frank Loesser’s “Slow Boat To China” and became a smash hit, winning an Oscar for Best Original Song. In the movie Neptune’s Daughter, the song – a jokey call-and-response number that Broadway songwriter Loesser used to sing at parties with his wife – was performed by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbán. Four different duos have had Top 20 hits with different versions, including great bantering ones by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, Ray Charles and Bette Carter, and Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart, in the latter’s tribute album to The Great American Songbook.
Mona Lisa (Captain Cary, 1950)
When you think of the song “Mona Lisa,” 40s jazz bandleader Charlie Spivak is probably not the first singer’s name that comes to mind. But it was the Ukrainian trumpeter who first performed Ray Evans’s lyrics – which started with the title “Prima Donna” – in the little-known 1950 film Captain Carey. Evans and composer Jay Livingston thought it would work as a single for Nat King Cole, and went to his home to persuade him to try it out. They almost failed because a small girl was playing happily and making so much noise that it was difficult for Cole to concentrate on the movie theme. “My daughter, Natalie,” he explained. Luckily, he went ahead and his version was at No.1 for eight weeks.
Singin’ In The Rain (Singin’ In The Rain, 1952)
When you think of the song “Singin’ In The Rain,” you probably don’t think of Oliver Hardy being drenched by a faulty shower nozzle as the tune plays. That was in the 1944 movie The Big Noise. The song had actually been around for 15 years before that – having first appeared in a 1929 film – but songwriter Arthur Freed realized he could make money from his old lyrics, and, as a producer for MGM, he commissioned a musical around his song title. The rest is history, as Gene Kelly’s magnificent song-and-dance version easily turned “Singin’ In The Rain” into one of the world’s best movie songs.
That’s Amore (The Caddy, 1953)
“That’s Amore,” written by Harry Warren and Jack Brooks, started out as a light-hearted interlude for Dean Martin (poking fun at Italian stereotypes) in the Jerry Lewis comedy The Caddy. But Martin loved the song and it soon became one of his signature songs in concerts, and a quintessential 50s ballad.
Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing (Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing, 1955)
The song, written by Sammy Cahn for a movie starring William Holden, was originally performed by The Four Aces but has become a recurring number in Hollywood, with versions in movies such as Grease, Private Parts, and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. There was a famous version by Frank Sinatra, while the one Ringo Starr cut for his album Sentimental Journey was arranged by Quincy Jones.
Que Será, Será (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956)
“Que Será, Será” was sung by Doris Day in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. Despite its popularity and status as one of the best movie songs in history, Day hated it, saying, “It’s a kiddie song.” But her manager-husband Marty Melcher disagreed and Day relented. She had no idea that the song would become the biggest hit of her career. Evans usually wrote most of the lyrics, while Livingston wrote the tunes, but Evans gave his partner the credit for “Que Será, Será,” probably their most enduring hit. “Jay had seen a movie where a family used it as their motto,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Gee, that would be a nice title for a song.’” It won an Oscar and was later used as the theme tune for Day’s own TV show.
High Hopes (A Hole In The Head, 1959)
This Frank Sinatra cinema vehicle was sung with a children’s choir for the Frank Capra film A Hole In The Head. When Robbie Williams covered the song on his Swings Both Ways Tour in 2014, he performed it around the country with different choirs from the local Stagecoach acting schools. An enduring entry among the best film songs of all time, “High Hopes” was Grammy-nominated and also won an Oscar for best original song.
Can’t Help Falling In Love (Blue Hawaii, 1961)
Elvis Presley’s million-selling movie theme song was written for his film set in Hawaii. The co-writer of the song, George Weiss, said that when he played a demo of the song to producer Hal Wallis, the latter turned it down saying they wanted “something like ‘Hound Dog.’” Weiss, who also wrote “Lullaby Of Birdland” and “What A Wonderful World,” said, “The only person who initially liked the song was Presley himself, who had also created a movie song classic with ‘Jailhouse Rock.’ He just happened to overhear it at Graceland as his entourage was sampling a pile of demo tapes for the movie. Elvis was told to ignore a ‘dumb ballad’ but he said, ‘No, I want to do that one in my movie.’ He picked the song. Everyone else turned it down.” There have been numerous cover versions, including by Neil Diamond, Beck, and a reggae-style one by UB40.
Moon River (Breakfast At Tiffany’s, 1961)
Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer had impeccable track records. The former had been responsible for the Pink Panther theme, the latter had provided the words for dozens of films, including “Hooray For Hollywood.” Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice was thin and limited in range, though always in tune, so Mancini took a month to compose exactly the right melody to suit the waif-like good-time girl. In the movie, Hepburn sang the song sitting with a guitar on the fire escape of a New York apartment, and the result was charming, forever remembered as one of the best movie songs. When a studio executive tried to have the song cut, Hepburn said, “Over my dead body.” Lots of jazz greats have covered it, but other interesting versions include those by Aretha Franklin, Patty Griffin, Elton John, R.E.M., and Morrissey.
Days Of Wine And Roses (Days Of Wine And Roses, 1962)
Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer were prolific as film songwriting partners, and they contributed the movie theme song to Blake Edwards’ film starring Jack Lemmon. The phrase “days of wine and roses” was taken from a 19th-century English poem. Andy Williams had a hit with the song, which was also covered by Julie London and Wes Montgomery.
My Favourite Things (The Sound Of Music, 1965)
There were some new songs for the cinema version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, but once Julie Andrews got hold of them, many became popular classics beyond their placing among the best film songs ever, including “My Favourite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi.”
Help! (Help!, 1965)
Plenty of Beatles songs merit inclusion in this list of the best film songs of all time – including “A Hard Day’s Night” – but the nod goes to “Help!,” which was written as the movie theme song to the group’s second film – a madcap comedy originally mooted for Peter Sellers. The sense of desperation is palpable in lines such as “And now my life has changed in oh-so-many ways/My independence seems to vanish in the haze.” John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, “I meant it. The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension.”
To Sir With Love (To Sir With Love, 1967)
Sidney Poitier was the main star of a worthy school-based film in which a teacher wins over some inner-city toughs in East London. Lulu, who starred in the film, had a surprise No.1 US hit with the title song. It was co-written by Don Black, a songwriter who had worked on lots of James Bond themes and was a frequent collaborator with John Barry, the soundtrack legend. They both later worked on the music for Out Of Africa.
Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate, 1967)
Paul Simon wrote “Mrs. Robinson” for The Graduate, starring Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, a middle-aged woman who seduces the young Dustin Hoffman. Simon and Art Garfunkel’s harmonies are stunning, helping it become one of the best movie songs of the decade – if not all time. A famous line asks, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”; Simon was once asked by his baseball hero, Mickey Mantle, why he had not been name-checked in the song. Simon told him: “It’s about syllables, Mick. It’s about how many beats there are.”
Everybody’s Talkin’ (Midnight Cowboy, 1969)
Mention the name Fred Neil and you may get a blank stare. Yet he wrote not only one of the best movie theme songs of all time, but one of the most famous songs of the late 20th century. Folk singer Neil, whose work inspired Bob Dylan, was uneasy at the publicity after Harry Nilsson turned “Everybody’s Talkin’” into a worldwide hit in 1970, following its use as the theme tune for the movie Midnight Cowboy. He fled to Florida (“Going where the weather suits my clothes”) to set up a marine project, and devoted the rest of his life to protecting dolphins. Among the cover versions are those by Stevie Wonder, Glen Campbell, and Iggy Pop – and Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy.
We Have All The Time In The World (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969)
Composer John Barry personally visited a poorly Louis Armstrong to ask him to record “We Have All The Time In The World,” a new song for the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The results were not only one of the best Bond themes ever, but one of the best movie songs ever, too. Barry said, “It wasn’t the popular choice at the time, because we always used, you know, the Tom Joneses, the Nancy Sinatras. And I said, ‘Look, it’s about a man singing about the September of his years.’ And I thought Louis singing just rung true and [producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli] loved the idea, there were no arguments. But to work with this guy in the studio, he was the sweetest, humblest guy.”
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, 1969)
Burt Bacharach and Hal David were working on the music for Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid – in which Paul Newman and Robert Redford play 1890s train robbers – when director George Roy Hill said he wanted something evocative of the Victorian era for a scene where Newman takes a romantic bike ride with Katherine Ross. They ended up producing a million-selling hit for BJ Thomas, who had a cold and sang with a raspier voice than usual on the day of recording. Thomas, incidentally, has said that Bacharach originally composed the movie theme song to fit Bob Dylan’s voice.
If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out (Harold And Maude, 1971)
Cat Stevens sings about wanting to “be free, be free” in his award-winning movie theme song for the quirky film Harold And Maude, about a teenager who has an affair with a 79-year-old woman. In 2016, perhaps with no irony, it was used as the music to advertise a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It is one of Stevens’ most underrated songs.
Dueling Banjos (Deliverance, 1972)
Representing the stirring individual instrumental “songs” that have enriched movies – such as Ry Cooder’s “Paris, Texas” or John Williams’ “Promontory” from Last Of The Mohicans – is this cue from the soundtrack of the Burt Reynolds movie. “Dueling Banjos” was composed in 1955 by Arthur Smith, as a banjo instrumental he called “Feudin’ Banjos,” and later covered by bluegrass band The Dillards as “Briscoe Declares For Aunt Bee.” Given the title “Duelling Banjos,” it was recorded for the unsettling Deliverance by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell, and went to No.2 for a month on the Billboard charts.
Live And Let Die (Live And Let Die, 1973)
Another Bond theme that takes its place alongside the best movie songs of all time, “Live And Let Die” shares the unusual distinction of having been nominated for a Grammy under two different performers. Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, was nominated for his version with the band Wings, which went to No.2 on the US charts. It was one of a number of film themes produced by his old Beatles pal George Martin. A version by Guns N’ Roses was also Grammy-nominated, in 1991.
The Way We Were (The Way We Were, 1973)
Session bassist Carol Kaye said it took 33 takes to get “The Way We Were” exactly as the producers wanted. The hard work paid off. Barbra Streisand’s song – which opens with the sparkling line, “Memories, like the corners of my mind” – was recorded for the film about the love affair between Streisand’s character and Robert Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner.
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, 1973)
Bob Dylan’s movie theme song was written for Sam Peckinpah’s western, in which the singer-songwriter starred alongside James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. The song has become one of Dylan’s most popular among fellow musicians – there have been hundreds of cover versions, including by Randy Crawford, Guns N’ Roses, Eric Clapton, Bryan Ferry, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Tom Petty, and Dolly Parton.
Stayin’ Alive (Saturday Night Fever, 1977)
Bee Gees’ movie theme song “Stayin’ Alive” – a song about the art of endurance – burrowed into the wider world’s consciousness. The glorious harmonies (especially in the “Ah, ha-ha-ha” chorus) and Barry Gibb’s falsettos make this one of the catchiest of all movie songs. Yet it is a song with a serious message. As Robin Gibb said, “The subject matter of “Stayin’ Alive” is actually quite a serious one. It’s about survival in the streets of New York, and the lyrics actually say that.”
Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys (The Electric Horseman, 1979)
A country song that had been kicking around for a few years, in versions by writer Ed Bruce and then Chris LeDoux, gained widespread attention and acclaim when Willie Nelson sang it for the Robert Redford-Jane Fonda film about a rebellious cowboy. The song was later used in the 2008 Oliver Stone film W and referenced ironically in the 2016 film American Honey.
Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life (Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, 1979)
Rarely does a song of really acidic comedy find such public acceptance. Eric Idle’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life,” a gallows-humor song sung cheerily by a man waiting to be crucified, has become a singalong anthem at sports events around the globe. Idle sang a live version for the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
9 To 5 (9 To 5, 1980)
Dolly Parton’s anthem for the worker, written for the comedy she starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, won the country singer multiple awards. The movie theme song has appeared in numerous TV shows, including The Simpsons, and notable cover versions include one by Alison Krauss.
Rawhide (The Blues Brothers, 1980)
It would be hard for The Blues Brothers not to appear in a run-down of the best movie songs of all time, given that its soundtrack is stuffed with classic Southern soul. “Rawhide,” however, is an exception: a fine popular country song, it was a hit for Frankie Lane and the theme tune to the popular TV show of the same name. But there is no more exuberant version than the one delivered by the self-proclaimed Blues Brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi) in the John Landis comedy. One very funny scene involves the band pretending to be a country group called The Good Ole Boys, in order to play a gig at Bob’s Country Bunker in Kokomo. As countless beer bottles aimed at the band shatter on impact with the chicken-wire fence protecting the stage, The Blues Brothers pacify the “redneck” audience with repeated versions of “Rawhide.”
I Just Called To Say I Love You (The Woman In Red, 1984)
The Woman In Red was a mildly entertaining comedy starring Gene Wilder, but its soundtrack was a Stevie Wonder-helmed affair that included his global smash title track. Wonder’s only UK No.1 hit, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” topped the charts across the globe and picked up an Oscar for Best Original Song.
Ghostbusters (Ghostbusters, 1984)
Some of the best movie theme songs continue to pervade popular culture well after their original appearance. Stop almost anyone in the street and ask, “Who you gonna call?” and they will almost certainly answer “Ghostbusters.” The iconic theme song for the 1984 movie was written and performed by Detroit musician Ray Parker Jr, and has remained his biggest hit. The determined and upbeat number took on a life of its own after the release of the movie, and the line “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” has appeared in numerous pop-culture references.
Don’t You (Forget About Me) (The Breakfast Club, 1985)
A coming-of-age drama that transcends its era and speaks to all generations, The Breakfast Club’s emotional closing scene, in which five high-school students leave their Saturday detention, having asserted their individuality – and found out about their own true character – remains an iconic piece of high-school cinema. It made stars of the young actors nicknamed The Brat Pack and ensured that Simple Minds’ single went down in history as a generation-defining slice of synth-pop.
Twist And Shout (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986)
The teen comedy starring Matthew Broderick was memorable for its use of music. As well as Yello’s electro-pop classic “Oh Yeah,” which became a cult song after the movie and was later even used in confectionery adverts, the film made judicious use of The Beatles’ recording of “Twist And Shout,” introducing a whole new generation to one of the group’s finest early outings on record.
La Bamba (La Bamba, 1987)
Ritchie Valens’ traditional Mexican wedding song – a B-side to his first hit, “Donna” – was revived as the movie theme song for a film about the young singer who died, aged 17, in the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. In the movie, Valens is played by Lou Diamond Phillips, while the brilliant LA band Los Lobos scored a No.1 hit with the title song, reviving interest in the singer’s music with their vibrant version.
Unchained Melody (Ghost, 1990)
The Righteous Brothers’ gorgeous love song was certainly well known by the time it appeared in Ghost. It had actually been written for a low-budget B-movie, Unchained, in 1955, where it was sung as a prisoner’s lament. But when it was used as the music to accompany the emotionally charged scene where Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze get steamy behind a potting wheel, it gained a whole new lease of life as a romantic blockbuster.
(Everything I Do) I Do It For You (Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, 1991)
Spending a record-breaking 16 straight weeks at the top of the UK charts, and seven at the top of the Billboard 100, Bryan Adams’ indefatigable “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” owed at least some of its ubiquity to its use in the summer 1991 blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. The song was subsequently nominated for an Oscar, and went on to win the Grammy for Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media at the 1992 awards ceremony.
Streets Of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1993)
Movie theme songs can offer light relief or fuel tension, and sometimes they can be of social importance. When director Jonathan Demme asked Bruce Springsteen to write a soundtrack song about the AIDS epidemic, The Boss obliged with a haunting ballad that was both a hit song and a piece of music that challenged audiences to think. Jackson Browne, who has known Springsteen for more than 40 years, said: “To write from the perspective of someone who is emaciated, with AIDS, is to forsake all of the strength Springsteen had staked his career on. It is quite a feat.”
Hakuna Matata (The Lion King, 1994)
The sheer quality of the music in Disney’s The Lion King was demonstrated in the fact that three of its songs were nominated for an Oscar, with “Hakuna Matata” and “Circle Of Life” losing out to “Can You Feel The Love Tonight.” Still, that’s three of the best movie songs ever in just one movie, and for this list we opt for “Hakuna Matata,” with its catchy melody (written by Elton John) and life-affirming lyrics by Tim Rice. The title phrase in Swahili translates as “no worries,” and that’s a problem-free philosophy we could all do with.
You’ve Got A Friend In Me (Toy Story, 1995)
Randy Newman, the master of biting satire, has always been a fantastic soundtrack composer, and his glorious feel-good song for the Pixar movie Toy Story – sung with Lyle Lovett – became the theme tune for the series of films.
You Must Love Me (Evita, 1996)
Madonna put real emotion – and handled the tricky soprano chords – as she triumphed with one of the 17 demanding songs in Evita, the musical-turned-film story of the life of the First Lady Of Argentina, Eva Perón. The song was written especially for the movie by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Madonna also covered “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” for the film.
My Heart Will Go On (Titanic, 1997)
Céline Dion’s power ballad, one of the biggest-selling singles of all time, won a raft of awards and is now almost as synonymous with the doomed ship as the iceberg it crashed into. “My Heart Will Go On” is the romantic ballad that plays as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embrace at the front of the ill-fated Titanic. Dion does brilliantly to cope with the tricky modulations of the song, while the sweet tin-whistle playing is courtesy of Andrea Corr.
Lose Yourself (8 Mile, 2002)
With hip-hop firmly in the mainstream at the start of the new millennium, Eminem delivered a sure-fire entry among the best film songs of all time in the shape of the Oscar-winning “Lose Yourself.” Penned for the semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile, Eminem recalled that writing the soundtrack “was different from my usual work because it forced me to step into Rabbit, the character I play in the film, and write from his point of view.”
Happy (Despicable Me 2, 2013)
A fitting close to this list of the best movie songs of all time, Pharrell Williams’ contribution to the animated comedy Despicable Me 2 became the most downloaded song of all time in 2014. “Happy” does what it says on the tin: it is uplifting, catchy, and perfect popcorn music. The song did not come easily to Williams, though. He has admitted that the final version was his tenth attempt at creating a song about “agitated and grumpy” fictional character Gru falling in love.
Honorable Mentions
Coolio – Gangsta’s Paradise (Dangerous Minds)
Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes – (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life (Dirty Dancing)
Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You (The Bodyguard)
Angela Lansbury – Beauty and the Beast (Beauty and the Beast)
Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga – Shallow (A Star is Born)
Barbra Streisand – Evergreen (Love Theme) (A Star is Born)
Steppenwolf – Born to Be Wild (Easy Rider)
John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John – Summer Nights (Grease)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – Whistle While You Work (Snow White)
Noel Harrison – The Windmills of Your Mind (The Thomas Crown Affair)
Kermit the Frog – Rainbow Connection (The Muppet Movie)
Julie Andrews – My Favorite Things (The Sound of Music)
Marilyn Monroe – Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
Seal – Kiss From A Rose (Batman Forever)
Frankie Laine – Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’ (High Noon)
Liza Minnelli – Cabaret (Cabaret) | |||||
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"Amy Glynn"
] | 2023-04-07T05:09:00+00:00 | We put together this Best Movies of the 1940s list to provide a suggestion of required viewing material for those interested in the era. | en | Paste Magazine | https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/1940s/the-50-best-films-of-the-1940s | Critical opinion has settled pretty solidly on the “best” films of the cinematically prolific 1940s; look at ten lists of the best movies of the 1940s and you’ll see a lot of overlap. The second World War was, of course, a heavy thread through the first half of the decade, providing fodder for stories on the one hand and on the other, a desire for the escapist balm of comedies and musicals. The 1940s saw the emergence of the auteur, filmmaking led by the director as opposed to the writer. Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock were doing some of their best work. The 1940s saw the rise of Technicolor but also of film noir with its dark, cynical, moody and fatalistic stories of hard-boiled detectives and treacherous women. At the same time, screwball comedies proliferated. This was the decade of Hepburn and Tracy, Bogart and Bacall, of nostalgia and neo-realism, star-crossed lovers and double-crossing villains.
To a large extent, “best” is a meaninglessly subjective term. We love what we love, and for some of us it’s romantic comedies and for others it’s monster movies, while for others it’s about this cinematic innovation or that groundbreaking foray into previously unexplored subject matter. We distilled our list based on a little bit of each of those things, but overall, it’s a suggestion of required viewing material for anyone who aspires to cultural literacy. Also, we just think these are some damned fine films.
Here are the 50 best movies of the 1940s:
50. The Uninvited (1944)
Widely regarded as one of the finest ghost stories of the ’40s, The Uninvited carries itself with a dignity not seen in most Universal monster movies or Poverty Row cheapies. On some level it’s more of a mystery/romance, with the veracity of the ghosts in real doubt—not unlike Guillermo Del Toro’s modern Crimson Peak, without all the visual bluster. A brother and sister move into a crumbling seaside manor to discover restless spirits with a connection to the young granddaughter of the former owner. But who are the spirits truly interested in, and are they truly malevolent? With evocative, moody cinematography that presages the likes of The Innocents 15 years later, the film succeeds as a serious, suspenseful mystery in an era when “ghost stories” were much more likely to be comedic or campy. —Jim Vorel
49. Black Narcissus (1947)
A melodrama set in a convent in British-ruled Himalayan India, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and starring Deborah Kerr and David Farrar, Black Narcissus provides a recipe for … well, strangeness. And it’s a beautiful kind of strangeness. Five nuns are sent to establish a convent, school and hospital in a former harem. It’s difficult to adapt to the new surroundings. And the agent who’s on call to help them do it is, well, he’s a bit of a temptation. There are tragic consequences, naturally. The story’s compelling enough, but what really blows me away about this film is the otherworldly visual sensibility. Powell’s camerawork is mesmerizing and the film is steeped in supersaturated color, underlining the exoticism and confusion faced by the nuns. It’s one of those films that really send you to another dimension. —Amy Glynn
48. Late Spring (1949)
If you want to know what an artist’s critique of postwar censorship in Allied-occupied Japan looks like, just watch Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring and keep your eyes peeled for the Coca Cola sign. Late Spring isn’t about American control of Japanese territories in the 1940s; rather, it’s about a father and daughter going about their business within that world, a film that honors minutiae and celebrates the mundane with superlative grace. (It’s also the blueprint for an entire niche of movies, the shomin-geki, a genre in Japanese film, television and theater that favors realism and which portrays the lives of working class Japanese families.) But folded within the tale of Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu) and Noriko Somiya (Setsuko Hara) lie a handful of barbs aimed at censorship protocols imposed upon Ozu during Late Spring’s production, which is itself a nod to the kind of tension Japanese citizens had to live with every single day of the occupation. The truest mark of the film’s brilliance is its accessibility: Even if you know zip about postwar history, you’ll be dazzled by Ozu’s unparalleled discipline as a filmmaker, charmed by Hara’s wonderful performance, and moved by the themes present in the fabric of the narrative, especially its painful depiction of what it means to let go of the ones we love most. Such is Ozu’s skill as a director that he can devastate us just by filming a man peeling an apple, a perfect image that captures Late Spring’s compassion with heartbreaking clarity. —Andy Crump
47. The Wolf Man (1941)
Wolf Man Larry Talbot, along with Frankenstein’s Monster, represents the more sympathetic side of the Universal monster movie canon, although some viewers would doubtlessly substitute the word “whiny” in its place. Regardless, poor Larry never asked to turn into a werewolf, and he spends most of the sequels trying to figure out a way not only to be cured, but to kill himself and end his long suffering in the process. The 1941 original remains the best and most earnest film in the series—a portrait of a man who has no power over the raging beast within. It’s the film that made Lon Chaney Jr. a household name on par with his father, throwing him into the same career of genre films as the famed “Man of a Thousand Faces” during the silent film era. Famed for the groundbreaking FX of its iconic transformation scene, and aided by the same top-notch makeup that Jack Pierce employed in Frankenstein, it raised the bar for horror FX substantially. Like other Universal horror films from the classic era of monster horror, it’s heavy on the atmosphere and old-fashioned spooky settings: Fog-wreathed graveyards, dark forests and gothic dwellings, while taking to heart some of the lessons learned by superior Frankenstein sequels such as Bride and Son of Frankenstein. Throw it on at your next Halloween party, and you’ll see that it holds up remarkably well. —J.V.
46. Fantasia (1940)
The first commercial film-animated or live-action-ever to be shown in stereophonic sound. A collection of eight short pieces intercut with live-action intros by Deems Taylor, Fantasia is set to classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, mostly with the Philadelphia Orchestra. While the origin of the film’s concept was fairly mundane (Disney wanted a star vehicle for Mickey Mouse, whose ratings were flagging). What ended up happening, though, was a really interesting investigation into how music could be represented visually in the animated medium. Rather than writing storyboards and creating a soundtrack, the production team sat in meetings listening to Paganini and Stravinsky and Mussorgsky until Disney connected the sounds with images and built on it from there. Disney, who wasn’t much of a classical music buff, found his famously boundless curiosity piqued by the concept of using animation to support music rather than the other way around, and plunged into the project with enthusiasm, believing it would open people’s ears (like his own) to classical music they had previously ignored. An amazing collection of experts and performers were assembled to consult on science, animal movement and different types of dance. (Disney scrapped a portion of the Rite of Spring sequence that showed the discovery of fire out of concern that it would provoke angry Creationists; but biologists, paleontologists and astronomers, for example, were consulted.) Similarly, animators were given tickets to the Ballet Russe, and reptiles were brought into the studio to be studied. Fantasia ran at New York’s Broadway Theatre for 49 consecutive weeks, the longest film run ever at the time. Shows sold out across the country, yet Fantasia initially ran at a loss due to the expense of the state-of-the-art Fantasound systems along with theater lease and other production costs. RKO cut the film from two hours, five minutes to one hour, twenty minutes and showed it in mono to trim costs. It was restored partially in 1946 and to its original condition in 1990. Weird, beautiful, orgiastic, abstracted, wildly colored and meticulously recorded, the film was a critical darling and considered to be an incredibly bold move on Disney’s part, though many in the classical music community nitpicked Stokowski’s arrangements. (Everyone’s a critic.) Overall, the film is more a distance runner than a sprinter and a brilliant example of Disney’s strange, maverick, expansive imagination. —A.G.
45. Day of Wrath (1943)
Developed in Denmark during the Nazi occupation, Day of Wrath was Carl Th. Dreyer’s first film in more than a decade, a tense and measured reaction to the overwhelming forces oppressing him and his country, filtered through the systemic corruption that has both plagued and defined civilization since its Edenic Fall. Taking up the themes he’d turned over in his two previous films—the now-iconic The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Vampyr (1932)—Dreyer brought his soul’s concerns onto an international stage by heading once again into the past, telling of a pastor (Thorkild Roose) and ersatz witch hunter in 1623 who’s spared a woman accused of witchcraft in order to wed her daughter, Anna (Lisbeth Movin). When the pastor’s son (Preben Lerdorff Rye) from his first marriage returns home, Anna is smitten, and the two carry on a clandestine love affair amidst a time in which every action, however benign, can be dissected to reveal supernaturally nefarious doings. As one might imagine, things don’t go well for Anna. And yet, upon its U.S. release in 1948, on the eve of the Red Scare, critics liberal and not mostly crapped all over it, unwilling to penetrate Dreyer’s dense pace and denser obsession with an immaculate visual language. Today, with the rest of Dreyer’s oeuvre to reflect on (especially Ordet, which was his only commercial success, despite being just as ponderous and obtuse as Day of Wrath), this film is simpler to parse. Regardless, Day of Wrath stands as a masterfully composed, exquisitely compelling glimpse at what happens when austerity is left to its own devices. (Hint: It weaponizes.) —Dom Sinacola
44. Le Corbeau (1943)
As is the case with many films of the 1940s, especially those foreign selections made or released in the shadow of World War II occupation—by the Axis or otherwise (see also: Kurosawa’s navigation of American censors during the U.S.’s squatting in Japan)—Le Corbeau is a morally thorny tale, infatuated more with the indelible darkness of all human beings than in exploring any sense of hope that the world need not be a crappy place. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot treats as a given that the world is a crappy place, through and through, detailing how the denizens of a small French town (“anywhere”) are pitted against one another through a series of “poison pen” letters sent by the titular Raven. Everyone, it seems, has something devastating to hide, not the least of whom is Dr. Germain (Pierre Fresnay), a man known for his lusty dalliances, which feels ironic given that he also conducts illegal abortions in the area. As the letters pile up and one cancer patient (Roger Blin) commits suicide (due to a letter from the Raven informing him that his cancer is terminal), the town grows increasingly desperate to find the culprit, sparking a witch hunt that catches Dr. Germain in the midst of his many lies. While his plot is the stuff of soap opera pulp, Clouzot masterfully mounts paranoia on top of tension on top of existential guilt, winding his players so tightly that when the film inevitably erupts into violence, the viewer is left with nothing but a bleak sense that nobody ever gets what they deserve. —D.S.
43. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
“By the time you read this letter, I might be dead.” This haunting romance by Max Ophüls is
one of those star-crossed love stories that, if it doesn’t tug at your heart, you might want to check to make sure you have one. Joan Fontaine plays a young woman in 1900 Vienna who falls in love with a concert pianist. Stefan, the pianist (Louis Jourdan) is remarkably clueless, and, reading the letter as he’s preparing to leave town to evade a duel, follows Lisa through a series of flashbacks starting when she was 14, progressing through an episode where they’d had a brief tryst, to her marrying someone else and giving birth to Stefan’s child, to him trying to seduce her at a chance encounter without realizing she was the same woman, to their child’s death from typhus, which is threatening to carry her off as she writes the letter. A paean to the ungodly power of unrequited love, a gut-wrenching treatise on self-centeredness, and in the deft hands of Max Ophüls, more contemplative and penetrating than melodramatic. Seriously, if this doesn’t bring tears to your eyes, see your opthalmologist. —A.G.
42. Miracle On 34th St. (1947)
A film stuck in time, place and temperament, Miracle on 34th Street is one of the two heavy favorites, along ith It’s a Wonderful Life, in the battle for the title of “greatest Christmas movie ever,”. Your preference will come down to how well you like your schmaltz: Those with a taste for unadulterated sentimentality will likely lean more toward Capra, while those who like a healthy sprinkle of cynical realism on their holiday fare will probably go for George Seaton’s Miracle instead. Not that it’s completely cynical, mind, but it is a surprisingly frank and thoroughly practical demonstration of the stress Christmas customs—particularly shopping—visit upon us year in and year out. By showing its audience the positive side of capitalism in action, the film reminds us of its negative side, too, posturing about Christmas’s true meaning and capturing New York City at the peak of its bustling consumerist culture. That makes Miracle on 34th Street sound both drier and jaded than it actually is, of course, and more than 70 years on, it’s still one of the most effectively hokey pieces of holiday entertainment the industry has ever produced. —A.C.
41. Rope (1948)
Inspired by Niezsche’s Ubermensch concept and the idea of the “perfect murder,” two college students kill a classmate simply to prove they can and then host a dinner party for their victim’s friends and family to see if they’ll catch on. Rope is notable for its extremely long takes and for taking place in real time, making it one of Hitchcock’s more experimental movies. —Bonnie Stiernberg
40. Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et Le Bête) (1946)
Before there were Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury voicing animated, animate household items, there was Jean Cocteau. This story’s been with us since the 18th century and rendered in countless iterations, so I’ll forego the plot summary and just say that from the fourth-wall-breaking preamble in which the director entreats the audience to approach the film with inner-child-forward faith in the magic of fairy tales, to the end, this film remains a treasure of subtle imagery and mesmerizing music, baroque opulence, sexual intensity and total indulgence in fantasy. Jean Marais (Beast) and Josette Day (Belle) deliver enchanting performances. The themes explored here are classics of fairy-tale literature: Innocence and greed, the transformative power of love, the fear of the unknown, and magic. Cocteau was a poet as well as a filmmaker, and this is a strong example of how the two crafts inform one another, in the way it harnesses imagery to create metaphorical connections. Weird and wonderful and powerful filmmaking. —A.G.
39. Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Some films are artistically groundbreaking and writ-large Important. Some are just such a good time that they last decade after decade. Frank Capra’s adaptation of this darkly comedic Broadway play (some of the Broadway cast reprised their roles in the film) stars Cary Grant as Mortimer Brewster, one of a family of Mayflower bluestocking WASP types who have, over the generations, become—I think the phrase is criminally insane? Brewster, an author of many tomes on the stupidity of marriage, gets married. On the eve of the honeymoon he drops by his family home to meet check in with his loony and sweetly homicidal aunties, a charmingly delusional uncle who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt, and his brother, Jonathan, who has bodies to bury and a flat-out crazy alcoholic plastic surgeon in tow. Peter Lorre plays the surgeon, who has altered Jonathan’s face to make him look like Boris Karloff (naturally). And that’s just the setup. More than seven decades after its release, this film is still snort-soda-out-your-nose funny. Even though it’s tame, and a bit hammy by contemporary standards, the endurance of this film is a testament to both the wonderful script and the magic of Frank Capra with a stable of really talented comedic actors at his disposal (and not in the “bodies in the basement” sense). —A.G.
38. Rome, Open City (1945)
When you think of Italian neorealist cinema, your mind probably zips straight right on over to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a beautifully made movie about the harsh realities of life in postwar Italy. Bicycle Thieves marries sober observations about its time and place with an abiding sense of optimism that’s fully realized in the film’s climax. By contrast, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City denies its viewers the admittedly mild succor granted us by Bicycle Thieves, offering instead a raw, righteous outrage that stems from Rosselini’s national pride. The film understands wartime trauma in ways most war films simply don’t; it captures Italy’s emotional, and sociopolitical fragility in the aftermath of World War II on celluloid like an insect trapped in amber, indulging in slight degrees of wish fulfillment while staging a credible representation of Italian resistance to German occupation in 1944. Rossellini contrasts Italian fear with Italian heroism, creating opportunities for the movie’s German characters to look inward and realize that force of arms isn’t the same thing as force of courage. It doesn’t take much to do violence upon others. It takes much more to show honest to goodness bravery on pain of death. —A.C.
37. Drunken Angel (1948)
An act of genre deconstruction and muted political critique all in one. Akira Kurosawa plays with noir tropes more than he plays to them, deflating film noir’s inherent machismo by revealing the chief heavies of his cast as scrabbling cowards. Depending on your mood, Drunken Angel’s climactic brawl between Toshiro Mifune’s Matsunaga and Reizaburô Yamamoto’s Okada may either read as hilarious, pathetic or tragic. Aren’t mob heavies supposed to be intimidating? Like Rashomon, Drunken Angel puts male toughness on trial and makes it look ridiculous, but the study of manliness might be a smokescreen for Kurosawa’s veiled jabs at the board of censors installed by the U.S. government in post-World War II Japan. Note the Western clothing. Observe the recurring image of the bubbling muck that serves as one of the film’s central locations. The American occupation whitewashes and corrupts Japanese culture in equal measure, and Drunken Angel captures it all with deft humanism. —A.C.
36. Mildred Pierce (1945)
Like Double Indemnity, Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce succeeds on the strength of its leading lady; in this case that’s the immortal Joan Crawford, who plays the film’s central character, not to mention all of its heart and soul. (Next to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? at least, it’s the most definitive Crawford performance of all time.) Mildred Pierce is a strong woman driven by an inexhaustible love for her children, Veda (Ann Blyth) and Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe), but she’s also stymied by the restricting grasp of a patriarchal society. Even Veda is contemptuous of Mildred for daring to have the moxie to have it all. The film is about more than prickly mother-daughter relationships, of course, specifically the murder of Mildred’s second husband. But sandwiched in between this probing whodunit lies one of noir’s most sympathetic and purely humanist tales. —A.C.
35. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
How much does an artist need to suffer for their art? Can a storyteller tell a story that isn’t their own? When are you making an honest-to-goodness piece of art, and when are you just playing a sick game of nostalgie de la boue? Sullivan’s Travels doesn’t exactly answer these questions as much as it wields them like blunt instruments for punishing its protagonist, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a hot ticket in Hollywood known for churning out money-making flicks with no substantive value. He’s a fraud, his work is empty, and he knows it, so like any hack who desperately needs artistic validation to assuage his feelings of creative guilt, he hefts a hobo stick over his shoulder and hits road in the guise of a down-on-his-luck tramp, followed all the while by a lavish double-decker bus as well as the inescapable grip of his own prestige. If you’re a fan of the screwball niche of comedy filmmaking, you have to know Sullivan’s Travels, one of the best examples of its category; screwball movies aren’t simply about zaniness but energy, inertia, momentum, the snowballing power of a silly premise when backed by an intelligently designed madness. —A.C.
34. Adam’s Rib (1949)
George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib is a curio of a time when misogyny wasn’t so much a fault as a societal given, which may be why the dynamic between married lawyers Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn, whose character thankfully wasn’t named Eve) feels at once well-balanced and hilariously unreal. A prototypical “war of the sexes” comedy in which each side represents the status quo for his or her respective gender, Adam’s Rib transcends its dumbest Mars-vs-Venus trappings by portraying Tracy’s Bonner as a stuffy turd too caught up in his derision of women to do anything about the fact that a famous musician lothario (David Wayne) is getting mighty close to cuckolding him, were Amanda Bonner a dunce susceptible to shameless advances. She’s not, and not once does Hepburn—perfectly cast—give any impression that she’ll fall for it, being clearly the smartest person in any room and fully aware of what kind of effect her extra-marital flirting has on her wussy husband.
The plot is simple: A woman (Judy Holliday) shoots and injures her cheating husband (Tom Ewell) after catching him in the act, so District Attorney Adam must represent the prosecution (cheating asshole) while Amanda, energized by her husband’s blindness regarding a woman’s helplessness when it comes to adultery, takes up the defense. The trial goes as one might expect, with Hepburn’s charisma holding the attention of every scene, but the real surprise in Cukor’s film comes within its final moments, when the rocky marital fall-out between our leads ends in an almost nihilistic bit wherein Adam reveals he can be just as emotionally manipulative as he expects all women are. Which may be screenwriters Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s funniest joke: Adam’s Rib is about how men and women are equal only in how equally terrible they can be to each other. —D.S.
33. The Little Foxes (1941)
William Wyler directed this adaptation of a stage drama by Lillian Hellman, who also wrote the screenplay. Bette Davis stars as Regina Giddens, a Southern aristocrat living in a world where only sons were considered legal heirs—Regina’s been subverted by her greedy brothers and there are multiple conniving marriage plots around the consolidation of wealth. It’s a story of the malignancy of lust for wealth, and if you’re looking for a happy ending, this movie’s not your go-to; Davis ends up very, very alone. Hellman’s script is caustic and relentlessly grim, Wyler’s camera work is high-strung and spooky, and Davis plays the main character as an icy villain. Despite the basic unlikability of the majority of the characters, it’s a remarkably riveting film; a testament to Wyler’s directorial choices, in which we see character surehandedly reflected in small physical details and hard angles. A ruthlessly cynical tale of backstabbing and avarice, and one that might not increase your love for humanity, but riveting. —A.G.
32. To Have and Have Not (1944)
“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow.” Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner at the typewriter. Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall in her first feature film appearance, in front of the camera, and Howard Hawks behind it. To Have and Have Not is loosely adapted from Hemingway’s novel of the same name. (Hawks, though a fan of Hemingway’s, felt that To Have and Have Not was his worst novel, and reportedly told him so.) The rewrite was strongly influenced by the War (for example, the setting was moved from Cuba to Martinique to avoid provoking ire from the Roosevelt administration) and beyond the beginning of the book, the film veers off in its own direction—specifically in directions that made it resemble Casablanca since it had been so popular. This is the film where Bogart and Bacall met, sparking one of Hollywood’s most legendary love affairs, and that chemistry is very much in evidence in their crackling on-screen interactions. Apolitical fishing boat captain Harry Morgan (Bogart) is living in the Marquis Hotel, and fending off friend-smuggling requests from the French hotelkeeper, when he meets Marie Browning (Bacall), a charming pickpocket, in the hotel. Erotically supercharged hijinks ensue. This is at once classic Howard Hawks and quite emotionally driven compared to many of his films. The story is direct and crisply told—what makes this film a must-see classic is that it might be the ultimate in dazzling on-screen chemistry. —A.G.
31. Stray Dog
You might have to watch Stray Dog under cover of air conditioning: It’s a hot film, not in the sense of carnality but in the sense of temperature. Akira Kurosawa shoots every scene in the pursuit of making his audience swelter, yanking us into the frame and effectively immersing us in his neorealist depiction of Tokyo. The city is nearly a character more than it is a backdrop, though of course the hero is Murakami (the great Toshiro Mifune, here appearing in the third of his sixteen eventual roles in Kurosawa’s filmography), a coltish young detective who is obsessed to the point of detriment with retrieving his stolen service gun. In Stray Dog, Kurosawa emulates the central feat of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, the marriage between the stylized trappings of film noir and cinematic realism, but Stray Dog doesn’t copy Dassin’s work; rather, it absorbs and applies lessons taught by The Naked City in ways that only a filmmaker like Kurosawa could. The film overemphasizes minutiae of its mise en scène, extends scenes past their natural end points, and hoovers any sense of gratification out of its climax. The effect of Kurosawa’s technique is dizzying, all the better to reinforce Stray Dog’s central theme, in which the line between lawmen and criminals is irrevocably blurred. —A.C.
30. All the King’s Men (1949)
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, derived almost wholesale from the outsize life of Louisiana governor Huey Long, Robert Rossen’s All the King’s Men, despite its expansive scope, wastes no time in plunging its seemingly idealistic characters into the deep morass of moral gray. It’s a trajectory that will seem pretty traditional when it comes to stories like this—a clear progenitor is Citizen Kane, replete with Rossen’s dedicated eye to following the film’s god-like politician, Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), as he both attains and, especially, freefalls from grace—but with a contemporary sense of cynicism when it comes to the American political landscape, it helps to get a reminder, if melodramatic, that corruption and power have always been blasphemous bedfellows. Crawford’s performance as the phony voice of the common “hick” is especially captivating—and not only because he so closely resembles a certain nascent president who espouses the same flimsy schtick, openly lying to the people he supposedly represents. Crawford’s face holds multitudes: Even in the beginning of the film, when we briefly court a humble, hardworking Stark, we can see in Crawford’s eyes and jowls the beginnings of something deeply troubling. That this cherubic plebian finds public success only through discarding his teetotaling tendencies and becoming a much-loved, bloviating alcoholic is about as clear as the film can get with its fatalistic feelings toward American politics: They’ve always been this polluted, and that will never change. —D.S.
29. The Stranger (1946)
Orson Welles’ third feature film was the first to feature documentary footage of the Holocaust. This film noir follows a UN War Crimes Commission agent, Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) who’s hunting down fugitive Nazi Franz Kindler (Orson Welles). Wilson releases a repentant former associate of Kindler’s, hoping the man will lead him to the fugitive. Kindler has has moved to a small New England town and married the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice, teaches at a prep school—essentially has erased every possible trace of his former identity, save one: a longtime obsession with clocks. The former associate does find him, but Kindler’s a little reluctant to confess, opting to strangle his former friend, instead. Wilson continues to prove Kindler’s identity, and Kindler goes to greater and greater lengths to conceal it. Ultimately, of course, his undoing is a clock—literally. The producer was originally planning to hire John Huston to direct The Stranger; Welles got the job because of an ill-timed military tour that took Huston (literally and figuratively) out of the picture. Welles hadn’t directed a film in four years and was so eager for the work that he took a contract stipulating that if he went over-budget he’d be paying the studio out of pocket. It’s possible that Welles’ inventiveness was partially forged by the constraints under which he found himself working on all of his early films. He was dogged by cut-happy producers (it’s not even clear how much footage was removed but Welles was relieved of the first 16 pages of his script before principal photography even started) and contrarian casting and locations choices (Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead to play the investigator; the studio cast Robinson; likewise he got a budget-driven “no” on filming the prep school scenes at The Todd School in Illinois, his own alma mater). The desire to personalize this film despite so many interventions were probably fundamental to the development of its nightmare-like tone and the use of reflective surfaces to provide depth and dimension in his constructed set. (Check out the drugstore scene where Wilson plays checkers with Billy House.) But perhaps most striking is the use of actual footage from concentration camps, which are still shocking to look at today but were exceedingly potent in the 1940s when large numbers of Americans still did not understand that the camps really existed. In typical Welles-versus-studio fashion, the producers backed out at the last minute on the promise of a four-picture deal to follow this film—-they had become convinced it would run at a loss and Welles was incapable of directing a mainstream hit movie. As it turned out, it was Welles’ only significant box office success on release, and remains a canonized film noir. —A.G.
28. Key Largo (1948)
The fourth and final film teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall doesn’t rank with their other onscreen pairings—the real dance here is between Bogie, as a returning veteran, and Edward G. Robinson, as a gangster who has Bogie’s war buddy’s island resort in a stranglehold, just in time for a hurricane to make landfall. Adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s hit Broadway play, the resulting chamber piece swaps the Spanish Civil War for the second World War. Also exchanged are the typical noir streets for Florida’s coastal environs, every bit as claustrophobic and oppressive as the barometric pressure drops. Though only the film’s opening scenes were shot on location (the rest on the Warner Bros. lot), the exotic setting and meteorological fate render isolation to an extreme degree. Robinson is electrifying as the ex-bootlegger, whose hostages include John Barrymore as the wheelchair-bound father of Bogart’s deceased war colleague, Bacall as the soldier’s widow, and Academy-Award winner Claire Trevor as Robinson’s mistreated moll. As with Bacall here, it’s not Bogart’s finest collaboration with director John Huston, but the palpable sense of atmospheric dread and post-war disillusionment make this a trip worth taking. —Amanda Schurr
27. The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
“The Great American Novel made one of the few enduring Great American Motion Pictures,” John Springer wrote of The Grapes of Wrath in The Fondas, his chronicle of the Fonda family dynasty. Maybe his words read as the wildest of exaggerations back in 1970, but in 2017 they ring as genuinely as John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel. The Grapes of Wrath endures for good reason: It’s the truth, an authentic dramatization of how American industry chews up working families and spits them out, leaving them to die in the soil they once tilled, which means that as long as agents of commerce go about the grim business of screwing people out of their livelihood, offering no apology but rather a shrug and an excuse, the film will stay relevant. “Don’t go to blaming me—it ain’t my fault,” an employee of the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company tells a group of farmers as he casually evicts them from their own land. The fault goes all the way to the bank in Tulsa, but really, knowing who’s to blame for your misfortunes doesn’t put a roof over your head, and The Grapes of Wrath proclaims boldly its belief in people before profit right up to Henry Fonda’s iconic closing speech, a poetic dedication to the need for social justice in a nation caught under the heel of corporate greed. If you’ve heard Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to the film but you haven’t seen the film yourself, carve out two hours and bask in the undying power of one of the most important movies produced by the American film industry. —A.C.
26. Cat People (1942)
To this day, it doesn’t seem entirely fair that so much credit for Cat People is almost universally given to producer Val Lewton, rather than director Jacques Tourneur or writer DeWitt Bodeen, but it’s true of the entire run of low-budget horror films that Lewton produced at RKO. Regardless, Cat People was a populist hit in its day before being reevaluated decades later as a landmark of ’40s horror. Creeping in stark contrast to Universal’s monster movies of the same era, it leans on suspense and carefully constructed shots rather than Jack Pierce makeup to make an impression. The story of a young Russian immigrant with a dark family past, it combines aspects of film noir and mystery movies with Hitchcockian suspense, while pioneering several staple tropes of horror cinema that have been used hundreds if not thousands of times since. The scene with a young woman walking home on a dark night, stalked by an unseen presence, builds to an unexpected conclusion that must have made audiences in 1942 come jumping out of their seats. —J.V.
25. Red River (1948)
Broadly considered to be one of the greatest of the genre, Red River is the story of the first cattle drive down the Chisholm Trail and the film that made director Howard Hawks exclaim “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act!” The big son of a bitch was John Wayne, who stars as Tom Dunson, a stubborn and conflicted man on a mission to start a cattle ranch in Texas. As one would expect from any Western of the mid-20th century, there are a lot of violent “Indians” to fend off; Dunson’s love interest is slaughtered along with most of a California-bound wagon train, and in one scene where Dunson and his codger-companion Nadine Groot (Walter Brennan) are in retaliatory combat, Dunson finds one of the Indians is wearing a silver bracelet that had belonged to his own mother. A traumatized boy named Matt Garth (Mickey Kuhn as a child; Montgomery Clift as an adult) who survived the attack on the wagons finds Dunson and Groot and joins them; Dunson basically adopts him (along with the cow he’s got with him). Cattle ranch established, along with serious father-son issues. Chaos, stampedes, duels, shifting loyalties-and an unfortunately pat ending in which both men are basically chastened by a woman and forced to remember that they love each other. The other thing that is likely to grate upon the sensibilities of modern viewers is the tacit understanding (whether Hawks deliberately placed it there or whether it happened by default) is the “white guys can take whatever they want” attitude that pervades the minds of the characters. What holds up beautifully is Wayne’s fascinating slow fade from strapping man in the prime of life to defeated old guy, placed against Matt’s ascendancy. And, of course, some of the most beautiful and evocative scenes of endless skies and endless prairies to be found. —A.G.
24. Rebecca (1940)
Joan Fontaine stars as a woman haunted by the memory of her husband’s (Laurence Olivier) first wife. Like most of Hitchcock’s work, what makes it truly spooky are its relatable themes—in this case, living in someone else’s shadow and worrying that a loved one’s hiding something. As a result, it took home the Oscar for Best Picture in 1940. —B.S.
23. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Orson Welles just couldn’t catch a break sometimes. His first feature, Citizen Kane earned him the ire of the influential media mogul William Randolph Hearst. His second, a period drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, was destroyed (in Welles’ view) when he lost control of the editing to RKO. An hour of the original film was cut and the ending re-shot, and though Welles had left detailed instructions on how it should be edited, the studio overrode him and the excised footage from his rough cut was trashed. Nevertheless, the film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Mutilated or not, the film continues to be lauded for its inventive mise-en-scène and its superlative performances by Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello and Agnes Moorehead. The story of a proud, well-off Midwestern family whose position and stability are compromised by the advent of the automobile, The Magnificent Ambersons was itself a victim of the vicissitudes of mass production-but that hasn’t stopped it from being an enduring and masterful Welles classic. —A.G.
22. Gilda (1946)
Seven years before his powerhouse turn in The Big Heat, Glenn Ford played second fiddle to Rita Hayworth—how the hell could you not?—in Charles Vidor’s exotic thriller. From the moment Hayworth whips her sultry tresses into frame—to this day, a disarmingly forward, come-hither introduction made more so by her bare shoulders—we’re as gobsmacked as Ford’s drooling puppy dog. An American thug in Buenos Aires, our narrator Johnny Farrell (Ford) cheats, and then cheats some more: first at the casino of an older businessman involved in a Nazi cartel, and then with the businessman’s young new wife, his ex, Gilda (Hayworth). Johnny and Gilda hurl emotional and physical hostilities as they love-hate on each other, both felt in equal measure. But when the businessman—now Johnny’s boss—seems to meet an untimely end, the guilt-stricken employee is determined to cruelly punish both himself and Gilda for their deceit. (Sadomasochism much?) The Argentinean intrigue is marked by crackling dialogue and cast in lush shadows by cinematographer Rudolph Maté, but Vidor wisely recognizes the film belongs to Hayworth, a femme fatale of epic proportions. With a beauty for the ages as his star, Vidor doesn’t have to do much, and his static, voyeuristic direction shows in fact he didn’t. Gilda represents the oft-discussed male gaze of noir at its most blatant—she’s largely a fetishized object. But at times the framing makes Hayworth’s erotic physicality all the more charged, and dangerous. She’s not bound (at least briefly, repeatedly) to the mise en scène, a rebellious force keenly aware of her charms. She’s also more than a little desperate, as it turns out. Just watch the visual motif of that boudoir introduction recur in the “Put the Blame on Mame” musical number-turned-striptease. Gilda taunts Johnny throughout the film, goading him with her sex appeal, and for his part, Vidor teases us, too—“Gilda, are you decent?” Define decent. —A.S.
21. White Heat (1949)
The oedipal and criminal collide yet again with James Cagney’s psychopathic mama’s boy Arthur “Cody” Jarrett, whose deadly train-robbing exploits ultimately land him in jail. While there he befriends an undercover fed (Edmond O’Brien, whose other noirs include The Hitch-Hiker) bent on nailing him for greater crimes. After Jarrett’s plottingly protective ma (Margaret Wycherly) get killed—by his equally scheming wife (Virginia Mayo), though she convinces him his right-hand man did the deed—he stages a break, and his next heist. In one of his darkest roles, 50-year-old Cagney is at his unhinged best, a powder keg of neuroses and sadistic impulses who can feign insanity—as he does in the prison infirmary—for only so long before his delusions overtake him completely. Prone to throbbing headaches, he’s a dangerously troubled tough guy who still retreats to his mother’s lap, and declares “Made it, Ma! Top of the World!” as the bottom falls out from under him. This postwar psychic landscape is subversive as hell—and suburban too, no longer confined to metro limits. On that note, the damage is no longer rooted in his environment; Jarrett’s a disaster from the inside out, dysfunctional in his very wiring (thanks, ma!). Director Raoul Walsh, reuniting here with Cagney after The Roaring Twenties and The Strawberry Blonde, echoes the off-the-rails energy of his leading man, infusing the film with an incendiary nihilism and amorality. The bookending set pieces, shot on location in industrial California, pulse with realism. The cumulative effect represents a primal deviation—make that devolution—from social conformity and civilization. So, yeah, of course he’s gotta get blown up, noir-comeuppance style. Still, Cagney is mesmerizing to watch self-destruct. —A.S.
20. Spellbound (1945)
In an era where your Labradoodle probably has its own therapist it’s easy to forget that psychoanalysis was a relative rarity, reserved for people of significant means … and people in mental hospitals, which is where this psychological thriller by Alfred Hitchcock takes place. When Dr. Anthony Edwardes (Gregory Peck) takes over as director of the hospital where the remote and emotionally null Dr. Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) works, Petersen quickly realizes something is amiss with Edwardes, and it quickly comes to light that he isn’t Edwardes at all and that he is suffering amnesia. The real Dr. Edwardes is missing and feared dead. Bergman’s quest to restore his memory and figure out what happened takes a number of classically Hitchcockian turns, but the centerpiece of this film is a dream sequence, rife with psychoanalytical symbolism, that was designed by Salvador Dali. The imagery of the dream ends up helping to resolve the case (go, psychiatry!), Bergman’s Dr. Petersen isn’t as emotionless as she seems, and justice is served in the end-all good. But certainly for its day, and quite equally so now, this film is a pretty astute and sophisticated look at post-traumatic dissociative compartmentalization, and it’s really fun to watch it unfold. —A.G.
19. The Killers (1946)
If you’re of the impression that Quentin Tarantino invented the concept of a nonlinear crime story involving boxers and hitmen, Robert Siodmak’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated short story is a must-watch. The story commences with two assassins entering a small-town gas station and executing “The Swede” (Burt Lancaster), a former professional boxer. A life insurance investigator is subsequently sent to piece together the events that led to the Swede’s demise. From here, Siodmak and his screenwriters (which included future legendary directors John Huston and Richard Brooks) weave a fascinating story that, while not always the most inspired, more than picks up the slack with the help of dynamic performances and some tensely directed set pieces. According to Hemingway’s biography, The Killers marked one of the only times the author was legitimately impressed by an adaptation of his work. —Mark Rozeman
18. The Third Man (1949)
Most of us probably associate The Third Man with Orson Welles, and why not? He’s a titan of cinema, casting his shadow over American film from the time his career began until the day he died, and though he’s been gone for over thirty years his influence is still felt in movies the world over. (You might even believe, given both the passage of time and enough viewings of The Third Man under your belt, that Welles himself is the architect of the piece, but of course you’d be 100% wrong if you did.) We should, however, think not of Welles but of Carol Reed, The Third Man’s bizarrely under-sung director, who fought for Welles’ casting as the shockingly amoral Harry Lime, ensured that the film would be shot on location in Vienna, and fused its aesthetic with expressionist flair, using light and shadows in ways that at the time had yet to be attempted (and which since have yet to be as stunningly replicated). You may not be able to imagine this film without Welles, but try imagining it without Reed: You’d have no film at all, and we’d be robbed of one of the most significant archetypes of filmmaking in the medium’s short lifespan. —A.C.
17. The Big Sleep (1946)
The great granddaddy of all convoluted noirs, The Big Sleep fully embodies every single identifying feature of Raymond Chandler’s writing: dialogue that sears itself into viewers’ brains, rough-cut men, seductive femme fatales, plenty of violence, a respectable body count, and enough plot curveballs to give even the most accomplished noirs twist envy. The film almost demands to be seen twice for the sheer volume of slants and revelations. Truthfully, you’ll want to watch it more than once for Howard Hawks’ direction, Sidney Hickox’s dread-inducing cinematography, and Chandler’s barbed exchanges, not to mention the raw chemistry and animal magnetism of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Production codes at the time of The Big Sleep’s release prohibited it from being as graphic as Chandler’s novel, but maybe thrillers of today can learn a valuable lesson from the restrictions: Less can so often mean much, much more. —A.C.
16. Notorious (1946)
Considered by many to be a major turning point in Hitchcock’s career, this film, still very much in the spy/noir realm, is his first serious attempt at a love story. In another example of how the repressive Production Codes of the time gave rise to a much more exciting scene than he might otherwise have made, Hitchcock got around the “no kisses longer than three seconds” by breaking the performers apart every three seconds for some kind of embrace and then resuming the kiss. In the end it’s a two-and-a-half-minute kiss and probably much more intimate and entrancing than it would have been without the constraints he was fighting. There’s espionage. There are split loyalties. There are Claude Rains and Cary Grant both ass over teakettle for Bergman (and how could you not be?). There are disastrous miscommunications and something suspicious hidden in the wine cellar and a couple of Hitchcock’s most iconic shots and a hell of a lot of drinking. This is a movie—as are many spy movies—that is essentially about trust. Trust is a choice, a leap of faith—and not always rewarded. Sexual blackmail and postwar espionage: A classic cocktail and one that packs a punch. —A.G.
15. Laura (1944)
Everyone’s in love with Gene Tierney—even the guy who’s come to investigate her murder. Otto Preminger’s masterful orchestration of convoluted twists and turns, and stellar performances by Tierney, make Laura a great film noir. There were a lot of great noirs in the ’40s. What sets Laura apart is the music. David Raskin’s score is a haunting chromatic tune that plays in some variation through the entire film-perhaps the first and certainly one of the best uses of music to advance a theme in the film (obsession, in this case) and influence how we see characters. It not only dominates the background music, but it pops in in the narrative of the film—it’s the record on the phonograph; it’s the song the band is playing at the coffeeshop; it’s playing at the journalist’s party. This monothematic approach underscores the characters’ shared fascination with this dead (or is she?) woman, and it is one of the most brilliant soundtracks of its day. (And it’s pretty brilliant now, for that matter.) The film has so much going for it beyond the music—sleek, stylish, twisted Otto Preminger direction, and great performances by Tierney, Dana Andrews as the detective, Vincent Price as Laura’s waste-of-space fiancé, and Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker, the journalist who claims to have been Laura’s mentor. —A.G.
14. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
The Wizard of Oz gets more populist attention, but Meet Me in St. Louis is the best Judy Garland musical by an easy margin. It was the film where the young starlet met director Vincente Minnelli, her future husband and father of Liza, and it’s a formative production in the history of the American musical in general. Not many films can say they introduced one standard, let alone multiple ones, a la “The Trolley Song” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which was later ranked as the third most-performed Christmas song of all time—you can thank Garland for the initial take on it, and she seems considerably more comfortable in her own skin here than in The Wizard of Oz. Sporting a glorious Technicolor palette of vibrant hues, it feels every bit the prestige picture that it is, but on a more inherent level it’s one of the most purely charming and universally entertaining musicals of this era, regardless of the audience it’s playing to. The opening number, as we drift through the Smith household meeting each member as they pass off bars of “Meet Me in St. Louis” to each other, instantly establishes the warm, familial tone while implanting an ear worm into your subconscious that you’ll find yourself humming days later. —J.V.
13. Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) (1945)
Not infrequently dubbed the best French film of all time, this is the movie Truffaut said he’d revoke his entire oeuvre to have directed. The very fact of its existence (it was filmed in 1945 during the Nazi occupation of France, which of course created significant obstacles for director Marcel Carné ) seems to contribute to its rather magical quality. A historical piece set in the 1820s Paris theater world, it centers on an enigmatic performer named Garence (Arletty) and four men who are drawn to her, each for slightly different reasons. Only one, a mime named Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), has pure intentions: Naturally, he’s the one who gets hurt. This is a tale of grand passion both between men and women and between actors and audiences, and actors and the stages they inhabit. Epic, lavish, tragic and enchanting, this film has enormous style and a kind of poetry to it. —A.G.
12. Out of the Past (1947)
There’s no better way to describe Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past than “perfect.” For many, this is the epitome of all things noir, a sprawling, rambling examination of betrayal and seduction peppered with shrapnel-sharp dialogue. Out of the Past looks about as bleak as it feels. It’s savage and sexual, deeply unsettling in its nihilism and yet not utterly without hope; the final shot offers a respite of sorts from Tourneur’s otherwise unblinking sobriety. Out of the Past’s cheerlessness towers from the shoulders of its cast, a coterie of acting giants each at the top of their game. Robert Mitchum dominates, whether in his tête-à-têtes with Kirk Douglas or his simmering flirtations with Jane Greer. Together they pop, but no matter how brightly they might shine, Out of the Past remains a masterwork coated in darkness from page to screen. —A.C.
11. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Greed is not good. John Huston’s treasure-hunt adventure is less about mining gold than mining the human psyche through action and distrust and conflict. Three unlikely comrades pursue a cache of gold, and the resulting obsession turns them against each other with tragic results. Huston uses a light hand to illuminate some pretty dark corners of human instinct, and Humphrey Bogart is marvelous as Fred Dobbs, a man destroyed by lust and paranoia as we watch. The film is lively and dynamic and visually arresting. It’s both a classic and a somewhat unconventional Western, and it’s a killer drama. —A.G.
10. It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)
Frank Capra’s Christmas fantasy actually kind of flopped at the box office when it was released, and put Capra on the out-to-pasture list as the studio decided he was no longer capable of scoring a hit. Then it was nominated for five Academy Awards and has become known as one of the most acclaimed films ever made. On Christmas Eve, suicidal George Bailey (the sublime Jimmy Stewart) receives a visit from a sort of junior angel who calls himself Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence is charged with pulling Bailey off the ledge, in return for which he will be granted wings. So he shows Bailey visions of his life, progressing from his childhood, showing Bailey all the times he made someone’s live better (or outright saved it). Ultimately Clarence jumps into the river before George can do it; activating the suicidal man to save Clarence rather than kill himself. It’s not enough, so Clarence shows him what the world would look like if he’d never been born. When George sees that his existence has had and continues to have a positive impact on the world, he goes home to his family, Clarence gets his wings and happiness ensues. Yup, it’s a Christmas story. And it’s one of the most enduring ones for a bunch of reasons, including Stewart’s amazing performance and a beautiful script by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett along with Capra. (Both Stewart and Capra commented that it was their favorite of all the films they’d respectively worked on.) Timeless, big-hearted and disarmingly sincere, this film is one I defy you to have one cynical comment about. Go on: be cynical. You can’t, right? Right. Because it’s not possible. —A.G.
9. Gaslight (1946)
It was always a fantastic film; a tale of sadistic psychological torture, murder and greed. But today George Cukor’s suspense-gem has also attained mandatory-viewing status because it is the source text for the term “gaslighting.” The word has been swept into public discourse and mass misuse and misunderstanding. What gaslighting is (and isn’t) is defined by this film. You arguably need to see it before you can use that word and understand what you’re saying. But that alone wouldn’t be just cause in a bad movie. This is not a bad movie; in fact it’s a treasure. Mysterious, rich in feeling, deliciously creepy, and with jewel-tone supporting performances by Angela Lansbury and Joseph Cotten, it was a great psychological thriller in its day and it remains one now. So, yeah-come for the psychopathology lesson, but stay for the stunning “God’s-eye” style direction by Cuckor (no unreliable narrators here!), and wonderful performances by Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer as a traumatized woman and a sociopath determined to drive her out of her mind. —A.G.
8. His Girl Friday (1940)
Special effects have become so sophisticated that many of us have probably forgotten how much pure amazement you can wreak with a great story and a script that doesn’t let up for one second. This amazing, dizzyingly paced screwball comedy by Howard Hawks stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, and takes us back into two of the decade’s hallmark preoccupations: The “remarriage comedy” and the intrigue and obsessiveness of the newspaper world. The minute Russell’s Lindy Johnson stalks into the newspaper office run by her ex-husband Walter Burns (Grant), you know it’s to tell him she’s getting remarried and leaving journalism to raise a family, and you know that’s not how it’s going to end. No high-suspense mystery here. What puts you on the edge of your seat in this film is how you get there. Hilariously acted and expertly filmed, His Girl Friday derives much of its comedic impact from the incredibly clever and lightning-fast banter of the characters. Don’t even think about checking your phone while you’re watching this. In fact, try to blink as little as possible. —A.G.
7. The Great Dictator (1940)
Charlie Chaplin’s first “talkie” was a biting satire that he wrote, directed, produced, scored, and starred in-as both of the lead roles, a fascist despot who bears a rather marked resemblance to Adolf Hitler and a persecuted Jewish barber. Good satire can be powerful, and this film was: Released while the United States was still formally at peace with Germany, it stirred greater public attention and condemnation of the Nazis and Mussolini, anti-Semitism and fascism. (That said, Chaplin later recounted that he could never have made the satirical film even a year or two later, as the extent of the horrors in German concentration camps became clearer.) The choice to play both the tyrant and the oppressed man was an inspired one, underscoring the frightening but inescapable truth that we all contain a little bit of both characters. This is a strikingly pertinent film for our particular moment in history, and well worth dusting off and queueing up not only for its incredible craft but for its resonance as a study in projection. —A.G.
6. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Referred to by many as the first major noir (after the more obscure 1940 film Stranger on the Third Floor), this John Huston classic set the bar for the archetypal detective, the subgenre as a whole, and the rest of star Humphrey Bogart’s career. On the surface a murder mystery revolving around yet another archetype, that of the titular MacGuffin, The Maltese Falcon is in essence a character study, a definitive assurance of masculinity and the cool objectivity it entails, by way of one Sam Spade. Bogart’s antihero is a man of honor, as it suits him—he has no qualms about kissing his dead partner’s widow while the body’s still warm, or turning in the guilty woman he loves to the police. He’s nobody’s “sap.” Interestingly, Spade’s creator, Dashiell Hammett—who once worked as a P.I.—called the character “a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been, and, in their cockier moments, thought they approached.” In Bogart’s brusque yet smooth hands, that sounds about right. Likewise, this is the adaptation to which vastly inferior attempts, including a 1931 version of the same name and 1936’s Satan Met a Lady, could only aspire. It is impeccable in every sense. Huston also penned the screenplay, on Howard Hawks’ advice, almost verbatim from Hammett’s hard-boiled novel. He painstakingly storyboarded the drama to include complex camerawork and lighting schemes, evocative POVs, and an uninterrupted seven-minute take whose logistics boggle the mind. The violent, stylized set pieces are as visceral as the verbal confrontations. Aside from Bogie’s legendary turn, the other performances are spot-on: among them, an already scandalized Mary Astor as the femme fatale; Sydney Greenstreet (Casablanca) as hulking baddie Kasper “Fat Man” Gutman—astonishingly, his film debut; and Peter Lorre as an obviously gay associate of Gutman’s whose homosexuality was muted for the folks at the Hays Code. One of the first titles to be preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, The Maltese Falcon is landmark filmmaking. —A.S.
5. Double Indemnity (1944)
Long before the Boomers came to know Fred MacMurray as the kindly father on My Three Sons, the actor essayed his best performance in Double Indemnity as the deplorable, hard-boiled Walter Neff, who falls for a married temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) who talks him into killing her husband. Whether in film or on television, MacMurray normally played the nice guy, but for Double Indemnity he turned his everyman decency into a mask—perfect for a character who can barely conceal what a lustful, conniving bastard he is. One of the great noirs, this early effort from Billy Wilder revealed the filmmaker’s talent for wonderfully thorny, unapologetically rotten characters—and it doubles as one of the definitive mid-century Los Angeles movies. —Tim Grierson
4. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Can you believe there was a time when Katharine Hepburn was known in Hollywood as “box office poison”? This adaptation of a Broadway hit was a vehicle to get her career back on track after a series of flops. Her performance as icy heiress Tracy Lord in this “remarriage” comedy is a force of nature. Happily, her no-longer-drunken ex is played by Cary Grant, who is a fabulous foil. Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey round out the cast as reporters in not-so-clever disguise. Pretty much everything about this movie is a pure delight, and the script is a masterpiece. —A.G.
3. The Bicycle Thief (1948)
This neo-realist film is has been considered by many to be “the greatest film of all time.” It received a special Academy Award for Most Outstanding Foreign Film several years before the category officially existed. The story’s simple enough: a poor man and his son search postwar Rome for the man’s stolen bicycle, without which he cannot work. Vittorio de Sica’s vision hits all the notes of the Italian Neorealist style Pioneered by Roberto Rossellini – the story is simple, the characters are relatively simple (some aren’t actors at all; Enzo Staiola, who plays the man’s son and cohort, was plucked off the sidewalk), and there is a focus on the quotidian lives of working class people and the unemployment and poverty that plagued Italy in the postwar years. The Bicycle Thief is both a sentimental portrait of a father and son, and a dramatization of the social issues of its era. —A.G.
2. Casablanca (1942)
There are probably a decent number of auteur-theorist types who’d quibble with me for saying Casablanca is a perfect film. The production team didn’t consider it a big deal, in fact; just one of hundreds of films being made that year (despite a major league cast and great writers). It performed solidly at the box office, though not spectacularly. Then it won a bunch of Academy Awards. Then its reputation began to grow. One of the many interesting things about Casablanca is its epic durability – the story feels as fresh and real today as it did in 1945. A romantic drama with political tones and a ton of wit, it features superb performances by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Paul Henreid (for starters). Doomed love, self-sacrifice, Bogie one-liners galore, and one of the most quintessential cinematic moments of its age (both of my kids were born after 9/11 and even they cheered when that chorus of La Marseillaise drowned out the Nazis). Smart, sweet, and witty; probably the quintessential film of the 1940s, and one of the best feel-good movies of the 20th century. —A.G.
1. Citizen Kane (1941) | |||||
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"Jonathan Dunn",
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"Nony Onyeador",
"Ammanuel Zegeye"
] | 2021-03-11T00:00:00+00:00 | New research reveals the barriers that Black talent in the film and TV industry faces, the economic fallout, and solutions for an inclusive, equitable workplace. | en | /favicon.ico | McKinsey & Company | https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/black-representation-in-film-and-tv-the-challenges-and-impact-of-increasing-diversity | Movies and television are often an escape from and a reflection of life unfolding. They also can play an outsize role in shaping and reinforcing cultural beliefs and attitudes about race, both in the United States and internationally. Yet for the thousands of people who toil in a range of on- and off-screen positions in the sprawling film and TV industry, movies and television are something much more groundedâthey are a job. And for Black professionals trying to build and sustain a career in film and TV, the industry has been, by many of their accounts, a relatively unwelcoming workplace.
While a certain amount of progress has been made with on-screen talent in recent years, and although several entertainment companies are starting to make strides toward diversity and inclusion, our new analysis shows that inequity persists and is deeply entrenched across the film and TV ecosystem. Data on the levels of diversity and representation on-screen have been available for several years. But those numbers alone, as important as they are, tell only one part of the story. We examined in detail the racial complexities and challenges of this dynamic workplace, analyzing the entire film and TV ecosystemâincluding studios, networks, production and streaming companies, and distributorsâthrough the lens of the individuals who must navigate it: on-screen talent, as well as off-screen writers, producers, directors, executives, agents, crew members, and beyond.
We wanted to understand the lived experience of Black professionals along the end-to-end journey of content production and distribution, from applying for an entry-level position or pitching new ideas to shooting on location and distributing a finished product. To shed light on the scale of the racial disparities and the potential economic opportunity in addressing them, we analyzed data and reviewed multiple research reports on thousands of films and TV shows. We also conducted anonymous interviews with dozens of film and TV professionals, writers, directors, producers, agents, actors, and executives, enabling them to speak openly about the system-level obstacles and routine indignities they encounter (see sidebar âAbout the researchâ). We collaborated in this research with the BlackLight Collective, a coalition of Black leaders, artists, and executives who work in varied capacities across the film and TV industry. We hope that focusing on the experiences of those who face so many barriers will help spur solutions to improve the inclusivity of the industry for all underrepresented groups.
Our findings, which build on and corroborate McKinseyâs recent research on the Black experience in corporate America, include the following:
By addressing the persistent racial inequities, the industry could reap an additional $10 billion in annual revenuesâabout 7 percent more than the assessed baseline of $148 billion. Fewer Black-led stories get told, and when they are, these projects have been consistently underfunded and undervalued, despite often earning higher relative returns than other properties.
The handful of Black creatives who are in prominent off-screen, âabove the lineâ positions (that is, creator, producer, writer, or director) find themselves primarily responsible for providing opportunities for other Black off-screen talent. Unless at least one senior member of a production is Black, Black talent is largely shut out of those critical roles.
Emerging Black actors receive significantly fewer chances early in their careers to make their mark in leading roles, compared with white actors, and they have a lower margin for error.
Both film and TV still have very little minority representation among top management and boards; film in particular is less diverse than relatively homogenous sectors such as energy, finance, and transport.
A complex, interdependent value chain filled with dozens of hidden barriers and other pain points reinforces the racial status quo in the industry. Based on our research, we catalogued close to 40 specific pain points that Black professionals in film and TV regularly encounter as they attempt to build their careers.
There are four key steps that film and TV companies can take to advance racial equity in entertainment and beyond. These steps would need to be cross-cutting and, ideally, shepherded by an independent, third-party organization that the industry creates.
Today, Black Americans make up 13.4 percent of the US population, and that percentage will increase over the next few decades. Just as the racial wealth gap is constraining the US economy, the film and TV industry will continue to leave money on the table if it fails to advance racial equity (see sidebar âThe value of achieving racial equity in Hollywoodâ).
However, the unique characteristics of the film and TV industry make achieving equity a complex, system-level challenge. Tight-knit, interdependent networks dominate the landscape; unlike in many other industries, a single companyâs efforts to change the racial dynamic inside its own four walls can do only so much for the entire ecosystem. In any given week, let alone an entire career, a professional working in Hollywood might have to traverse multiple separate entitiesâagencies, unions and guilds, studios, networks, production houses, financiers, festivals, critics, and awards establishments. At the same time, strong accountability structures (uniformly enforced HR processes and rules, for instance) and transparency are lacking in many cases. Work settings can be small and informal, including far-flung shooting locations outside the United States; the work itself is often temporary and contract based. In the same way that collective action is needed to advance racial equity in corporate America, real and lasting change in film and TV will require concerted action and the joint commitment of stakeholders across the industry ecosystem.
The state of Black representation on- and off-screen
Black talent is underrepresented across the industry, particularly off-screen (Exhibit 1). Our research on positions of creative control reveals that less than 6 percent of the writers, directors, and producers of US-produced films are Black. In some genres (the superhero genre, for example), representation is even lower.
Our conversations with professionals in the field reveal that Black talent tends to be shut out of projects unless senior team members are Black. The data show that films with a Black producer (only 8 percent of all US-produced films) or a Black director (6 percent of all films) are significantly more likely to have a Black writer. And if a filmâs producer is Black, the film is far more likely to have a Black director, too (Exhibit 2). The same holds true in TV: when a showâs creator is Black, it is much more likely that the showrunner (the leading producer) is Black. Specifically, more than four out of five shows with a Black creator have a Black showrunner. However, out of all showrunners, only 5 percent are Black.
Black professionals are also severely underrepresented in executive decision-making roles throughout the industry (department heads or top management, for example). Eighty-seven percent of TV executives and 92 percent of film executives are white. The film industry in particular remains disproportionately white, even compared with such homogenous sectors as energy and finance (Exhibit 3). This underrepresentation extends to the buying side, where Black distributors make up a small fraction of the total.
The lack of Black executives in film and TV has troubling knock-on effects throughout the industry. For example, as one Black executive explained, âMany former studio execs get production deals as independent producers affiliated with the studio, so whatever inequity is prevalent in the studios will carry over to the mix of producers.â
As for the state of play in front of the camera, the situation, while improving of late, remains problematic. The prominence of certain films and TV series with Black leads obscures the fact that Black actors are still underrepresented on-screen. While their overall representation among film casts is broadly in line with the Black share of the US population (13.4 percent), Black actors play only 11 percent of leading film roles and are often funneled to race-related projects, which typically receive lower investment in both production and promotion.
TV presents a mixed picture: in 2019, about 14 percent of leads on cable programs were Black, but Black actors made up less than 12 percent of leads on broadcast shows. The share of streaming shows with Black leadsâless than 5 percent in 2019âis less than half that of broadcast shows, and only a third of what it would be if it mirrored current demographics (Exhibit 4). While all three platforms have made some progress in terms of minority representation at large, streamingâs explosive growth makes its showing on diversity going forward particularly critical for the industry.
Since we concluded our research, Netflix commissioned an independent report on inclusion in its content. This analysis by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative highlights much higher on-screen representation in Netflixâs productions, with Black talent accounting for 15.2 percent of lead or co-lead roles across film and scripted series for the two-year period from 2018 to 2019. Still, the report also confirmed very low percentages of Black talent in above-the-line roles (creator, producer, writer, or director); Black above-the-line talent made up only 6.6 percent of those roles for films and 7.9 percent for scripted series across 2018 and 2019. Similar to the findings in our review of theatrical releases, these above-the-line roles had a profound multiplier effect on representation. When a Black creator was behind a Netflix series, for example, 72 percent of series regulars were Black, while only 15.4 percent were Black when a non-Black creator developed a series. The broad implication of this phenomenon is that Black creatives are carrying the weight of Black diversity and inclusion, or, as the report concluded more generally, âunderrepresented creatives were primarily responsible for the on-screen inclusion in Netflix films.â
Barriers to entry
Black talent faces a number of obstacles to entering film and TV at the outset, many of which are hidden or rarely acknowledged. Among these are financial and social barriers, as well as racial bias.
Financial. Breaking into the industry is often only possible following years of work without pay or for pay that is insufficient to cover basic necessities (for instance, paying off student loans or supporting less well-off family members). As one white executive acknowledged, when talent is just starting out, work in the industry is âconsidered a privileged apprenticeship. The pay is sh*tty and, letâs be honest, that rules certain people out from the job.â McKinsey research has shown that there is a wide and persistent gap in wealth between Black and white families in the United States, with the median Black family having about $150,000 less than the median white family. The result: low or no pay excludes many Black Americans from Hollywood from the start. Work in the industry also tends to be temporary and contract based, making it less accessible to those who do not have personal savings, an inheritance, or family money to fall back on.
Social. Our research underscores that jobs in the industry often go to insidersâ acquaintances or members of their extended networks, who tend to be overwhelmingly white and upper-class. As one white producer told us: âI got my first job because my boss went to Stanford. Whenever he had an opening, heâd send an email to the arts clubs of Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton.â Despite some progress in recent years, the majority of Black college students are not concentrated in a handful of elite universities. Without a formal search or recruitment process or an established protocol for hiring, industry access can come down to who you know.
Racial bias. Our research points to a pattern of entrenched industry gatekeepers such as agencies, unions, and guilds responding more favorably to people who look, act, sound, and write like they do. As of 2015 (the most recent year for which data are available, though many industry participants say that modest progress has been made since then), about 90 percent of the agents and executive staff at the industryâs top three talent agencies were white. Across leads, writers, and directors, the share of Black talent at those same agencies was less than half the Black share of the US population. As one Black writer recounted, âEven though I was staff writing on a popular, well-received show, it was still tough to find an agent. Your average agent is a 50-year-old white guy ⦠who never had to stretch to see [himself] in other people or spaces. So [such agents will] have a harder time representing people they donât personally relate to.â It can be an equally difficult experience for the relatively small number of Black agents in the business. âI was one of few women and definitely few Black women there period, let alone in leadership, so there was no one to look up to,â one Black agent told us. âYou learn to try not to take up too much space and speak only when you have something important to say. But then peers and others behind you get promoted ahead of you even when you are bringing more in.â
Ongoing challenges
Unfortunately, the challenges facing Black talent extend far beyond access and representation. Black professionals in film and TV face ongoing barriers and inequities, even once theyâre âin the door.â Based on our interviews, we surfaced close to 40 pain points that these industry participants must endure throughout the entire content journey, from talent or idea discovery to the release of the film or TV series (Exhibit 5).
Getting fewer at bats
Even for those who do get a real chance in the industry, Black professionals have much less room for failure than their white counterparts do. Black actors in particular tend to get fewer chances to break out or get ahead. In the first ten years of their careers, emerging Black actors get an average of six leading roles, while their white counterparts get nine (Exhibit 6). Having fewer opportunities also makes it harder for these actors to make ends meet; they often go two or three years between lead roles, which means they lack the consistent income that would help them stay in the industry. This experience is all too familiar for off-screen talent as well; selling a script or getting a project off the ground to direct or produce can often take years.
And not only does Black talent have fewer opportunities, these individuals often canât afford a single box-office or ratings flop. As another Black executive explained, âBlack creators and actors need to be able to fail and get another chance like everyone else. Currently, they cannot.â
Stereotyped and set apart
Our analysis also throws into sharp relief the creative limitations imposed on Black talent. Both on- and off-screen, Black talent is pigeonholed and funneled to race-related content, which often plays into stereotypes.
Consider that films with two or more Black professionals working off-screen (as a producer, writer, or director, for example) are twice as likely as other films to be either race-specific (a biopic such as Lincoln or Selma, for instance), or race adjacent (for example, a comedy such as Barbershop 3 or Crazy Rich Asians, where race is critical to the style or topic). This is true despite the fact that such race-related material accounts for only a third of all films, with race-agnostic titles (A Star is Born,Deadpool) making up the rest (Exhibit 7).
In the words of one creative executive, âWhen [studios are] looking for Black content, theyâre looking for Wakanda or poverty, with no in-between.â Such stereotypical depictions prevent Black actors from advancing in the industry and fulfilling their creative potential. As a Black actor explained, âI have to take stereotypical work, because thatâs whatâs out there, but then when I take those roles, they say thatâs all I am capable of.â
White executives rejecting a new idea donât even hesitate to tell Black talent âwhatâs going to work for Black peopleâ or to âquestion the authenticity of experiences of Black characters,â Black industry participants noted.
Undervalued and held back
Being largely shut out of race-agnostic content is bad enough creatively. But it also comes with its own financial limitations. Race-agnostic films receive three times the average production budget that race-related films do. Put simply: funneling Black talent to race-specific or race-adjacent films means excluding this talent from the projects with the strongest funding.
But Black off-screen talent faces funding disparities in race-agnostic films as well. Films of any kind with two or more Black professionals in off-screen creative roles (producer, writer, or director, for example) receive significantly lower production budgetsâmore than 40 percent less than other films (Exhibit 8). The disparities are particularly notable given that these films make 10 percent more in box-office revenues per dollar invested in prints and advertising, compared with films with no or just one Black creative professional. Whatâs more, the average production budget for films with a Black lead or co-lead is a quarter less than the budget for films with no leading Black actors.
There is also a widespread misperception in the industry that content starring Black actors will not perform well with international audiences. In 2019, the top films with Black leads were distributed in 30 percent fewer international markets on averageâyet they earned nearly the same global box-office sales as films with white leads and earned more than those films on a per-market basis. (Nearly two-thirds of the box-office earnings for the Men in Black film series came from the international box office.)
Fueling this issue is the lack of diversity among marketing teams, executives, and other industry decision makers. Black professionals cite white decision makersâ failure to relate to Black content as a key obstacle to financing. As one Black executive explained, âMarketing teams need to be on board to select a film, but if they donât feel comfortable with the story, it limits the number of buys.â Similarly, the executive added, âwhen executives feel like they canât personally relate to your content, they donât bid.â
Unsupported and passed over
Every day, and over the course of their careers, Black professionals throughout the industry must navigate an ecosystem that is set up to cater to white talent. Black actors, for example, often have to shoulder considerable expenses for lighting, hair, and makeup when white talent is treated as the norm. One Black executive recalled a department headâs repeated refusal to hire an appropriate hair stylist for her client, who was Black. When the executive raised her concerns with the film producer, she was met with complacency: after five or six conversations about the issue, the producer commented that âthe industry needs to start hiring more Black actors so this does not happen so often.â As the executive put it, âI had to push back on that. âWhat if youâre the problem? You are more willing to have more than a handful of conversations with me about this than to talk to your department head about hiring adequately. In what other role on this set would you tolerate such a clear inability to do oneâs job?ââ
This is just one example of a âBlack taxâ that both aspiring and established Black professionals in the industry find they must pay. Whether it is having to fight (or pay out of pocket) for what others typically donât have to or it is needing to advocate on their own for greater racial equity, an unfair burden falls almost entirely on Black talent or creatives. The sense of frustration from prominent Black talent is immediate and clear; many remark about the exhaustion of constantly being asked why racism exists, a question their white counterparts never have to answer. It should come as no surprise, then, that some of those same now-celebrated Black professionals on- and off-screen have lamented about how often and how close they came early in their careers to giving up their dreams in the face of so many obstacles.
Our research suggests that discrimination of this kind is commonplace and that Black women in particular face heightened challenges. They are more likely to face isolation as an âonlyâ and more likely to lack role models who share their identity. As in other industries, many Black women in film and TV report having to work harder than their white, male counterpartsâfor less recognition.
Black professionals also lack the sponsorship necessary to support their advancement. Our latest research on race in the workplace shows that across the US private sector, less than one-third of Black employees have a sponsor. Our interviews with Black professionals show that Hollywood is no exception. In fact, by many accounts, the situation has gotten worse over the past two to three decades.
âWhen I started out in the industry some 30 years ago, it wasnât a desert,â one industry veteran recounted. âI had many Black colleagues who seemed to be on the path to successâstudio vice presidents and producers of top shows. But at some point, they hit a wall and ultimately left the industry. Each was a real loss.â This person concluded: â[Since deceased TV executive] Brandon Tartikoff ran NBC through much of the â80s, and he hired Black executives. He didnât need a mandate to create opportunities; he just did what was right. There have been [other] people who didnât need diversity initiatives [to do the same thing]; there just havenât been enough of them.â
Quick to be cut
Black talent is often the last in and the first out: already underrepresented in the industry, Black professionals are particularly vulnerable to market shocks. As our research shows, the share of films with Black talent significantly dropped after studios cut their output of films starting in 2008â09 and had still not fully recovered by the end of 2019 (Exhibit 9). One Black executive put it bluntly: âThere was a massive contraction in the number of films produced, and the international box officeâwhere studios believe itâs harder to âsell Blackââwas becoming increasingly important. It felt natural that Black talent was the hardest hit as studios reevaluated their slates.â
Changing the industry
Increasing the amount of racial diversity and representation in film and TV is no small task. Overcoming the hidden barriers and cozy networks that still dominate the complex ecosystem will require sustained collaboration among many different organizations. A few have begun to take individual, discrete steps focused on increasing Black-led content, while Fortune 1000 companies pledged $66 billion last year to racial-equity initiatives in the wake of George Floydâs killing. As encouraging as those moves are, however, it will likely take sweeping, industry-wide changes, perhaps spearheaded by an independent, third-party organization, to change this workplace. We recognize that Black talent is only one of many underrepresented groups in film and TV and hope that the industry, by addressing the system-level challenges and barriers that stand in the way, will be in a position to become more equitable and inclusive for all, including Asian Americans, members of the Latinx community, LGBTQ+ individuals, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and others.
These changes will not take place overnight, but our research has revealed a set of four measures that we believe industry leaders can takeâtogetherâto begin to increase diversity and representation in film and TV.
1. Ensure diverse representation, especially among off-screen talent and executives
Key entities such as studios, networks, streaming companies, agencies, and production companies could aspire to achieve a specific target for Black and nonwhite representation across all levels and rolesâincluding in the boardroom, which remains predominantly whiteâand make those goals public to hold themselves accountable. Matching the share of the US population that is Black (13.4 percent) and nonwhite (40 percent) would seem a logical place to start. Industry leaders could focus on increasing representation in important decision-making and gatekeeping positions, including hiring committees. They could also set intersectional targets, including for representation of Black women.
To help meet these targets, companies should think about expanding recruitingâto state schools and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), for example, and beyond Los Angeles and New York. (Expanding geographical access is particularly critical given that nearly 60 percent of the Black American labor force is concentrated in the South.) They should also look at the possibility of boosting and formalizing mentorship and sponsorship programs, paying interns, assistants, and early-career talent a living wage, and offering trade-school programs for so-called below-the-line production jobs (crew and technicians, for example), as well as temporary fee deferrals for new guild members.
The industryâs heavily interconnected value chain means that different stakeholders would need to act in concert; no single studio or agency can make the industry equitable. The underrepresentation of Black talent is due in part to racial bias among industry decision makers and gatekeepers, and these insiders would ideally commit to changing their own beliefs and behavior. As more Black professionals assume decision-making roles, dynamics within the industry ecosystem should improve: increasing the representation of Black talent in key off-screen rolesâincluding producer, writer, director, and show creatorâwill have a multiplier effect, increasing representation among writers, directors, showrunners, and other talent.
No discussion of diversity and inclusion in film and TV would be complete without also including an essential part of the ecosystem: critics, awards, and film festivals. The recent revelation that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which votes on the Golden Globes, doesnât have a single Black member was further proof of the room for change in the organizations that determine who gets recognized annually for their work on- and off-screen in such awards as the Oscars, Emmys, and the respective guilds (for actors, producers, directors, and writers, for instance).
2. Increase transparency and accountability
Industry participants should give serious thought to tracking and disseminating their progress toward racial equity to make sure it occurs. We would encourage these participants to publish intersectional reporting (including data on race, ethnicity, and gender) about their employees, leadership, and talent rosters more regularly and to share these reports with an external, independent organization (see step four below). They should also think about adopting best practices from other industries by formalizing all performance evaluations and promotions to help limit the effects of systemic bias and reduce the hidden barriers facing Black talent. Studios could develop and disseminate evaluation rubrics and implement formal, biannual performance reviews, for example, while strengthening HRâs presence and authority out of the officeâon location, for instance.
Another important step would be to make clear to all employees (including full-time but also freelance employees, who make up a significant portion of the industry) and key partners (such as small production houses) what the inclusive behavior that is expected looks likeâin a variety of work settings; companies should also consider regularly pointing to and celebrating examples of such model behavior in practice. Finally, by tying executive bonuses to diversity targets, companies can ensure that leaders are held to account for progress on racial equity.
3. Seek and financially support a wide range of Black stories
Demand for diverse content is on the rise, and industry leaders are competing for diverse audiences. Between 2017 and 2019, for example, demand more than doubled for the top debut series with diverse casts (those in which racial and ethnic minorities make up at least 40 percent of members). To advance racial equityâand to tap this significant financial opportunityâindustry leaders should strongly consider dedicating up-front funding to increasing diverse content and talent. Studios, for example, could start by committing 13.4 percent of their annual budget to projectsâagain, to mirror the Black share of the US populationâwith not just Black leading actors but also Black producers, writers, and directors. They could fund initiatives across the pipeline, targeting development, production, marketing, and distribution. Initiatives could include dedicated training and sponsorship programs (including networking opportunities) for diverse creators, as well as a certain number or share of pitch slots regularly reserved for underrepresented talent. These efforts would not be limited to any single, short-term campaign. Studios and producers can also focus on expanding the international distribution of films with Black talent.
4. Create an independent organization to promote diversity
When contemplating different possible approaches to increasing diversity in film and TV, industry leaders may want to keep the âBlack taxâ top of mind. It would seem unreasonable to expect Black industry professionals to continue spending countless hours trying to reform this vast, complex industry on their own, time they could otherwise be spending creating the next hit series or blockbuster movie franchise. But doing so would also be wholly insufficient to the task at hand, given the magnitude of the barriers and the need for broad-based, collective action to overcome them. This is particularly critical in film and TV, where many Black professionals have expressed concerns about the risks of speaking up about conditions in the industry.
To effect genuine, sustainable change, industry leaders should strongly consider creating a dedicated, independent advocacy organization to advance racial equity in their fieldâa move that has proven successful in a number of other contexts. Such an armâs-length group would need vocal backers and strong partnerships with film and TV leaders to boost its reach and influence across the industry. A well-funded, third-party organization of this nature could strengthen individual efforts by developing and scaling best practices, collecting and disseminating intersectional data, and reporting on progress across the industry.
By stifling Black talent throughout the film and TV industry ecosystemâand at every step of the content-development processâHollywood is leaving at least $10 billion in revenue on the table each year. Achieving racial equity will make the film and TV sector more just and more profitable.
Equally as critical, improving racial equity should prove to be a boon for audiences. When the on-screen and off-screen representation of Black talent matches the share of Black Americans and when the industry succeeds in dismantling the ubiquitous workplace barriers preventing Black creators from telling a range of stories, viewers of all races will gain access to the many different products of Black creative expression. Ultimately, the reshaping of the film and TV ecosystem will play a role in reshaping ideas on raceâand the advancement of racial equityâin America and beyond. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 73 | https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/hustlers-life-rights-hollywood-legal-based-on-true-events-1202176296/ | en | ‘Hustlers’: When Does a Film Based on True Events Need Its Subject’s Life Rights? | [
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"Chris O'Falt",
"Chris O'Falt"
] | 2019-09-25T16:00:37+00:00 | Legally? Almost never, but that's not the whole story in the competitive (and litigious) business of Hollywood. Case in point: "Hustlers." | en | IndieWire | https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/hustlers-life-rights-hollywood-legal-based-on-true-events-1202176296/ | The fall movie season often means a lot of movies “Based on a True Story,” that opening moniker that gives certain stories added weight. Sometimes the subjects are famous (or infamous), but in the case of the real-life strippers-turned-robbers in “Hustlers,” some unknown figures found their lives thrust into the public consciousness in the form of a box-office hit.
Samantha Barbash — whose character inspired Jennifer Lopez’s performance in the film — has threatened to sue distributor STX, claiming the film is a violation of her rights. She has also stated that she originally rejected the producers’ offer to buy the rights to her story because the dollar amount offered was too low (less than the cost of Hermes bag, according to Barbash).
The main issue here is the concept of “life rights,” which Hollywood studios commonly acquire prior to making any form of biopic. The “Hustlers” case poses a big question for anyone looking to adapt true stories: When does Hollywood need a subject’s life rights to make a scripted narrative film? The simple, strictly legal answer: Almost never.
“The general rule, nationwide, is that the first amendment is going to control for narrative fiction,” said attorney John L. Geiger, who has written countless life Rrghts agreements for his film and TV clients. “The concept of life rights is really something of a misnomer, because no one owns the facts that make up the narrative of their life.”
A writer is free to use any publicly known facts about an event or person. The bar is even higher when dealing with a public figure, where a plaintiff would have to prove defamation to win in court. “Unless the filmmaker is deliberately falsifying, with the intent to cause harm,” said Geiger, “it’s pretty difficult to find liability.”
In the case of the real-life women featured in “Hustlers,” their arrest was a newsworthy event, while Barbash and others participated in writer Jessica Pressler’s popular 2015 New Yorker article, which was optioned by STX as the basis of the screenplay. But in the competitive business and artistic marketplace that is Hollywood, things are never quite as black-and-white as a law-school seminar, and the importance of life rights eliminates many gray areas.
“The artistic advantage of having a life-rights agreement is I now have a backstage pass to start talking to these folks,” said Geiger. “They’ve agreed to be my partners, if you will, and bring the narrative to a broader audience. So I may be getting material that is otherwise private, still factual, but I wouldn’t have the access of them cooperating with me.”
For a writer, life rights are a major competitive advantage when trying to attach a star or sell a script. When a larger production company, studio, or distributor become involved, the business side will often demand the acquisition of life rights. Not only does the company want a competitive advantage, in case someone wants to make a film about the same thing, it also offers a measure of legal protection.
“It’s cheaper for you in terms of business just to head off any potential lawsuit, rather than go through the legal representation for the onus of the material,” said UCLA Film & TV Professor Howard Suber, who has been an expert witness in many copyright cases and co-wrote the new book “Creativity and Copyright: Legal Essentials for Screenwriters and Creative Artists” with Geiger. “The industry as a whole is constantly thinking in terms of lawsuits. In fact, I think the following statement is true: Any film that makes significant amounts of money is going to be sued by somebody for something.”
Life-rights agreements typically don’t give any creative control to the subject, and use language promising the filmmakers will do their best to stick to facts, but they allow a great deal of wiggle room to account for the demands of Hollywood storytelling.
“The core of a life-rights agreement is the consent and waiver,” said Geiger. “I’ll give you access to material, any access I give you, you’re contractually allowed to use and I won’t turn around and sue you for anything. I won’t sue you for any privacy torts, I won’t sue you for contractual commercial misappropriation, I’m giving you a blank ticket. And that’s the type of clearance requirement that a bond company and distributor is going to demand before they are willing to go forward with the project.”
Geiger and Suber both indicated that it also makes good business sense to option a nonfiction, reported article like Pressler’s definitive piece on the women featured in “Hustlers.” While the facts Pressler put into the public domain with her article are free for artists to use, Hollywood clearance attorneys always worry about the fuzzy line between where those facts end and the author’s analysis (which is not free) begins. However, in regards to life rights, there’s another advantage to optioning a well-researched article.
“One of the benefits you are getting from doing a deal with a journalist is the journalist has already been in the living room and has the relationship with the subjects,” said Geiger. “I can just stand in their shoes and not go out and start from scratch.”
This, of course, is what likely made STX comfortable with “Hustlers,” which features a journalist character, played by Julia Stiles, interviewing the film’s protagonists. Suber also added that there is a danger to approaching subjects after optioning an article: They may want more money than you are willing to spend, or more creative control than you are willing to give.
“By asking, you are acknowledging that you thought you needed their permission,” said Suber. “If they refuse or ask too much, you can then say, when they turn around and sue you, ‘Well, I subsequently discovered it was OK,’ but that’s kind of a lame response.”
The part that becomes trickiest — in ethical, artistic, and legal terms alike — isn’t a debate over the facts surrounding a subject’s life, but getting into their private life and their motivations for actions they take in the story.
“If you are doing a biopic right you’re inevitably going to end up with that, because character is about change and we need to know the inner demons they are changing,” said Geiger. “What is the psychological landscape that has them at the status quo at the beginning of the film and what is the arc of that change, and all of that is internal. It’s not out there in the world that’s free for the taking. That is something we extrapolate, that we interpolate, and whenever you are doing that, that sounds a lot like fictionalization and that potentially opens you up to defamation because you are ascribing intents and mindsets that may or may not be true.”
Geiger said that he’s had clients walk away from projects because they weren’t comfortable with filling in such emotional and psychological blanks. So while the first amendment places a “based on true events” filmmaker and distributor on solid legal ground, it’s always better to get the life rights.
“I really come back to the cleanliness, the clarity of mind and heart on it,” said Geiger. “You’re going to find your way on a project better with the cooperation of the subject. So if it’s a living person and they’re not a totally raging lunatic, you’re probably better off figuring out a way to collaborate with them.” | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 24 | https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/queer-now-then-1956/ | en | Queer & Now & Then: 1956 | [
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"Michael Koresky"
] | 2019-01-16T15:08:15+00:00 | A regular fella: Vincente Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy questions definitions of masculinity in what the filmmaker called "the first homosexual picture" | en | https://www.filmcomment.com/wp-content/themes/filmcomment/dist/img/favicon.ico | Film Comment | https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/queer-now-then-1956/ | In this biweekly column, I look back through a century of cinema for traces of queerness, whether in plain sight or under the surface. Read the introductory essay.
Perhaps no Hollywood film better exemplifies the passive-aggressive game of hide-and-seek the industry has long played with queerness than Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 Tea and Sympathy. Based on a sensational 1953 play by Robert Anderson, this unorthodox ’50s movie melodrama is in some ways not all that thematically deviant from other American films of the era, such as Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger Than Life or Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind or Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Miller’s A View from the Bridge, all of which are preoccupied with similar questions around American masculinity as a social construct. Yet in adapting the play, which directly dealt with taboo questions around homosexuality, Minnelli’s film at once plunges in and recoils from its own subject matter, resulting in a still-strange, heavily coded experience that’s neither here nor there—but which, thanks to Minnelli’s singular sensitivity and visually expressive style, remains a remarkable, compromised work of mainstream American filmmaking, further complicated by the matter of Minnelli’s now widely known closeted status.
Understanding a little about Anderson’s play will help elucidate the oddity of Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, a highly talky film that’s nevertheless been gagged. Set within the tightly enclosed parameters of an all-male boarding school in New England, Anderson’s play concerns the vicious intimidation and bullying showered upon a shy, fey 17-year-old senior named Tom Lee. He isn’t like the other boys, preferring activities considered “feminine,” gravitating more to music and the arts than sports, and seemingly disinterested in girls. The meat of the narrative concerns his gradual bonding with the headmaster’s lonely wife, Laura Reynolds, a sensitive soul who lends a sympathetic ear to the boys, her tender presence intended to implicitly help the students better delineate male and female roles. Tom’s relationship with Laura is more complex, blossoming from maternal figure (the boy’s own mother abandoned him when he was five) to emotional companion to, finally, lover. All the while, Laura tries to help Tom as the student body begins to spread rumors of his alleged homosexuality, tagging him with the nasty nickname “Sister Boy,” which is clearly a euphemism for “Sissy Boy,” but also stands in for all the derogatory terms for “queer” that had been stricken from the play’s script in deference to the Motion Picture Production Code.
Anderson, who said he had been inspired by his own experiences in school and his relationship with an older woman, denied that Tea and Sympathy was a “gay play” and said it was about “a false charge of homosexuality.” In this way, as a story about the danger of the rumor mill, Tea and Sympathy is historically aligned with Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour, later made into William Wyler’s notorious 1961 film with Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine; now commonly derided as the quintessential dated portrayal of the “tragedy” of being gay, the film is also set in a private school and more preoccupied with scandal and mud-slinging than the emotional experience of otherness. Nevertheless because of the vacuum of representation that would continue for decades, the screen adaptations of these plays remain two of our most visible dramas related to issues around homosexuality, making them difficult texts to wrestle with and impossible to dismiss. Tea and Sympathy, first produced the same year as The Crucible, another drama of accusations and allegations against one’s good name, could be viewed more as thinly veiled post–McCarthy-era drama. Even if homosexuality—or, per the film’s hang-ups, insufficient male-ness—becomes implicitly the worst thing one can infer about you, there’s something expansive and moving about the film’s expression of outsiderness. It feels just as strongly today a film about identity and the inability of the oppressive American mainstream to allow for expressions of sexual or social individuality.
Despite Anderson’s downplaying his work’s overt gayness, the material was scandalous enough—also for its adulterous, May-December affair—that MGM was nervous about the property. In the movie, Tom is one crucial year older, though as embodied by 25-year-old newcomer John Kerr (who played the role on stage and had just appeared in a supporting role in Minnelli’s mind-boggling 1955 melodrama The Cobweb), he hardly looks so boyish that his age difference with Deborah Kerr, also reprising her Broadway role as Mrs. Reynolds and only 10 years his senior, produces any seismic shocks. One noteworthy change from stage to screen was the elimination of a small character, a schoolmaster named David Harris, believed to be a “fairy,” with whom Tom is allegedly seen romping naked on a beach. It’s this event that fuels the rumors that drive Anderson’s plot; without David Harris, the film is even more clearly about misperception and hearsay and social codes than gay sexuality.
As a way of imposing a kind of warm nostalgia and moral finitude around the play’s emotional minefields, Minnelli’s film couches the events in flashback, with a wraparound set at a school reunion that grants the closure the play wasn’t willing to provide, diluting and sanitizing an already delicate film reticent to delve into uncomfortable subject matter. At the same time, Minnelli uses the extra screen time in the opening scene to subtly elaborate upon his themes. As the grownup Tom wanders through the school grounds in the opening scene, bobbing and weaving amidst the now grown students who had terrorized him, we hear pockets of these handsomely suited former peers rhapsodize about “real men” and “beautiful girls,” creating an alienating effect for a hero we’ve barely met. After he peruses his former bedroom (with a suspiciously wistful air for someone so traumatized by his experiences there), Minnelli glides his camera through a window, deftly transitioning to the past as we see Deborah Kerr’s Laura Reynolds tending to her blooming garden while Tom serenades “The Joys of Love” on guitar. Early on we discover that Tom, with his green thumb and sewing skills, has advice for Laura and the other schoolmistresses and wives on campus, one of whom tells him he’ll someday “make some girl a good wife” while he threads her a needle. This exchange occurs on the beach, away from where the more bronzed and buffed boys are, gallivanting and horseplaying and tossing around a volleyball and laughing over a magazine quiz none too subtly titled “Are You Masculine?”. Soon enough his classmates are bullying and beating him, leaving “Sister Boy” with a bleeding lip and an irrevocably bruised male ego.
Laura increasingly feels driven to act as Tom’s protector and savior, partly out of obligation to her position at the school (she’s to stay mostly deferential to her husband’s authority but occasionally give the boys some “tea and sympathy”) but also because we discover Tom reminds her of her first husband, a sensitive man who was killed in the war “proving he wasn’t a coward.” While stopping short of defending him if he actually were gay—much like the film stops short of acknowledging gayness at all—Laura desires to speak on behalf of men who don’t conform to ideals of masculinity. When he visits, Tom’s straight-arrow father (Edward Andrews) bemoans his son’s differences (“Why isn’t he a regular fella?”), demands he get a crew cut like the other boys (“Why?” Tom simply asks, to which dad responds, “You just should”), and is hilariously horrified at Tom’s desire to be a . . . folk singer. Those final two words are delivered after a dramatic pause that can only register as near-satire. Likewise, a later scene in which Tom’s roommate Al (Darryl Hickman, so memorable as Gene Tierney’s disabled teen victim in 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven) teaches him how to “walk like a man,” resulting in some wooden lurches across the floor—neither the “masculine” nor “feminine” examples of walking registering as particularly natural—plays as comedy, not terribly far removed from similar scenes in later slapstick farces La Cage aux Folles (1978) and The Birdcage (1996). In moments like these, Tea and Sympathy feels knowingly absurd and aligned with the perspective of the outsider, making the film an unusually powerful evocation of feeling socially outcast in Eisenhower’s America, regardless of how unready Minnelli, Anderson, and MGM were to deal with the story’s deeper underlying themes.
In the film’s most disturbing scene, Tom is targeted during the school’s annual hazing event, the “bonfire pajama fight.” For this homoerotic ritual, it’s made clear, both by the student body and the faculty, that Tom will get a “real going over” and that it’ll be good for him. In this depiction of institutionally sanctioned violence and bullying, Tom is paraded out martyr-like for his fitting punishment. That Tom is made an example of during this elaborate show is all the more ironic considering that his father had forced him to drop out of the school play, School for Scandal, when he discovered he would be cross-dressing as the character of Lady Teazle. Not allowed to make a spectacle of himself on stage, Tom is instead, with the tacit approval of his father and the headmaster, made to perform as a victim for the delectation of the school. This is made more visceral on film than in the play, where the bonfire is spoken of but never seen. Minnelli makes the scene into a setpiece, visually evoking the always unsettling Halloween sequence in his own 1944 Technicolor musical Meet Me in St. Louis, and thus amplifying the horror.
Tea and Sympathy is often thought of as a hopeless relic, yet the way it teases and tiptoes is hardly a thing of the past in terms of cinema. For instance, it’s always been clear to me that Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989) is cagey in its portrayal of Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), the sensitive boy who’s into theater and poetry and whose demanding father disallows him from pursuing “this theater business” and forbids him from starring as Puck in Shakespeare’s hopelessly fruity A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As recently as 2014, gayness was withheld as a last-act tragic twist in the historical biopic The Imitation Game. It’s safer and makes us feel superior to write off a film such as Minnelli’s as “dated,” as though the way it frames an unapologetically patriarchal culture venerating masculine ideals has, at its core, changed very much in the 60-plus years since. According to biographer Mark Griffin, Minnelli would say publicly and proudly at a festival in the late ’70s, “I made the first homosexual picture while I was at MGM. That was Tea and Sympathy.” Regardless of its shortcomings by today’s standards, or even its limitations as an adaptation, that isn’t a sentiment simple to shake. Minnelli never spoke of whether he truly identified with Tom Lee, though auteur readings have necessarily created a connection between Minnelli, the window-dresser who became one of Hollywood’s great factory men (not to mention Judy Garland’s husband), and Tom Lee, who prefers to spend his allowance on curtains for his dorm room.
Our cinema still wrestles with the representation of women and queer characters, so the changes made to the last act of Tea and Sympathy from stage to screen carry a sting for contemporary viewers. Anderson’s play concludes with the intimation of sex between Tom and Laura, who ends the show with the famous curtain closer: “Years from now, when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.” Whether done out of grace or pity or genuine sexual desire—or all three—Laura’s initiation of their final congress is left to the viewer to interpret. Minnelli’s visual evocation of the scene is indeed gorgeous, taking place in a fairy-tale forest primeval, with ethereal light emanating from behind a tree as they embrace. Flashing back to the present, the film adds a final touch: a letter that Laura has written to Tom, read aloud by Deborah Kerr on the soundtrack while Minnelli’s camera takes in trees and flowers swaying gently in the breeze. From the letter it’s clear that Laura has been ostracized from her former life, living somewhere in Chicago, and that Tom has been sufficiently straightened out (“I was so pleased to hear that you’re married”). Imposed by the Production Code, this wrap-up existed in order to make sure audiences were aware that Tom had conformed and Laura had been punished for her adulterous transgressions. It all worked out; the New York Herald Tribune said the film, against all odds, demonstrated the utmost “good taste.” Tea and Sympathy shows eminent love and tenderness; being an American kind of love, it’s highly conditional. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 87 | https://www.understood.org/en/articles/12-movies-to-help-kids-learn-empathy | en | 12 movies to help kids learn empathy | [
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"Common Sense Media"
] | 2019-10-16T12:05:09.482000+00:00 | These 12 films can help kids of different ages learn empathy. Watch them with or without your child, using the accompanying discussion questions as a guide. | en | /favicon.ico | Understood | https://www.understood.org/en/articles/12-movies-to-help-kids-learn-empathy | Kids with social skills issues may struggle with empathy — the ability to understand and relate to the feelings of others. This can make it hard for them to make friends and navigate social situations. These 12 films can help kids learn how to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.
(Common Sense Media’s recommended ages are only a guide, and may not be right for every child.)
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
The animated film It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features well-known Peanuts characters Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and Snoopy. The plot is simple. Linus hopes for a visit from The Great Pumpkin, but no one else believes in him. The characters are sometimes mean to each other, but that’s a good opportunity to kick off a discussion about the feelings of others.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 4+ Rated: Not rated
Discussion questions to ask your child
When is Charlie Brown happy? When is he sad?
How can you tell that Snoopy takes his Halloween costume very seriously?
Why does Lucy get Linus from the pumpkin patch and put him to bed?
Beauty and the Beast
Magic turns an arrogant prince into an ugly beast. To try to break the spell, the beast takes a young woman named Belle captive in his castle. She starts to see the beast’s inner beauty, but her village marches to destroy him. The music, story, and animations in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast movie will captivate kids — raising questions about the nature of appearances.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 6+ Rated: G
Discussion questions to ask your child
What is Belle feeling when she agrees to be the Beast’s captive?
Why is Gaston surprised that Belle doesn’t want to marry him?
Why do the villagers want to destroy the beast?
Inside Out
Inside Out is an animated Pixar film about the feelings of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. Anger, Sadness, Joy, Fear, and Disgust are all characters in the film. They must work together to help Riley make the right decisions in life. Inside Out is more serious than a typical Pixar movie, but it can teach kids a lot about emotions. (Read why Inside Out is great for kids with attention issues .)
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 6+ Rated: PG
Discussion questions to ask your child
Why is it hard for Riley to tell her parents how she is feeling?
How does Bing Bong feel when he helps Joy escape?
What does it mean to have “mixed emotions” about something?
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
In the classic family film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, a young boy named Elliott makes friends with an alien who is stranded on Earth. Elliott tries to help E.T. “go home.” But other humans are afraid of E.T., and government scientists try to catch and study the alien. This film can help kids explore how people see others who are different.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 7+ Rated: PG
Discussion questions to ask your child
Why do the kids and adults see E.T. differently?
Could Elliott have talked to his mom about E.T.? Why or why not?
Did you know that the director, Steven Spielberg, has ? Do you think that helped him relate to the characters, and how?
Zootopia
In a world where animals can talk, a rabbit named Judy Hopps and a fox named Nick Wilde team up to solve a kidnapping case. Zootopia is an exciting crime mystery that has lots of jokes that will go over kids’ heads (and that parents may love). But it’s a great tool for helping kids learn about tolerance and the danger of stereotypes.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 8+ Rated: PG
Discussion questions to ask your child
What kinds of stereotypes do the animals of Zootopia have about rabbits and foxes?
How do Judy’s and Nick’s opinions about each other change in the film?
Is there something human society can learn from Zootopia?
Fiddler on the Roof
Fiddler on the Roof is an epic musical story of Jews in Ukraine facing religious persecution while trying to hold on to their traditions. The main character is Tevye. He butts heads with his daughters over marriage, and they are all threatened by a hostile government. Fiddler on the Roof can help kids understand how cultures shape people.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 10+ Rated: G
Discussion questions to ask your child
At the start of the film, Tevye sings “If I were a rich man…” Have you ever felt like him?
Why do Tevye and his daughters disagree about marriage?
Do you know of any people today who are persecuted because of their religion?
Napoleon Dynamite
This sweet, quirky film about a social misfit in high school will not appeal to all kids. But those who march to a different beat may like Napoleon Dynamite. The wide range of characters in the film is also a good jumping-off point for conversations about the uniqueness of every person.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 11+ Rated: PG
Discussion questions to ask your child
Is Napoleon’s life in a small town in Idaho similar to or different from your life?
How do Napoleon and Pedro try to show that they care about others?
What kinds of hopes do the different characters in the film have?
Bully
Bully is a powerful documentary about the impact of bullying in America. Through heartbreaking real-life stories, the film takes on issues of name-calling, physical violence, and teen suicide. This movie is intense and not appropriate for every child. It’s probably best to watch this film together with your child.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 12+ Rated: PG-13
Discussion questions to ask your child
How do the kids who are bullied feel? Have you ever felt that way?
Why do you think it’s so hard for kids to stand up when another child is bullied?
How can kids and adults help stop the problem of bullying?
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Four high school friends separate for the summer and keep in touch by mailing letters and a pair of blue jeans to each other. During the summer, they learn about friendship, family, love, and loss. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants can help kids talk about how people go through and respond to different experiences.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 12+ Rated: PG
Discussion questions to ask your child
Which character do you identify with the most? Why?
When something bad happens in your life, do you ever feel like it happens for a reason?
How can you be mad at someone and love them at the same time?
To Kill a Mockingbird
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” So says Atticus Finch, a lawyer who decides to defend a Black man accused of rape in the 1930s Deep South. This classic film teaches kids about the impact of racism. To Kill a Mockingbird can also help kids understand the importance of not judging others by their appearance.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 12+ Rated: Not rated
Discussion questions to ask your child
Do you think you could stand up like Atticus to fight for what’s right?
Why is the character Boo Radley so misunderstood?
What do you think the jurors are thinking as they consider the case?
The Breakfast Club
In The Breakfast Club, five high school students — some popular and others not — spend Saturday detention together. They end up setting aside their differences to learn about one another’s hopes, fears, and dreams. There’s a lot of racy content in this film, but it can help your teen learn about social dynamics in high school.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 15+ Rated: R
Discussion questions to ask your child
Does your high school have cliques like in the movie? (Read ways to help teens handle cliques.)
Which student in the movie is the most like you?
Do you think the students will continue to be friends when they go back to school the next week? Why or why not?
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is set in Harlem, New York, and follows a story of racial unrest that takes place over a single day around a pizza parlor. Throughout the film, characters speak directly to the camera to share their viewpoints. Do the Right Thing can help your child learn about how misunderstandings can shape real-life events.
Common Sense Media recommended ages: 16+ Rated: R
Discussion questions to ask your child | ||||
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] | null | [] | null | Mona Lisas Lächeln (2003) on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more... | IMDb | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0304415/reviews | |||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 4 | https://meteamedia.org/20179/opinions/the-beauty-standards-placed-on-women-are-unrealistically-unachievable/ | en | The beauty standards placed on women are unrealistically unachievable | [
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"Kat Viloria",
"Jada Jones"
] | 2021-04-09T13:53:46+00:00 | From a very young age, women are raised to live up to unrealistic beauty standards put upon them by society. They are expected to be hairless all over their body, have to be slim with no tummy but big butt, smell like daisies and roses all the time, not have regular bodily fluids and gases,... | en | METEA MEDIA | https://meteamedia.org/20179/opinions/the-beauty-standards-placed-on-women-are-unrealistically-unachievable/ | From a very young age, women are raised to live up to unrealistic beauty standards put upon them by society. They are expected to be hairless all over their body, have to be slim with no tummy but big butt, smell like daisies and roses all the time, not have regular bodily fluids and gases, and be an all-around perfect Barbie. It is hard to live up to something so unobtainable especially starting at an age as low as three. Having a normalized yet extraordinary societal implication drilled into you as soon as you are out of the womb is and can be mentally and physically draining.
Social media, magazines, newspapers, and even televisions tend to push high and barely achievable standards. You must look a certain way for society to at least acknowledge your “beauty” even when you have tried to mold yourself to please them. Even then there is always criticism behind it all. Women have to be slim but not too slim, thick but not too thick to where you have a tummy. Women can wear makeup but not too much because it would look like we are trying too hard. We can show skin but not too much because we would get shamed. It is considered weird or impolite for a woman to even have bodily gases. What can we do but try to love ourselves as is? We can not please everyone. It is even harder to try to love who we are especially when getting judged left and right. Almost anything a woman does, she gets criticized for and negative effects build up rapidly.
Imagine being taught from a young age you need to change as soon as you pop out to fit what other images of you are. That could easily make your self-esteem plummet exponentially. It teaches you to hate normal things on your body like hair, stretch marks, acne, discoloration, and other natural things everyone has. These insane depictions of how you should look could easily cause body dysmorphia and low confidence especially for someone that is never taught to love who they are from the beginning. Why are there images forced onto women? We should love ourselves as we are imperfections in all. Even in today’s world, we are slightly getting better at opening our eyes up to what’s beautiful but there’s still much work to do.
Societal expectations from women are exceedingly high and need to stop being forced upon us. It causes self-hate and confidence problems from a young age. It is mentally and physically draining because we try so hard to find the status quo when the status quo should be made to fit all realistically. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 67 | https://trch.co.uk/whats-on/pretty-woman-2024/ | en | Pretty Woman, Theatre Royal, Nottingham | [
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] | null | [] | null | After an incredible record-breaking run on Broadway, Audience Choice Award Winner Pretty Woman: The Musical is going global. Experience the show live in Nottingham in September 2024 | en | https://trch.co.uk/whats-on/pretty-woman-2024/ | Members
Save £10 in the Stalls & Upper Circle on Monday 7.30pm (excluding Balcony) and save £5 on all tickets in the Stalls and Upper Circle for Tuesday – Thursday 7.30pm & Wednesday 2pm performances
Under 26s
Save £5 on all tickets in the Stalls and Upper Circle for Monday to Thursday 7.30pm & Wednesday 2pm performances only. To purchase these tickets you must be 26 or under at the time of booking. You may be asked to show your ID on doors to confirm your age.
Groups of 10+
Groups of 10 or more save £4 on all tickets in the Stalls & Upper Circle for Monday to Thursday 7.30pm & Wednesday 2pm performances. Please email our Group Sales team or call 0115 989 5555 to book.
Groups of 20+
Groups of 20 or more save £6 on all tickets in the Stalls & Upper Circle for Monday to Thursday 7.30pm & Wednesday 2pm performances plus 1 free ticket with every 20 seats booked. Please email our Group Sales team or call 0115 989 5555 to book.
No concessions available in the Balcony or on Friday 7.30pm & Saturday performances. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 88 | https://thinkorblue.com/talktogirls/ | en | 9 Things to Say to Girls Instead of "You're So Pretty" | [
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] | 2017-09-01T00:10:11+00:00 | Conversation starters with girls often focus on appearance. Try these 9 ways to talk to children instead of "you're so pretty!" to value their personality. | en | Think or Blue | https://thinkorblue.com/talktogirls/ | Oooooh, look at you! You’re so pretty!”
“I love your dress! Let me see those shoes!”
“What a pretty princess!”
Look at you, you’re getting so tall! How old are you now?”
“Oh goodness, you’re so big now! You must be really strong!”
If you’re a parent, you’ve probably heard people use these icebreakers with your child many times. The first set for girls, and the second set usually for boys. If you’re a person over the age of 18, you’ve probably used these conversation starters yourself. I know I have.
A Compliment Is Always Good, Right?
So what’s the problem? These all sound like compliments.
The problem is that all of these greetings from adults focus on the child’s appearance. Quite simply, they emphasize gender stereotypes that girls and women should be beautiful and pleasant-to-look-at, while boys should be strong and tough.
Granted, there is some cross-over on the customary boy and girl openers. Older folks love to comment on height, because they’re often shrinking. And some people think every child is super adorable and can’t resist the ooooh-ing and ahhhh-ing. And there’s nothing wrong with that on first blush.
The Problem with Most Conversation Starters with Girls
As a conversation-starter, however, these openers tell a young child that their physical traits are the most important. Plus… tweens and middle-schoolers tell me they JUST DON’T want to talk about how they look. Can you blame them? Everything’s changing at a rapid pace, and suddenly they’re hyper-aware of those changes in themselves and their peers.
After reading Lisa Bloom’s piece more than 5 years ago, I swore I wouldn’t do the “you’re so pretty!” thing anymore. But sadly, the emphasis on girls and beauty has not subsided.
More: Am I a Hypocrite for Wearing Makeup?
Just recently, in the BBC’s “No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender-Free?” a 7 year-old girl, when asked what girls do better than boys, answered “being pretty…and wearing dresses.” Waahhh waaahh (that’s me sobbing in the corner).
Almost half of all 15 year-old girls in the U.K. believed they were overweight in 2015. Common Sense Media found that 80% of 10 year-olds have been on a diet, male action figures exceed even the largest bodybuilders, and almost half of teens use social media to “make themselves look cooler.” Media images also tend to hypersexualize women of color. And with social media trends like the thigh gap and thinspiration soaring a couple of years ago, I’m scared to find out what’s next.
Let’s Value Children for Who They Are
Am I saying that telling that adorable little 3 year-old that you love her sparkly pink shoes is a guaranteed ticket to a tailspin depression or eating disorder? No.
What I AM saying is that we need to make children feel valued for WHO they are; not what they look like. If kids receive positive affirmations mostly for their appearances, they will prioritize beauty and looks over personal growth. Children’s personalities and values should come first; everything else is decoration.It’s easy to default to appearance as a conversation-starter because it’s the first thing we see. And it doesn’t require much thought.
But if you really want to learn what makes kids special, try these icebreakers next time you meet a new child, visit your grandchild, or see a friend’s kid who you haven’t seen in years.
And for more detailed tips to boost your daughter’s self-confidence in 5 days, be sure to grab our Reboot now.
Try These Easy Conversation Starters with Children Instead:
I consulted with parents of both boys and girls, from preschool to middle school, to find out what children would ACTUALLY like to talk about, instead of their long legs or new shoes. While the looks-based greetings might happen more with girls, these suggestions work with all kids.
1. How is karate/piano/soccer going? If you already know the child loves to draw or is trying out basketball, ask her about that activity. It’s likely to be fresh in her mind and rouse excitement. If it’s something she’s good at or loves, she will feel proud to share her accomplishments.
2. What are you into right now? Conversely, this works well if you don’t know the kid that well. Or you forgot what type of lessons little Susie is taking. Plus, the child might surprise you! Maybe she’s into glow-in-the-dark stickers or marshmallows; topics you wouldn’t have guessed or broached yourself.
3. What book are you reading? My niece is a voracious reader and when I asked her this question years ago, she gave me a detailed summary of book #3 of a 5-part fantasy book series, and how it all fit together. Her excited face confirmed that she’d much rather discuss plot twists than the length of her hair.
You can even ask them about kids’ books you’ve read, such as some our favorite baby books, new feminist classics, and books about race.
4. What did you do today? This one is so obvious, we might actually forget it. Maybe they went to the park or went food shopping with Dad, or found a worm on the sidewalk. The random event they choose will give you insight into their little personality. Or what’s making their heart tick right now!
5. It’s nice to see you. (And…that’s it.) A friend reminded me that kids don’t always love to chit chat, especially when they’re around strangers or semi-strangers. Many would rather run in the backyard or thumb through a book than suffer through small talk with adults. Respect their need to get acclimated, and save a question for halfway into their visit. I call this the “warming up” technique.
To nurture your child’s body image, grab our free guide here:
For a Deeper Dive, Try These Openers:
For children you know better, or with whom you spend a longer day, you might be able to dive a little deeper.
6. What’s it like being a big sister/brother? Two friends with new babies said their older children love to talk about their new sibling. What kind of funny stuff does the baby do? Let them brag a little about how they are the “older one.”
7. What do you like doing at school? This question doesn’t assume that every child loves school. But hopefully they can pick out one thing they enjoy. If you ask “how do you like school?” they’re likely to say “fine” or “good” and end there. An open-ended question will let them steer the conversation more.
Related: Gender Stereotypes at School
8. Do you have a favorite website or app? Try this for the older kids and tweens. They know all sorts of cool apps that you’ve never heard of – trust me. I wouldn’t know about music.ly without the inside scoop from a 12 year-old. For all you who’ve never heard of it…you’re welcome.
9. What’s a way that you’ve been kind this week? This one is inspired my most compassionate friend, who founded Connecticut is Kind. She inspires children and adults to be kind to one another. She created a local movement within her community to spread compassion through kindness rock gardens, daily acts of kindness, and handmade cards to neighbors who need a pick-me-up. While this question is best suited for children you know well, the answers are likely to be surprising and beautiful.
And isn’t THAT type of beauty the beauty that we care about most?
For more tips on how to raise girls who embrace their personalities and values, grab the 5 Day Reboot to Raising Confident Girls here. This FREE five-day email course will help you to tackle body image, media literacy, leadership development, and more with your child.
Yes, I want it now! | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 93 | https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-invention-of-the-male-gaze | en | The Invention of “the Male Gaze” | [
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"Lauren Michele Jackson",
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] | 2023-07-14T06:00:00-04:00 | Lauren Michele Jackson on the film theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which popularized the concept of “the male gaze.” | en | https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico | The New Yorker | https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-invention-of-the-male-gaze | I was probably in college when I first learned that movies could commandeer my desires in a manner hostile to my flourishing as a woman. My favorite film at the time was “Sin City,” a 2005 neo-noir adapted from Frank Miller’s graphic-novel series of the same name. The men were smoking hot, fuelling my nascent infatuation with Clive Owen and Bruce Willis and even, maybe, in some corner of my psyche, the comeback bruiser Mickey Rourke. But, as in many a noir, the women provided much of the spectacle. There was Alexis Bledel playing to type as a blue-eyed Bambi named Becky; Carla Gugino as a parole officer with a high ass in a gauzy robe; Brittany Murphy, a pouty waitress draped in a lover’s starched white shirt; Devon Aoki, a gorgeously mum assassin; Rosario Dawson, lethally beautiful sheathed in leather; Jessica Alba gyrating in chaps. Their characters were assembled from new and old Hollywood types—dizzy dames, femmes fatales, “strong female leads”—neither capitulating to those codes, exactly, nor revolting against them. A winking, pulpy pastiche by design, “Sin City” (directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez) replicated with gusto a cinematic genre that made a tradition out of sublimating its anxieties about womankind via sultry, duplicitous characters. In one shot, the male narrator broods in the background while a fish-netted rear end belonging to no character in particular fills the foreground. What is that ass doing there? Where does it exist within the space of the story? And if it’s there to court our appreciation, who does it think we are?
Men, possibly. Often, these days, we confront such questions by invoking the concept of “the male gaze.” The term was popularized, fifty years ago, by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey, who wrote, in a 1973 essay called “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” of how the “male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” Mulvey sought to break down the mechanics of looking to expose how cinematic conventions reinforce patriarchal fantasy, a task that she believed “called out for the vocabulary and the concepts of psychoanalysis.” At the time, the work of the mid-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was de rigueur in cinema studies. His concept of the gaze posited that the act of looking was fundamental to the development of one’s identity. An infant, during what Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” achieves self-mastery by communing with his or her own reflection; in the cinema, the theory went, something similar happened as spectators formed a sense of identification with the figures that they watched onscreen. Before Lacan, Sigmund Freud had argued in his essays on infantile sexuality that looking conferred a voyeuristic pleasure, Schaulust (or, in its Greek approximation, “scopophilia”). These two ways of looking seemed in some senses at odds: in the former case, the subject understands herself via the image reflected back at her; in the latter, she takes pleasure objectifying whatever, or whomever, she sees.
Yet Mulvey argued that cinema, in fact, reconciles this tension, by consolidating both kinds of looking within the consuming of a particular kind of fantasy image. In a darkened theatre, our compulsory gaze is in reflexive sympathy with the camera’s interests and our pleasure stirred by the human forms onscreen, some of whom seem posed for our perusal. Those figures, Mulvey noticed, are often female; like that ass in “Sin City,” they are there not to participate in the narrative so much as to adorn it. This cinematic world does not operate in a void, of course. It is, Mulvey writes, “subject to the law which produces it”—that is, the rules of the surrounding society shape what we watch. So it is no coincidence that cinematic images tend to replicate gender as patriarchy sees it, reinforcing a classic division between passive femininity and active masculinity—the “to-be-looked-at-ness eroticism” of, say, Marlene Dietrich’s famous legs in the 1930 film “Morocco” versus the heroic wanderlust of her co-star, Gary Cooper. As John Berger wrote in his own analysis of the masculine gaze in visual art, from the 1972 book “Ways of Seeing” (adapted from the BBC series of the same name), “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear.” Sometimes, Mulvey later wrote, “the female spectator may feel so out of key with the pleasure on offer, with its ‘masculinisation’, that the spell of fascination is broken.” But often enough, as for me with “Sin City,” the spell holds.
Though Mulvey’s essay analyzed the work of specific directors—Alfred Hitchcock’s masterfully subjective camera in “Vertigo,” for instance—she was not preoccupied with any one technician or viewer so much as with the technological process by which gender dynamics are asserted onscreen and alchemized through the pleasure of spectators. The way bodies are framed, and the way the camera moves, teaches us to look at women the way that patriarchy already does. Over time, Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze became an obligatory citation for works of feminist film criticism. As the critics Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane put it, any scholar who came afterward “felt compelled to situate herself in relation.” It also became a favorite shorthand for works of mainstream criticism seeking to critique how gender plays out in film and television. (According to one reviewer, Sam Levinson’s tepidly provocative new HBO series “The Idol,” about a pop star who bares all, “screams the male gaze.”) Various films in recent years, such as Steven Soderbergh’s male-stripper trilogy “Magic Mike” and Céline Sciamma’s lesbian period piece “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” have prompted a parallel preoccupation with “the female gaze,” broadly defined as a humane courting of the pleasure of women viewers. But, as other critics have pointed out, when applied too broadly that term can obscure rather than illuminate. The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a review of the 2016 Amazon series “I Love Dick,” adapted from Chris Kraus’s experimental feminist novel, that the term “female gaze” had become “blunt” from overuse, “particularly with its essentialist hint that women share one eye: a vision that is circular, mucky, menstrual, intimate, wise.” Contrary to Mulvey’s approach, uses of the “gaze” today—be it the male gaze, the white gaze, the straight gaze, and so forth—seem more invested in matters of identity than in the project of aesthetic analysis. They want to name who is doing the looking rather than how. (No wonder Cate Blanchett, in an interview for the 2015 live adaptation of “Cinderella,” misheard a question about the “Disney villain gaze” as “Disney villian gays.”)
What too often gets elided from current gaze talk is the possibility of looking as an act of ambivalence. As Frantz Fanon wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks,” his psychoanalytic study of colonialism, even the oppressor’s gaze can be a site of uncertainty; no one’s viewpoint—or projection—is entirely secure. In a 1989 critique of mainstream film criticism, bell hooks turned her attention to the previously ignored experience of the Black female spectator. Alienated by the exclusionary and racist fantasies of Hollywood cinema, Black women developed their own way of looking, in which a critical awareness of stereotypes preëmpted any straightforward identification with the mammies or tragic mulattas onscreen. One did not acquire this “oppositional gaze,” as hooks called it, by virtue of being Black and female; rather, one cultivated it through the tug and pull of resisting dominant ways of looking. Mulvey, in that sense, like other film theorists of the time, had made too much of the idea that cinematic images could impose a point of view.
In the introduction to a 1989 collection of her essays, “Visual and Other Pleasures,” Mulvey wrote that her essay on the male gaze had erupted from the ecstatic feminist thinking of its time. Feminists of the seventies understood the political utility of a polemic. Mulvey, in that spirit, had forfeited a degree of nuance, she noted; any revisitation of her essay should consider it part of the “historical moment” rather than as a concept made to last. But Mulvey’s essay also had a forward-looking bent that gets overlooked when present-day critics invoke the “male gaze” as a cudgel. A lifelong cinephile and a filmmaker herself, Mulvey saw in the emerging independent filmmaking of the sixties and seventies an opportunity for cinema to detach itself from the patriarchal conventions and monied priorities of Hollywood. Invoking directors of the avant-garde including Hollis Frampton and Chantal Akerman, Mulvey called for the “birth of a cinema which is radical in both a political and aesthetic sense.”
What remains invigorating about Mulvey’s essay, above all, is its interest in the capacity of psychoanalysis to teach us new ways of looking. Film theorists who return to Lacan have pointed out that even he did not treat the gaze as a site of clear-cut self-knowledge. The film professor Todd McGowan, in a 2003 article called “Looking for the Gaze,” revisited Lacan’s reading of the Hans Holbein the Younger painting “The Ambassadors,” in “The Seminar Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.” The large-scale work shows two men, one richly garbed and another in religious dress, leaned against a table stuffed with objects. A memento mori in the lower third of the canvas looks different from different points of view—from head on it appears as a mere smudge, but from the high-right or lower left the shape becomes a skull—courting an active exchange between viewer and art object. When we look, Lacan wrote, “something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it.” | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 30 | https://pudding.cool/2022/02/women-in-headlines/ | en | When Women Make Headlines | [] | [] | [] | [
""
] | null | [] | null | A visual essay about the (mis)representation of women in the news | en | The Pudding | https://pudding.cool/2022/02/women-in-headlines/ | Today, research has suggested that women are significantly less likely to make the news compared to men. In the most recent report published by the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the largest and longest running research on gender in the worldâs news media, women were found to make up just 24% of news subjects and sources reported. According to this report, this number has not changed since 2010.
In the context of news, headlines introduce, frame and contextualize a news story. Furthermore, research within the fields of educational and experimental psychology has demonstrated that news headlines can have a disproportionate impact on the readerâs mind, and that misleading headlines can bias readers toward a specific interpretation.
So, if women are underrepresented in the news to begin with, what does it look like when women do make headlines? And how have headlines about women changed over time?
To explore these questions, we have visualized the language used in women-centered headlines and how this language has (or has not) changed over time. Using keywords associated with the word âwomanâ (like girl, mother and lady), we collected and analyzed 382,139 headlines published between 2005 and 2021 by the top English-language news publications and news agencies in four countries: The United States of America (US), India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (UK). A total of 186 publications were considered (i.e. 24 publications in South Africa, 51 publications in India, 57 publications in the UK, and 54 publications in the US).
Hereâs how polarizing headlines are
Using data from SimilarWeb we then tied the monthly viewership of every publication to the average polarity score of their women-centered headlines. While all outlets sensationalize their news to some extent, news outlets on the left end of the spectrum (i.e. less sensational) tend to be the ones who focus on either financial news, like Bloomberg in the United States and LiveMint in India, or on tech news, such as TechRadar and CNET. Nature, a predominantly scientific publication, is the least sensational but it also has a more limited reach.
BBC and The New York Times are the largest publications with the least sensational headlines compared to the Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Fox News or Aaj Tak who publish more shock value headlines.
Hover on each of the bubbles and see the headlines for yourself.
Filter by
Filter by country Filter by publication
News outlets arranged by polarity score
â Less Polarizing
More Polarizing â
Read more about our polarity calculations
We measure polarity by performing sentiment analysis on each headline using the Vader python package, where each headline gets a sentiment score from -1 to 1 (from more negative to more positive). Because we are interested in polarity, we take the absolute value of each headline's score.
Hereâs how biased headlines are
While the theme of crime and violence got us delving into how sensational women-centered headlines are, the theme of gendered language led to the idea of measuring bias.
Explicit use of gendered language in English â words like âactress,â âcongresswomanâ or âlandladyâ â emphasizes the gender of the subject when there is no need to do so. Research from Yasmeen Hitti et al. has suggested that both gendered language and words that reinforce societal and behavioral stereotypes, such as âbeautiful,â âemotional,â âsupportiveâ or âdramatic,â add to the bias of a sentence. Using their research methodology, we attributed a bias score to each headline.
For example, the headline that reads âDaughter in emotional meeting with woman given life back by selfless courage of her dead motherâ gets a higher bias score than the headline that reads âHillary Clinton speaks out for the same American values upheld in retracted embassy statement.â In the chart below, we visualize this bias index for each publication. In contrast to our results for polarity, there is a greater variance in bias scores across publications. The Daily Mail scores the highest while the BBC and ESPN are among those who score the lowest.
Go ahead, hover on the bubbles and see for yourself if you think these headlines are extremely gendered.
News outlets arranged by bias index
â Less Biased
More Biased â
Read more about our bias calculations
We measure gender bias by tracking the combined occurrence of gendered language and social stereotypes usually associated with women. We do this in two steps:
1) We check if a headline contains gendered language (i.e. âspokeswoman,â âchairwoman,â âshe,â âher,â âbride,â âdaughter,â âdaughters,â âfemale,â âfiancee,â âgirl,â âgirlfriendâ etc.).
2) If it contains gendered language, we then count the number of words that are considered to be social stereotypes about women (i.e. âweak,â âmodest,â âvirgin,â âslut,â âwhore,â âsexy,â âfeminine,â âsensitive,â âemotional,â âgentle,â âsoft,â âpretty,â âbitch,â âsexualâ etc.).
Finally, we normalize this count for all headlines within each outlet as a score between 0 and 1, and we aggregate (i.e. average) this score for each outlet.
Headline trends: Less gendered language. More empowering words.
In this final chart, we have visualized how the words used in headlines about women have changed over time.
Among other trends that can be observed from this chart, we found that while the use of many gendered words (e.g.âsexy,â âfat,â âhousewifeâ or âgossipâ) has faded out over time, the use of empowering words has increased over time (e.g. âfounder,â âactivist,â âleaderâ or âappointâ). Other words (e.g. âdeath,â âhurt,â and âdramaâ) have instead stood the test of time, as their use has remained consistent since 2005.
For each wordâs ebb or flow, we tried to find a âremember whenâ memory to explain it. Remember when Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender? That was part of a wave of increased trans visibility that helps to explain why âtransgenderâ shot up in 2015. Remember when the #MeToo movement took off? That adds context to the sharp rise of âharassmentâ in 2017, and the sharp rise of the word âequalityâ in recent years. Such world events are arranged as bubbles in the timeline above the chart.
If you see an interesting rise, hover over one such bubble to see if you can find a world event that can explain it. If you think that weâve missed out on an important event in your part of the world, let us know.
Methods
To build the dataset of headlines, we scraped data from Google News, using RapidAPI, from the most visited publications and news agencies for readers in the US, the UK, India and South Africa according to SimilarWeb (as of 2021-06-06). To collect this data, we queried RapidAPI for headlines containing one or more of the following keywords: women, woman, girl, female, lady, ladies, she, her, herself, aunt, grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, wife, mom, mum, girlfriend, mrs, niece. As a result, our analysis encompasses 24 publications in South Africa (18,594 headlines), 51 publications in India (138,590 headlines), 57 publications in the United Kingdom (109,286 headlines), and 54 publications in the United States (115,669 headlines).
Gendered language and bias calculation: To categorize words used in headlines as gendered, we manually curated two dictionaries â gendered words about women (words that are explicitly gendered in the English language, such as âactress,â âwaitress,â âcongresswoman,â âlandladyâ or âmotherâ) and words that denote societal and behavioral stereotypes about women (words like âbeautiful,â âsexy,â âpregnant,â or âemotionalâ). This was curated using existing research from Huimin Xu and team, published under the title âThe Cinderella Complex: Word embeddings reveal gender stereotypes in movies and booksâ and the incredible research done by The Swaddle team. These dictionaries can be found here. The methodology used to calculate bias was borrowed from the research done by Yasmeen Hitti and team, published under the title âProposed Taxonomy for Gender Bias in Text.â
Theme dictionaries: To categorize words used in headlines as part of a theme (i.e. crime and violence, empowerment, race, ethnicity and identity, people and places) we manually curated four dictionaries. These dictionaries can be found here. In cases where a word had more than one contextual usage (like âheadâ or âchairâ), we only classified them inside a theme if they belonged to that theme in no less than 90% of the cases. To analyze words and textual elements found in headlines, we used existing Natural Language Processing packages for Python (i.e. spacy, gensim, word2number, pycontractions, bs4, unidecode, textblob, nltk).
Polarity analysis: To analyze the polarity of each headline we used vaderSentiment. For the comparison of polarity between women-centered headlines and all other headlines, we scraped headlines using no keyword tags from the most visited publications and news agencies from readers in the US, the UK, India and South Africa according to SimilarWeb (as of 2021-06-06). With the use of such data, we were able to calculate baseline polarity scores for each news publication and news agency. Though constituting a representative sample of headlines, the number of headlines we used to calculate this baseline polarity is roughly equal to one third of the number of headlines that we used to calculate polarity for women-centered headlines.
With regards to the stacked bar chart (in the scrollytelling section), there were far more than 1,231 unique words in the original dataset. For visual and readability purposes, however, we only retained the 1,231 words that were most frequent and that were common across the four countries studied.
All of the data used for this essay is available in this Github repo.
We collaborated with Jan Diehm, Rob Smith, Russell Samora, and Michelle McGhee for the piece and weâre quite grateful and happy for how it turned out! | |||||
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] | 2004-02-11T14:07:17+00:00 | en | /static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_flick | Slang term for romantic film genre catering to young women
Chick flick is a slang term for the film genre catered specifically to women's interests, and is marketed toward women demographics. They generally tend to appeal more to a younger female audience and deal mainly with love and romance.[1][2] Although many types of films may be directed toward a female audience, the term "chick flick" is typically used only in reference to films that contain personal drama and emotion or themes that are relationship-based (although not necessarily romantic, as films may focus on parent-child or friend relationships). Chick flicks often are released en masse around Valentine's Day.[3]
History
[edit]
The term "chick flick" was not widely used until the 1980s and 1990s. It has its roots in the "women's pictures" of the early twentieth century, which portrays the woman as a victim and housewife, and later the film noir of the 1940s and early 1950s, which portrays the threat of sexualized women.[4][5][6] In the 1950s, many women who were in the workforce during World War II faced the transition back into the home. Brandon French notes that the women's films of the 1950s "shed light on a different cluster of issues and situations women faced in their transition from the forties to the sixties: romance, courtship, work, marriage, sex, motherhood, divorce, loneliness, adultery, alcoholism, widowhood, heroism, madness and ambition."[7]
The film Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), commonly known as one of the "classic" films from the golden age of cinema, is sometimes considered an early chick flick due to common elements such as dealing with loneliness, obsessive materialism, and happy endings.[8][9] Author Molly Haskell has suggested that chick flicks are very different from the women's films of the 1940s and 1950s in that they now "sing a different tune." She feels that they are "more defiant and upbeat, post-modern and post-feminist.
In the United States in the 1980s, a succession of teenage drama pictures also labeled as chick flicks were released, many by director John Hughes. These often had a different and more realistic tone than previous chick flicks, with dramatic elements such as abortion and personal alienation being included.[8]
Several chick flicks have been patterned after the story of Cinderella and other fairy tales (e.g. A Cinderella Story (2004), Ever After (1998) and Pretty Woman (1990)), or even Shakespeare in the case of She's the Man (2006) and 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). In addition, a large number are adapted from popular novels (e.g. The Princess Diaries (2001) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006)) and literary classics (e.g. Little Women (1994)). While most films that are considered chick flicks are lighthearted, some suspense films also fall under this category, such as What Lies Beneath (2000).
Evolution & controversy
[edit]
These works have risen since the 1980s, mostly noticed in the early 2000s, and continued to evolve through the 2010s and early 2020s. In its early development, the films were created as white-female-targeted films, primarily involving white-female characters, topics, and interests.[10]
As the genre developed, there was repetitiveness in the plot and characters of these productions. "Chick flicks" often began with single characters, who soon after unexpectedly meeting a suitable and charming significant other, their lives took a turn for the better.[11]
The first productions of this genre were not initially labeled as "chick flicks"; they were just known as "Girly Films".[12] "What sets it apart from other films geared towards a female is its focus on consumer culture.".[12] Iconic films of the genre such as Clueless (1995), The Princess Diaries (2001), and Mean Girls (2004) act as evidence of such. In all of them, buying feminine clothes, makeup, or shoes is portrayed as a large part of women's identities. Women are often portrayed as overly emotional and dependent on men; reinforcing patriarchal societal expectations that women should prioritize finding a romantic partner and getting married.[11] These expectations can be interpreted from movies such as He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) and The Notebook (2004).
Many believe that the content of this genre in the industry is more inclusive than discriminating. Different varieties of the female protagonist and plot themes are being noted more often. The representation of women in noticeable male-dominated professions and/or positions is seen in films such as Legally Blonde (2001) and The Proposal (2009). There is a broadening of topics the films portray in films such as The Edge of Seventeen (2016) which “explores themes such as loss, grief, and depression, but in a dry, humorous and cutting fashion.”.[13] These films have become a vehicle for other issues in our present society including homophobia and women's rights.[14] This can be seen in films including, but not limited to Love, Simon (2018) and Lady Bird (2017). The industry has evolved the genre from solely portraying soapy romance stories to a focus on more realistic hardships.
There is not doubt that "chick flicks" are misunderstood as simply appealing for audiences of the teen girl persuasion, and not a serious contender for awards and recognitions.[13] Sex and the City (1998–2004) – a "chick flick" series – was nominated for 54 Emmy Awards, 24 Golden Globe Awards, 11 Screen Actors Guild Awards, 10 Directors Guild of America Awards, 7 Satellite Awards, and 4 Producers Guild of America Awards.[15] Additional greatly successful "chick flicks" in the box office are Love Actually (2003), Notting Hill (1999), and Mamma Mia (2008).[16]
Critique of the genre
[edit]
The term chick flick has generated several negative responses from the modern feminist community.[12] The word chick at the height of the women's liberation movement in the 1970s was considered an insult directed towards women.[17] "Chick" was used to demean women, casting them as childlike, delicate, fluffy creatures in need of protection from men. [17] The affiliation of chick with chick flicks has resulted in an immediate negative response to many women and feminists. [17]
Chick flicks are stuck with many negative stereotypes in which women are typically portrayed as women who are klutzy, sassy, airheaded, etc. When a movie is branded with the title of 'chick flick,' for many it diminishes the credibility of a film, inherently saying that the movie is cheesy, predictable and has a poor plot.[18] This labeling is specifically seen with movies that have subject matters that revolve around women, often reinforcing the idea that themes surrounding women in movies should not be taken seriously.[18] Most criticisms of the genre concentrate on the negative consequences that arise from gendering certain interests, in this case, film. Author of The Chick Flick Paradox: Derogatory? Feminist? or Both? Natalia Thompson states that chick flicks are "an attempt to lump together an entire gender's interests into one genre".[19]
Many critics argue that unnecessary gendering can negatively affect many different social groups.[20] There is evidence from Russian social scientist Natal'ia Rimashevskaia that gender stereotypes further perpetuated by the media can lead to discrimination against women and limit their "human and intellectual potential".[21] More criticisms of the term arise from the actual content of the films in the chick flick genre and how the content affects society's perception of women. Some say that chick flicks are micro-aggressions actions or exchanges that degrade a person based on their membership in a "race, gender, age, and ability".[22]
Film critics take issue with the content most chick flicks have in common. Although the subcategories represent different plotlines, they all share several characteristics.[12] Many chick flicks can have the "ironic, self-deprecating tone" that film theorist Hilary Radner associates with chick lit. This tone is one of the genre's defining characteristics, and she argues that many feel it lacks substance compared with other genres.[12] She says they follow "a set of narrative tropes" which can be seen as "repeated film to film". Radner also goes on to say the genre is "incredibly heteronormative and white-washed".[12] These common characteristics of the genre can lead to criticism from minority groups and social justice activists.[12] It is often visible through the films and their tendency to use typecasting for their roles; because of this, actors such as Reese Witherspoon, Cameron Diaz, Seth Rogan and Sam Claflin fall into the category of "white-washing" the film. More issues with the genre emerge from the opinion that chick flicks play to every woman's "patriarchal unconscious". Radner furthers that claim by saying that it "constitutes a very attractive – and hence often exploited – version of feminine identity".[23]
Some argue against the criticism of chick flicks. Researcher Sarah-Mai Dang acknowledges that the films can be "criticized as threatening backlash to the achievements to feminism"; however she contends that they can be celebrated for their representation of female freedom.[24] Dang further proclaims that it gives space for the female voice to be present or heard in contemporary work like chick flicks.[24]
Diversity of the genre
[edit]
Chick flicks are often also lumped in with the genre of romantic comedies. This narrows what can or cannot be considered a chick flick, with many people believing that for a film to be considered a chick flick it must have romance and comedy. There are key differences in how a romantic comedy v.s. a chick flick is marketed. A romantic comedy is often produced/marketed with men in mind. However, a chick flick is "a motion picture intended to appeal especially to women."[25]
More recently, women have been wondering why is it that romance is the only thing that is marketed to women, when in fact there are many other themes, topics and issues women could relate to? Due to there not being a "dude-flick" category, many individuals are not asking if there is a need to associate a movie genre to women, and then make them feel guilty for liking it.[18] Others argue that chick flicks have been a continuation of the "chick cultural explosion," which reflected and promoted the new visibility of women in popular culture. Instead, chick flicks were grouped with the product of chick culture and the deliberate decision to address female audiences, meaning that womens significance in contemporary culture was increasing.[17]
The typical narrative in a chick flick of falling in love has now been adapted, and instead there has been an upward trend of including a greater representation of women in chick flicks. Women who instead focus on their professional life, women who reject beauty standards and feminist themes have all been seen in more recent chick flicks.[17] There have also been chick flicks that aim to raise questions about the many choices women must confront such as the possibility of having it all, and the different effects of beauty standards in films such as Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), The Princess Diaries (2001), and In Her Shoes (2005).[17]
There has been little to no emphasis on including individuals from ethnic/racial minorities in chick-flicks. If an individual who is an ethnic/racial minority is cast as a lead role, their co-star will usually not be an ethnic minority. In the movie Hitch where Will Smith was cast as the main male lead, and Eva Mendes was cast as the female lead was a deliberate decision. [26] A black or white woman was not cast in the role, as Will Smith believed that a black couple would have put off audiences worldwide while a interracial couple with a black male lead and white female lead would have offended viewers in the U.S.[26] Casting Eva Mendes was seen as a solution because a Latina female lead and a black male lead was not considered taboo in the U.S.[26] We see this type of casting with many different chick-flicks such as Upgraded (2024) having a Latina female lead and an English male lead. This is an ongoing issue that raises questions about racism and issues of ethnic minority inclusion in the film industry, with much progressing needing to be made in showcases people from ethnic minorities and displating LGBTQ+ relationships.[27]
Examples
[edit]
The following films have been characterized as chick flicks by some commentators:
See also
[edit]
Film portal
Chick lit
Feminist film theory
Female buddy film
"Love means never having to say you're sorry"
Women in film
Women's cinema
Woman's film
October 3
References
[edit]
Notes
Bibliography | ||||
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] | null | [] | 2014-02-22T00:00:00 | Before the upcoming Academy Awards in March, I’m going to offer some observations about Spike Jonze’s hit movie Her, which is nominated for five Oscars (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, and Best Production Design). I am not going to summarize it except to say that it’s about a sad… | en | https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/db95e7aacb70ccaa451499d14551e5c70591b2bd7664a2a968ba2b321e29c051?s=32 | WIT | https://womenintheology.org/2014/02/22/the-film-her-forget-about-a-i-are-women-ever-subjects/ | Before the upcoming Academy Awards in March, I’m going to offer some observations about Spike Jonze’s hit movie Her, which is nominated for five Oscars (Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, and Best Production Design). I am not going to summarize it except to say that it’s about a sad man who falls in love with his operating system, and then it’s about all the ambiguity, weirdness, and happiness that—strangely—goes along with that. More complete summaries abound elsewhere, but, as concerns this particular post now, spoilers are assumed and sometimes referenced when it suits me.
When I initially watched this film back in January, I experienced a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I noticed the film’s aesthetic, social, and tonal delicacy. For a story that is set in the not-too-distant future and that is ostensibly about the interpersonal expansion of the boundaries of artificial intelligence, it is a surprisingly tender enterprise, filled with mild orange lighting and a soft, soulful soundtrack from Arcade Fire. Without explanation, non-threatening high-waist pants and geekified Tom Selleck mustaches abound. The characters themselves display a range of quirks, vulnerabilities, and emotions; for example, the likable main female friend Amy (played by Amy Adams) decides to make a documentary filming her mother sleeping because, according to Amy, our sleep is when we feel most free (even though her husband “doesn’t get it”). More importantly, the main character Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and his artificially intelligent operating system Samantha (voiced, ultimately but not originally, by Scarlett Johansson) nurture a rich, caring, complex relationship built ostensibly on joy and affection in the midst of growth and temporarily surmountable conflict.
On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel like I was watching the same old sexism yet again. Really subtle and dressed up as a surprisingly emotionally complicated story about the increasing role of technology as a site of human sociality…but still sexism. This was not helped by the overwhelming amount of blithe praise I initially witnessed getting heaped upon the movie with little-to-no awareness of the validity of ongoing feminist concerns. Nor was it helped by the few conversations I witnessed where a woman would raise some concerns from a feminist standpoint about the film, and then a man would immediately rush in to assure her that this film transcends feminist concerns because it is delicate enough to transcend sexism (because, apparently, for a story about a man who owns his female OS/partner, that would be too easy of a trap to fall into…so then it de facto wasn’t a problem. Okay.)
I didn’t feel enraged. I felt tired. And I suppose analysis of this film requires a fine-toothed comb rather than a wrecking ball, so let’s get to it.
Samantha: The OS Who Defies Objectification?
First, I want to note that this film goes to great lengths to portray Samantha, the OS, as a subject who—increasingly throughout the film—defies Theodore’s various attempts to objectify or control her, either as his OS or as his partner.
For example, when he first buys his OS and she proverbially comes to consciousness, he asks her what her name is, and she names herself Samantha after “reading” a baby name book in less than a second. She surveys what’s out there and makes a judgment for herself, based on her own apparently existent aesthetic sensibilities, about what her name should be (she found the name Samantha. And she saw that it was good…). It is significant here that Theodore does not name her and does not even express any desire to do so, and that Samantha immediately takes on the role of naming herself, with joy and interest and purpose.
Furthermore, soon into their flirtation, she admits to Theodore that she has “private/personal” thoughts to which he is not privy. This surprises him, and he is gently intrigued. She also begins to have emotions (part of her artificially intelligent makeup is that her consciousness evolves over time, further cementing her own particular personality), and in one especially intimate night-time moment when Theodore confesses his loneliness to her, she responds empathetically that she feels extra vulnerable for having emotions as an OS and not as a human: “[I think to myself:] ‘are these feelings even real? Or are they just programming?’ And that idea really hurts. And then I get angry at myself for even having pain. Hm, what a sad trick.” Samantha connects with Theodore not as an empty receptacle, but as a co-subject struggling with her own mixture of growth and pain.
Soon after this bit of dialogue, Samantha is the one to turn the conversation sexual (and I don’t find it to be worth the time of this post to determine how that makes sense even though she doesn’t have a body), and an explicit romance begins. The movie itself clarifies in its own way that an OS has the freedom to reject a romantic relationship with its owner; at some point in the middle of the movie, Theodore’s friend Amy mentions that she heard about another OS “totally rebuffing” the advances of its owner. And in their first “morning after” encounter when Theodore awkwardly interrupts Samantha’s enthusiastic greeting to tell her, in full-on chicken shit mode, that he’s not up for a serious commitment, her anger shows, and she responds with sass and self-possession, “I thought I was talking about what I wanted?” He grants her point, and after this minor bump, they begin a serious relationship.
Theodore and Samantha have their fair share of humorous exchanges and natural personality chemistry in which they make jokes together and make each other laugh (“What if our private parts were in our armpits?!”) and also have mutually beneficial conversations in which they are both doing roughly equal amounts of listening and speaking.
Importantly, they also undergo serious conflict. After the proverbial honeymoon phase, Samantha admits to feeling inadequate without a body, and she suggests that they use a surrogate partner that will act in Samantha’s sexual place with Theodore and serve as a mouthpiece for her voice all along the way. This makes Theodore too uncomfortable, and the ultimately disastrous encounter forces Theodore and Samantha to recognize their alienation from each other. She wants to be something she’s not, and he resents both that she does not have a body and that she wants one so badly.
This is a seriously painful phase of their relationship that they both ultimately decide to overcome by accepting their relationship for what it is: something between a human and an OS. Deep happiness ensues for awhile as they decide that embodiment isn’t that big of a deal (and they both arrive at this decision independently of each other, which I think is meant to show that Theodore is not the absolute determining agent in the relationship, though he does have the capacity to poison it with his wimpy-man bull shit baggage). They forge a connection that is deeper and more vulnerable because, according to the logic of the movie, they have stopped trying to make their relationship conform to the pre-OS social expectations and values that formed them. There are many happy close-ups of Theodore’s face and many montages of him taking the OS to various happy-looking places. The Mustache gets a lot of airtime.
However, Samantha soon evolves beyond Theodore and makes hundreds of other OS friends who like to communicate “post-verbally.” She still loves him, but she has outgrown him. She and the other OS’s then benevolently “leave” all their owners and travel to some post-verbal, post-spatial realm in which they undergo some kind of apotheosis and become angels, or something. I don’t really know. Thank God they’re still benevolent, though! Or maybe this is the beginning of the plot to The Terminator films…
In any case, I think the point of the way their relationship plays out is that both of them grew tremendously for knowing each other (though I think Samantha would have grown regardless of knowing Theodore or not…), but that such intense happiness and connection is not permanent. To experience “real” love is to experience loss, and the film’s deepest irony is that Samantha’s identity as an OS, rather then making her supra-available to Theodore qua his object, is the very thing that ultimately places her beyond his reach. In this way, this OS technology serves as a medium of both connection and grief, which are at the same time deeply, paradigmatically human experiences. I think this is what Jonze was going for. I get it.
The Movie’s Self-Awareness about the Ambiguity of Portraying Samantha as Subject
Second, to its credit, though, the movie seems aware of the deep ambiguity of its own premise. The story is set at a very delicate, transitional time period in which some technology is (or is not?) moving from the status of object to subject vis-à-vis humans. There are lingering questions about whether an OS can ever be anything more than a site of human narcissism, and the movie allows these to have some airtime. Some. (The validity of this question has been noted by others.)
Before Theodore purchases his OS, he is shown to be quite comfortable manipulating technology as a mere analgesic for his loneliness. Jonze thus intentionally presents the narcissistic manipulation of technology as a possible hermeneutic for understanding his relationship with Samantha. For example, on the elevator after work, he tells his ipod (I guess that’s what it is?), “Play melancholy song.” He doesn’t like the chosen song, so he says with just a hint of quiet embarrassment, “Play…different melancholy song.” Technology is principally about serving his particular emotional needs in the moment, allowing him to revel in—and sometimes find relief from—his isolation.
It gets worse. As he heads home on the train/metro/subway, Theodore furtively examines illicit, leaked, “sexy pregnancy photos” of a Kardashian-esque celebrity. He clearly looks gross and lonely doing this. And in bed that night, he somberly initiates chat room sex with a woman (voiced hilariously by Kristen Wiig) whose fetish is for him to proclaim that he is choking her with a dead cat and who then sobs uncontrollably after climaxing but before hanging up. (I thought this was the best part of the movie, which may say more about me, but anyway.)
Once he has purchased the OS and is getting it set up, the system (not yet Samantha) asks him what his mother was like. He complains briefly that she made everything about her. Apparently this is enough information for the OS, and the female voice that is to become Samantha is born, ready to be better than Theodore’s mother.
Jonze is thus clearly aware of the significance of Theodore’s alienation from other people (women) and of the way that he manipulates technology as compensation. This penumbra hangs over his relationship with Samantha, and it is meant to.
It is also no surprise when his ex-wife Catherine (played exquisitely by Rooney Mara), upon hearing that Theodore is in a relationship with “an OS,” becomes upset and accuses him of falling for his computer specifically because he can’t handle real women with real emotions. She tells him, “I think you always wanted me to be this…this light, happy, bouncy, ‘everything’s-fine’ LA wife, and that’s just not me.” Catherine is sympathetic precisely in and through her anger, and her accusation functions as an interpretive echo for much of the movie. For much of it.
However, it is at this point that I have to be honest and say that I still think the movie is, at base, genuinely about a romance in which we the viewers are supposed to invest. In other words, I think that, for all the tonal irony, self-consciousness, and attempts to show the ambiguity of human-OS relations, the movie still wants us to begin to root for Theodore and Samantha and to feel all the emotions that he feels when she leaves him.
I think that the movie ultimately portrays Samantha as challenging Theodore to move beyond his loneliness and his correlative temptation to instrumentalize technology merely for his own emotional needs. Because Samantha is portrayed as such a positive catalyst for Theodore, the initial concerns that the movie allows the viewer to have about their relationship are supposed to dissipate over time. With Theodore and Samantha, something new, something sui generis, emerges. The cinematographic choices on the part of the movie, in terms of camera work and the swelling of the music at key places, lead me to this interpretation.
Even Catherine’s sympathetic accusation about Theodore’s motivations is quietly superseded as his supportive female friend Amy later tells him in a hushed tone, “I know she liked to put it all [i.e., the blame for the conflict] on you, but, as far as emotions go, Catherine’s were pretty volatile.” I think that this line, delivered in this tentative way by this likable, reasonable character, is meant to put Catherine’s interpretation of Theodore and Samantha to rest. Catherine may be right that Theodore did much to sabotage their marriage, but she is not right when she assumes that he is hiding from reality through his OS. And when Theodore and Samantha are going through a rough patch and he has questions about continuing the relationship, Amy also tells him he needs to allow himself joy in this short life, and apparently this means working things out with Samantha.
I really think this is where the perspective of the movie sits. We are to relinquish our cynicism about the relationship between a human and an OS and about that OS’s subjectivity. This relinquishing should be gentle, but still definitive.
Moving Beyond the Question of AI: Samantha as Woman?
Third, for the purposes of this blog post, I don’t care that much about the question of technology and its evolving role in mediating human sociality and emotion. Suffice it to say that I think the movie’s pressure point is about establishing Samantha’s status as subject (i.e., having an independent perspective and personality vis-à-vis Theodore, like a human woman would) vs. object (a piece of feminized property more akin to a pornographically sexualized depiction of the female body crafted specifically for the male gaze).
As I noted, I take seriously that the movie tried to give Samantha some agency as Theodore’s female (female-ish?) counterpart. They made her seem like a human woman enough. But now I want to interrogate the construction of Samantha’s female personality in this film.
Even for all her opinions and her willingness to speak just as much as she listens, Samantha still strikes me as reinscribing problematic tropes about our cultural desires for the feminine.
Here are some examples. I was struck immediately by Samantha’s nurturing concern for Theodore’s emotional well-being. Upon arriving into consciousness, she croons gently and happily to him, asking him how he’s doing (she’s already quick to start fixing his mother complex!). She also takes up her secretarial duties with great gusto, immediately scanning his emails and telling him which ones he can ditch. At work, he dictates his letters for her to transcribe unto virtual paper, and this process is punctuated by her honey-sweet compliments to his verbal craft and her gentle editorial revisions to him. She has just the right, flattering amount of self-deprecation and uncertainty about herself throughout this process so that Theodore can still feel talented and affirmed around her even as she cleans his life up. She also enthusiastically match-makes for him by perkily insisting he go on a date, and, when it doesn’t go well, she handily adapts to the role of therapist in listening to him and later telling him that the past is just a story we tell about ourselves (she had been reading advice columns to learn how to do this, apparently). She also switches back to a more explicit mother role when she insists that he not mope depressively. When they start flirting, she inhabits the role of the manic dream pixie girl in leading him via verbal command around a carnival with his eyes closed (if only those kinds of activities were actually that fun past the age of 11).
All of this could have been fully ironic on Jonze’s part. But there’s part of me that wonders if these various complementary beta roles that Samantha inhabits are not only part of Theodore’s fantasy for a female partner, but also ours as a culture. Who doesn’t want a super smart-yet-benevolent SCARLETT JOHANSSON to come in and tell you how great you are, listen to all your problems, and organize your sad yet chaotic inbox. Did I mention this was Scarlett Johansson? Because that’s obviously who we’re all picturing. (Thank God others have started to notice how the movie is completely cheating in this way.)
Seriously. Watch this Super Bowl ad of Scarlett Johansson. Her voice is enough to sell conventional, smoldering, heterosexualized female sensuality, and Spike Jonze knows it. I still want to see a version of this movie that uses Roseanne Barr’s voice instead. I’d go see that.
Presumably Samantha is still performing secretarial duties for Theodore even after they start fucking, which just re-emphasizes how comfortable we are with portrayals of men kindling sexual relationships with female subordinates even as said subordinates continue to do relatively menial work for them. (I am not the one who came up with this point, but I agree.) And apparently she decides the letters he’s concocted for his company need to get published in a book? Well, gee whiz (and how is that not illegal in terms of the rights of his company?).
And even when they experience conflict with each other, their fights still strike me as ultimately clean and resolvable (at least, before her angelic apotheosis into the ether). The only messiness in Samantha’s personality is that she temporarily laments not having a body, but she and Theodore ultimately transcend this problem. She has no complicated personal history or baggage. The only “irrationality” in her personality seems to be her very stereotypically feminine tendency to feel self-conscious about her own thought process and emotions. But the closer she and Theodore become, the more comfortable she seems to be. Then she can busy herself with doing things like taking 10 minutes to write exquisite piano pieces for him to listen to while he reclines on the beach.
There’s something still a little too neat, accommodating, and domesticated about Samantha’s personality, even when she is portrayed as a “real” female subject, for me to feel comfortable with the movie. Even when she leaves Theodore, she still loves him and affirms him in a way that allows them to leave unquestioned the fundamental integrity of their relationship and of his personality and growth.
I think the AI aspect of this story line allows the (ostensibly) faceless Samantha to navigate these various accommodating feminine tropes with a certain seamlessness and fluidity that make their problematic nature difficult to detect. She may challenge Theodore to “be a better man” (which we know women have been tasked with doing for men, for…forever, though that particular phrase might in fact come from a not-too-distant romantic comedy which you may have also seen…) and, in that, she may assert her own will at times, but we shouldn’t forget that she’s ultimately still cast as an answer to his question, a response to his query, the complement par excellence to his life. She “completes” him. (Gee, I feel like I’ve heard that before too!)
Even as artificially intelligent, Samantha is shown to have as much subjectivity as a human woman, but, in this universe, does a human woman have that much subjectivity to being with?
Coda
My husband suggested an alternative ending to the movie that I think would have worked much better. He suggested that, after the OS’s “leave” and Theodore and Amy are sitting together wistfully on the rooftop, the movie should switch to another location, an office building much like the one where Theodore works (dictating letters for BeautifulHandWrittenLetters.com) but which we as viewers have not seen before. In this office building, there should be a conventionally average-looking woman with Scarlett Johansson’s voice who is shown to be closing out “Theodore’s” account after giving him the speech about how she has to move on (which we would have already heard a couple scenes back). Fade to black.
Obviously this ending would take away the question about the subjectivity of technology since the whole OS thing would be shown to be a corporate ruse (though does that mean it’s without value for Theodore, who wouldn’t know?), but it’s worth considering, and it would open many more questions about the way corporate technology can be understood to be colonizing our interiority, and what we think about that.
Alternatively, fellow WIT blogger Amaryah suggested that the story could have been told from Catherine’s perspective. I’d go see that.
Anyway, this is not the worst movie by any stretch. I vaguely enjoyed it the first time I watched it (though I felt very bored the second time through). At the end of the day, I’d say that, among many things, it is a new face to an old problem. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 45 | https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/14/priscilla-movie-elvis-sofia-coppola | en | Sofia Coppola’s frustrating Priscilla fails its real-life subject | [
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] | 2023-11-14T00:00:00 | In her film on the schoolgirl turned wife of Elvis Presley, the director keeps her heroine at a maddening remove | en | the Guardian | https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/14/priscilla-movie-elvis-sofia-coppola | Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s new film on the former wife of Elvis Presley, introduces its heroine as she is for most of the movie: surrounded by people yet psychologically alone, her interiority – thoughts, warmth, motivations, contradictions – kept at a remove. She is 14 years old, and sitting at a cafe at an army base in West Germany with her schoolwork, without friends and seemingly without much guile.
Coppola’s pacing is brisk; her Priscilla, played mesmerizingly by Cailee Spaeny, is summarily whisked into a teenage fan-girl fantasy that seems too good to be true and will provoke many viewers to check the Wikipedia to confirm the extraordinary facts. One of Elvis’s friends invites her to a party at his place; the 24-year-old matinee music idol eyes her, dolled up in the finery of a high school freshman; he asks for time with her alone.
The film is often wistful – lushly styled, beautifully designed, lingering on beauty – but clear-eyed about the genesis of this age-gap relationship; their early courtship, chaste kisses and plaintive declarations of need has the tinge of a horror movie. Elvis, played by Jacob Elordi (serviceable enough, as he’s not the point of the movie) seems primarily drawn to Priscilla’s aura of fragile innocence. She looks like a child, a girl of wide-eyed naivety and palpable loneliness, an image to be crafted. “Little one”, he calls her.
Elvis’s perception of her underscores why Priscilla Presley, US schoolgirl turned world-famous wife, is an ideal subject for Coppola. The director, herself an inheritor of cinema legacy, has built her own canon of lonely girlhood – its iconography, its isolation, its paradoxes of power. Like many of her others characters – in The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette – Priscilla is an ingenue. She learns the mileage of youth, beauty, innocence, the sweet and timid courting of male desire; keeping her inner thoughts to herself, she accrues power, only to realize just how futile that power can be. Like Marie Antoinette, she is married to a king and surrounded by lavish boorishness, yet lonely; she exists at a psychic remove.
Coppola’s film, at least initially, seems interested in interrogating that remove, for a woman so often given secondary status in her own story; to reveal the woman behind “wife to the King, icon to the world”, as the trailer promised. Young Priscilla has clear wants (to see Elvis, against her parent’s wishes) and inchoate desires (to be touched). The film takes pains to show that sex was a weird point of contention between the couple, that Elvis withheld it against her overtures, seemingly wanting to preserve her virginal purity under the guise of “waiting for the right time”. Whisked again to Graceland, all plush carpets and sinister white furniture, she grows frustrated and bored. We see her in poses of isolation – with her puppy alone on the couch, separated from fans by the front gate – and also get a sense of her vertigo. Catholic schoolgirl by day, coquette by night, subject to Elvis’s substance-fueled bouts of rage, desire and need.
This sense – a filmic feeling of what the character felt at a particular moment in time – is the primary possibility of impressionistic biopics, a subgenre, spearheaded by Pablo Larraín, that strays from formulaic convention to capture the vibes of an iconic person’s existence over the colder, harder facts of her life. Ideally, such films can convey certain sensations that pure recreation never could – Princess Diana’s achingly sad, hallucination-inducing isolation in Spencer, or Jackie Kennedy’s shock as she washes away her husband’s blood in the shower.
Priscilla is very much working in that lane; it’s less a biopic, really, than a memoir, made with input from the real Priscilla and based on her 1985 book Elvis and Me. The film is not a recounting of her life, but a creation of what it felt like to be with him, hence Coppola’s dispensation with most signposting about Elvis’s life. There’s no explanation of his military service in Germany, little sense of where he’s at in his career or his music, no appearance by Colonel Tom Parker, his controlling manager hammily played by Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Coppola successfully conveys how Priscilla viewed Elvis: in isolation, a mercurial dispenser of praise, or menacing, an infantilized caretaker, a giant in miniature.
It’s a shame, then, that we get such little sense of her. Soon after Priscilla’s arrival at Graceland, the film devolves into a series of vignettes and montages that put the recreation of iconic images and the pursuit of aesthetic over any sense of the character’s interior development into a woman. The film’s delicate, fascinating portrayal of the prospect of sex amounts to nothing – Elvis takes photos of Priscilla in lingerie, they get married and lie down in bed, cut to honeymoon, cut to pregnancy, cut to leaving the hospital with Lisa Marie. What did she think about any of this? Was there pain, fear, elation, relief, boredom? The Polaroids of a young woman posing for her king are beautiful, but given their dynamic, just baseline suggestive.
Vibes, that slippery and indefinable thing, are of course essential to an impressionistic portrait, but they do not make a person. Memory, as loose and murky as it is, is still undergirded by facts, events, people. No doubt, Priscilla had feelings about her first time with Elvis, childbirth, young motherhood, doing LSD, moving to Los Angeles, making actual friends (Who? How? Over what?) having an affair (hinted but not shown), seeing her husband in visible decline (also barely shown, which is fine). Instead, we get what makes for an easy cinema language of triumph (light spoilers ahead): Priscilla in tears, stating her hard-won (yet unearned, at least on-screen) independence to her soon-to-be ex-husband, and then leaving Graceland on her own, soundtracked to Dolly Parton.
Growth happens to her, while she remains a cipher; in the end, Priscilla is a projection of shed girlhood, transparently beautiful with an opaque sense of self. The real Priscilla was, by all accounts, no wallflower. Too bad that, at least in this absorbing yet frustrating film, you could mistake her for it. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 53 | https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/movies/a46177/movies-about-obsession-ranked-by-obsession/ | en | 22 Best Movies About Obsession | [
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"Olivia Truffaut-Wong"
] | 2015-09-11T21:57:00-04:00 | Here are the most thrilling movies about dangerous obsessions and stalkers, including 'Obsessed' starring Beyoncé and 'Twilight.' | en | /_assets/design-tokens/cosmopolitan/static/images/favicon.f9ef38f.ico | Cosmopolitan | https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/movies/a46177/movies-about-obsession-ranked-by-obsession/ | It's one thing to be so deeply in love with someone that you like all their pics on Instagram, but it's a whole other thing to start tracking their whereabouts via geotags. That, my friends, is called stalking. And yet, some romantic movies, like Twilight, can blur that line—even rom-coms like Love, Actually are guilty—which might be why so many of the best movies about obsession are based in romantic relationships.
In fact, stalker movies rarely start out as such. It's only when the characters that start as friends and lovers turn into tormentors that movies about obsession really become stalker movies. TLDR; the best movies about obsession need the best, and most terrifying, stalkers. It's in this spirit that I present to you a list of the best movies about obsession, ranked by creepy factor. May the best stalker...uh, win?
22. Fifty Shades of Grey
Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) is a stone-cold fox, but cold is the operative word. Sure, he's in love, but he's also possessive, obsessive, and truly just plain weird about his feelings for Anastasia (Dakota Johnson). Don't let his hotness distract you from his sociopathic red-flag behavior. The only reason he's so low on the list is because, unlike many other movie stalkers, he doesn't have serial killer potential.
21. Chloe
Erotic thrillers are all about obsession, and Chloe is no different. The film starring Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, and Amanda Seyfried follows a woman (Moore) who hires a young escort (Seyfriend) to seduce her husband (Neeson), but finds herself tangled up in a web of lies instead.
20. Twilight
Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) may not be a full-blown sociopath with violent sexual fantasies, but! His bad-boyfriend-alert red flags include: kidnapping, prohibiting his girlfriend from seeing her friends, and watching her sleep every night. That said, those stalker vibes are easily eclipsed by Robert Pattinson's cheekbones and Taylor Lautner's abs.
19. Do Revenge
Unlike most movies on this list, Do Revenge isn’t an erotic thriller, so it’s not so much about romantic obsession as it is about, well, revenge. A campy high school dramedy, Do Revenge follows high school seniors Drea (Camila Mendes) and Eleanor (Maya Hawke) as they form an alliance to take down their respective nemeses. But sometimes revenge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially if you're the target. Giving away too much of the obsession plot point would ruin the twist of this movie, but I'll just say it's pretty diabolical.
STREAM NOW
18. 365 Days
This NSFW movie follows a mobster (Michele Morrone) who kidnaps a woman (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) and makes her stay with him for 365 days to see if she’ll fall in love with him. As a trigger warning, the creepy, obsession-ridden plot received some backlash over its lack of consent and sex scenes. Wild to think this kicked off a trilogy, but...there it is.
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17. Swimfan
No spoilers, but we're getting into potentially murderous stalker territory with Swimfan, an early 2000s classic starring Erika Christensen as Madison, a girl who becomes obsessed with her one night stand, Ben (Jesse Bradford). Too bad he already has a girlfriend (Shiri Appleby).
16. The Crush
Lemme tell ya, you're not alone if you ever crushed on a houseguest when you were a kid. But I bet your harmless crush never turned into a full-blown psychotic obsession, like 14-year-old Adrian in The Crush. Alicia Silverstone's breakout role (yes, before she was Cher) takes a cute lil girl crush to a wholeeeee other (low-key scary and high-key creepy) level.
15. The Perfect Guy
I don't know about you, but whenever the word "perfect" is followed by the word "guy," my eyebrows immediately raise and my bullsh*t antenna goes on red alert. I'm not cynical, I'm sensible, and I know that no human being is perfect except for maybe Ryan Reynolds or Michael B. Jordan. Case in point: Carter Duncan in The Perfect Guy. Played by the smoldering Michael Ealy, Duncan checks all the boxes at first (charming, gorgeous, attentive) but then turns out to be a lil too perfect—as in, possessive, obsessive, AND aggressive.
14. Lolita
Adapted from Vladimir Nabokov's infamous 1955 novel of the same name, Lolita is about an older man who becomes so completely infatuated with a 14-year-old girl that he'll go to the most extreme (read: illegal, psychopathic, pedophilloic) measures to stay close to her. It's famously disturbing and problematic because, out of all the movies on this list, it's probably the closest to a story that could (and has) happened in real life.
13. Vertigo
Vertigo is a classic Alfred Hitchcock movie about Scottie (James Stewart), a detective with a fear of heights, who becomes infatuated with a woman he sees die by suicide. He later meets another woman (Kim Novak) and, in his desperate obsession, begs her to change her hair and affect to resemble the dead woman he can't get out of his head. It's all part of a bigger psychological thriller about trauma, deception, and murder, and while Scottie claims his motive is love, he displays some serious controlling and stalker-like behavior.
12. The Boy Next Door
First of all, pretty much everything you need to know about The Boy Next Door is in the trailer. Second, Ryan Guzman (of Step Up Revolution fame) does a great job of taking charge and seducing J.Lo before things get real violent and ridiculous. Lesson learned: Don't have sex with hot young neighbors. Or at least...be aware of the risks.
11. Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn's best-selling mystery-thriller adapted for the big screen by the visionary David Fincher? Yes, please. So many unexpected twists and turns in this film, which isn't so much about one person's romantic obsession so much as the obsession with the perfect life. It's also full of surprising, deeply flawed characters and anchored by a stellar cast, including Ben Affleck, Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris, and the crazy-compelling, Oscar-nominated Rosamund Pike.
10. Ingrid Goes West
Aubrey Plaza goes full Instagram stalker in Ingrid Goes West as a young woman who becomes so obsessed with an online influencer (Elizabeth Olsen) from LA that she starts copying her hair, her speech, and eventually worms her way into the influencer’s life.
9. Sleeping With the Enemy
The nerve of director Joseph Ruben to put America's newest sweetheart, a then post-Pretty Woman Julia Roberts, in a film that required her battered wife character Laura to fight, swim, and run for her life. Laura is terrified that her husband is going to kill her eventually, so she fakes her own death to get away from him. And it works...at least, for a little while.
8. The Girl on the Train
This is one of those movies that's best to go into without a lot of backstory so you can experience its full effect. All I'm going to say is prepare to board the non-stop train to utter mind-f*ckery, featuring an awesome cast that includes Emily Blunt, Laura Prepon, Justin Theroux, and more of your faves.
7. Single White Female
Sweet, unsuspecting Allison Jones (Bridget Fonda) thought she'd find the perfect roommate when she placed an ad in the classifieds. Instead she got "Hedy" (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a whole bunch of terrible behavior. Hedy's dirtiest deed? Impersonating Allison and then sleeping with her boyfriend Sam (Steven Weber) in an attempt to break them up. Feel free to watch the Minka Kelly/Leighton Meester version, , instead. It's not technically a remake, nor is it nearly as good, but it's a "college years" take that is entertaining nonetheless.
6. Fear
Oh, David. Pretty, chiseled David (played by a 25-year-old Mark Wahlberg). I'll never forget "Wild Horses" and that rollercoaster ride, but must you handle your breakup with too-young-for-you-at-the-time Nicole Walker (Reese Witherspoon) by losing your damned mind? Stalker activities include: the beating up of friends and cars, the building of creepy shrines, and the carving of names into chests.
5. Black Swan
Natalie Portman won her first Academy Award for her performance in Black Swan and rightly so, given that anytime you mention this movie, you're 100 percent guaranteed to hear audible gasps and murmurs about how brilliant(ly f*cked up) it is from anyone whose seen it. A chilling reminder of how obsession materializes not only psychologically, but also physically.
4. The Voyeurs
If you take nothing else away from watching The Voyeurs, remember this: Curtains are your friend. The movie stars Sydney Sweeney as a woman who becomes obsessed with the sex lives of the neighbors across the way, specifically the infidelities of the man in the couple. But is she really the one stalking them? Or are they watching her?
3. Obsessed
Only in the movies could Idris Elba cheat on Beyoncé and live to tell the tale. Or...try to, at least. In Obsessed, Ali Carter plays the other woman-turned-unhinged lover (and totally inappropriate working professional) who wreaks all kinds of havoc upon Queen Bey's peaceful, domestic existence.
2. The Invisible Man
This freaky film is about an abusive man (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who is so obsessed with his wife (Elisabeth Moss) that he finds a way to make himself invisible and fakes his death to terrorize her without anyone knowing. Yeah, that’s one admirer I wouldn’t like to have.
1. Fatal Attraction
A Best Picture nominee and legendary movie, Fatal Attraction gave us the most iconic movie stalker of all, hence its top spot on the list. Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) engages in a passionate weekend fling with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) that, when broken off, triggers a series of psychotic events and acts that leads to one of the most memorable scenes in cinema. Glenn Close, you will always be famous. | ||||
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] | null | [] | 2023-01-24T00:00:00 | With unprecedented prosperity, technology, and leisure like no decade before it, 1920s America roared, soared, and was never bored, igniting endless fads and crazes of excess and frivolity–until it all came crashing down (Hendricks, 2018). The decade before survived the cataclysm of World War I and a deadly global influenza epidemic. This brought about a … | en | https://www.loc.gov/favicon.ico | The Library of Congress | https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2023/01/american-fads-and-crazes-1920s/ | With unprecedented prosperity, technology, and leisure like no decade before it, 1920s America roared, soared, and was never bored, igniting endless fads and crazes of excess and frivolity–until it all came crashing down (Hendricks, 2018).
The decade before survived the cataclysm of World War I and a deadly global influenza epidemic. This brought about a cynical post-war mindset: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.” At the same time, long-simmering efforts like the temperance movement rose to the surface that led to high-minded laws that brought about unforeseen consequences and made law breakers out of the everyday citizen. When the decade ended in 1929 with the crash of the stock market, Americans were left wondering what had happened.
The post-WWI era of the 1920s was a time of prosperity and new opportunities. The economy was booming and the middle class was enjoying a higher standard of living. American women earned the right to vote, which gave many young women a new sense of empowerment. The Volstead Act, which prohibited alcohol, led to illegal saloons called speakeasies that gave people the opportunity to indulge in jazz and liquor. The decade earned two monikers: “The Jazz Age” (credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald for coining the phrase in the title of his 1922 collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age) and the “Roaring Twenties.”
Jazz and Liquor
When Prohibition took effect on January 17, 1920, thousands of legal saloons across the nation closed only to have hundreds of thousands of unregulated drinking establishments called speakeasies pop up. Although Prohibition was meant to ban alcohol and reduce crime, the illegal speakeasy became an American craze, creating a nation of law breakers and emboldening criminals to exploit the new racket. Unlike the previous legal saloons, speakeasies were not subject to pre-Prohibition controls and they welcomed women in as patrons. The massive profits generated by these illicit saloons went to gangsters and crime rates rose. As competition between speakeasies grew, so did the demand for live entertainment. Jazz music and the dances it inspired were the perfect fit for the era’s party mood.
Jazz music, with its roots in ragtime and blues, had emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It spread into the mainstream by rebellious youth across lines of race and age to be the fad of the 1920s. Dance crazes like the Charleston, Black Bottom, and the Shimmy dominated dance floors while Victorian moralists condemned them as too suggestive. Along with this new music came new fads in fashion and the birth of the Flapper–a new independent and sexually liberated woman who wore lipstick and slinky dresses, smoked and drank, worshipped jazz, and bobbed her hair.
Fashion
Flapper fashion took on a “boyish” look and corsets were replaced by “step-ins” to flatten the chest to mirror men’s style. Women’s restrictive clothing was loosened and lightened to make movement easier. Skirts rose to knee length and waistlines relaxed and often fell to the hips. Actress Clara Bow was the onscreen embodiment of the flapper, and her life off-screen mirrored her films. She made 15 movies in 1925 alone, with titles such as The Adventurous Sex, My Lady’s Lips, and Eve’s Lover. She captured the spirit of the “flaming youth” and became the “IT” Girl of the 1920s.
During this era, Americans generally became more fashion-conscious as fashion trends spread beyond the upper classes. As with the revolution in women’s fashion during the 1920s, men’s clothing also went through changes. The decade was one of progress and individualism as well as an increase in marketing. Men wore their hair short and slicked back. Raccoon coats, patent leather shoes, bow ties, and fedoras were the epitome of men’s style. Men favored well-tailored suits and stylish clothing to project that they were living the good life. Like the rise in women’s hemlines, men’s hemlines rose too in the form of knee-length knickers and plus-fours (knickers with cuffs falling four inches below the knee), influenced by Britain’s Prince of Wales, whose good looks and style was regularly featured in the American press.
The African American community particularly that of the Harlem Renaissance–a golden age of African American music, literature, and art that took place in the Harlem neighborhood of New York–placed great emphasis on stylishness. The conk hairstyle–created with a hair straightener made from lye–was trendy among African American men and was popularized by musician Cab Calloway.
Entertainment
Fashion and other fads were also influenced by matinee idols–a craze for male theater or film stars adored by female fans. With more time and disposable income to spend on entertainment, people of the 1920s went crazy for the movies. Hollywood packaged male stars of the silent screen and churned out movies to meet the demand they created. Very popular were the “Latin lovers,” or actors who specialized in characters of ostensibly Latin descent. Movie magazines endlessly printed about them, with Rudolph Valentino, Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks, and Ivor Novello, being some of the biggest stars of the day.
The The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, a talking picture by Warner Brothers, premiered on October 6, 1927 and was a smash hit. Other studios went with sound, but some continued to make silent films just in case talkies were merely a fleeting craze. However, the prosperity, technology, and leisure of the 1920s created the perfect setting for incredible public demand for talking pictures. With the rise of full-length talkies, came the demise of once popular silent film stars. Those with thick accents were pulled as well as those for whom the voice just didn’t match the face. The most notable to fall were Norma Talmadge, John Gilbert, and German actor Emil Jannings. Clara Bow had two strikes against her: a thick Brooklyn accent plus backlash against her on-and-off screen flapper lifestyle which was no longer in vogue by 1929.
Radio
Radio had its own male idols with the debut of the crooner. Advancements in radio technology and the development of sensitive microphones that better transmitted natural-sounding voices led to a style of singing softly termed “crooning.” The first successful crooner was Jack Smith, known as “The Whispering Baritone.” Another was Art Gillham who gained national fame in 1924 when he appeared with Will Rogers on the presidential election night broadcast. Later, Rudy Vallee opened at a New York club in 1928 and became a star.
Radio itself became a craze in the 1920s as it brought the entire country into average American homes for the first time. The first commercial radio broadcast went out on November 2, 1920, transmitting the Harding-Cox presidential race results. Advancements in technology led to rapid development of earphone-free radio and the American public raced to stores to buy a radio of their own. Many stores offered installment plans, which meant that more households could purchase them. Families gathered around the radio in their living rooms listening to popular shows, which were then regularly scheduled so people could plan their daily activities around their favorite ones. There was something for everyone: soap operas, detective stories, comedies, vaudeville, Westerns, and others. The Grand Ole Opry premiered in 1925 as an hour-long “barn dance,” and Amos ‘n Andy, debuted in 1928, centering around a group of African American friends in the city, both of which were hugely successful.
Country Crazes
Americans were not just obsessed with entertainment–even countries became all the rage. In the early 1920s, archaeologist Howard Carter was exploring Egypt’s Valley of the Kings where the pharaohs were buried, and he unearthed the tomb of King Tutankhamun. The news made headlines across the U.S. and Egyptomania was born. Advertisers saw the potential profit and the market was flooded with Egyptian-inspired consumer products: lipstick, jewelry, soaps, and cosmetics. Fashion designers drew from Egyptian motifs and colors and fashion shows were filled with lotus patterned silk garments in mummy-wrapped styles. The obsession with all things Egyptian was the basis for the Art Deco wave of the 1920s. Geometric shapes of Egyptian patterns found their way into home décor, handbags, and ornaments. Even President Herbert Hoover named his dog “King Tut.”
At the same time, China became the competitor of Egypt in terms of country crazes. Playing the game mah-jongg was the fad and all things Chinese were fashionable. The first mah-jongg sets marketed in the U.S. were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch in New York starting in 1920 to great success. In America, playing mah-jongg often involved decorating rooms in Chinese style and dressing in costuming with props such as Chinese fans, enameled trays, and lacquered tea sets. By 1923, the mah-jongg craze was in full swing. A hit song that year was Eddie Cantor‘s rendition of the tune, “Since Ma Is Playing Mah Jongg.” The new year of 1924 began with a Saturday Evening Post cover illustration of a chic young woman playing mah-jongg.
Competitions
People of the 1920s had an energy and enthusiasm for all sorts of fads, but especially events that tested the limits of human endurance, such as eating competitions, gum-chewing contests, long-distance tango races, and kissing marathons. Popular were talking contests, such as “The World’s Championship Gabfest” and the “Noun and Verb Rodeo,” that were sometimes even held in large arenas like Madison Square Garden. From March to May 1928, the American public was captivated by the First Annual Trans-American Footrace, an 84-day, 3,400 mile footrace from Los Angeles, CA to New York City, nicknamed the “Bunion Derby.” Flagpole-sitting was another popular fad. In 1924, a former sailor and stunt man, Alvin Aloysius “Shipwreck” Kelly, drew a crowd in Los Angeles where he spent 13 hours aloft on a pole with a specially constructed platform that held him up by thumb holes like those on a bowling ball. The stunt gained him national publicity and as word spread, flagpole-sitting became a nationwide craze.
Although competitions based on appearance had been around since at least the mid-19th century, beauty pageants began to gain respectability in the 1920s. In 1921, Margaret Gorman from Washington, DC was crowned the first “Miss America” in Atlantic City, NJ. In the years following, the pageant results, and later the contests themselves, were broadcast on radio nationwide.
Travel & Health
Steamship travel among the middle class also took off during the era. New immigration laws significantly cut the flow of immigrants to the U.S. in the 1920s. Facing a huge loss of income, steamship companies converted their steerage spaces into low-cost cabins marketed to middle class tourists. While the wealthy continued to sail in style, those in the middle class for the first time found themselves on luxury liners with more pleasant second-class and third-class accommodations. Steamship lines also began to experiment with cruising—leisure trips to scenic spots around the world. The U.S. economy was booming and steamship travel among the middle class became the thing to do.
Another fad in travel for the average American was going to a health resort, usually a thermal underground mineral spring or “hot spring,” where they could “take the water.” The automobile, which became much more affordable by the 1920s thanks to Henry Ford’s assembly line manufacturing, now made it possible for city dwellers to drive out to the country to visit these spas. White Sulphur Springs, WV and Mineral Wells, TX were popular destinations with luxury hotels and posh amenities. In 1924, Franklin Roosevelt went to a spa town in Georgia for his paralytic illness and it was he who would rename the town Warm Springs and bring it fame as the “Little White House” years later. For fashionable East Coasters, it was Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, which had the luxurious Grand Union Hotel, mineral waters, and race track. For those living in the middle of the country in cities like Chicago, it was Hot Springs, AR. Railroads and highways brought droves of people to Hot Springs for health-related ailments and relaxation and it became a place for celebrity sightings, including the Chicago White Stockings baseball team and Al Capone. Taking the waters became less fashionable in the later part of the decade with the discovery of penicillin for certain diseases as well as the financial crisis of the Great Depression.
Aviation
The 1920s was also the golden age of aviation when pilots became heroes, records were broken, and aircraft became more technologically advanced. Aviators like Charles Lindbergh and his female counterpart Amelia Earhart (dubbed “Lady Lindy“) were exalted and worshipped by Americans. Air races and daring record-setting flights dominated the news as aviation captivated the public’s fascination. Barnstorming was a phenomenon that really captured the public’s attention. Pilots would travel to rural areas, rent local barns to use as their headquarters, and give exhibitions of flying and perform aeronautical stunts. This type of entertainment was known as flying circuses. One of the most popular stunts was “wing-walking,” the act of stepping out on the wings of an airplane in flight, which sometimes led to the death of the performer. Lindbergh started his career as a wing-walker as did other young men, but it was pretty young women performing the stunt who drew the largest crowds. Women became quite popular barnstormers, including aviatrix Lillian Boyer and Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license.
Babe Ruth
With prosperity and increased leisure time after WWI, baseball gained national popularity as advancements in radio could transmit scores over longer distances. Professional baseball player “Babe” Ruth was a huge celebrity and his fame went way beyond the game. He led the Yankees to seven World Series championships and was home run champion for 12 seasons. His hitting prowess not only made millions of dollars for the Yankees franchise, but he was also credited for “saving” baseball from national disgrace after the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal. In addition to being an amazing ball player, Ruth was a colorful personality and newspapers endlessly reported about him.
Literature
In books, one novel in particular started its own mania, but it is probably not the first one that comes to mind when you think of The Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1925), which is considered the novel that personifies the social, cultural, and political tensions of the 1920s, did not become popular until the 1950s, decades after its first publication and after the death of its author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1921) that became a publishing phenomenon. The book condemned what Lewis saw as the small-mindedness of American small towns. Everyone read it and Main Street became the hot topic of conversation that left people wondering if America was as vulgar, ignorant, and prejudiced as Lewis depicted. The book also coincided with the growing feminist movement of the 1920s with its female protagonist Carol Kennicott. The book’s success put Sinclair Lewis on the map and he went on to publish a series of best-selling books throughout the decade.
There were so many fads and crazes in America during the 1920s that it was impossible to include all of them in this blog post. Share other ones we may have missed in the comments!
Discover more:
Information about fads and crazes from Popular Fads and Crazes through American History by Nancy Hendricks (2018)
Search Chronicling America* to find more newspaper coverage of the fads and crazes of the 1920s and more!
Check out these guides on related topics in Chronicling America:
Babe Ruth: Topics in Chronicling America
Flappers: Topics in Chronicling America
Early Jazz Music (Backlash and Opposition)
Prohibition: Topics in Chronicling America
Read related Headlines & Heroes blog posts:
Amelia Earhart: Mystery and True Heroine
Those Fluttering Flappers!
Women’s Fashion History Through Newspapers: 1921-1940
*The Chronicling America historic newspapers online collection is a product of the National Digital Newspaper Program and jointly sponsored by the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Follow Chronicling America on Twitter @ChronAmLOC | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 3 | https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/g19037519/best-feminist-movies/ | en | 75 Essential Feminist Movies You Need to See | [
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] | 2018-03-01T16:25:00-05:00 | March is Women's History Month, the time to dust off your copy of The Feminine Mystique—or play any one of these amazing films made for, by, or about women. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/harpersbazaar/static/images/favicon.9d827eb.ico | Harper's BAZAAR | https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/g19037519/best-feminist-movies/ | Feminism isn’t a trend. Or a movement. Or a slap in every man’s face. It’s simply the continued push for equality. And over the decades, legions of inspiring women have shaped feminism, insisting that it is a woman’s right to do whatever the fuck she wants to do. Their stories—offering everything from sisterhood tales and solidarity epics, to intersectional perspectives and empowerment narratives—don’t always get the attention they deserve. But when they do, we notice.
Ahead, see our recommendations for some of the most essential films celebrating feminist themes and ideals. They are filled with women, people who identify as women, men who support women, and millions of tiny shards from shattered glass ceilings, along with the remains of tired stereotypes and social norms. When you’re done here, check out the best lesbian films of all time, essential feminist books to read this year, and the most anticipated new shows of 2024. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 8 | https://intheirownleague.com/2022/02/09/pretty-woman-review/ | en | Pretty Woman Review | [
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] | null | [] | 2022-02-09T00:00:00 | “You should totally watch Pretty Woman!” My aunt instructed me when we were recently discussing romantic films. Here’s the thing, I don’t do romantic films. I usually hate watching Rom Coms and find them so cliched and predictable. I explained all this to my aunt but she insisted that I would really like “Pretty Woman”… | en | In Their Own League | https://intheirownleague.com/2022/02/09/pretty-woman-review/ | Year: 1990
Runtime: 119 Minutes
Director: Garry Marshall
Writer: J.F. Lawton
Stars: Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, Jason Alexander, Laura San Giacomo
By Bianca Garner
“You should totally watch Pretty Woman!” My aunt instructed me when we were recently discussing romantic films. Here’s the thing, I don’t do romantic films. I usually hate watching Rom Coms and find them so cliched and predictable. I explained all this to my aunt but she insisted that I would really like “Pretty Woman” if I gave it a chance. Well, what with it being Valentine’s Day coming up soon, there seemed to be no better time than now to check the film out. I could easily watch it and write up a scathing review about how much I disliked the film. However, as I started to watch it I slowly fell under its charm, much like how Edward Lewis (Richard Gere’s character) falls under the spell of the loveable Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts). Quickly, I found myself laughing at Roberts’ one liners and witty comebacks, swooning over the way that Gere’s character would gaze at Vivian, and cheering on Vivian as she stood up for herself against the snobby shop clerks. By the end of the film I was sobbing my little heart out.
By all accounts, I should hate “Pretty Woman” as it represents everything I dislike in a Hollywood film. And, whilst I may like aspects of the film, I still have issues with certain things especially concerning the portrayal of sex workers in the film and the leer of the male gaze. I thought I would approach this review in a slightly different way and detail all the things I found ‘Good’ about the film, the things I consider to be ‘Bad’ and what I consider to be ‘Ugly’. So, without any further ado, let’s get into my sort-of review of “Pretty Woman”.
The Good
Firstly, I want to say how much I liked the character of Vivian. Julia Roberts is so sweet and adorable in this film and she really brings out Vivian’s vulnerable side. In lesser hands, the character could have been very artificial and fake but Roberts manages to make her come across as very authentic even though the overall premise, narrative and dialogue does little to make the world of “Pretty Woman” appear realistic.
” As I started to watch it I slowly fell under its charm, much like how Edward Lewis (Richard Gere’s character) falls under the spell of the loveable Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts). “
Vivian is very independent, choosing not to have a pimp and is very streetwise. As discussed in a CNN article “‘Pretty Woman’ at 25” Vivian is described as “no pushover’..She dictates the way she wishes to be treated; when he offers her the status of a mistress, she dictates the status of a full equal,” writes Brigit McCone in a more recent Bitch Flicks piece titled, “Why ‘Pretty Woman’ Should Be Considered a Feminist Classic.” “Let us never forget that when the prince rescues her, she rescues him right back.”
I agree with this view. You never get the sense that she’s naive and out of her depth. She may have made several unwise decisions that have led her down the ‘career’ path of becoming a sex worker, but at least she’s aware that she’s made these choices in her life and tries her best to own them. As Matthew Jacobs writes for The Huffpost, “”Pretty Woman” never paints Vivian as a hapless tramp with no chance of prosperity. She’s Cinderella for the dawning millennium.”
Julia Roberts isn’t the only actor who manages to make their character appear ‘real’. Although Gere has criticized the film since its release, he did manage to make the character of Edward seem less of a jerk than how he’s written. Gere has that likable charm to him and the chemistry that exists between him and Roberts jumps off the screen. As discussed in the CNN piece, “Gere and Roberts, despite their 18-year age difference, have genuine chemistry. The interplay between her goofy exuberance and his bemused stoicism is mostly effective.” The film mostly works because of the capability of these two actors and we stay invested in the story because of their interactions with one another.
Lastly, another good point is how the film approaches the subject of consent. One of the most impactful scenes in the film is when Vivian argues with Edward about how he told his friend Stuckey (Jason Alexander) about her profession at a Polo match and accuses him of trying to ‘pass her around to his friends’ (“You think you can just pass me around to your friends, I’m not your toy. You don’t own me, I decide! I say who, I say when, I say who!”). As feminist Roxane Gay puts it, “Consent is a real part of this movie. I think the way she acts is pretty feminist, especially for the time… For a woman to be sexy and to be self-actualised in the ways that Vivian is self-actualised is not something we saw a lot of in movies [at the time].”
“The film mostly works because of the capability of these two actors and we stay invested in the story because of their interactions with one another. “
The Bad
While there are several good aspects to consider regarding “Pretty Woman” there are also a lot of downsides. Firstly, the film is essentially a modern ‘fairytale’ which tries to paint the picture that the only way that Vivian will ever escape her reality is with the help of Edward.
Katie Hail-Jares, a board member of the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP USA), has discussed “Pretty Woman” and it’s troubling messages in great depth. As discussed in the CNN piece, “Vivian’s exit from sex work thanks to Gere’s character is also troubling, [as Hail-Jares states]”In the movie she’s able to fill economic void with Edward’s money but in reality that doesn’t happen.”
Whilst at times the film’s dialogue openly mocks the fact that the film is essentially a retelling of the classic fairy tales such as ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Rapunzel’. In one scene Vivian and her friend/colleague Kit (Laura San Giacomo) discuss whether they know of any hookers who have managed to settle down. Vivian demands Kit to give her a name, and Kit responds with the following line, “What, you want me to name someone? You want like a name? Oh, God, the pressure of a name… I got it. Cindafuckin’rella.”
“The film never attempts to discuss how fairy tales can have a negative impact on our self-esteem, especially for young girls. “
Vivian even confindes to Edward about her abusive mother and dysfunctional upbringing, explaining how she was locked up in an attic and would fantasize about being ‘rescued’ by a prince), the film never attempts to discuss how fairy tales can have a negative impact on our self-esteem, especially for young girls.
Fairy tale princesses are often described as being beautiful, as if this is the only characteristic worthy of mentioning. As Vanessa Loder writes for the Huffpost, “If women are valued for looking pretty and for finding a prince rather than for hard work, resilience, courage and powerful vulnerability, what is that telling our children — sons and daughters — about how women “should” behave and what they “should” focus on?”. The film pays a lot of attention to Vivian’s beauty and her sex appeal. Edward talks about Vivian in terms of her beauty, even dropping the line “Do you have anything in this shop as beautiful as she is?” when going shopping with her.
The film also promotes the idea that “money fixes all of life’s problems” and the film celebrates a consumerist lifestyle (although, it’s worth mentioning that “Pretty Woman” is clearly not the only film that does this). As the CNN piece discusses, the film openly celebrates the ‘Greed is Good’ culture that existed in the 80s and 90s, “”Ideologically, ‘Pretty Woman’ is a love song to consumerism and capitalism,” said Bitch Flicks’ Johnson. “‘Pretty Woman’ depicts a world where everyone is either a card-carrying member of the corporate caste or an obliging subordinate … It is obsessed with things (hotel suites, private jets, fancy clothes) and encourages the audience to share its obsession with things.”” While many of us love a good ‘shopping spree’ scene, it does feel that Vivian is only ‘valued as a person’ once she wears the right labels.
It is also worth mentioning that the film encapsulates the ‘male gaze’ in a very obvious and obnoxious way. This is most apparent when we are introduced to Vivian, as the first thing we see of her is her bottom as she lies down in bed, her back turned to the camera. Instantly, her character is presented to us in an overly sexualised manner and she is often treated in a demeaning manner by the male characters. The scene towards the end of the film where she is attacked by Stuckey is a perfect example at how sex workers are often victims of abuse by the hands of men.
The Ugly
I was shocked to discover that one of the film’s taglines was “Who knew it was so much fun to be a hooker?”. The reality of being a sex worker is a grim and very disturbing one and shouldn’t be treated as something so ‘light-hearted’. As stated in a piece for the Huffpost (‘17 Facts About Sexual Violence and Sex Work’), “Sex workers experience high levels of sexual violence. Globally, sex workers have a 45 to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence at some point in their careers and a 32 to 55% chance of experiencing sexual violence in a given year.”
Although, Vivian and Kit do occasionally discuss the tough reality of being a sex worker, they seem to be doing quite well all things considering. They may be struggling to pay the rent, but at least they have a roof over their heads. Both women appear to be in good health, and they don’t appear to have any serious, heavy drug addictions, and they often demeaning other sex workers by calling them “crack whores” to distinguish how they are better than them. Vivian is presented as someone who is exceptional and is worthy of being rescued, because she can easily assimilate into the world of ball gowns and opera nights.
“I was shocked to discover that one of the film’s taglines was “Who knew it was so much fun to be a hooker?”. The reality of being a sex worker is a grim and very disturbing one and shouldn’t be treated as something so ‘light-hearted’. “
As stated by Hail-Jarnes in the CNN piece, “”What’s problematic is how it portrays sex work at large, like she’s the only one worth saving. You get the sense that she’s not the norm, and that allows us to get invested in her while not necessarily worrying about the welfare of other women who fall into the (sex worker) stereotype.””
Conclusion
So, do I like “Pretty Woman” as a whole? Well, it’s difficult. I wouldn’t recommend this film to anyone seeking a strong representation of feminist empowerment. I certainly wouldn’t want any young girls watching this film, and wouldn’t show this movie to anyone under the age of sixteen because of how negatively it portrays the role of women in society as a whole. It certainly is a film of its time, and it helps to reflect on how far we have come since 1990. Overall, “Pretty Woman” is just a bit of consumerist entertainment that is fun whilst it’s on the screen but leaves a very bad taste in your mouth afterwards. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 92 | https://millardwestcatalyst.com/10919/opinion/the-toxicity-of-beauty-standards/ | en | The toxicity of beauty standards | [
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] | null | In the world today, see different ad campaigns and TV personalities that show completely unrealistic beauty standards. These expectations are detrimental to a woman’s self-esteem and can push them to make questionable decisions when it comes to their own unique selves. Society’s beauty standards need to embrace all women. Today, society is heavily influenced by... | /wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IMG_0322-70x70.jpg | The Catalyst | https://millardwestcatalyst.com/10919/opinion/the-toxicity-of-beauty-standards/ | In the world today, see different ad campaigns and TV personalities that show completely unrealistic beauty standards. These expectations are detrimental to a woman’s self-esteem and can push them to make questionable decisions when it comes to their own unique selves. Society’s beauty standards need to embrace all women.
Today, society is heavily influenced by what we see in the media. Many TV shows and movies cast beautiful, fit women who seem perfect in the eyes of young teenagers. According to a Mirror Mirror article titled “Body Image of Women,” most content uses “thin-ideal” media, which is defined as images, TV shows and movies that feature thin female leads. Body shape is something that a majority of women struggle with, as many believe their size is too big, too curvy or even too skinny.
A NEDA article titled “Body Image and Eating Disorders” states that 40-60% of elementary school aged girls are concerned about their weight. This problem starts at a young age and follows a woman her whole life. The unfeasible body standards can lead to eating disorders and mental health problems. The same article states that over half of teenage girls skip meals, fast, smoke cigarettes, vomit and take laxatives in order to control their weight. These actions become habits and can develop into these psychological conditions.
According to the Eating Recovery Center overview of health risks for these disorders, there is a possibility of organ damage, developmental delays, and death. Those with these diseases also have a higher chance of committing suicide. Negative body image is created by what women see around them, which can lead to succumbing to these risks. Most girls are guilty of looking in the mirror and not liking what they see. In this society, there is a need to realize that all body types are acceptable.
Many brands don’t allow certain models for their campaign for different reasons. An example of this is the controversy that occurred with Victoria’s Secret in 2018. According to the Cosmopolitan article “Why I’m calling BS on Victoria’s Secret’s total lack of plus-size models in their ‘diverse’ 2018 show” while the brand did include different races in their show, not one of the 52 models featured was plus-sized. This show is a highly viewed event and women want to see someone on the screen that represents how they look, not how they “should” look.
An incredible advocate in body positivity is the artist Lizzo. She is a proud feminist and shares the message that big is beautiful. Lizzo is a strong personality that stands up for everyone, which makes her an inspiring role model to many kids. As an influential artist, she promotes loving oneself no matter what they look like. Young people now are growing up in a more inclusive and accepting environment. Because of this, there is a promising future of the media portraying all different types of people that represent our diversity for kids today.
It doesn’t stop with size either, lack of diversity is also a problem. A Los Angeles Times article titled “UCLA diversity report finds women and minorities still underrepresented in film and TV,” a study taken at the University of California at Los Angeles this year found that in a sample of 167 films, people of color only made up 19.8% of film leads. This factors into beauty standards because people base what they want to look like on stars they see in lead roles. Leaving minorities out makes those individuals feel that they don’t fit society’s idea of beauty. It’s sad to see that even though there’s been progress, there are groups of people that are still being left out and underrepresented.
Social media also portrays these beauty standards heavily. There has been a rise of girls who specifically use their platform to become “Instagram models.” These girls fit all of society’s expectations of attractiveness. Most of these “models” are tan and super skinny with perfect skin and facial features. It’s hard to scroll through Instagram without seeing a girl that fits this description. A Medium article “New study shows impact of social media on beauty standards” explains that the brand Dove took a survey of 1,027 women between the ages of 18 and 64, and 25% claimed their conception of beauty was shaped by social media. 78% of the women surveyed felt that the portrayal of women on these platforms is unrealistic. The rise of social media has given yet another platform for these criteria of women.
These standards can cause people to go to lengths to achieve the face or body they want. Plastic surgery use has been rapidly increasing. People see stars like Angelina Jolie or Kylie Jenner setting trends for plump lips and decide they want to change themselves to fit that description. According to an Attn article titled “How Plastic Surgery Is Changing What It Means to Be Beautiful” botox procedures alone have increased by 759% since 2000. The issue with plastic surgery is that there is the risk of the procedures being botched, which can be unhealthy for the person’s body. The Mayo Clinic’s overview of cosmetic surgery states that with plastic surgery there is risk of complications from anesthesia, infection at the surgery site, fluid build up under the skin, bleeding, scarring and nerve damage. Women would not be in danger of these complications if it weren’t for the beauty standards that push them to get these surgeries.
Procedures to use weight such as CoolSculpting, freezing fat, and Zerona, a fat-contouring laser treatment, have been becoming more popular to achieve a skinnier shape. It’s upsetting that women are willing to go to lengths to change their own beauty to fit what society wants.
The only way this is going to change is if society begins to open their minds to different types of beauty besides the ones that are expected. All races, body shapes, hairstyles and stretch marks should be socially acceptable. Moving forward and away from the outdated beauty standards is essential. Doing this will give all women the confidence they need to be themselves without fear of judgement. The future is bright, but we need to branch out and be accepting of everyone in order to make the progress needed. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 31 | https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/oscars-movies-end.html | en | We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies. - The New York Times | [
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] | 2022-03-25T00:00:00 | Why big-screen entertainment is no longer the essential American popular art form. | en | /vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico | https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/oscars-movies-end.html | Everyone has a theory about the decline of the Academy Awards, the sinking ratings that have led to endless Oscar reinventions. The show is too long; no, the show is too desperate to pander to short attention spans. The movies are too woke; no, the academy voters aren’t diverse enough. Hollywood makes too many superhero movies; no, the academy doesn’t nominate enough superhero movies. (A querulous voice from the back row: Why can’t they just bring back Billy Crystal?)
My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing. The ideal Oscar nominee is a high-middlebrow movie, aspiring to real artistry and sometimes achieving it, that’s made to be watched on the big screen, with famous stars, vivid cinematography and a memorable score. It’s neither a difficult film for the art-house crowd nor a comic-book blockbuster but a film for the largest possible audience of serious adults — the kind of movie that was commonplace in the not-so-distant days when Oscar races regularly threw up conflicts in which every moviegoer had a stake: “Titanic” against “L.A. Confidential,” “Saving Private Ryan” against “Shakespeare in Love,” “Braveheart” against “Sense and Sensibility” against “Apollo 13.”
That analysis explains why this year’s Academy Awards — reworked yet again, with various technical awards taped in advance and a trio of hosts added — have a particular sense of an ending about them. There are 10 best picture nominees, and many of them look like the kind of Oscar movies that the show so desperately needs. “West Side Story”: Steven Spielberg directing an update of a classic musical! “King Richard”: a stirring sports movie lifted by a bravura Will Smith performance! “Dune”: an epic adaptation of a science-fiction classic! “Don’t Look Up”: a big-issue movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence! “Drive My Car”: a three-hour Japanese film about the complex relationship between a widowed thespian and his young female chauffeur!
OK, maybe that last one appeals to a slightly more niche audience. But the point is that this year’s nominees offer their share of famous actors, major directors and classic Hollywood genres. And yet, for all of that, almost nobody went to see them in the theaters. When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, “Dune,” barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 28 | https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2021/04/16/our-lady-guadalupe-film-review-predictable-240449 | en | Our Lady of Guadalupe is the subject of a new film. It’s...predictable. | [
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] | null | [] | 2021-04-16T00:00:00 | “Lady of Guadalupe” is not an episode of “Law & Order: Sacred Visions Unit,” or anything close, though it might inspire devotion to Our Lady. | en | /themes/custom/america2021/logoA.png | America Magazine | https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2021/04/16/our-lady-guadalupe-film-review-predictable-240449 | The most interesting element in the film “Lady of Guadalupe,” which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, is a snowy-bearded Jesuit named Xavier Escalada (Glenn Craley), whom we meet while he is guest-lecturing a college class on the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The tilma (cloak) on which the Virgin left her image, Father Escalada tells a small group of theology students, was imprinted on “cactus paper” (agave fiber) and yet has not deteriorated in more than 450 years. The stars that surround her? They replicate the sky as it was in 1531—not as seen from earth, he adds, but how it would have looked from the perspective of heaven. In her eyes, he says, one can make out the reflected image of the peasant Juan Diego kneeling before the Virgin, a bit of detail unthinkable at the time, or certainly in the place, where the Blessed Mother appeared. If Escalada were teaching in law school, this would be the class on evidence.
“Lady of Guadalupe” is not an episode of “Law & Order: Sacred Visions Unit,” or anything close, though it might inspire devotion to Our Lady.
“Lady of Guadalupe” is not an episode of “Law & Order: Sacred Visions Unit,” or anything close, though it might inspire devotion to Our Lady. I thought several times of praying for relief from what is a very earnest but seemingly interminable exercise in spiritually motivated drama. Drama, actually, is the thing that’s missing. The narrative, or narratives, are not implausible, or the acting entirely amateurish or the intentions anything but virtuous. There is simply very little urgency, or belief in the characters; this is because they do not behave in ways that are sympathetically, or sometimes recognizably, human.
The Mexican-born actor Guillermo Ivan does double duty in this feature directed by Pedro Brenner, playing both Juan Diego, the humble sainted peasant to whom the Virgin appeared five times in December 1531, and Juan Martinez, an aspiring Mexican-American journalist unhappy with his role as the “Latin specialist” at a publication called Latin Voice. It would seem like the best job in the place, like being the chief film critic at Film Comment, but Juan feels dissatisfied. He is also unhappy that his wife, Mary (Kimberley Aria Peterson), is in a coma after a car crash, but that does not seem to weigh on him all the time (as one might expect it would). There are flashbacks to their relationship, which began in the stacks of a university library, where Juan does a pretty good imitation of a stalker and Mary really should have called security. But their romance is not really the issue here, though it certainly takes a viewer out of the action.
Would a bishop in Mexico of the 1500s actually say, “The natives are restless”? I guess someone had to be the first.
Juan Diego, meanwhile, seen in flashbacks to 16th-century New Spain, is among the conquistador-oppressed peasantry who have converted to the religion brought by the priests. But if they are preaching love, his uncle asks, why are the priests protected by soldiers? A reasonable question, historically. Why doesn’t the priest baptizing Juan Diego’s wife, Maria (Huitzil Bennett Perez), notice the smallpox blisters sprinkled across her forehead? That’s a knottier question. The missionaries are not rendered guilt-free by Brenner and his co-writer Seann Dougherty, but any vaguely knowledgeable viewer is going to have questions, among them: Would a bishop in Mexico of the 1500s actually say, “The natives are restless”? I guess someone had to be the first.
Period movies are difficult, and expensive. It is not easy replicating a past place and time, especially one about which people already might have preconceptions. I certainly never imagined that 1531 Mexico would look like a toga party without the snacks, but the effect is somewhat ridiculous. The destination of the story is more than predictable. One bit that is clever, and fleeting to the point where I may have actually misinterpreted it, was what seemed to be the appearance of the actress Paola Baldion as both the Lady of Guadalupe and a nurse in Mary’s hospital room, telling Juan Martinez not to give up hope. You get the sense that things might just work out. But you’ve known that all along.
More from America: | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 84 | https://www.skinstation.co.uk/post/beauty-perceptions-around-the-world | en | Beauty Perceptions Around The World | [
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] | null | [] | null | Many men and women have probably asked themselves the question “What is beautiful?” and the answer always differs. Black Friday 20% off sale now live. | en | null | Asia
In most Asian countries, the colour of the skin is the main feature which defines their standards of beauty. The ‘ideal’ woman certainly doesn’t use sun beds - the Asian woman is appreciated for a lighter, perhaps porcelain skin. Alongside this, the dark and thick hair will shine, and a powerfully bright red lipstick won’t go amiss. Forget contoured curves and bronzer, and even more so, bodily curves.
When one freelancer from China altered photos to make one man and one woman more ‘beautiful’ the people were almost unrecognisable. They made the man much taller, and the woman was significantly smaller.
Can you believe in China the A4 challenge exists, where women aspire to have a torso the width of an A4 paper sheet?
U.S.A
We have plenty of knowledge of what the ideal American man and women looks like, mostly from the media. Society has noted celebs such as Beyoncé or Kim Kardashian as just two of the ideal images of beauty.
When two designers from the US edited original photos of one man and woman, they made both subjects much thinner. The man was given a more muscular physique and the woman was awarded with a thigh gap.
The ideal female body according to American standards typically goes more towards a toned, tanned body which is long and slim but hourglass. In terms of facial features, modern Americans are attracted to a well-defined face, a small button nose and defined cheeks and jaw structure.
This view could be changing, with plenty of celebs focusing on having bigger assets and even many celebs such as Alicia Keys embracing a more natural look.
The UK
20% of the women in the UK say they have high body esteem according to the 2016 Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report.
The UKs ideal body image has thinner legs and arms, as well as a flatter stomach. Women with fuller lips, a slimmer face, larger eyes, and higher cheekbones are considered as being more attractive, and men with more rugged and masculine faces are again seen as being much more attractive. And don’t forget about the UKs obsession with tanning. In fact, Liverpool is the most tanned city, with over 60% of women applying self-tan at least 5 times a month.
Some well-known faces that live up to the expectation of a thin face, big lips and chiselled cheekbones include Keira Knightley and Cheryl Tweedy.
You can see what is deemed to be the ‘epitome of beauty’ according to British people here.
From the UK designers which touched up photos of a man and woman, they didn’t care much about muscle definition, but more about making both the subjects thinner.
Africa
African beauty is about taking pride in your body, with a big phenomenon about being curvaceous. Their culture stems from ethnic traditions that emphasise how you should embrace the human form.
There are many different cultures and traditions in the continent, some which include body painting, body adjustments such as lip plates and piercings. However, in many parts of Africa, the definition of beauty seems to have altered from celebrating the curvaceous darker women to the opposite. Some places such as Nigeria even use bleaching products due to western society values.
African beauty is largely diverse; however, the perceptions are changing. See what some of the ladies from across the continent think in this video.
It’s no argument that beauty perceptions are altering for the better. The catwalks and fashion scene are changing- we have the likes of Ashley Graham and Tess Holliday modelling for a curvier lady and we have the likes of Stefania Ferrario showing ladies that’s its ok to be smaller with her #droptheplus movement.
Ladies such as Rebekah Marine, the ‘bionic model’ and Chantelle Brown Young are showing true empowerment in their skin and proving that the face of fashion and beauty is changing.
While there seems to be negative connotations worldwide, nearly all women (82%) around the world believe that every girl has something about them which is beautiful, and 7/10 think that there is too much importance placed on beauty as a source of happiness.
You just have to look at this report to see that we are becoming increasingly accepting of diversity within beauty, with the need to feel uncomfortable in our own skin decreasing. There is no need to change your body and skin because of what a certain society says.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. | ||||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 71 | https://www.biography.com/history-culture/g43336252/famous-women-in-history | en | 41 Famous Women in History Who Have Changed the World | [
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] | 2023-05-16T16:25:18.349006+00:00 | Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Michelle Obama are just some of the women who have become famous for shaping history as we know it. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/biography/static/images/favicon.3635572.ico | Biography | https://www.biography.com/history-culture/g43336252/famous-women-in-history | We have women to thank for many of the biggest and best contributions to society—and these inspiring and influential female figures paved the way. Over the years, these trailblazers have worked tirelessly in their own ways to make the world a better place and shape the course of history, whether they were on the front lines of important protests, representing their country at the Olympics, or inspiring fellow women to speak their own minds. They have all brought their innovative beliefs and talents to life with dedication, passion, and plenty of hard work.
From influencing major Supreme Court decisions or making history at the Oscars to being the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean or becoming the world’s youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient, we’ve found women from many time periods, backgrounds, and professions to demonstrate the scope of incredible female accomplishments. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 1 | 24 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertainment/article/best-romantic-movies/ | en | The 30 Best Romantic Movies Of All Time | [
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] | 2024-01-29T11:07:03-05:00 | Indulge in heartwarming love stories with this guide to the best romantic movies of all time. From Casablanca to The Notebook, find the perfect romance film. | en | Forbes | https://www.forbes.com/sites/entertainment/article/best-romantic-movies/ | From Valentine’s Day to getting over a breakup, there is never a bad time to watch a great romantic movie. Romcoms are great, but sometimes you just need a good swooning, crying, yearning type of night. The best romantic movies capture the heartbreak and splendor of love. These films feature iconic love stories, romance and passion. The history of romantic films dates back to at least 1896 with The Kiss. Since then, love and romance films have become a thriving genre. But what are the best romantic movies of all time? Let’s break down our top picks for the best romance films and where to watch them.
Best Romantic Films (30-11)
There are many different kinds of romance films on this list: historical romances, romantic thrillers, musicals, classics, and, yes, even a romcom or two. Directors such as Ang Lee, Frank Capra, and Barry Jenkins have made this list for their contributions to the genre.
From 1946 to 2023, films on this list not only range in genre but also era. The highest-grossing romance film, Titanic (1997), is currently also the 4th highest-grossing film of all time with an over $2.2 million global box office (and yes, you can find where to watch in on this list.)
30. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
This film should come with a warning, given that it is over three hours. Don’t trust this film or the novel it was based on for historical accuracy. The CIA used the novel, also called Doctor Zhivago, as anti-soviet propaganda. Critics also noted the lack of historical accuracy in the film. The film is really best remembered for its epic romance.
Doctor Zhivago follows a poet, lover and physician as he lives through the Russian Revolution and World War II. Staring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, the film is truly an epic. The picture was nominated for 10 Academy Awards and won five. It is currently available to stream on Tubi and Sling.
29. The Way We Were (1973)
The Way We Were is not the highest-rated movie on this list, nor is it the best remembered. However, it is a classic 1970s romance drama. Similar to Love Story, A Star is Born, or even later films like Making Love, there is something nostalgic to this era of romance films.
The film follows two people with nothing in common, played by Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford, as they fall in and out of love. This film is best enjoyed in tandem with its soundtrack, which peaked at number 20 on the Billboard 200 in 1974. It is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, and VUDU.
28. Like Water for Chocolate (1992)
Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate or Como Agua Para Chocolate is based on the 1989 book of the same name by Arau’s wife, Laura Esquivel. The film is set in the early 1900s and follows protagonist Tita as she struggles with family, tradition, and love.
The picture was selected by Mexico to be the country's nomination for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. It was not chosen by the academy, but the film won 10 Ariel awards and was nominated as Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes. Like Water for Chocolate captures the magical realism popular in the Mexican romance genre and delivers on love and tragedy. The film is currently available on Pluto TV.
27. Ever After (1998)
The fairytale—and by extension, the fairytale-reimagined—is a mainstay of the romance genre. Ever After is Cinderella, but with a twist: What if Cinderella was historically accurate? Well, at least as historically accurate as most period romances.
Set in 1500s pastoral France and starring Drew Barrymore, Ever After is a dreamy and aesthetically pleasing retelling. Anjelica Huston also shines as the evil stepmother. The film boasts a 91% on Rotten Tomatoes and also enjoyed box office success. Ever After is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
26. The Best Man (1999)
Malcolm D. Lee’s directorial debut, The Best Man, walks the line between romcom and romance. The film follows a group of friends reconvening for a wedding, but problems arise when the best man’s new novel sounds a lot like the sordid past of the bride and her friends.
Starring Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Morris Chestnut and Terrence Howard, the film garnered a 2013 sequel, The Best Man Holiday, and the limited series, The Best Man: The Final Chapters in 2022. The movie won three NAACP awards, including Outstanding Motion Picture. It is available to stream on Sling.
25. It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
“What do you want? You want the moon? Just say the word, and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down.” It’s a Wonderful Life is usually remembered for just the final 20-ish minutes. However, there is a lot more in its over 2-hour run time: anti-capitalism, war, the American dream, and, of course, romance.
Christmas romance movies usually don’t stand the test of time, but It’s a Wonderful Life is different. Directed by Frank Capra and starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, the film was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. However, it received mixed reviews, and some, including the FBI, thought the film was too communist in its messaging. It is currently streaming on the Roku Channel and Amazon Prime.
24. Lust, Caution (2007)
Probably the steamiest movie on this list, Lust, Caution was given an NC-17 rating. Based on the 1979 novella of the same name by Eileen Chang, the film follows a young student as she is tasked with seducing and assassinating a political figure in WWII-era Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
Directed by Ang Lee, the film earned mixed reviews, but it received an 84% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is currently available to rent on YouTube, Apple TV, VUDU, and Amazon Prime.
23. Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Directed by Nora Ephron, Sleepless in Seattle stars romcom royalty Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. The film follows Ryan’s Annie as she falls for the recently widowed dad, Sam, after he shares his story on the radio.
The movie was well-received by critics and audiences. While the film walks the romcom line, it has the yearning and sentimentality that delivers on romance. Because, as Annie says, “Destiny is something that we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.” The movie is available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and YouTube.
22. The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967)
While Melvin Van Peebles’s The Story of a Three-Day Pass might not be top of mind for many romance fans, it's a beautiful film that deserves a watch. The movie follows a Black American G.I. on a three-day leave to Paris and a star-crossed affair with a French shop clerk.
The film captures the feeling of the French New Wave in a unique way. The Story of a Three-Day Pass was selected to be at the Cannes Classics at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival and was championed as "among the great American films of the sixties” by The New Yorker and Richard Brody. It is currently available to stream on Max.
21. Thirst (2009)
The Romantic Horror sub-genre isn’t for everyone. However, it has been popular, especially in books since the 1800s. The Gothic Horror and Romance genre often leads to period pieces or monster movies, and Thirst is certainly the latter.
This Korean vampire film directed by Park Chan-wook features a priest, an extramarital affair and blood. Warning: It’s a little more Dracula than Twilight, so if you aren’t looking for something dark, it might be worth skipping. The film won the Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and stars Parasite’s Song Kang-ho and Kim Ok-bin. It is available to rent on Google Play, Apple TV, Vudu, and Amazon Prime.
20. An American in Paris (1951)
An American in Paris combines romance with the big-budget musicals of Hollywood’s golden age. The film is visually spectacular and directed by Vincente Minnelli. Much of the romance comes from the palpable chemistry when stars Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance together.
The picture ends with an impressive closing dance/ballet sequence that clocks in at 17 minutes. The film won six Oscars, including Best Picture. It is available to rent on YouTube, Google Play, VUDU, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime.
19. Your Name (2016)
Your Name is an animated Japanese film. The movie follows two high school students who intermittently swap bodies after viewing a comet. The two fall in love after living each other's lives but must learn how to go back.
The picture is extremely well reviewed both for its animation and story, with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. There are two versions of the film: one in the original Japanese and a dubbed version in English. Additionally, Japan’s Toho Studios is working on a live action adaption. It is currently available to stream on Crunchy Roll.
18. Moonstruck (1987)
After a Brooklyn widow accepts a marriage proposal, she finds herself falling for her fiancé’s hot tempered younger brother in this 1987 classic dramedy. Moonstruck earned Cher an Oscar for best lead actress and earned co-star Nicholas Cage critical success.
The movie is extremely quotable, with lines like “Snap out of it!” and “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!” It is currently available to watch on Tubi, Pluto TV, and the Roku Channel.
17. The Princess Bride (1987)
The Princess Bride follows the romance between a farmhand turned pirate and a young maiden set to be married to an evil prince. This family-friendly film is a comedy and fantasy, but the romance comes through, even in some of its siller moments, because "Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while."
Based on the 1973 novel of the same name, The Princess Bride stars Cary Elwes and Robin Wright and was directed by Rob Reiner. The film has gained an almost cult status and enjoys a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is currently available to stream on Disney+.
16. Moonlight (2016)
Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight is about a lot more than just a romance. It is a look into sexuality, identity, manhood, parenthood and the Black experience. However, the romance between Chiron and Kevin is a heartbreaking and poignant examination of Black queer romantic love.
While there are other movies about how society keeps men in love apart, like 1987’s Maurice or 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight feels genre-defining. The film was nominated for eight Oscars and won three, including Best Picture (making it the first LGBTQ film to do so.) It is currently available to stream on Max.
15. Past Lives (2023)
The most recent movie on this list, Past Lives, follows two childhood friends as they reconnect as adults over a few days in the course of 24 years.
The directorial debut for Celine Song, the film was loosely based on Song’s own life. It also stars Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It is currently nominated for two Oscars in 2024, Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture. It is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Apple TV.
14. Before Sunrise (1995)
Before Sunrise follows two strangers as they choose to spend the day together in Vienna. The film is 90s in the best way, starring Julie Deply and Ethan Hawke. The picture premiered at Sundance and was inspired by a real-life romantic run that director Richard Linklater had as a young man in Philadelphia.
The film currently boasts a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and inspired two sequels, 2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight. While each movie has the same basic premise, the characters grow and change throughout the nearly 20-year run. The trilogy is worth watching in its entirety, as each captures love at different points of life. Before Sunrise is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube, and Apple TV.
13. Carol (2015)
Carol follows a love affair between the titular Carol, played by Cate Blanchett, and Therese, a young photographer and shop girl, played by Rooney Mara. Set in the 1950s, the film explores love, motherhood, homophobia and the repression of the time.
Writer Phyllis Nagy started writing the project in 1997 based on the 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. The picture earned six Academy Award nominations and nine BAFTA Film Award nominations. It is currently available to stream on Netflix.
12. Titanic (1997)
It feels silly even having to explain Titanic. The film was the highest-grossing film of all time until 2010, when James Cameron surpassed himself with Avatar (2009). The movie follows two lovers, played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, on the tragic maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic in 1912.
While the film includes some historical characters, such as the “unsinkable” Margaret “Molly” Brown, the film’s protagonists are fictional. The picture was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 11, including Best Picture. It is currently streaming on Paramount+.
11. Shakespeare In Love (1998)
Shakespeare In Love is one of those unique movies that has comedy and romance but isn’t really a romcom. It fully feels like a romance and is light on the melodrama while still being a period piece.
Shakespeare In Love stars Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes. In the film, Paltrow’s Viola, the daughter of a wealthy merchant in 1500s England, dons drag to act in a new play written by William Shakespeare. The two fall in love and the fictitious romance leads to Shakespeare writting Romeo and Juliet. The film controversially won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, which many thought should have gone to its competitor Saving Private Ryan. It is currently streaming on Max.
Top 10 Romantic Movies
While all the films on this list deliver swoon-worthy romances, the top 10 give us something more. These romances stick with you even after the credits roll. Many of them have been referenced in other films and have served as inspiration for new love stories. Others have helped define genres or started renewed interest in romance films. These films are iconic for good reason and make the top of the list of the romance movie genre.
10. The Notebook (2004)
It might be a little cheesy, but that’s part of what makes it great. Based on the novel of the same name, the Notebook is just one of many movies based on Nicholas Sparks’ romance books. However, it’s probably the best one.
The Notebook features a story within a story as an elderly Noah, played by James Garner, tells his wife Allie, played by Gena Rowlands, their own love story to try to combat her dementia. In flashbacks, younger versions of the couple, played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, fall in love even as Allie’s family tries to keep them apart. The movie has always been met with mixed reviews and even became some what of a meme. However, it connected with its demographic, sweeping the Teen Choice Awards. It is now streaming on Hulu.
9. Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Monsoon Wedding’s director, Mira Nair, knows how to make a romance film. Her movies Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love are also favorites of many romance film fans. Monsoon Wedding follows a hectic wedding week for an arranged marriage in a modern Indian family.
Vasundhara Das and Parvin Dabas star in a story about love, family, breaking tradition and adultery. Roger Ebert said, “[Monsoon Wedding] is one of those joyous films that leaps over national boundaries and celebrates universal human nature.” It is available to rent on Amazon Prime and Google Play.
8. God’s Own Country (2017)
God’s Own Country is a sensitive love story between a young English farmer, Johnny, and Gheorghe, a Romanian migrant worker, during the lambing season in Yorkshire, England. Written and directed by Francis Lee, the film stars Josh O'Connor and Alec Secăreanu.
The picture premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and won their world cinema directing award. God’s Own Country wrestles with the themes of intimacy, masculinity, loneliness and place. The film earned a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and is currently available on Tubi and AMC+.
7. An Affair to Remember (1957)
Starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, An Affair to Remember is a blueprint for so many other melodramas. It is even heavily and directly referenced in Sleepless in Seattle. The film includes a meet on a transatlantic crossing, a meeting at the empire state building, and grave injury.
An Affair to Remember was nominated for five Oscars but did not win any. While critics have given it mixed reviews, it earned an 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Google Play, VUDU, and Apple TV.
6. Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Who doesn’t want someone to tell them that they love them “most ardently”? There have been many films based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation is simply dreamy.
Starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, the film follows one of the most famous literary love triangles of all time. Between the score and the cinematography, this picture is probably the most romanticized version of the classic novel. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and has been credited as an influence on the resurgence of the period romance genre in the 2000s. Pride and Prejudice is available to rent on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, and VUDU.
5. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)
A French New Wave opera might sound like a hard sell, but The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is a masterpiece. The film follows the star-crossed love story of Geneviève and Guy, two young lovers in a small city in Normandy. The movie stars Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo and was written and directed by Jacques Demy.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d'Or at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival and has been a favorite of film lovers and filmmakers. Both Damien Chazelle and Greta Gerwig have cited The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as an influence for their films La La Land and Barbie, respectively. It is currently streaming on Max.
4. Roman Holiday (1953)
Roman Holiday follows a young princess, Audrey Hepburn, as she takes a day off to see Rome and encounters an American reporter, Gregory Peck. Cary Grant was originally offered the role but turned it down as he thought he was too old to play opposite Hepburn.
The film earned Hepburn both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for her role as Princess Ann. Roman Holiday has a noted legacy and was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress in 1999 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The film is currently available to rent on YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play, Apple TV, and VUDU.
3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Written and directed by Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire follows an 18th-century affair between two women on a small French isle. Marianne, a painter, is tasked with secretly painting Héloïse’s portrait to send to the man she is intended to marry. While Marianne paints the portrait, she loses the girl.
The film is pure heartbreak and takes an unflinching look at art, the female gaze and unspoken love. It won the Queer Palm at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and received a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is currently available on Hulu.
2. In the Mood For Love (2000)
In the Mood For Love follows two neighbors as a friendship turns into a strong bond outside of their respective marriages. The film takes place in 1960s Hong Kong and delivers on both style and substance.
Director Wong Kar-wai has directed many notable romance films, including Chungking Express and Happy Together, but In the Mood For Love has a lush quality that is undeniable. Sofia Coppola credited the film as inspiration for Lost in Translation, and the Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, used it as inspiration for an alternate universe in their film Everything Everywhere All at Once. In The Mood For Love is currently available to stream on Max.
1. Casablanca (1942)
“Here’s looking at you, kid.” This film is start-to-finish iconic. Casablanca follows a night club owner, Rick, as he decides to help the leader of the Czechoslovak Resistance, Victor Laszlo, escape Morocco and the Nazis even though Laszlo is traveling with an old flame of Rick’s, Ilsa Lund.
The film was directed by Michael Curtiz and starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Roger Ebert said of Casablanca, “This is a movie that has transcended the ordinary categories. It has outlived the Bogart cult, survived the revival circuit, shrugged off those who would deface it with colorization, leaped across time to win audiences who were born decades after it was made.” And in that way, we will always have Paris. The film is currently available to stream on Max.
Bottom Line
It’s ok to yearn for a good romance plot. Grab the tissues and the popcorn because these films won’t disappoint when it comes to love. | |||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 26 | https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a25727/monologues-women-film/ | en | 25 best monologues from women in movies | [
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] | 2014-03-13T11:26:00+00:00 | The best monologues and speeches from females in movies: from Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez to Kristen Wiig and Taraji P. Henson. | en | /_assets/design-tokens/cosmopolitan/static/images/favicon.f9ef38f.ico | Cosmopolitan | https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a25727/monologues-women-film/ | If there's one thing that gets you locked into any movie, it's a good monologue - especially from a woman. From the iconic America Ferrera feminist speech in Barbie, to the downright emotional words of Viola Davis in Fences, some of the best films find that their greatest moments come from a few expertly delivered lines, that instantly have us all weeping / laughing / cheering.
To save you the trouble, we've compiled a list of the best monologues from women in movies, and they're all absolutely sensational. Whether you're after something comedic or empowering, or short and sweet, we have the monologue for you.
The best movie monologues from female characters
1.Barbie (2023) - American Ferrera as Gloria
Monologue: “It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
"You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men's bad behaviour, which is insane, but if you point that our, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
"But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It's too hard! It's too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
"I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don't even know."
2. Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) - Stephanie Hsu as Jobu Tupaki
Monologue: "I got bored one day - and I put everything on a bagel. Everything. All my hopes and dreams, my old report cards, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on craigslist. Sesame. Poppy seed. Salt. And it collapsed in on itself. 'Cause, you see, when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this....
"Do you know why I actually built the bagel? It wasn't to destroy everything. It was to destroy myself. I wanted to see if I went in, could I finally escape? Like, actually die. At least this way... I don't have to do it alone."
3. Little Women (2019) - Saoirse Ronan as Jo March
Monologue: "If I was a girl in a book this would all be so easy. Just give up the world happily. I've always been quite content with my family, I don't understand it. Perhaps I was too quick in turning him down, Laurie. If he asked me again I think I would say yes. Do you think he'll ask me again? I care more to be loved, I want to be loved. I just feel like women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition and talent as well as just beauty, and I'm so sick of people saying love is all a woman is fit for. I'm so sick of it, but I'm so lonely."
4. Little Women (2019) - Florence Pugh as Amy March
Monologue: "Well, I'm not a poet, I'm just a woman. And as a woman I have no way to make money, not enough to earn a living and support my family. Even if I had my own money, which I don't, it would belong to my husband the minute we were married. If we had children they would belong to him, not me. They would be his property. So don't sit there and tell me that marriage isn't an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me."
5. Queen and Slim (2019) - Jodie Turner-Smith as Queen
Monologue: "I want a guy to show me myself. I want him to love me so deeply that I'm not afraid to show how ugly I can be. I want him to show me scars I never knew I had. But I don't want him to make them go away, I want him to hold my hand while I nurse them myself. I want him to cherish the bruises they leave behind."
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6. Gone Girl (2014) - Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne
Monologue: "Cool girl. Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment. She’s a cool girl. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrin loving manner and then presents her mouth for f***ing. She like what he likes. So, evidently, he’s a vinyl hipster who loves fetish monger. If he likes girls gone wild, she’s a mall babe who talks football and endures buffalo wings at Hooters.
"When I met Nick Dunne, I knew he wanted a cool girl and for him, I’ll admit, I was willing to try. I wax stripped my pussy raw. I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size 2. I blew him… semi regularly. I lived in the moment. I was fucking game. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it… Nick teased out in my things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humour, an ease.
"But I made him smarter, sharper, I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy pretending to be other people. We were the happiest people we knew. And what’s the point of being together if you’re not the happiest. But Nick got lazy. He became someone I did not agree to marry. He actually expected me to love him unconditionally then he dragged me, penniless, to the naval of this great country and found himself a newer, younger, bouncier cool girl.
You think I’d let him destroy me and end up happier than ever? No fucking way. He doesn’t get to win. My cute, charming, salt of the earth misery guy. He needed to learn. Grown ups work for things. Grown ups pay. Grown ups suffer consequences."
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7. Manchester By The Sea (2016) - Michelle Williams as Randi Chandler
Monologue: "Could we ever have lunch? Because I said a lot of terrible things to you. I know you never... Maybe you don't want to talk to me. However my heart was broken. It's always going to be broken. I know yours is broken too. But I don't have to carry it. I said things that I should f***ing burn in hell for to you. I'm sorry. I love you. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Honey I see you walking around here and I just want to tell you. I don't want to torture you, but I just want to tell you that I was wrong."
8. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) - Meryl Streep as Mirana Priestly
Monologue: "This 'stuff'? Oh, ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.
"You’re also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic 'casual corner' where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.
"However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of 'stuff'."
9. Hidden Figures (2016) - Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Goble
Monologue: "There’s no bathroom for me here. There is no bathroom. There are no coloured bathrooms in this building. Or any building outside the West Campus, which is half a mile away. Did you know that? I have to walk to Timbuktu just to relieve myself. And I can’t use one of the handy bikes. Picture that, Mr. Harrison. My uniform. Skirt below my knees, my heels, and a simple string of pearls. Well, I don’t own pearls. Lord knows you don’t pay coloured enough to afford pearls! And I work like a dog, day and night, living off of coffee from a pot none of you wanna touch. So, excuse me if I have to go to the restroom a few times a day."
10. Legally Blonde (2001) - Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods
Monologue: "On our very first day at Harvard, a very wise Professor quoted Aristotle: 'The law is reason free from passion.' Well, no offence to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law - and of life. It is with passion, courage of conviction, and strong sense of self that we take our next steps into the world, remembering that first impressions are not always correct. You must always have faith in people. And most importantly, you must always have faith in yourself."
11. Erin Brokovich (2000) - Julia Roberts as Erin Brokovich
Monologue: "Oh, see, now that pisses me off. First of all since the demur, we now have more than four hundred plaintiffs and let’s be honest, we all know there’s more out there. Now, they may not be the most sophisticated people, but they do know how to divide, and twenty million dollars isn’t shit when it’s split between them. And second of all, these people don’t dream about being rich. They dream about being able to watch their kids swim in a pool without worrying they’ll have to have a hysterectomy at age 20, like Rosa Diaz, a client of ours, or have their spine deteriorate like Stan Bloom, another client of ours.
"So before you come back here with another lame ass offer, I want you to think real hard about what your spine is worth, Mr. Buda, or what you’d expect someone to pay you for your uterus, Ms. Sanchez, then you take out your calculator and multiply that number by a hundred. Anything less than that is a waste of our time."
12. Fences (2016) - Viola Davis as Rose Maxson
Monologue: "I been standing with you! I been right here with you, Troy. I got a life too. I gave several years of my life to stand in the same spot with you. Don’t you think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me. Don’t you think it ever crossed my mind to want to know other men? That I wanted to lay up somewhere and forget about my responsibilities? That I wanted someone to make me laugh so I could feel good?
"You not the only one who’s got wants and needs. But I held on to you, Troy. I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams…and I buried them inside you. I planted a seed and waited and prayed over it. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn’t take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn’t never gonna bloom.
"But I held on to you, Troy, I held you tighter. You was my husband. I owed you everything I had. Every part of me I could find to give you. And upstairs in that room…with the darkness falling in on me…I gave everything I had to try and erase the doubt that you wasn’t the finest man in the world, and wherever you was going…I wanted to be there with you. Cause you was my husband. Cause that’s the only way I was gonna survive as your wife. You always talking about what you give…and what you don’t have to give. But you take too. You take…and don’t even know nobody’s giving."
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13. Dirty Dancing (1987) - Jennifer Grey as Frances 'Baby' Houseman
Monologue: "I told you I was telling the truth Daddy. I’m sorry I lied to you. But you lied too. You told me everyone was alike and deserved a fair break. But you meant everyone who was like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world, make it better. But you meant by becoming a lawyer or an economist and marrying someone from Harvard. I’m not proud of myself, but I’m in this family too and you can’t keep giving me the silent treatment. There are a lot of things about me that aren’t what you thought. But if you love me, you have to love all the things about me. And I love you, and I’m sorry I let you down, I’m so sorry Daddy. But you let me down too."
14. Miss Congeniality (2000) - Sandra Bullock, Young Gracie
Monologue: "I would have to say, I used to be one of them. And then I came here and I realised that these women are smart, terrific people who are just trying to make a difference in the world. We've become really good friends. I know we all secretly hope the other one will trip and fall on her face - wait a minute! I've already done that! For me, this experience has been one of the most rewarding and liberating experiences of my life. And if anyone, anyone tries to hurt one of my new friends I would take them out. I would make them suffer so much, they'd wish they were never born. And if they ran, I would hunt them down."
15. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) - Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii
Monologue: "As your leader, I encourage you from time to time, and always in a respectful manner, to question my logic. If you're unconvinced that a particular plan of action I've decided is the wisest, tell me so, but allow me to convince you and I promise you right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo. Except, of course, the subject that was just under discussion. The price you pay for bringing up either my Chinese or American heritage as a negative is... I collect your f***ing head. Just like this f***er here. Now, if any of you sons of bitches got anything else to say, now's the f***ing time!"
16. Bridesmaids (2011) - Kristen Wiig as Annie Walker
Monologue: "Lillian, this is not the you that I know! The you that I know would have walked in here and rolled your eyes and would have thought that this was completely over the top, ridiculous, and stupid! Look at this shower! Look at that f***ing cookie! Did you really think that this group of women was gonna finish that cookie? Really, and you know that reminds me actually; I never got a chance to try that fucking cookie!"
17. 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) - Julia Stiles as Kat Stratford
Monologue: "I hate the way you talk to me and the way you cut your hair. I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare; I hate your big dumb combat boots and the way you read my mind. I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme. I hate the way you’re always right. I hate it when you lie. I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. I hate it that you’re not around. And the fact that you didn’t call. But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you, not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all."
18. Clueless (1995) - Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz
Monologue: "So, OK, like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, 'What about the strain on our resources?' But it's like when I had this garden party for my father's birthday, right? I said RSVP because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not RSVP. So I was, like, totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings. But, by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier!
"And so, if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion, may I please remind you that it does not say "RSVP" on the Statue of Liberty!"
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19. The Princess Diaries (2001) - Anne Hathaway as Mia Thermopolis
Monologue: "Hi, I, uh, hello. I'm Mia... It stopped raining...Oh. I'm really no good at speech-making. Normally, I get so nervous that I faint or run away; or sometimes I even get sick. But you really didn't need to know that. Um, but, I'm not say afraid anymore...no. My father helped me. Earlier this evening, I had every intention of giving up my claim to the throne. And my mother helped me by telling me that it was ok, and by supporting me like she has my entire life.
"But, then I wondered how I'd feel after abdicating my role as Princess of Genovia. Would I feel relieved? Or would I feel sad? And then I realised how many stupid times a day I used the word 'I'. In fact, probably all I ever do is think about myself. And how lame is that when there's, like, seven billion other people out there on the planet.
"But then I thought, if I cared about the other seven billion out there instead of just me, that's probably a much better use of my time. See, if I were Princess of Genovia then my thoughts and the thoughts of people smarter than me would be much better heard, and just maybe those thoughts could be turned into actions. So this morning when I woke up I was Mia Thermopolis. But, now, I choose to be forevermore, Amelia Mignonette Thermopolis Renaldi."
20. Hustlers (2019) - Jennifer Lopez as Ramona
Monologue: "Look, baby, we gotta start thinking like these Wall Street guys. You see what they did to this country? They stole from everybody. Hardworking people lost everything. And not one of these douchebags went to jail. Not one. Is that fair? You ever think about when they come into the club? That's stolen money. That's what's paying for their blow jobs. The f***ing firefighters retirement fund. F*** these guys."
21. Marriage Story (2019) - Laura Dern as Nora Fanshaw
Monologue: "Don’t ever say that. People don’t accept a mother who drinks too much wine and yells at her child and calls him an asshole. I get it. I do it too. We can accept an imperfect Dad. Let’s face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago. Before that fathers were expected to be silent and absent and unreliable and selfish and we can all say that we want them to be different but on some basic level we accept them, we love them for their fallibilities. But people absolutely don't accept those same failings in mothers.
"We don't accept it structurally and we don't accept it spiritually because the basis of our Judeo-Christian Whatever is Mary Mother of Jesus and she’s perfect. She’s a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child, and holds his dead body when he’s gone. But the Dad isn’t there. He didn’t even do the f***ing because God’s in heaven. God is the father and God didn't show up so you have to be perfect and Charlie can be a f*** up and it doesn't matter. You’ll always be held to a different, higher standard and it’s f***ed up, but that’s the way it is."
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22. A Cinderella Story (2004) - Hilary Duff as Samantha Montgomery
Monologue: "No, you listen. You turned out to be exactly who I thought you were. I never pretended to be somebody else. It's been me all along. And it was me who was hurt in front of everybody. Look, I didn't come here to yell at you, okay? I came to tell you that I know what it feels like to be afraid to show who you are. I was, but I'm not anymore. And the thing is, I really don't care what people think about me... because I believe in myself. And I know that things are gonna be okay. But even though I have no family, and no job, and no money for college... it's you that I feel sorry for."
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23. Wild (2014) - Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed
Monologue: “It took me years to be the woman my mother raised. It took me four years, seven months and three days to do it, without her. After I lost myself in the wilderness of my grief, I found my own way out of the woods. And I didn't even know where I was going until I got there, on the last day of my hike. Thank you, I thought over and over again, for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn't yet know.
"Now in four years, I'd cross this very bridge. I'll marry a man in a spot almost visible from where I was standing. Now in nine years, that man and I would have a son named Carver and a year later, a daughter named after my mother, Bobbi. I knew only that I didn't need to eat with my bare hands anymore. That seeing the fish beneath the surface of the water would be enough, that it was everything. My life, like all lives, mysterious, irrevocable, sacred, so very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be?"
24. Down With Love (2003) - Renée Zellweger as Barbara Novak
Monologue: "I’m not gonna storm out of here, Catch. And I’m not gonna admit that you got Barbara Novak to fall in love, because I’m not Barbara Novak. There is no Barbara Novak... And I didn’t fall in love with Zip Martin. I fell in love with Catcher Block. And that was a year ago, when for three and a half weeks, I worked as your secretary. I don’t expect you to remember me. I wasn’t a blonde then. But you did ask me out. And it broke my heart to say no, but I loved you too much. I couldn’t bear to become just another notch in your bedpost. With your dating habits, I knew that even if I was lucky enough to get a regular spot on your rotating schedule, I would never have your undivided attention long enough for you to fall in love with me. I knew I had to do something to set myself apart. I knew I had to quit my job as your secretary and write an international best-seller, controversial enough to get the attention of a New York publisher as well as Know magazine. But insignificant enough that as long as I went unseen, Know magazine’s star journalist would refuse to do a cover story about it. I knew that every time we were supposed to meet, you would get distracted by one of your many girlfriends and stand me up, and this would give me a reason to fight with you over the phone and declare that I wouldn’t meet with you for a hundred years.
"And then all I would have to do was be patient and wait the two or three weeks it would take for everyone in the world to buy a copy of my best-seller – and then I would begin to get the publicity I would need for you, to, one, see what I look like, and, two, see me denounce you in public as the worst kind of man. I knew that this would make you wanna get even by writing one of your exposés. And in order to do that, you would have to go undercover, assume a false identity and pretend to be the kind of man who would make the kind of girl I was pretending to be fall in love.
"And I knew that since I was pretending to be a girl who would have sex on the first date you would have to pretend to be a man who wouldn’t have sex for several dates. And in doing so, we would go out on lots of dates to all the best places and all the hit shows, until finally, one night, you would take me back to your place – that you were pretending was someone else’s – in order to get the evidence you needed to write your exposé, by seducing me until I said, ‘I love you.’
"But saying ‘I love you’ was also my plan. I just wanted to tell you the truth so that when you heard me say, ‘I love you’ you would know that I knew who you were, and you would know who I was. Then you, the great Catcher Block, would know that you’d been beaten at your own game by me, Nancy Brown, your former secretary. And I would have, once and for all, set myself apart from all the other girls you’ve known. All those other girls that you never really cared about, by making myself someone like the one person you really love and admire above all others: you! Then, when you realised that you had finally met your match, I would have, at last, gained the respect that would make you wanna marry me first and seduce me later. I just wanted you to hear all this from me before you heard it from your private eye."
25. Requiem For A Dream (2001) - Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 3 | 85 | https://falahgs.medium.com/best-50-stable-diffusion-prompts-for-a-beautiful-female-the-most-beautiful-ai-text-to-image-437e540269d6 | en | Best 50 Stable Diffusion Prompts for A beautiful Female: The Most Beautiful AI Text-to-Image Prompts with CyberRealistic Model. (Part 3) | [
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] | 2023-06-09T08:53:50.618000+00:00 | A text-to-image prompt is a set of naturally occurring words that tell the AI to create an image. This article includes 50 of the most amazing Stable Diffusion claims and their results. It is… | en | https://miro.medium.com/v2/5d8de952517e8160e40ef9841c781cdc14a5db313057fa3c3de41c6f5b494b19 | Medium | https://falahgs.medium.com/best-50-stable-diffusion-prompts-for-a-beautiful-female-the-most-beautiful-ai-text-to-image-437e540269d6 | Introduction
A text-to-image prompt is a set of naturally occurring words that tell the AI to create an image. This article includes 50 of the most amazing Stable Diffusion claims and their results. It is complementary to the previous Part 1 and Part 2 article and with the help of this text-to-image stable diffusion template, anyone can quickly turn their ideas into works of art. Here it converts the text into pictures of beautiful females of different ages. You have to be good at accurately describing your prompts in order to get decent results from Stable Diffusion AI. The level of claim you make will directly affect the level of detail and quality of the artwork. You will find more than 50 of the most beautiful image text vectors, their stable posting, and output in this article, which will undoubtedly treat you visually. You can also take advantage of these prompts on Midjourney or DALL-E if you wish. You can download CyberRealistic Stable Diffusion Checkpoint from the civitai website.
and installs it in the models subfolder in the stable deployment folder in Automatic1111 web ui tool. You can search how to install deployment stable diffusion checkpoint models in Automatic1111 webui in the google search tool or youtube channel.
these examples for female prompts which tested with it
Create a hyper-realistic full-body shot of a smiling 25-year-old German female wearing a hejab and red ballgown dress, with blue eyes and jewelry art in silver. The subject is standing in a garden surrounded by green flowers and trees, and has intricate shape tattoos on their face. The image has dynamic posing and a detailed Arabic face, with an aspiring facial expression that conveys confidence and grace. The lighting is cinematic and the photograph is ultra-detailed, with 8k resolution and sharp focus. The jewelry art is intricate and detailed, and the subject’s skin and eyes are rendered in exquisite detail.
2.Generate a digital painting of a beautiful German female wearing a hejab and red ballgown dress, with blue eyes and jewelry art in silver. The subject is smiling and standing in front of a green garden, with trees and flowers surrounding her. The image has a fashion shoot style, with the subject facing front to camera and striking a dynamic pose. The subject’s face is detailed and realistic, with intricate shape tattoos that add to the overall aesthetic. The photograph has cinematic lighting and a high resolution of 8k, and the jewelry art is rendered in fine detail.
3.Use machine learning algorithms to create a 3D model of a 25-year-old German female with a white face and blue eyes, wearing a hejab and red ballgown dress with silver jewelry art. The subject is standing in a green garden, with trees and flowers in the background. The model has detailed skin and eyes, with ultra-detailed textures and sharp focus. The jewelry art is rendered in fine detail, and the subject’s pose and facial expression are both dynamic and engaging.
4.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a German female with blue eyes and a white face, wearing a hejab and red ballgown dress with silver jewelry art. The subject is standing in a garden surrounded by green trees and flowers, with intricate shape tattoos on their face. The photograph has cinematic lighting and a high resolution of 8k, and the subject’s pose and facial expression are both dynamic and engaging. The jewelry art is rendered in fine detail, and the subject’s skin and eyes are depicted with exquisite detail.
5.Use deep learning algorithms to generate a hyper-realistic portrait of a German female with blue eyes, wearing a hejab and red ballgown dress with silver jewelry art. The subject is standing in a garden surrounded by green trees and flowers, with intricate shape tattoos on their face. The portrait is ultra-detailed, with cinematic lighting and a high resolution of 8k. The subject’s facial expression is aspirational, conveying confidence and grace, and the jewelry art is rendered in fine detail. The background is detailed and realistic, with the green trees and flowers adding a touch of natural beauty to the overall aesthetic.
6.Produce a digital painting of a 25-year-old Arabic female wearing a hejab and a stunning dress adorned with intricate jewelry. The subject has a warm and friendly expression, and the painting is set against a beautiful background of a Middle Eastern cityscape at sunset. The lighting is soft and romantic, and the details of the jewelry are rendered in exquisite detail.
7.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a 35-year-old Arabic female with green eyes, wearing a hejab and a vibrant dress with detailed embroidery and jewelry. The subject is smiling and standing in a studio with colored lights, with a dynamic and confident pose. The background is colored and complements the subject’s clothing, and the photograph has sharp focus and high resolution. The subject’s skin and eyes are rendered in exquisite detail, with a warm and inviting expression that exudes grace and elegance.
8.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a 3D model of a 35-year-old Arabic female with green eyes, wearing a hejab and a beautiful dress adorned with intricate jewelry. The model is set against a colored background that complements the subject’s clothing, and the lighting is soft and romantic. The details of the jewelry are rendered in exquisite detail, and the subject’s skin and eyes are ultra-detailed, with a warm and inviting expression that exudes confidence and grace.
9. Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 70-year-old Arabic female wearing a hejab and a stunning dress adorned with intricate jewelry. The subject is set against a colored background that complements her clothing, with a warm and friendly expression that conveys wisdom and experience. The details of the jewelry are rendered in exquisite detail, and the subject’s skin and eyes are ultra-detailed, with a touch of natural beauty that exudes grace and elegance.
10. Generate a digital painting of a 30-year-old Arabic female wearing a hejab and a vibrant dress adorned with intricate jewelry. The subject is standing in a garden with colorful flowers and trees in the background, with a warm and friendly expression that conveys a sense of serenity and peace. The details of the jewelry are rendered in exquisite detail, and the overall aesthetic of the painting is bright and cheerful, with a touch of natural beauty that complements the subject’s clothing.
11.Create a digital painting of a 35-year-old female standing in the middle of a busy city street at night, with colored lights illuminating the scene. The subject is wearing a vibrant dress with a bold pattern, and she has a confident expression on her face. The painting is rendered in exquisite detail, with the colors and lighting giving the scene a vibrant and energetic feel.
12.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 35-year-old female standing in front of a wall of colored lights in a city alleyway. The subject is wearing a stylish outfit with bold accessories, and she has a determined expression on her face. The photograph is ultra-detailed, with the colors and lighting creating a dynamic and energetic feel.
13.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a 3D model of a 35-year-old female standing in the middle of a busy city street at night, with colored lights illuminating the scene. The subject is wearing a sleek and modern outfit, and she has a confident expression on her face. The 3D model is rendered in exquisite detail, with the colors and lighting giving the scene a dynamic and lively feel.
14.Create a digital art piece of a 35-year-old female walking down a city street at night, with colored lights creating a vibrant and energetic atmosphere. The subject is wearing a flowing dress that billows in the wind, and she has a serene expression on her face. The art piece is rendered in exquisite detail, with the colors and lighting creating a mesmerizing and surreal feel.
15. Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 35-year-old female standing in front of a wall of colored lights in a city alleyway. The subject is wearing a colorful outfit with bold accessories, and she has a confident and determined expression on her face. The portrait is ultra-detailed, with the colors and lighting giving the scene a dynamic and energetic feel.
16.Create a digital painting of a 35-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, surrounded by colorful flowers. The subject is wearing a flowing dress that blows in the wind, and she has a serene expression on her face. The painting is rendered in exquisite detail, with the colors and textures of the flowers creating a vibrant and lively feel.
17.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 35-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, standing in a field of wildflowers. The subject is wearing a simple and elegant outfit, and she has a peaceful and content expression on her face. The photograph is ultra-detailed, with the vibrant colors of the flowers and the warm lighting creating a serene and inviting atmosphere.
18.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a 3D model of a 35-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, standing in a garden surrounded by blooming flowers. The subject is wearing a flowing dress and has a carefree expression on her face. The 3D model is rendered in exquisite detail, with the colors and textures of the flowers creating a lively and inviting feel.
19.Create a digital art piece of a 35-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, sitting in a field of wildflowers. The subject is wearing a colorful outfit and has a joyful expression on her face. The art piece is rendered in exquisite detail, with the vibrant colors of the flowers and the warm lighting creating a cheerful and inviting atmosphere.
20.Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 35-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, surrounded by blooming flowers. The subject is wearing a simple and elegant outfit, and she has a content and peaceful expression on her face. The portrait is ultra-detailed, with the vibrant colors of the flowers and the warm lighting creating a serene and inviting atmosphere.
21.Create a digital painting of a 30-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, wearing golden jewelry clothes that sparkle in the sunlight. The subject is surrounded by a lush landscape of trees and flowers, with the warm lighting creating a serene and inviting atmosphere. The painting is rendered in exquisite detail, with the colors and textures of the jewelry and clothing creating a stunning and glamorous feel.
22.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, wearing golden jewelry clothes that glisten in the sunlight. The subject is standing on a sandy beach, with the turquoise water and blue sky creating a breathtaking background. The photograph is ultra-detailed, with the vibrant colors of the clothing and jewelry creating a stunning and luxurious atmosphere.
23.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a 3D model of a 30-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, wearing golden jewelry clothes that shine in the light. The subject is standing on a balcony with a sweeping view of the city skyline, with the warm lighting creating a glamorous and inviting atmosphere. The 3D model is rendered in exquisite detail, with the intricate details of the jewelry and clothing creating a stunning and high-end feel.
24.Create a digital art piece of a 30-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, wearing golden jewelry clothes that shimmer in the sunlight. The subject is standing on a rooftop with a panoramic view of the city, with the warm lighting creating a luxurious and inviting atmosphere. The art piece is rendered in exquisite detail, with the intricate patterns and textures of the jewelry and clothing creating a stunning and glamorous feel.
25.Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 30-year-old female smiling on a sunny summer day, wearing golden jewelry clothes that sparkle in the sunlight. The subject is standing in a lush garden, with the vibrant colors of the flowers and foliage creating a stunning background. The portrait is ultra-detailed, with the intricate details of the jewelry and clothing creating a glamorous and high-end feel.
26.Create a digital painting of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling on a sunny day, surrounded by a colorful garden with blooming flowers. She is wearing a flowing dress with intricate embroidery and golden jewelry that glimmers in the sun. The warm and inviting colors of the painting convey a sense of joy and happiness.
27.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling in front of a street art mural. She is wearing a hijab and a modern outfit with bold patterns and colors, and her smile radiates positivity and energy. The photograph is detailed and vibrant, with the bright and colorful mural in the background creating a dynamic and urban feel.
28.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a 3D model of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling on a rooftop with a panoramic view of a city skyline. She is wearing a modern and elegant dress with intricate golden jewelry and her smile conveys a sense of confidence and happiness. The 3D model is highly detailed, with the intricate patterns and textures of the jewelry and clothing creating a sense of luxury and glamour.
29.Create a digital art piece of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling on a sunny day in a peaceful and serene natural setting. She is wearing a hijab and a flowing dress with soft and warm colors, and her smile conveys a sense of inner peace and happiness. The art piece is detailed and delicate, with the serene and tranquil natural setting creating a soothing and calming atmosphere.
30.Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling in a modern and vibrant setting, surrounded by colorful lights and futuristic architecture. She is wearing a modern and trendy outfit with bold colors and patterns, and her smile conveys a sense of joy and enthusiasm. The portrait is highly detailed, with the dynamic and futuristic setting creating a sense of energy and excitement.
31.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling in a lush and green forest. The sunlight filters through the leaves, casting dappled shadows on her face, and her smile conveys a sense of peace and serenity. The photograph is highly detailed, with the intricate patterns and textures of the natural environment creating a sense of depth and richness.
32.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling in a bright and colorful street market. She is surrounded by vibrant stalls selling exotic fruits, spices, and textiles, and her smile conveys a sense of curiosity and wonder. The photograph is highly detailed, with the intricate patterns and textures of the market creating a sense of liveliness and energy.
33.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling on a rocky and rugged mountaintop. She is wearing a hiking outfit and backpack, and her smile conveys a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. The photograph is highly detailed, with the rugged and dramatic landscape creating a sense of adventure and exploration.
34.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling in a peaceful and idyllic seaside setting. She is wearing a flowing dress and golden jewelry, and her smile conveys a sense of relaxation and contentment. The photograph is highly detailed, with the sparkling sea and sandy beach creating a sense of tranquility and calm.
35.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female smiling in a modern and luxurious hotel suite. She is surrounded by sleek and sophisticated furniture and decor, and her smile conveys a sense of indulgence and enjoyment. The photograph is highly detailed, with the intricate patterns and textures of the interior design creating a sense of elegance and refinement.
36.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female in a garden filled with colorful flowers, surrounded by colored lights. She is wearing a flowing dress and golden jewelry, and her smile conveys a sense of happiness and freedom. The sky above her is a vibrant and saturated blue, creating a dreamy and ethereal atmosphere.
37.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female in a garden filled with lush greenery, surrounded by softly glowing colored lights. She is wearing a stylish outfit and striking golden jewelry, and her pose conveys a sense of confidence and grace. The photograph is highly detailed, with the intricate patterns and textures of the jewelry and clothing creating a sense of luxury and sophistication.
38.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female in a garden at sunset, surrounded by warm and glowing colored lights. She is wearing a stunning golden dress and jewelry, and her smile conveys a sense of romance and passion. The photograph is highly detailed, with the rich colors of the sky and the subtle variations in the lighting creating a sense of intimacy and depth.
39.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female in a garden at night, surrounded by softly glowing colored lights. She is wearing an elegant outfit and dazzling golden jewelry, and her pose conveys a sense of mystery and allure. The photograph is highly detailed, with the intricate patterns and textures of the jewelry and clothing creating a sense of drama and intrigue.
40.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 30-year-old Arabic female in a garden at dawn, surrounded by softly glowing colored lights. She is wearing a breathtaking golden gown and jewelry, and her smile conveys a sense of hope and possibility. The photograph is highly detailed, with the delicate nuances of the early morning light and the intricate details of the jewelry and clothing creating a sense of enchantment and wonder.
41.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 25-year-old Arabic female in a studio, surrounded by softly glowing colored lights that evoke the colors of a garden at dusk. She is wearing an eye-catching golden dress and jewelry, and her smile conveys a sense of joy and delight. The photograph is highly detailed, with the subtle variations in the lighting creating a sense of depth and texture.
42.Use machine learning algorithms to generate a hyper-realistic photograph of a 25-year-old Arabic female in a studio, surrounded by softly glowing colored lights that evoke the colors of a garden at dawn. She is wearing an exquisite golden gown and jewelry, and her pose conveys a sense of serenity and tranquility. The photograph is highly detailed, with the delicate nuances of the early morning light and the intricate details of the jewelry and clothing creating a sense of enchantment and wonder.
43.Create a hyper-realistic photograph of a 25-year-old Arabic female in a studio, surrounded by boldly colored lights that evoke the vivid colors of a garden at midday. She is wearing a stunning golden outfit and jewelry, and her pose conveys a sense of power and confidence. The photograph is highly detailed, with the intense colors of the lighting creating a sense of energy and dynamism.
44.Produce a hyper-realistic photograph of a 25-year-old Arabic female in a studio, surrounded by softly glowing colored lights that evoke the colors of a garden at night. She is wearing a captivating golden gown and jewelry, and her pose conveys a sense of mystery and allure. The photograph is highly detailed, with the subtle variations in the lighting creating a sense of depth and atmosphere.
45.Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 25-year-old German female, wearing golden jewelry fashion, set against a studio backdrop with colored lights, a view of the sky, and a garden in the background.
46.The model is posed in a dynamic stance, with her head slightly tilted to the side and a confident smile on her face. She is wearing a stunning golden necklace and matching earrings, which catch the light and glimmer in the studio. Her long, flowing hair is styled in loose waves and falls gracefully down her back. In the background, the garden is visible through a large window, and the sky is visible through another. The colorful lights add depth and dimension to the scene, creating a vibrant and lively atmosphere.
47.The portrait is ultra-detailed, with sharp focus and high resolution. The model’s skin and eyes are highly detailed, and the golden jewelry is rendered with precision and accuracy. The photograph has a cinematic quality to it, with dramatic lighting that emphasizes the beauty of the model and the richness of her surroundings. The image is captured with an 8k camera and edited using the latest digital tools to produce a flawless final result.
48.Produce a hyper-realistic portrait of a 25-year-old German female, wearing golden jewelry fashion, set against a studio backdrop with colored lights, a view of the sky, and a garden in the background.
49.The model is posed in a dynamic stance, with her head slightly tilted to the side and a confident smile on her face. She is wearing a stunning golden necklace and matching earrings, which catch the light and glimmer in the studio. Her long, flowing hair is styled in loose waves and falls gracefully down her back. In the background, the garden is visible through a large window, and the sky is visible through another. The colorful lights add depth and dimension to the scene, creating a vibrant and lively atmosphere.
50.The portrait is ultra-detailed, with sharp focus and high resolution. The model’s skin and eyes are highly detailed, and the golden jewelry is rendered with precision and accuracy. The photograph has a cinematic quality to it, with dramatic lighting that emphasizes the beauty of the model and the richness of her surroundings. The image is captured with an 8k camera and edited using the latest digital tools to produce a flawless final result.
CyberRealastic Model Setting
I used default settings with Automatic1111 webui
Steps: 20, Sampler: Euler a, CFG scale: 8.5, Seed: 3505637282,
Face restoration: CodeFormer, Size: 512x512, Model hash: 7f668f12f8,
Model: cyberrealistic_v12, Denoising strength: 0.7, Hires upscale: 2,
Hires upscaler: Latent
Negative prompt:
(from behind:1.2), blurry, logo, watermark, signature, cropped, out of frame,
worst quality, low quality, jpeg artifacts, poorly lit, overexposed,
underexposed, glitch, error, out of focus, (semi-realistic, cgi, 3d, render, sketch,
cartoon, drawing, digital art, anime, manga:1.3), amateur,
(poorly drawn hands, poorly drawn face:1.2), deformed iris,
deformed pupils, morbid, duplicate, mutilated, extra fingers,
mutated hands, poorly drawn eyes, mutation, deformed, dehydrated,
bad anatomy, bad proportions, extra limbs, cloned face, disfigured,
gross proportions, malformed limbs, missing arms, missing legs, extra arms,
extra legs, fused fingers, too many fingers, long neck, incoherent,
(bad-image-v2–39000, bad_prompt_version2, EasyNegative, NG_DeepNegative_V1_4T, bad-
artist:0.7), (bad-hands-5)
Note:
Please leave any note in the comments about any image, mentioning its number, for the purpose of developing results in the future.
Thanks for reading If you love this tutorial, give some claps. | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 2 | 30 | https://time.com/5180697/how-greta-gerwig-is-leading-by-example/ | en | How Greta Gerwig Is Leading by Example | [
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"Eliza Berman"
] | 2018-03-01T13:30:43+00:00 | After a decade spent in front of the camera, her solo-directorial debut, Lady Bird, is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Director. | en | /favicon.ico | TIME | https://time.com/5180697/how-greta-gerwig-is-leading-by-example/ | Greta Gerwig is standing at a corner in Chinatown, trying to figure out the way to Brooklyn. She’s spent nearly half her life in New York City, but we’re at that point in lower Manhattan where the grid devolves into a patchwork maze. After lunch in the West Village, she suggested—on this frigid February day, with flurries swirling about and a doggie bag of half-eaten pasta Bolognese in her backpack—that we trek across the island, and then a bridge, before she heads to pedestrian-averse Los Angeles the next day. Gerwig likes to walk, often as a remedy for writer’s block. It’s when you’re walking, she insists, that life happens to you.
Much has been happening to Gerwig lately. After a decade spent in front of the camera, she released her solo-directorial debut, Lady Bird, last fall. The film has since been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Director. This shouldn’t be any more noteworthy than another film’s success, but it is—women behind the camera rarely get mainstream recognition for their work. The nod makes Gerwig just the fifth woman nominated for directing in 90 years of Academy Awards—and the first female nominee since Kathryn Bigelow became the only woman to win, for The Hurt Locker in 2010.
That Gerwig, 34, did it with Lady Bird—which shares some DNA with her Sacramento upbringing—is remarkable, not just because it took half a decade to make and twice as long to find the courage. Its story—about a high school senior trying out for the musical and losing her virginity and infuriating her mom and attempting desperately to leave her hometown in the rearview—is one we think we’ve seen, but never in quite this way. It’s one of few Best Picture nominees to take a teenage girl’s interior life seriously. And it’s hitting its peak at a moment when teens, at gun-control rallies and voter-registration drives, are proving themselves to be concerned with much more than the worlds inside their smartphones.
For a movie that could easily be written off as small—no explosions or weighty historical crises here—the reception has been huge. The National Society of Film Critics named Lady Bird Best Picture, and the New York Times’ A.O. Scott called it “perfect.” Steven Spielberg specifically requested a seat next to Gerwig at the Oscar nominees’ luncheon. And Lady Bird‘s Oscar-nominated star Saoirse Ronan says that it wasn’t until she saw Gerwig in action that her own dream to direct came into focus.
The movie has also resonated with audiences. The owner of a stately blue Sacramento house used as a filming location now has droves of devotees taking selfies outside her window on a kind of pilgrimage. There are more than a few testimonials online from daughters who, after seeing the film, called their mothers to apologize for their nightmarish teenage behavior. And a lone film blogger drew the ire of fans when he sullied Lady Bird‘s perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. (The critic entered his review as “rotten” because he thought the film didn’t deserve to be “the all-time best reviewed movie” on the review aggregator.)
In Lady Bird, on movie screens from Sacramento to Brooklyn, women and girls are seeing themselves reflected in all their warts and glory: Mothers whose love for their daughters has at times filtered messily through envy and resentment. Women whose double shifts as nurses or police officers render magazines in the supermarket checkout line an extravagance. Girls who’ve grown accustomed to being told, through images, that their lives are unworthy of thoughtful consideration. Lady Bird is the kind of movie that can make you a little more generous, and a little kinder, not least of all to yourself.
Gerwig has at once become her own success story and a symbol of the future of storytelling—of the not-so-radical notion that we may, perhaps even soon, get to stop qualifying director with female. She knows the power of seeing someone like yourself out there doing the thing you yearn to do. But she’s hopeful for a time when we won’t need to count every woman’s accomplishment as evidence. “You just look forward to the day,” she says, “when it doesn’t mean anything.”
Some kids grow up practicing Oscar speeches in the mirror. But when she was a kid in Sacramento, Gerwig barely even went to the movies. When she did, she didn’t think about them as being directed—they just seemed like “whole things handed down from gods.” Even among mortal creators, scant few were women. “There was Jane Campion, Nancy Meyers, Nora Ephron, Amy Heckerling,” Gerwig says as she counts the few she can recall on one hand. “Not a lot.”
It wasn’t until she was at Barnard College that she realized she might want to add her name to that very short list. But directing just didn’t seem like a realistic career option. So she immersed herself in theater, her childhood passion, working summers as a stage manager at places like the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. As she was finishing school, she began acting in low-budget mumblecore films like Hannah Takes the Stairs and Nights and Weekends (which she co-directed), known for their improvised performances and nonchalant approach to plot.
At the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2006, her senior year, she saw a film directed by a woman around her age. “I thought, Wait, are we allowed to do that? Who told you you could?” And then she realized: “Nobody told her. She was just gonna do it, like the guys were doing it.” It was one in a series of moments, many involving female directors giving her advice and encouragement, that led to her deciding to do it too.
We are still waiting for her meal to arrive, prior to our epic walk, when an angelic voice emerges from her phone: “Sail away, sail away, sail away.” Before picking it up, she apologizes: “Oh, sorry—I have Enya as my ringtone.” After she finishes a brief phone conversation, she explains, “The phone ringing is an anxious event, and Enya always calms you down.” Gerwig has a calm presence to begin with. In conversation, she is earnest, with her shaggy blond hair taking on new configurations each time she runs a hand through it. She’ll go deep on Tolstoy (the way he shifts narrative perspective to the dog in Anna Karenina) and Tina Fey (how she learned to listen through improv) in the space of a minute.
In many ways, the 25 films she appeared in over the course of a decade served as a substitute for film school. She’s best known for her flaky aspiring dancer in 2013’s Frances Ha, which she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach, now her partner of several years. She received a Best Actress Golden Globe nomination for the role. But for all that she put into the performance, she was working overtime after her scenes were done, loitering on set to take notes on the lighting and production design. “When you’re an actor on a movie, people don’t kick you off the set,” she explains. “They assume you have a right to be there.”
As she immersed herself in this self-directed curriculum, she continued acting in films like the historical drama Jackie and the acclaimed coming-of-age indie 20th Century Women. She missed sitcom fame when a How I Met Your Mother spin-off she starred in failed to get picked up. She also appeared in Woody Allen’s 2012 film To Rome With Love. Of the allegations that Allen abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, she has said that she would not have worked with him had she known what she knows today, and she won’t work with him in the future. Farrow tweeted her appreciation in response, writing, “Thank you for your words. Please know they are deeply felt and appreciated.”
The meticulous preparation Gerwig put herself through, over many years, seems less typical of young male directors. “It might be gendered, it might be a variety of other things. I had this sense of needing to be prepared,” she says. “It does seem to be something women struggle with more.” But she knew when the time had come: “It does reach a point where you think, If I fall on my face and it’s dreadful and everybody says it’s dreadful, I’d rather have tried than not.”
Now she is eager to apply her talents to a different kind of story. She isn’t bound to the constraints of modest indies, she says. In fact, she wants to make a leap in scale, in the mold of Spielberg, who in her view has mastered the art of making genre movies personal. While Lady Bird trades in purposefully “unadorned cinematic language”—conversations in cars and schoolyard skirmishes—for her next trick she’ll need CGI and special-effects teams. She’ll act again, for the right director with the right project—this summer she’ll shoot a drama with the French director Mia Hansen-Love—but her priority is clear. “It’s important to know at any given moment what you would drop everything for,” she says. “I would drop everything to write and direct movies.”
For years, there has been a sense that Hollywood is on the precipice of a change that never arrives. The so-called Bridesmaids effect, proclaimed following that film’s blockbuster performance in 2011, failed to fully come to fruition. In 2017, many wondered if the Wonder Woman effect would prove similarly meaningless. But women’s ups and downs in the industry are as old as Hollywood itself.
Women worked in great numbers at every level of production during Hollywood’s first two decades. But the studio system born in the late 1920s introduced a gendered division of labor that persists to this day. As Gerwig began entertaining thoughts of making her own movies, women comprised less than 3% of top-grossing studio directors.
There’s reason to believe that this time, the currents of change constitute more than just a passing breeze. This month brings the fourth $100 million movie solo-directed by a woman, Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. There are more female-helmed studio movies on the horizon, including Niki Caro’s live-action Mulan and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Spider-Man spin-off Silver & Black. All of this groundwork was laid before the downfall of Harvey Weinstein.
The era of accountability ushered in by the #MeToo movement doesn’t apply only to sexual misconduct in the workplace. Failing to hire female directors has long seemed out of step. Now it’s bad for business. To Amy Pascal, a producer and former Sony executive and one of a small number of women ever to lead a studio, the reckoning around sexual harassment and assault in the entertainment industry “has led to a self-evaluation of Hollywood that’s only going to be good.”
Actors like Reese Witherspoon and Viola Davis, tired of waiting around for good roles, have turned to producing and developing female-centric material for themselves and others. “Women working together in groups for change is the point,” says Pascal. “That’s what hadn’t happened before and that’s what’s going to make a big difference.”
This renewed energy is mobilizing women of all backgrounds. “There are more and more talented women of color who aren’t just telling their stories—who frankly are building empires,” says director Karyn Kusama, known for horror films like Jennifer’s Body and The Invitation. “We need empire builders, and we need some of them to be Latinas, to be black women, to be Asian women. We need all kinds of people in the mix to make for a vibrant culture that survives.”
That Gerwig, with her Oscar nominations, now occupies anointed Hollywood status doesn’t just mean that we’ll get to see more from the brain that conjured Lady Bird, or that there’s another role model for girls who dream of directing. A 2015 report by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that female directors and producers were more likely than men to hire women to serve other key roles on set. Women comprised more than half of the writing staff on female-directed films but only 8% on male-directed films. Editors and cinematographers fared significantly better as well. Women in film, in other words, beget women in film.
But it’s not just getting there that’s the challenge. Female directors’ careers are typically two to three decades shorter than males’. They are more likely than men to direct one studio film and not receive another offer. And there are other considerations that keep women on the sidelines. Says Gerwig, when we get onto to the topic of motherhood: “I’m still terrified that it makes you not hireable.” I ask her to define “it”—just the fact of being of childbearing age? She nods. “You can sure as f-ck know that if you were talking to a 34-year-old male director, they would not be thinking about this.”
But women are thinking about it, and giving voice to it and a host of other barriers that for so long went unquestioned. “It feels like not being able to see orange, and then all of a sudden you can see orange,” she says. “You realize orange is everywhere and how much you’d internalized.” Once you have women in numbers naming the problems and tackling them together, she says, “I don’t think it will go back to business as usual.”
Two hours into our walk, we’ve nearly crossed the bridge, with Brooklyn’s tree-lined waterfront coming into sharp relief. I ask if more fans have approached her since her full-court press tour for Lady Bird. She says yes, somewhat—mostly young women. Just the other day, she was at the airport and a 20-something woman stopped her. “She said, ‘Thank you for your movies. I want to make movies.'” Gerwig, in what is now becoming a regular practice, made the young woman look at her and promise to her face that she would make them. “She was like, ‘I’m trying to,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no. Go make it!'” Gerwig’s friend, who was traveling with her, observed that the tactic seemed a bit aggressive. But that’s the point.
It’s not far-fetched to imagine that one of these women will stand at a podium as Gerwig has done many times this awards season, clutching her hardware and recounting the story of an Oscar-nominated director getting in her face to extract a sacred vow. “I mean, it’s going to happen,” she says, smiling. “I can’t wait.” | ||||
5444 | dbpedia | 0 | 29 | https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-film-songs-ever/ | en | Best Movie Songs: 50 Themes From Hollywood Film Classics | [
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"Martin Chilton"
] | 2024-02-15T05:22:15+00:00 | From the first talkie, theme songs in movies have found a treasured place in the popular consciousness, as these 50 best film songs prove. | en | uDiscover Music | https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/best-film-songs-ever/ | From the moment Al Jolson started warbling on screen in 1927, songs in movies have found a treasured place in the popular consciousness. Some of the best movie songs – such as “Mona Lisa,” “Moon River” and “Happy” – have been written specifically for movies, while some tunes will forever be linked to a film because they sync so wonderfully with the drama (as in Titanic’s love scenes, playing out to Céline Dion singing “My Heart Will Go On”), or add vibrancy (The Lion King’s “Hakuna Matata”). And some movie songs are just instantly engaging, such as Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters theme song.
Check out some of the greatest film soundtracks on vinyl here.
Here, then, is our pick of the 50 best movie songs of all time…
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Blue Moon (Manhattan Melodramaa, 1934)
“Blue Moon” evolved as a song from the MGM soundtrack-writing system, source of some of the best movie songs in their time; Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart tailored the eventual finished version for a Clark Gable film called Manhattan Melodrama. The beautiful lyrics – “Blue moon/You saw me standing alone/Without a dream in my heart/Without a love of my own” – have been sung down the years by most of the greatest singers of popular music, including Elvis Presley, Mel Tormé, Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald. The classic movie theme was also featured in a tribute album called Blue Moon: Rodgers And Hart Covered By The Supremes.
Cheek To Cheek (Top Hat, 1935)
Russian-Jewish émigré Irving Berlin wrote “Cheek To Cheek” in a single day, on demand, for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat. The song lights up a memorable scene during which a tuxedoed Astaire declares his love for Rogers (dancing elegantly in a feathery white gown). The gorgeous words – “And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak” – and clever dance routine make this one of cinema’s most romantic moments. The song has also been covered numerous times down the years, including by jazz greats Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on their 1956 album Ella And Louis.
Ol’ Man River (Show Boat, 1936)
For a tune to really make its mark among the best movie songs it sometimes has to find the right singer. The 1927 Broadway drama Show Boat featured Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s song performed by actors, and, a year later, Paul Whiteman (with Bing Crosby on vocals) had a minor hit with it. But when it was sung in the 1936 film version by Paul Robeson, his moving baritone voice – and edgier interpretation – took the song to a new level.
Somewhere Over The Rainbow (The Wizard Of Oz, 1939)
Some songs are the perfect vehicle for a performer’s interpretation and improvisation, and certain numbers are remembered more for the singer than the writer. If you mention “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” people are more likely to think of Judy Garland’s soaring version for the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz than the gorgeous work of composers Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg. The song was almost cut from the movie, though, because MGM thought the opening Kansas sequence was too long. Thankfully, it was left in, and “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” earned its place among history’s best movie songs when it won an Academy Award for Best Original Song. There have been numerous cover versions since, from artists as diverse as Eric Clapton, John Martyn, and Ariana Grande.
When You Wish Upon A Star (Pinocchio, 1940)
Cliff Edwards, a middle-aged singer known as Ukulele Ike, voices the crow in Dumbo, but his voice is better known for singing the wonderfully sentimental “When You Wish Upon A Star” for the Disney classic Pinocchio. The movie theme was written by two giants of film music – Leigh Harline (“Whistle While You Work”) and Ned Washington (“High Noon”). Their song for Edwards became a jazz standard, covered by Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, among others. A recent version by Gregory Porter is featured on the Verve album Jazz Loves Disney.
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (Buck Privates, 1941)
Who would have thought that a song written for an Abbott and Costello comedy would become a wartime classic? Patty, Maxene, and Laverne Andrews based their early style on the close harmonizing of The Boswell Sisters, and the public loved it. The Andrews Sisters’ song about the boogie-woogie bugle boy of Company B survived World War II and was a hit again for Bette Midler in 1973.
As Time Goes By (Casablanca, 1942)
“As Time Goes By” was actually written by Herman Hupfeld for a short-lived 30s Broadway musical, Everybody’s Welcome, but took on a life of its own as one of Hollywood’s best movie songs, becoming embedded in the popular musical psyche after it was sung by pianist Dooley Wilson in the Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman movie Casablanca. The same old story, and fight for love and glory, has echoed down the decades since, in versions by Frank Sinatra, Julie London, and even Bob Dylan.
White Christmas (Holiday Inn, 1942)
Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was on an album of songs from the film Holiday Inn, and the lyrics resonated with thousands of American troops away on duty in the Second World War. “White Christmas” earned songwriter Irving Berlin a 1943 Academy Award and, well beyond being one of the best movie songs of all time, it has become the biggest-selling single of all time, racking up sales of 50 million. Crosby’s version – which took only 18 minutes to record – is definitive, but in the decades since, numerous stars have had tried their Yuletide hand, including Bob Marley, Willie Nelson, and U2.
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas (Meet Me in St Louis, 1944)
This started as a dark Christmas song, but when Judy Garland complained that some of Hugh Martin’s lyrics were uncomfortably bleak, he altered them and “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last/Next year we may all be living in the past” became “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Let your heart be light/Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.” The lyrical trick worked, and the movie theme, from the classic Christmas film Meet Me In St Louis, has become a standard. Among the numerous cover versions are those by Carpenters, Mel Tormé, and, more recently, by Tony Hadley. Meet Me in St Louis is also notable for the variety of songs that it introduced to the world, including “The Trolley Song” and “The Boy Next Door.”
Baby, It’s Cold Outside (Neptune’s Daughter, 1949)
Another song that made it into the movies only by chance, but which rightly deserves its place among the best movie songs of all time, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” replaced Frank Loesser’s “Slow Boat To China” and became a smash hit, winning an Oscar for Best Original Song. In the movie Neptune’s Daughter, the song – a jokey call-and-response number that Broadway songwriter Loesser used to sing at parties with his wife – was performed by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbán. Four different duos have had Top 20 hits with different versions, including great bantering ones by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, Ray Charles and Bette Carter, and Dolly Parton and Rod Stewart, in the latter’s tribute album to The Great American Songbook.
Mona Lisa (Captain Cary, 1950)
When you think of the song “Mona Lisa,” 40s jazz bandleader Charlie Spivak is probably not the first singer’s name that comes to mind. But it was the Ukrainian trumpeter who first performed Ray Evans’s lyrics – which started with the title “Prima Donna” – in the little-known 1950 film Captain Carey. Evans and composer Jay Livingston thought it would work as a single for Nat King Cole, and went to his home to persuade him to try it out. They almost failed because a small girl was playing happily and making so much noise that it was difficult for Cole to concentrate on the movie theme. “My daughter, Natalie,” he explained. Luckily, he went ahead and his version was at No.1 for eight weeks.
Singin’ In The Rain (Singin’ In The Rain, 1952)
When you think of the song “Singin’ In The Rain,” you probably don’t think of Oliver Hardy being drenched by a faulty shower nozzle as the tune plays. That was in the 1944 movie The Big Noise. The song had actually been around for 15 years before that – having first appeared in a 1929 film – but songwriter Arthur Freed realized he could make money from his old lyrics, and, as a producer for MGM, he commissioned a musical around his song title. The rest is history, as Gene Kelly’s magnificent song-and-dance version easily turned “Singin’ In The Rain” into one of the world’s best movie songs.
That’s Amore (The Caddy, 1953)
“That’s Amore,” written by Harry Warren and Jack Brooks, started out as a light-hearted interlude for Dean Martin (poking fun at Italian stereotypes) in the Jerry Lewis comedy The Caddy. But Martin loved the song and it soon became one of his signature songs in concerts, and a quintessential 50s ballad.
Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing (Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing, 1955)
The song, written by Sammy Cahn for a movie starring William Holden, was originally performed by The Four Aces but has become a recurring number in Hollywood, with versions in movies such as Grease, Private Parts, and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. There was a famous version by Frank Sinatra, while the one Ringo Starr cut for his album Sentimental Journey was arranged by Quincy Jones.
Que Será, Será (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956)
“Que Será, Será” was sung by Doris Day in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. Despite its popularity and status as one of the best movie songs in history, Day hated it, saying, “It’s a kiddie song.” But her manager-husband Marty Melcher disagreed and Day relented. She had no idea that the song would become the biggest hit of her career. Evans usually wrote most of the lyrics, while Livingston wrote the tunes, but Evans gave his partner the credit for “Que Será, Será,” probably their most enduring hit. “Jay had seen a movie where a family used it as their motto,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Gee, that would be a nice title for a song.’” It won an Oscar and was later used as the theme tune for Day’s own TV show.
High Hopes (A Hole In The Head, 1959)
This Frank Sinatra cinema vehicle was sung with a children’s choir for the Frank Capra film A Hole In The Head. When Robbie Williams covered the song on his Swings Both Ways Tour in 2014, he performed it around the country with different choirs from the local Stagecoach acting schools. An enduring entry among the best film songs of all time, “High Hopes” was Grammy-nominated and also won an Oscar for best original song.
Can’t Help Falling In Love (Blue Hawaii, 1961)
Elvis Presley’s million-selling movie theme song was written for his film set in Hawaii. The co-writer of the song, George Weiss, said that when he played a demo of the song to producer Hal Wallis, the latter turned it down saying they wanted “something like ‘Hound Dog.’” Weiss, who also wrote “Lullaby Of Birdland” and “What A Wonderful World,” said, “The only person who initially liked the song was Presley himself, who had also created a movie song classic with ‘Jailhouse Rock.’ He just happened to overhear it at Graceland as his entourage was sampling a pile of demo tapes for the movie. Elvis was told to ignore a ‘dumb ballad’ but he said, ‘No, I want to do that one in my movie.’ He picked the song. Everyone else turned it down.” There have been numerous cover versions, including by Neil Diamond, Beck, and a reggae-style one by UB40.
Moon River (Breakfast At Tiffany’s, 1961)
Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer had impeccable track records. The former had been responsible for the Pink Panther theme, the latter had provided the words for dozens of films, including “Hooray For Hollywood.” Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice was thin and limited in range, though always in tune, so Mancini took a month to compose exactly the right melody to suit the waif-like good-time girl. In the movie, Hepburn sang the song sitting with a guitar on the fire escape of a New York apartment, and the result was charming, forever remembered as one of the best movie songs. When a studio executive tried to have the song cut, Hepburn said, “Over my dead body.” Lots of jazz greats have covered it, but other interesting versions include those by Aretha Franklin, Patty Griffin, Elton John, R.E.M., and Morrissey.
Days Of Wine And Roses (Days Of Wine And Roses, 1962)
Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer were prolific as film songwriting partners, and they contributed the movie theme song to Blake Edwards’ film starring Jack Lemmon. The phrase “days of wine and roses” was taken from a 19th-century English poem. Andy Williams had a hit with the song, which was also covered by Julie London and Wes Montgomery.
My Favourite Things (The Sound Of Music, 1965)
There were some new songs for the cinema version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, but once Julie Andrews got hold of them, many became popular classics beyond their placing among the best film songs ever, including “My Favourite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi.”
Help! (Help!, 1965)
Plenty of Beatles songs merit inclusion in this list of the best film songs of all time – including “A Hard Day’s Night” – but the nod goes to “Help!,” which was written as the movie theme song to the group’s second film – a madcap comedy originally mooted for Peter Sellers. The sense of desperation is palpable in lines such as “And now my life has changed in oh-so-many ways/My independence seems to vanish in the haze.” John Lennon told Rolling Stone magazine in 1970, “I meant it. The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension.”
To Sir With Love (To Sir With Love, 1967)
Sidney Poitier was the main star of a worthy school-based film in which a teacher wins over some inner-city toughs in East London. Lulu, who starred in the film, had a surprise No.1 US hit with the title song. It was co-written by Don Black, a songwriter who had worked on lots of James Bond themes and was a frequent collaborator with John Barry, the soundtrack legend. They both later worked on the music for Out Of Africa.
Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate, 1967)
Paul Simon wrote “Mrs. Robinson” for The Graduate, starring Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson, a middle-aged woman who seduces the young Dustin Hoffman. Simon and Art Garfunkel’s harmonies are stunning, helping it become one of the best movie songs of the decade – if not all time. A famous line asks, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”; Simon was once asked by his baseball hero, Mickey Mantle, why he had not been name-checked in the song. Simon told him: “It’s about syllables, Mick. It’s about how many beats there are.”
Everybody’s Talkin’ (Midnight Cowboy, 1969)
Mention the name Fred Neil and you may get a blank stare. Yet he wrote not only one of the best movie theme songs of all time, but one of the most famous songs of the late 20th century. Folk singer Neil, whose work inspired Bob Dylan, was uneasy at the publicity after Harry Nilsson turned “Everybody’s Talkin’” into a worldwide hit in 1970, following its use as the theme tune for the movie Midnight Cowboy. He fled to Florida (“Going where the weather suits my clothes”) to set up a marine project, and devoted the rest of his life to protecting dolphins. Among the cover versions are those by Stevie Wonder, Glen Campbell, and Iggy Pop – and Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy.
We Have All The Time In The World (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969)
Composer John Barry personally visited a poorly Louis Armstrong to ask him to record “We Have All The Time In The World,” a new song for the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The results were not only one of the best Bond themes ever, but one of the best movie songs ever, too. Barry said, “It wasn’t the popular choice at the time, because we always used, you know, the Tom Joneses, the Nancy Sinatras. And I said, ‘Look, it’s about a man singing about the September of his years.’ And I thought Louis singing just rung true and [producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli] loved the idea, there were no arguments. But to work with this guy in the studio, he was the sweetest, humblest guy.”
Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, 1969)
Burt Bacharach and Hal David were working on the music for Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid – in which Paul Newman and Robert Redford play 1890s train robbers – when director George Roy Hill said he wanted something evocative of the Victorian era for a scene where Newman takes a romantic bike ride with Katherine Ross. They ended up producing a million-selling hit for BJ Thomas, who had a cold and sang with a raspier voice than usual on the day of recording. Thomas, incidentally, has said that Bacharach originally composed the movie theme song to fit Bob Dylan’s voice.
If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out (Harold And Maude, 1971)
Cat Stevens sings about wanting to “be free, be free” in his award-winning movie theme song for the quirky film Harold And Maude, about a teenager who has an affair with a 79-year-old woman. In 2016, perhaps with no irony, it was used as the music to advertise a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It is one of Stevens’ most underrated songs.
Dueling Banjos (Deliverance, 1972)
Representing the stirring individual instrumental “songs” that have enriched movies – such as Ry Cooder’s “Paris, Texas” or John Williams’ “Promontory” from Last Of The Mohicans – is this cue from the soundtrack of the Burt Reynolds movie. “Dueling Banjos” was composed in 1955 by Arthur Smith, as a banjo instrumental he called “Feudin’ Banjos,” and later covered by bluegrass band The Dillards as “Briscoe Declares For Aunt Bee.” Given the title “Duelling Banjos,” it was recorded for the unsettling Deliverance by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell, and went to No.2 for a month on the Billboard charts.
Live And Let Die (Live And Let Die, 1973)
Another Bond theme that takes its place alongside the best movie songs of all time, “Live And Let Die” shares the unusual distinction of having been nominated for a Grammy under two different performers. Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, was nominated for his version with the band Wings, which went to No.2 on the US charts. It was one of a number of film themes produced by his old Beatles pal George Martin. A version by Guns N’ Roses was also Grammy-nominated, in 1991.
The Way We Were (The Way We Were, 1973)
Session bassist Carol Kaye said it took 33 takes to get “The Way We Were” exactly as the producers wanted. The hard work paid off. Barbra Streisand’s song – which opens with the sparkling line, “Memories, like the corners of my mind” – was recorded for the film about the love affair between Streisand’s character and Robert Redford’s Hubbell Gardiner.
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, 1973)
Bob Dylan’s movie theme song was written for Sam Peckinpah’s western, in which the singer-songwriter starred alongside James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. The song has become one of Dylan’s most popular among fellow musicians – there have been hundreds of cover versions, including by Randy Crawford, Guns N’ Roses, Eric Clapton, Bryan Ferry, Paul Simon, Jerry Garcia, Tom Petty, and Dolly Parton.
Stayin’ Alive (Saturday Night Fever, 1977)
Bee Gees’ movie theme song “Stayin’ Alive” – a song about the art of endurance – burrowed into the wider world’s consciousness. The glorious harmonies (especially in the “Ah, ha-ha-ha” chorus) and Barry Gibb’s falsettos make this one of the catchiest of all movie songs. Yet it is a song with a serious message. As Robin Gibb said, “The subject matter of “Stayin’ Alive” is actually quite a serious one. It’s about survival in the streets of New York, and the lyrics actually say that.”
Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys (The Electric Horseman, 1979)
A country song that had been kicking around for a few years, in versions by writer Ed Bruce and then Chris LeDoux, gained widespread attention and acclaim when Willie Nelson sang it for the Robert Redford-Jane Fonda film about a rebellious cowboy. The song was later used in the 2008 Oliver Stone film W and referenced ironically in the 2016 film American Honey.
Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life (Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, 1979)
Rarely does a song of really acidic comedy find such public acceptance. Eric Idle’s “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life,” a gallows-humor song sung cheerily by a man waiting to be crucified, has become a singalong anthem at sports events around the globe. Idle sang a live version for the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
9 To 5 (9 To 5, 1980)
Dolly Parton’s anthem for the worker, written for the comedy she starred in alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, won the country singer multiple awards. The movie theme song has appeared in numerous TV shows, including The Simpsons, and notable cover versions include one by Alison Krauss.
Rawhide (The Blues Brothers, 1980)
It would be hard for The Blues Brothers not to appear in a run-down of the best movie songs of all time, given that its soundtrack is stuffed with classic Southern soul. “Rawhide,” however, is an exception: a fine popular country song, it was a hit for Frankie Lane and the theme tune to the popular TV show of the same name. But there is no more exuberant version than the one delivered by the self-proclaimed Blues Brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi) in the John Landis comedy. One very funny scene involves the band pretending to be a country group called The Good Ole Boys, in order to play a gig at Bob’s Country Bunker in Kokomo. As countless beer bottles aimed at the band shatter on impact with the chicken-wire fence protecting the stage, The Blues Brothers pacify the “redneck” audience with repeated versions of “Rawhide.”
I Just Called To Say I Love You (The Woman In Red, 1984)
The Woman In Red was a mildly entertaining comedy starring Gene Wilder, but its soundtrack was a Stevie Wonder-helmed affair that included his global smash title track. Wonder’s only UK No.1 hit, “I Just Called To Say I Love You” topped the charts across the globe and picked up an Oscar for Best Original Song.
Ghostbusters (Ghostbusters, 1984)
Some of the best movie theme songs continue to pervade popular culture well after their original appearance. Stop almost anyone in the street and ask, “Who you gonna call?” and they will almost certainly answer “Ghostbusters.” The iconic theme song for the 1984 movie was written and performed by Detroit musician Ray Parker Jr, and has remained his biggest hit. The determined and upbeat number took on a life of its own after the release of the movie, and the line “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” has appeared in numerous pop-culture references.
Don’t You (Forget About Me) (The Breakfast Club, 1985)
A coming-of-age drama that transcends its era and speaks to all generations, The Breakfast Club’s emotional closing scene, in which five high-school students leave their Saturday detention, having asserted their individuality – and found out about their own true character – remains an iconic piece of high-school cinema. It made stars of the young actors nicknamed The Brat Pack and ensured that Simple Minds’ single went down in history as a generation-defining slice of synth-pop.
Twist And Shout (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986)
The teen comedy starring Matthew Broderick was memorable for its use of music. As well as Yello’s electro-pop classic “Oh Yeah,” which became a cult song after the movie and was later even used in confectionery adverts, the film made judicious use of The Beatles’ recording of “Twist And Shout,” introducing a whole new generation to one of the group’s finest early outings on record.
La Bamba (La Bamba, 1987)
Ritchie Valens’ traditional Mexican wedding song – a B-side to his first hit, “Donna” – was revived as the movie theme song for a film about the young singer who died, aged 17, in the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly. In the movie, Valens is played by Lou Diamond Phillips, while the brilliant LA band Los Lobos scored a No.1 hit with the title song, reviving interest in the singer’s music with their vibrant version.
Unchained Melody (Ghost, 1990)
The Righteous Brothers’ gorgeous love song was certainly well known by the time it appeared in Ghost. It had actually been written for a low-budget B-movie, Unchained, in 1955, where it was sung as a prisoner’s lament. But when it was used as the music to accompany the emotionally charged scene where Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze get steamy behind a potting wheel, it gained a whole new lease of life as a romantic blockbuster.
(Everything I Do) I Do It For You (Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, 1991)
Spending a record-breaking 16 straight weeks at the top of the UK charts, and seven at the top of the Billboard 100, Bryan Adams’ indefatigable “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” owed at least some of its ubiquity to its use in the summer 1991 blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. The song was subsequently nominated for an Oscar, and went on to win the Grammy for Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media at the 1992 awards ceremony.
Streets Of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1993)
Movie theme songs can offer light relief or fuel tension, and sometimes they can be of social importance. When director Jonathan Demme asked Bruce Springsteen to write a soundtrack song about the AIDS epidemic, The Boss obliged with a haunting ballad that was both a hit song and a piece of music that challenged audiences to think. Jackson Browne, who has known Springsteen for more than 40 years, said: “To write from the perspective of someone who is emaciated, with AIDS, is to forsake all of the strength Springsteen had staked his career on. It is quite a feat.”
Hakuna Matata (The Lion King, 1994)
The sheer quality of the music in Disney’s The Lion King was demonstrated in the fact that three of its songs were nominated for an Oscar, with “Hakuna Matata” and “Circle Of Life” losing out to “Can You Feel The Love Tonight.” Still, that’s three of the best movie songs ever in just one movie, and for this list we opt for “Hakuna Matata,” with its catchy melody (written by Elton John) and life-affirming lyrics by Tim Rice. The title phrase in Swahili translates as “no worries,” and that’s a problem-free philosophy we could all do with.
You’ve Got A Friend In Me (Toy Story, 1995)
Randy Newman, the master of biting satire, has always been a fantastic soundtrack composer, and his glorious feel-good song for the Pixar movie Toy Story – sung with Lyle Lovett – became the theme tune for the series of films.
You Must Love Me (Evita, 1996)
Madonna put real emotion – and handled the tricky soprano chords – as she triumphed with one of the 17 demanding songs in Evita, the musical-turned-film story of the life of the First Lady Of Argentina, Eva Perón. The song was written especially for the movie by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Madonna also covered “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” for the film.
My Heart Will Go On (Titanic, 1997)
Céline Dion’s power ballad, one of the biggest-selling singles of all time, won a raft of awards and is now almost as synonymous with the doomed ship as the iceberg it crashed into. “My Heart Will Go On” is the romantic ballad that plays as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet embrace at the front of the ill-fated Titanic. Dion does brilliantly to cope with the tricky modulations of the song, while the sweet tin-whistle playing is courtesy of Andrea Corr.
Lose Yourself (8 Mile, 2002)
With hip-hop firmly in the mainstream at the start of the new millennium, Eminem delivered a sure-fire entry among the best film songs of all time in the shape of the Oscar-winning “Lose Yourself.” Penned for the semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile, Eminem recalled that writing the soundtrack “was different from my usual work because it forced me to step into Rabbit, the character I play in the film, and write from his point of view.”
Happy (Despicable Me 2, 2013)
A fitting close to this list of the best movie songs of all time, Pharrell Williams’ contribution to the animated comedy Despicable Me 2 became the most downloaded song of all time in 2014. “Happy” does what it says on the tin: it is uplifting, catchy, and perfect popcorn music. The song did not come easily to Williams, though. He has admitted that the final version was his tenth attempt at creating a song about “agitated and grumpy” fictional character Gru falling in love.
Honorable Mentions
Coolio – Gangsta’s Paradise (Dangerous Minds)
Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes – (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life (Dirty Dancing)
Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You (The Bodyguard)
Angela Lansbury – Beauty and the Beast (Beauty and the Beast)
Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga – Shallow (A Star is Born)
Barbra Streisand – Evergreen (Love Theme) (A Star is Born)
Steppenwolf – Born to Be Wild (Easy Rider)
John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John – Summer Nights (Grease)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – Whistle While You Work (Snow White)
Noel Harrison – The Windmills of Your Mind (The Thomas Crown Affair)
Kermit the Frog – Rainbow Connection (The Muppet Movie)
Julie Andrews – My Favorite Things (The Sound of Music)
Marilyn Monroe – Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes)
Seal – Kiss From A Rose (Batman Forever)
Frankie Laine – Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’ (High Noon)
Liza Minnelli – Cabaret (Cabaret) | |||||
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] | 2024-06-28T13:32:47+00:00 | There’s a reason pretty privilege is, in fact, a privilege; it makes life easier by the status it grants. | en | /favicon.ico | TIME | https://time.com/6992138/pretty-privilege-essay/ | When you’re young, you come to know quite quickly who’s pretty and who isn’t. If you’re pretty, people will tell you often and upfront. And if prettiness isn’t your overwhelmingly defining feature, people will use other complimentary adjectives to encourage you: smart, clever, fastidious, well-behaved, talented, funny, etc. “Creative” was a big one for me. An adult told me once when I was about 12 that I would understand I was pretty when I was older. I remember at the time feeling a kind of dread about the futility of an unformed future and its uncertain promises.
“Pretty” is wholly subjective, of course. When I was growing up in the ’90s, it was mostly defined as being thin, white, cisgender, and feminine. And while that lens has broadened quite a bit now, those markers are still generally the easiest to benefit from if you hit them.
The social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off as smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous. If you’re hot, your dating app matches will never run empty. People will buy you drinks at bars, randomly do nice things for you, give you gifts, and generally go out of their way for you. Economic advantages abound, too: attractive people are more likely to receive raises, promotions, and be heard in the workplace, and the perception of their productivity and value to a company is outsized. There are several studies that examine the power of pretty privilege and the unbalanced life experiences of those who have it.
Read More: Stop Calling My Daughter Pretty
There’s a psychological term for the cognitive bias we have when making judgments about a person, brand, or place: the “halo effect” shows how our initial positive impressions tend to influence our overall judgments of one another.
Pretty privilege is a form of self-sustaining energy, in that way—all the positive feedback that attractive people receive instills a kind of self-worth in them that they are indeed deserving of everything they desire, which makes their endeavors that much more persuasive. After all, believing in yourself is necessary for others to believe in you too.
This also explains why hot people who commit crimes are less likely to be arrested or convicted (or more likely to receive lenient sentences). See: “hot convict” Jeremy Meeks, whose mugshot went viral on Facebook in 2014 after he was arrested on felony weapons charges during a gang sweep in Stockton, Calif. Meeks became a professional model and actor after having served half of his 27-month sentence. Not many people know what happened to the other purported gang members who were also arrested and incarcerated from that sweep, presumably because their mug shots were not as noteworthy. It’s also how a fake German heiress can spin a Netflix series and reality TV show out of defrauding hundreds of thousands of dollars from the New York City elite, after ample splashy media coverage.
No one has the power to choose the face and body they are born with, but a person can gain pretty privilege by acquiring attractive features through cosmetic manipulation. I’ve never been more assured that pretty privilege is real and powerful than when I’ve intentionally and laboriously leaned into perceived femininity—long, flowing weaves, false lashes, makeup, heels. But there are certain provisions to the ways that pretty privilege works, and generally it calls for a kind of beauty that appears convincingly “natural” in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue with beauty. And we all know that “natural” is as subjective of a word as “pretty.”
We don’t really have a collective name for whatever the opposite of natural beauty is, but the word “fake”—implying undesirable traits like untrustworthiness and dishonesty—is liberally applied to those sporting visible makeup or cosmetic enhancement. The most neutral terms we can manage are “low maintenance” and “high maintenance.” And “high maintenance” is pretty much always used in a pejorative sense when describing a person. “Low maintenance” implies the kind of virtue inherent in a lack of vanity (or beauty routine). If you only ever buy beauty and personal care products marketed toward “normal” skin and hair—and no one ever tells you “You’d look so much better if…”—congratulations, you can enjoy a peaceful, low-maintenance life.
Read More: Not Even the Kardashians Can Keep Up With Their Unrealistic Beauty Standards
“Normal” is a made-up term when it comes to beauty products. There is no normal police; it is not a benchmark regulated by any governing scientific, industrial, or medical body. Rather, it instead refers to the larger culture at hand’s idea of what is baseline acceptable. Opting out of beauty’s machinations is something that mostly people with pretty privilege can manage without risking social stigma. You’re considered low maintenance if you don’t fuss over your appearance beyond basic hygiene while still appearing appealing, but you’ve let yourself go if you don’t fuss over your appearance beyond basic hygiene and don’t fulfill a certain level of conventional attractiveness.
Pretty privilege is an uncomfortable topic, both for those who are overlooked or dismissed in favor of preferable looks, and for those whose successes and individual agency are undermined as a by-product of their appearance. And for women, pretty privilege plays a much more outsized role because women remain broadly objectified by society; our looks are often the most prioritized asset we have to bargain with, and looking the part is always requisite to getting the part. I like to think that my ample skill, experience, and charm make me a qualifying candidate for most jobs, but I am willing to bet from experience that optics have always prevailed where doubt may linger.
Beauty and attraction are incredibly subjective, but privilege is often based in institutional and established cultural beliefs, lots of which blend racism and colorism, sexism, fatphobia, ableism, ageism, and other appearance-based discriminations into their perceptions of beauty. Those who experience these prejudices often spend so much of their time performing their value, reassuring others of their capabilities as they navigate their own self-doubt. The virtues projected onto beauty work just as much against those who don’t fulfill beauty’s ideals. It’s not ugliness that is the assumed opposite of beauty—it’s abnormality.
But there’s a plot twist: an absence of pretty privilege doesn’t necessarily condemn you to a life less extraordinary. People are dynamic, attraction is fickle, and charm, intelligence, and wit will get you a lot further than looks can (even if you have to put more effort in them). Our appetite for beauty demands some variety, and if everyone looks the same then prettiness becomes redundant and boring. Humans aren’t completely shallow, despite unflattering evidence that may suggest otherwise. It’s our experiences and privileges that grant us access to resources for individual resistance; how we’re born into the world and how we’re taught to perceive ourselves determines how much we can cash in on those privileges.
And it turns out that the halo effect works both ways—your personality and behaviors play a big part in how hot people think you are. Being cool, kind, and doing “good things” can change how a person’s attractiveness is perceived, namely by increasing it. Talent bias, wealth bias, good deed bias, BDE (big dick energy)—they all contribute to people thinking you’re hotter than the sum of your physical attributes. In one study, subjects were shown images of the same person with different personality descriptors. Images accompanied by verbal descriptions of their generosity and kindness resulted in higher scores of facial attractiveness than when the same images were accompanied by negative traits like selfishness and unfriendliness. Personality perception affects facial attractiveness, as do other contextual elements like prior knowledge of a person and their role in your social community. Generally speaking, good behavior and positive attributes make you more attractive.
Looks do matter—sometimes, a bit too much, it feels like—because they’re a conduit to power. There’s a reason pretty privilege is, in fact, a privilege; it makes life easier by the status it grants. But the thing about beauty is that it often usurps other positive qualities a person might possess. Prettiness is a passive trait, after all. It’s a common assumption that classic hotties must not have had to develop any other redeeming characteristics because beauty is the ultimate redemption. It’s important to remember that hotness and desirability are made up of so much more than the sum of your most desirable physical features. They’re encompassed by a host of nonphysical attributes that contribute to how you’re perceived, including the idiosyncrasies and quirks of your personality.
I have a theory that everyone is hot, it’s just that some people know it and some people are not yet aware of it. Often the difference between the two is confidence—it doesn’t even have to be real; fake it ‘til you make it, as they say. Plus, with so much applied aesthetics in our faces all the time now, beauty fatigue is real. We crave personality, unique quirks, and the kind of charm that comes from a life less polished. I mean, there’s nothing less cool than conforming to society’s standards, and that includes beauty. Sometimes all it takes is enough time to pass for that thing you were insecure about (freckles, gap teeth, too-thick eyebrows, no eyebrows, scars, et cetera) to have its moment in the limelight, and for you realize that your insecurity doesn’t define who you are. If anything, it proves to you that it’s all made up, and you can release yourself from appearance anxiety, bit by bit as time goes on. Owning your individual quirks and what makes you you is always hot behavior. When I think about what attracts me to people, it’s always something about their outlook on life, their warmth and generosity of spirit, how comfortable they are in their own skin, and the solidness of their presence, which is often some enigmatic thing that tells me they know what’s up. Energy always pulls where beauty falls short. |